The Virgin Mirror

October 25, 2019.Reading time 1 minute.

By Claire Bateman

After the handmaidens, blindfolded and proceeding by touch alone, have
twined the masses of string across its enormous silvered surface, then the
mirror-keeper, also blindfolded, sets a lit match to the central knot.

When they sense that the whole skein is ablaze, they bear the burning glass
to the lake’s edge, and lower it into the icy shallows where the mirror-keeper
strikes a single blow, shattering it along every line at once.

Then they lift it in its frame from the water to tap and test its face with their
tongs, plucking out the fragments, swaddling them individually in silk to be
dispersed throughout the land.

Now instead of making pilgrimage in order to not look into the virgin mirror,
each family can cherish a shard to not look into without leaving home.

Scatter

October 24, 2019.Reading time 1 minute.

By Claire Bateman

Featured Art: The Breeze at Morn, 1930 by Thomas Lowinsky

And here we see where the pages of the ocean
were torn from their logbook as if in meticulous rage,
though there’s no debris adhering to the binding,
as might so easily have been the case.
What to do with this stiff and empty cover?
Pack it with snow and staple it all around,
so it can retain its shape until the committee
rends it open and shakes it out face-down,
inviting the ragged pages to return
in just the right sequence
from every place they’ve flown.

The Strategic Plan

October 24, 2019.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Carrie Shipers

Featured Art: Voyages of the Moon, 1934-7 by Paul Nash

No one knows its origins. Like carpools
and happy hour, the Plan has simply always been.
Its awkward page breaks and stilted phrasing,
preservation of failed projects, employees

long departed, are evidence of its ambition,
how it defies the limits of language, software,
human thought. No one has ever read the Plan
in its entirety. Attempts to download it

result in system crashes, sunspots, and recession.
A single hard copy is rumored to exist,
its pristine pages collated and punched,
then stored in binders ordered on a shelf—

but no one knows exactly where. A hundred years
from now, when the company has ceased to be
and its headquarters crumble, the Strategic Plan
will rest among the rubble waiting to be found.

Lacking an exact translation, its runic nature
will give rise to cults that worship its straight lines,
its acronyms and colored fonts. It will not
inspire war, only art and rumination.

No one who encounters the Strategic Plan
remains untouched. It features in the dreams
of former employees who understand too late
its vital truth: Every aspect of the Plan—

its ever-shifting goals, its layers of revision
and appendices—acts as both map and goad.
The Strategic Plan is perfect even
in its flaws. It isn’t meant to be fulfilled.

Questions for the Office of Public Relations

October 22, 2019.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Carrie Shipers

Featured Art: The Purchaser, 1915 by Eric Gill

Do you pride yourself on your preparedness? For example,
have you already drafted a statement expressing shock

and sadness at the actions of Employee X? Did you
write it with a particular person and scenario in mind,

and if so will you say which ones? Given your choice
of disaster, would you prefer a product recall months

after concerns were first reported, high-level infidelity
involving interns and/or prostitutes, a flagrant

disregard for federal law, or embezzlement based on
shareholder fraud? Did you choose the challenge

you’re best poised to meet, or the one that sounded
the most fun? Speaking of fun, is it true most members

of your field make very poor decisions regarding alcohol,
sex and property damage, and therefore any conference

lasting longer than a day devolves into a bacchanal?
How often, in your personal life, do you attempt

to reframe information and influence someone’s view?
Is this a breach of ethics on your part, or would you insist

it’s simply human nature to want your own way?
Have you ever waged a secret, negative (i.e., “dark”)

campaign against a neighbor, coworker or person
sleeping with your spouse? Were your actions

as successful as you’d hoped? Despite your efforts
to predict what I might ask, were there any points

at which you felt compelled to obfuscate, equivocate
or hedge? Do you assume you did so with such skill

I couldn’t tell? On learning this was not the case,
would you feel more disappointment that you’d failed,

or relief someone finally had seen through your facade?
If the former, would your distress be eased by my sincere

apology, or do you doubt that such a thing exists?

