Coyotes

December 13, 2019.Reading time 60 minutes.

by Terri Leker

Winner of the 2019 New Ohio Review Fiction Contest, selected by Claire Vaye Watkins. Originally published in New Ohio Review Issue 26

The coyotes moved into the woods behind my house just after I learned I was pregnant. On a quiet June morning, while my husband slept, I pulled on my running shoes and grabbed a leash from a hook at the back door. Jute danced around my feet on her pipe-cleaner legs, whining with impatience. It would have taken more than this to wake Matt, but I hushed her complaints with a raised finger and we slipped outside. A light breeze blew the native grasses into brown and golden waves as we wandered, camouflaging Jute’s compact frame. She sniffed the dirt, ears telescoping as though she were asking a question. When we reached a shady thicket of red madrones and live oaks, I unclipped the leash and wound it around my wrist.

Revising Bosch’s Hell Panel for the 21st Century

December 13, 2019.Reading time 4 minutes.

by Kelly Michels

“Hundreds of couples toting AR-15 rifles packed a Unification church in Pennsylvania on Wednesday to have their marriages blessed and their weapons celebrated as ‘rods of iron’ that could have saved lives in a recent Florida school shooting.” Reuters, Feb. 28^th 2018

They come wearing crowns of gold bullets in their hair, bodies drenched

in white satin, white lace, tulle, lining the pews on a weekday morning,

AR-15s in their hands, calling on god to save them. There is no

such thing as salvation, only the chosen and too few are chosen.

Children are told to stay inside, schools locked shut, swings hushed,

even the wind says, quiet, as the guns are blessed, dark O of mouths

waiting to exhale a ribbon of smoke. The children are told to crouch

in the closet, to stay still as butterflies on butcher knives

while the men take their brides and iron rods, saluting the book

of revelation, its scribbled last words, the coming of a new kingdom.

American Bachelor Party

December 13, 2019.Reading time 3 minutes.

by Conor Bracken

Featured Art: Star and Flag Design Quilt by Fred Hassebrock

Read by the author.

Here I am inside a firing range.

Loading and holding and aiming a pistol

the way America has taught me.

Hitting the paper target in

the neck the mullet the arm the arm.

The old-growth pines inside me

do not burst into orange choruses of flame.

I am disappointed I’m not making

a tidy cluster center mass.

Red Flags

December 13, 2019.Reading time 19 minutes.

by Whitney Collins

Featured Art: The Kiss by Max Ernst

The first thing Ilona saw when she got to the beach was the man, bleeding from his leg with a crowd of people around him. She was far up and away in Bill’s condominium, looking down at him from the master bedroom window with her two suitcases in her hands. The man held out his bleeding leg for everyone to admire. Half of the crowd looked down at the leg, half looked out at the ocean. After a minute, the man spread his arms out wide as if to show everyone how much he loved them. Thissssss much.

The Dock Hand

December 13, 2019.Reading time 2 minutes.

by Kathryn Merwin

this is a poem about losing things.

not a poem

for the boys who barreled their broken

bodies into the lightningwalls

of my body. for the knife

of let me

in, baby, the trigger-finger

of let’s

go back to my place, just one drink.

you, draining the blue

from my veins, dyeing

empty sheets of skin,

blue again, purple,

blue. the color

of healing of bloodpool

beneath skin. for the crushed

powder in my jack & coke of

no one will ever believe you.

you’ll spend the summer in alaska

and we’ll both pretend

like we’re not losing

something.

you have no idea

what i’m gonna do to you.

yes, I do.

A Cure for Grief

December 13, 2019.Reading time 3 minutes.

by Emily Franklin

Featured Art: Still Life With Apples and Pears by Paul Cézanne

Read by the author.

There isn’t one. But here is a pot of jam,

apricots plumped with booze, lemon rind, sugar—

the stuff of August evenings,

of dirt roads trimmed both sides

with heavy woods that narrow and finally

funnel to the ocean. To the house

Deluge

December 13, 2019.Reading time 43 minutes.

by Rachel Eve Moulton

Sara doesn’t sleep anymore. Not for more than an hour at a time. Her body feels sore, her joints loose, as if a leg could slip free if she isn’t careful. It’s May, her first spring in the house, and the rain has been falling steadily since early April. The Mad River jumped its banks some weeks before, and, in a gesture of solidarity, Sara’s body has ballooned at the ankles, the thighs. She’s 38 weeks pregnant with twin girls, and even her fingers have grown thick, her wedding ring now worn on a chain around her neck.

Sara is beginning to think she’s made a mistake.

Heartbeat Hypothesis

December 13, 2019.Reading time 2 minutes.

by Robert Wood Lynn

As it turns out there is this silly trick to knowing how long you,

no anybody, no any creature will live:

divide the average lifespan of an animal by its metabolic rate

and you will get a number that is about one billion. That’s what we get,

about one billion heartbeats on this planet Read More

Somewhere Outside of Loveland

December 13, 2019.Reading time 40 minutes.

by Amy Bee

Featured Art: “Design for 4-seat Phaeton,” by Brewster & Co.

My mom kicked me out this morning. If you’re still here by the time Doug gets home, I’m having you committed, she said, so I put on some jeans and ran to my old elementary school across the street. I headed toward the two tubes next to the monkey bars. I’d spent a lot of recesses in those coveted tubes. Now that I was in 8^th grade, the whole playground appeared fake somehow, like a toy model version of itself.