How to Be Better by Being Worse

October 20, 2019.Reading time 1 minute.

By Justin Jannise

Featured Art: The Kiss, 1895 by Edvard Munch

Ban soap. Banish suds.
Sweep the dormitory clean
of polish. Let dust do
what dust does with no opinion

from feathers.
Invite musk. Be clothed
in scandal. Smear
and smudge and slander yourself

courageous. Fuck
courage. Stick your finger
in its wet mouth and kiss
its salty neck. Slip in

as many chickenshit deeds
as any deadbeat dad
ever did. Forget
birthdays. Ruin Christmas.

Run people over
in conversation. Let them finish
not one sentence.
Let them sit with their own nonsense

for a second. Leave them
tongue-tied and pent up
with unexpressed vexation.
Get off the pleasant train to nowhere.

Get back on with your most
regrettable self. Someone
will love you. Someone will still fall
madly in front of you.

Wethersfield

October 19, 2019.Reading time 1 minute.

By Michael Pontacoloni

Featured Art: Fire at Full Moon by Paul Klee

Dad has three different chainsaws
and Kevlar shin pads,
the same glossy material
protecting a spacecraft
as it drifts into the Kuiper Belt
where little flecks of undead planet
fling around like buckshot
and light from the sun
takes a while to arrive.

I am glad that my dad is safe
from the Kuiper Belt.
Eventually something else will kill him,
but for now he is cutting firewood
into precise sizes. He is wearing
a wide-brimmed hat.
I am rubbing aloe
into my own growing forehead,
trying not to believe

that he grew up in the only town
hit by a meteorite twice.
One punched a hole in a roof
then rolled under a table
like a peach. The other
lodged in a crossbeam that might well have been

his sleeping smile or
the windshield of his idling El Camino.
He’s asked that I sprinkle him into the woods
when that something else
falls from the sky like a bucket of nails.

Moving the Piano

October 18, 2019.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Kathryn Petruccelli

Featured Art: The Keynote, 1915 by William Arthur Chase

It takes almost nothing
to step into each other’s lives: a favor
for a neighbor, a huge, upright Steinway
there’s no one left to play.

All morning they labored together,
the men. Everything they could think of
to get it out of the van
and over the curb—
metal ramp, wooden boards, a jack,
the old bed frame from behind the garage.

Dave had never asked my husband
for anything before. The house
he’d grown up in was already packed,
mementos sold, his mother’s mind

skipping liberally among the decades,
her fingers running through chords in the air
or waltzing grandly
through measures of Chopin.
His father
stooped from his own burdens, aged beyond
his years, nodding when people talked
about his new facility, so highly regarded,
so clean. There was sweat, grunting,

my husband mumbled a curse
as they argued about angles, pushed
their charge up the cracked walkway,
three shallow steps to the porch.

And because we have no better idea
how to be with each other
in our pain,
when they’d finally struggled
the monstrous instrument
into Dave’s house, they could only
wipe their hands on their jeans,
crack their knuckles, and share
a pizza, which they ate standing
in the kitchen, hunched over
its grease-stained box.

One Step

October 17, 2019.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Betsy Sholl

Featured Art: Towards the Forest I, 1897 by Edvard Munch

Who am I to say to the man: You can’t
sleep in corduroys and a dress shirt,

or: Don’t stick your fork in the potatoes,
spoon them onto your plate,

as I must have said more than once
to our children.

To the man I would have said: What does it
mean to be saved, and from what?

Or I’d ask about a friend’s blunder: How can
somebody so smart do such a dumb thing?

And he’d half smile, then shake his head,
Don’t you understand, it’s not about brains.

How can I tell this man: You can’t sleep
in anything that has a leather belt

or a wallet in its pocket, and, Here
are your pajamas, which he puts on

inside-out so the flannel pockets flap
like limp fins and he laughs

and flutters them a while before we start
again, right foot in right leg.

He laughs too at my schoolmarm self,
asks, How did you get so bossy?

Alexa

October 16, 2019.Reading time 1 minute.

By Ruth Bardon

Featured Art: L’Armoire à Glace, 1924 by Walter Richard Sickert

She is ignorant and admits to being
easily confused.

She tells her jokes with a cheerfulness
that shows how lost she is.

I want to help her and teach her how
the world works,

and I love this feeling of knowing
so much more,

but it also makes me hate her
a little more each time,

each time she admits she’s having trouble,
is helpless to assist,

like a mother of grown children,
who see her now

as someone who offers only facts
from the news,

a weather report or a small repertoire
of songs and stories,

like the mother I may become,
sitting and nodding

as if I understood the talk,
chiming in

and coming to attention
when my name is spoken.

The Oldies, at Island Pond, Vermont

October 15, 2019.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Allen Stein

Featured Art: Oberon, Titania and Puck with Fairies Dancing, 1786 by William Blake

Rockin’ in jeans, T-shirt, and sneakers
at the tiny bandstand by the pond,
the ponytailed girl belts them out, the goldies
of three or four decades ago.
She’s hittin’ ’em with her best shot,
makin’ it all hurt so good,
but a closer look shows she’s no younger
than the songs she sings,
though not as old as most dancing
on the worn-out patch between
their lawn chairs and the stage
this final Friday Night Live of a brief
summer that in these parts is rarely
without a hint of the fall.

The dancers, moving gingerly, stiffly,
grin in unabashed acknowledgment
that the tempo hasn’t changed but they have.
One white-bearded fellow’s denims droop
at the seat despite his tightened belt
and taut bright suspenders, and an old lady
stands at her walker and sways,
dreamy-eyed, perhaps recalling, perhaps not,
that these are the tunes not of her own youth
but her grandchild’s. Beside her,
a stout, gray-haired woman,
no doubt her daughter, mouths the words,
smiles, and holds her mother’s hands,
steadying her as they move together
to “Every Breath You Take.”

The surrounding mountains dim
and the nearby pond (a broad, deep lake, really)
reflects the stars. At its center sits an island,
thickly wooded, uninhabited.
As the sun moves on, the elderly drift away,
and younger kids step in,
accepting, for tonight at least,
a mellowed groove. In time, the last notes
of the final Friday Night Live
will float out over the water. The dancers
will linger briefly, then depart, grateful
for the music they’ve been given.

Morning Rig

October 13, 2019.Reading time 1 minute.

By Angela Sorby

Featured Art: Ophelia, 1851-2 by Sir John Everett Millais, Bt

The moon knows the laws—
the factors, the forces,
and is at peace. Look,

it’s unconscious up there!
Meanwhile, my brother quits
being a bankruptcy attorney

to get his Class B Trucking license.
Why? Let’s wake the moon
to ask why other people make

their weird other-people-decisions.
This is the origin of all religions.
An important part of the story:

the moon never responds.
It lies languid, bathed
in darkness like Ophelia,

while big rigs turn their engines
over as dawn breaks pink
with pollen and pollution.

So much is broken,
but never the largest laws—
how wheels set in motion

spin unless something stops them,
but never skid over the line
from speed to freedom.

The Dog in the Library

October 11, 2019.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Catherine Stearns

Featured Art: Sleeping Bloodhound, 1835 by Sir Edwin Henry Landseer

“We may be in the universe as dogs and cats are in our libraries,
seeing the books and hearing the conversation, but having no
inkling of the meaning of it all.” —William James

On sunny, cerulean days I go all the way
to eleven when I stretch and sniff among the leaves,
whereas you stay inside, hunched over
your moral universe. Old girl, if you
stopped trying to decipher those fossil bird tracks,
you might see the thermal-gliding hawk above
or that zaftig possum gnawing on fallen
persimmons under the window. I’m just saying
your preference betrays a certain fear
of your own nature. Remember
last summer when you left me in the car
to pick up a book they were holding for you,
and a page or two in you recognized
your own penciled and may I say
obsessive marginalia, although you had
no memory of the text itself?
Whatever made you think your mind
could be disenthralled with words?
As a pup, I once took Mark Strand’s
injunction in “Eating Poetry” to heart,
devouring one or two slim volumes,
but soon realized I prefer the raw
material of life, what e e cummings
calls “the slavver of spring”: smells
of fresh earth, the ghostly scent of
rabbits, even the mounds of dirty laundry
piled up on your bed. If you found answers
to your questions, do you truly believe
those answers would transform you?
So many of your species seem
susceptible to revelation. We’re all
browsers, old girl, without an inkling,
waiting by the door for a treat or to be forgiven
until our unleashed immortal part bolts
for that hit of dopamine. Then
all good dogs go to heaven.

Anti-Confessional

October 10, 2019.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Catherine Stearns

Featured Art: Girl in a Blue Dress, c. 1891 by Philip Wilson Steer

In one photo, she’s wearing a sapphire blue dress,
a black cloche posed rakishly over one eye,
a corsage of pink rosebuds around her wrist.
On the back it says JB & RPS, the man
in shadow next to her. This was before the war,
before they reinstated the marriage bar
and she lost her job when she married my father.

One hot summer night, maybe five years after he died—
we’d stripped down to our underwear to play Scrabble—
I asked her about grad school and her fifth-floor walk-up
with Mary Maud, about eating oysters at the Grand Central
Oyster House every Sunday, and the gold lighter engraved
in the Tiffany font at the back of her jewelry box, and I asked her
if she’d ever slept with anyone besides my dad.

She took an extra long sip of her G&T and told me to
mind my own business. Then reached over
to put her X on a Triple Word.

Exile Queen

October 9, 2019.Reading time 19 minutes.

By Bethany Schultz Hurst

the trees
                  flaunting their flowers                      after a while
their blooms will die and then
swell into a fruit             and I submit to you                 dear viewer
               this process is not monstrous

we’ve spent too much time

at night watching these shows where the queens
               keep making bad choices
like torching the city with their pet dragons
               or with sickly green fire
                              lit in tunnels underneath                  because they are mothers

they love their children too much or is it

                                 not enough         the flowers this spring
are ridiculous              on the way into the theater alone in broad daylight
               for some comic book sequel                I can’t stop
shoving my face           into the showy pink organs
               of the parking lot trees

at night I’ve been balancing like a knife on my side
of the couch the bed because I’m
too tired already to have anyone really
touch me

reCAPTCHA

October 2, 2019.Reading time 1 minute.

by Jiordan Castle
Featured Art: Dry Brook by Jervis McEntee

Read by the author.

A week to go &

still no word

on where they’re

sending him

this time. If you

search my father’s

first name, last

name, sex, &

race in a

federal inmate

database, you’ll see Read More

“Uber” and “Alexa”

October 2, 2019.Reading time 2 minutes.

by Ruth Bardon
Featured Art: Street Cart by Egon Schiele

Uber

The silent dot on the screen

moves and stops and starts again,

an ant sniffing out my scent,

determined to find me,

ambassador of an omniscient eye

that never looks away,

Landscape with iPhone

October 2, 2019.Reading time 3 minutes.

by Emily Mohn-Slate
Originally published in New Ohio Review Issue 25
Featured Art: Walk Behind the Beach Huts by Barbara Peirson

I don’t want to tweet this thought that comes to me

as I’m changing my daughter’s diaper—don’t want to pull my phone

out of my pocket—my phone is growing a tree right now

with an app called “Forest” that rewards me for not looking

at my phone—and what I want is for a thought to enter,

Poems About Facebook

October 2, 2019.Reading time 3 minutes.

Featured Art: The Toilers of the Sea by Albert Pinkham Ryder

Facebook Sonnet

by Tanya Grae
Originally published in New Ohio Review Issue 21

Someone thinks I’m beautiful again

& likes posts of my day, comments.

I stifle smiles & feel uncontainable—

bungeed off ether & the interplay. Read More

Flight Lessons

June 14, 2019.Reading time 44 minutes.

By Barbara Ganley

Featured Art: “Holy Holy Holy” by Yan Sun

Because it’s Thursday, nearing five o’clock, Lucie is well into a doozie of a headache. Every week at this time little Jenny Baker hands her one as they sit side by side in the dining room and Jenny busily tortures the piano. She’s a narrow slip of a thing with a distracting, gum-baring smile made stranger today by a drift of tiny metallic stars sweeping across her cheeks like cosmic freckles.

Her orange high tops smack the stool’s taloned feet bapbap as she bludgeons the keys in an apparent heavy-metal version of “Long Long Ago.”

The piano, old and patient, takes it. Lucie, who is neither of those things, says, “A bit slower and softer now. See if you can find the melancholy.”

She uses her hands to play a phantom keyboard floating in the air. She must look ridiculous. “Sing the words if you like. I find that helps.” She is ridiculous.

Jenny, clearly having the same thought, grins at the keys, speeds up and hammers away. She doesn’t sing. She never sings.

What ten-year-old doesn’t sing?

But of course Lucie is confusing children with birds, Jenny with Bacchus, her grandfather’s sidekick and belter of sea shanty and Broadway schmaltz. Since moving back home, she has learned far more about thirty-year-old African grey parrots than about ten-year-old humans. Prefers them, too, if truth be told, even if they do bite. Lucie understands that people would find that small of her. But this ten-year-old human next to her couldn’t care less. A look of near madness flashes across the girl’s starry face. Her thin hair switches about her neck like an agitated tail. She’s seeing herself onstage, adoring fans at her feet. Next she’ll be peeling the stars from her face and tossing them to the crowd.

Just Like All the Girls

June 14, 2019.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Francesca Bell

Featured Art: “The Sea of Memory and Forgetfulness” by Madara Mason

I always knew

a man waited for me somewhere
with hands that fit the particular curves
of my treacherous body.

Whether I watched for him or not.
Whether I believed.

Sometimes, in dreams, he entered me from above,
like a coffin lowered slowly into a grave.

Sometimes he held me hard from behind.

The hills scorched golden each summer.
My hair was streaked the color of dried-dead grass.

People said I was lucky to have it.

Every year, moths fluttered
against the trees’ dark trunks as I passed,
like scraps of parchment.

An infestation that maybe would, maybe would not, kill the oaks.

I dared myself to wonder
around which bend
would he find me.

Wherever I looked were signs.

The steep ridge, a gray fox hunting
at the slough’s edge, V of geese going over.

World of enchantment,
and I wandered precarious,

my steps disturbing the air,
their small sound like beads
counting out prayers.

Elegy with Two Portraits

June 14, 2019.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Dan Clark

Featured Art: “Basa de Maya” by Madara Mason

The priest swings a thurible. Incense,

swirling and nebulous, encircles the cremation urn.

A few feet away, a husband weeps.

He’s not thinking how Oregon came to fill the ocean

of itself, how island arcs docked like icebergs

against the Idaho shore, where Mesohippus,

diminutive proto-horse, grazed beneath the juniper.

He’s not considering how Oregon drifted through

several versions of itself—savanna, jungle, desert—

then settled for a time as a placid, inland lake.

Instead, he’s remembering forty years ago,

a dance floor, a promise emerging,

all red-haired and smile, in the same way Da Vinci

painted Ginevra, young woman in three-quarter view,

whose eyes engaged like none before,

the part of her braided hair revealing noble forehead,

the background a green halo of juniper.

And he’s not considering how the continent

has yet to finish arranging itself—Pacific plate

subducting from the west, Sierras

pressing north, rotating Oregon like a cogged wheel.

Yet he finds himself in the second pew, rearranging:

how that red-haired promise faded into

the drinking, the stolen meds, the swerving

between fallen arms of railroad crossings,

this version of her unrecognizable

like Willem de Kooning’s Woman I,

full-frontal view: terrible, Paleolithic,

brandishing eyes of knives, breasts challenging,

margin of her body dissolving into background.

The priest swings incense, swirling and nebulous.

Twenty miles above Earth, Hubble steadies its gaze

the way he studies the pink of his thumbnail.

He watches himself in the pew,

feels himself disappearing—

he cannot hold the red-shifts steady, cannot keep

the margins from dissolving to ground.

SKIN

June 14, 2019.Reading time 1 minute.

By Janice N. Harrington

Featured Art: “Squall” by Madara Mason

My skin, my confessor, my cubicle,

scrivener, touch screen, touch-collector.

Frame and shawl and portmanteau. Wait,

wait, don’t go. The sun’s too high,

too hot. You’ll burn for sure.

On my face, this scattered Braille.

Read what my cheek says; all those

cuts on my hands, read those too.

And that vowel in the small of my back,

say it, repeat after me.

A door for out, a door for in,

I’m in my skin, within, within. Without?

You mean without your skin?

The skin against my thigh says

warm, dry, soft, weight of, knows

silken and kerseymere, says here.

Says, yes. Says, no.

It whispers with its electric tongue, release

and absence. But absence is always worse.

It’s the one that leaves the scar.

Skin-clock, tick-tock, tick-tock.

A scar, a scurry, I wouldn’t worry.

We’re only skin scenes, skin-scapes,

little dioramas with clever apes,

a skin, akin, pretense, pretend.

Let me ask again, your skin or mine?

Wind & Sand & Stars

June 14, 2019.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Matt Prater

Featured Art: “Bull and Bird” by Madara Mason

There was a roaming troubadour in the years of maille & sword

who lunched on wild strawberries,

communing with the Lord.

But his creed was not dogmatic, & he didn’t bow the knee;

so found himself impaled by a roaming soldier, eventually,

when he would not sing the praises

of the ravenous Crusades. He held G-d

was the father of Muhammad & the Moors,

so went to Heaven softly, whispering amor.

There was a normal generation, for a while, between the wars–

chicken paprika & the Bauhaus & the post-impressionists.

None of life is automatic. France was big and France was grand

& France could claim Picasso. But France still didn’t stand.

But France survived, I can hear France say.

(J’ai vu le cinema verité, mais j’ai aussi vu que J’accuse!)

And that may be. But from what I know,

I am searching for Charles de Gaulles.

You can see it as I can see it. Something old was about to fall.

There is an awkward silence every time we talk.

The pattern seems half-broken. The thread is gone.

We tiptoe around each other. We are raw. We might come to blows

if we said what the other was thinking, or half

of what we know. There’s a cat on my warm porch,

sleeping so soundly I thought it had died. de Saint-Exupery,

perhaps, wrote his book Le Petit Prince, in the calm before

the end of things, during a summer slow as this.

Morning Commute with Revenant

June 14, 2019.Reading time 3 minutes.

By James McKee

Featured Art by Courtney Bennett

You know how it is: going in to work,

Who looks at anything? You’re late, it’s cold,

hot, raining, no buses again, whatever.

You’re long past fighting this fast-forward blur,

pure A-to-B time, better numbed than bored.

But then the street-views you sluice through slow and lock:

some old warehouse abutting a blacktop lot.

high up this soot-caked chainlink fence

that nets, for no one else, blank swaths of sky,

there juts forth a sawn-off sumac branch,

em dash black and cocked at ten-to-three.

See it first, since you must, as a quenched torch,

a club hanging half-swung,

or someone’s bony forearm thrust through the mesh,

lopped at wrist and elbow, and left as a warning.

Fine. But you’re not one to confuse

fancied-up musings with the truth:

one hapless stick is all the chainsaw left

the day someone decided

this tree—a weed that wedged upwards from

the cracks its seed happened among,

that rose against the traffic-ravaged air,

that pierced that fence and knuckled this pavement up—

had to come down.

Rough cobblestones plug the square yard

where its raw stump once weathered anvil-hard;

no doubt the sheared-off roots still grip

deep undertiers of pipe and stone.

A passing siren’s wave-crest flushes you

back in the churning surf of city noise,

but by now it’s too late:

you’ve gone and glimpsed that voided silhouette,

you’ve heard, in its tousling leaves’ soundless hiss,

another of those random sidewalk elegies

work alone can dismiss

And not because it isn’t true,

because it is.

Northern Flicker

June 14, 2019.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Kathryn Jordan

Featured Art: “Bird Notes” by Madara Mason

It hits the window like a woman being thrown

against a wall. “Must have been an owl,”

I say to my grown girl emerging

from her part of the house. “An owl?

Could that happen?” she asks. She takes

a torch into the dark alley while I remain

in my well-lit living room, protesting,

“I don’t want to know if it is or not:

I mean, how could I save an owl?”

Because of course it would come down to me.

The next day, a beautiful bird lies dead—

a Northern Flicker, red spot at its throat, white

and black speckled breast, wings limned in gold

rust—a color I can see when the creature

rests limp and quiet in my two cupped hands.

We bury its loveliness under a glass dome

in the garden to keep it from being torn apart

by ravening crows. She offers prayers and

suddenly I’m looking down the wrong end

of binoculars at my daughter, who announced

when she was six, “There’s no way to leave

this world until we die.” “Yes, I think you’re right,”

I agreed, trying to calibrate words to her age.

“It’s like a trap,” she said, then.

Twenty years later, at home for her own protection,

she says it again. “Choosing safety over my dreams;

it’s like a trap.” I recorded my child’s words back then

because they hit my heart just as a woodpecker

might, if, flying fast, it couldn’t see, didn’t know,

it was being pulled into its own reflection.

Construction Paper Flags Tacked to a Primary School Bulletin Board

June 14, 2019.Reading time 1 minute.

By Adam Tavel

Featured Art: “Noise in the System” by Madara Mason

for my sons

This one has concentric frames
that on close inspection are
pink strips of floss. This one
swims inside itself, three shades
of blue. This one’s stripes
are dead calligraphy: R.I.P. Abuela,
R.I.P. Cousin Juan. This one grows
bored and morphs into a sketch
of a cartoon baseball twirling
its handlebar mustache.
This one begs God Bless. This one
has sticker pistols saying BANG.
This one’s wrists wear broken chains.
This one is lost inside the glitz
of caked-on glitter gold. This one
is impasto red on red that bled
on everything it touched. This one
has forty macaroni stars
and this one has the husk
of a dragonfly where stars
should be, its glue-gobbed wings
unstitching from the corpse.

Now in Color

June 14, 2019.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Jacqueline Balderrama

Featured Art by Courtney Bennett

the migratory patterns of sheartail and warbler continue back and forth

and on foot—the grey wolf,

the armadillo,

the coyote.

Now paper, now papel—we learn to listen in different ways,

at night, hear the floor vents empty their chamber of words,

and again, they ask for the source of me

as if water could stop

or would.

Now the agents dress us in the terms of their casting calls—

anonymous beneath the sombrero, or fiery latina, or gardener, or alien, or drug lord.

Now Maria Montez, Katy Jurado, Rita Hayworth speak back to the funny mirror,

which reflects them only as cut tulips.

And my mother shakes her head for the childhood dog the neighbors took in

then abandoned in the desert.

Now the wildfires on the San Bernardino Mountains

when families at night set out lawn chairs to watch the flames.

And a man on the news electrifies his fences and shows the camera large photos

of bodies he’s found beneath his trees.

Now a prayer to Mother Cabrini, patron saint of immigrants.

Now the radio is breathless . . .

The television like an escape portal streams color through undraped windows,

but inside we are still here

fumbling to turn on the light or floating down in our chairs,

wishing the room to unleash its plum, its marigold, the blue of our jeans, the white walls

covered with frames, wishing too that everyone had been there with us.

Now we separate monstrous shadows from the broomsticks, the coils of rope, the strangers,

assuring ourselves that somehow we can still have good days.

Somewhere prickly poppies are blooming and want to.

An Unordered List of the Not-Beautiful

June 14, 2019.Reading time 1 minute.

By Katie Pyontek

Featured Art by Courtney Bennett

Beauty depends on magnitude and order.
Hence a very small life cannot be beautiful,
for the view of it is confused.

— Aristotle

Not the green bellies of hummingbirds, not

one set of wired bones shown behind glass.

Not the plump folds of tardigrades, not quarks,

not marbles on carpet, not pinhole stars.

Not the improbable orderliness

of ants, not feverfew or curls of hair,

not quick love notes left out on the counter.

Not a dozen kumquats, not an average

of six minutes. Not the intricate coils

of a snail’s shell, inching down the sidewalk.

After Hours

June 14, 2019.Reading time 4 minutes.

By Maria Nazos

Featured Art: “Illusion of My Studio” by Yan Sun

When I exited the stall, she was standing at the sink.

I knew her best from one night at the bar, when she’d said

my ex was handsome. Then asked whether I’d mind if she

called him later that night. I’d pressed my lips together

and said, go ahead, certain she held an unspoken malice

which young women carry into small towns. I’d moved

to the Cape to escape from my talent for tearing through

love, only to follow a trail of broken glass into every bar.

Only to find every fisherman with a penchant for failed

marriages and pot, and myself, again,

staying up too long and late.

As I stood beside her in the bathroom, washing my hands,

I thought of another night when she’d told me, as if casually

draping a dark blouse across a stool, that her father had just died.

I’d squeezed her hand. She pushed her blonde hair off her face,

said, that’s okay. But I’d seen her at the bar every night since,

drinking with a red-haired fisherman who’d tried to strangle

his ex. I shook my hands dry. Tear my shirt, she urged, interrupting

my reverie. Why? I asked. Did she want to show off

her seashell-curved cleavage or simply feel something

besides her heart splitting down the middle?

First Date

March 15, 2019.Reading time 15 minutes.

By James Lineberger

In the sixth grade I asked
Sissy Morgan
if she would go to the picture show with me
on what was supposed to be
my first date but when I said it her eyes got wide
and her mouth fell open and she just backed off till she ran into
a chair and had to sit down and didn’t say a word.

But during recess I could see her at the swings
giggling and whispering to her girl friends
and all of them staring at me
but if it was a trick or what I didn’t know
cause while I was waiting for the school bus
she came up to me and said
well all right but she would not go to
the Paramount which all
they showed was double-feature westerns with people like
Sonny Tufts or Charles Starrett
and if there was anything she could not abide it was Charles Starrett doing
The Durango Kid.

But when I told mama she said not
to worry because
we could go see Forever Amber at the Visulite
with Linda Darnell and Cornel Wilde
which was kind of like Gone With The Wind mama said
and the name was because of the color
of her eyes which ought to be just the kind
of story that a little girl would go for
and what we will do
mama said was I will drive y’all to the Visulite
and meet you out front again when
it is over.

My Younger Self Attempts Breakdancing at the Sadie Hawkins Dance

March 15, 2018.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Kerry James Evans

Featured Art: Dryland Farming #24, Monegros County, Aragon, Spain by Edward Burtynsky

I spin like an adolescent bottle
pointing in empty directions,

the colors of the divided gym
spiraling like one of Mrs. Peters’

chemistry experiments, the blurry
girls staring, the boys huddled together

like cows in a thunderstorm.
A minute ago, I’d sensed the movement,

two Samanthas on their way to our side
with their rare request.

Would you like to . . . ?
But I wasn’t waiting. I’d have my say first.

Now, I listen for the beat to drop
and I pose, balancing

all my weight on my left hand,
each leg a limp karate kick.

I move as a squid flees
a cameraman’s light,

arms crawling like
honeysuckle along a trellis.

If I love my body,
if any of us love our bodies,

we don’t know it yet.
What I do know?

Zenyatta

December 28, 2017.Reading time 5 minutes.

By Grady Chambers

Featured Art: French Knight, 14th Century, by Paul Mercuri

Breeders’ Cup, November 2010

In a different life she wins.
In a different November in Kentucky she leans
into the last curve of the brown-combed track
as she passes the thick of the field. In that one,
in a bar far away, in our lucky coats
and muddy white sneakers, we rise
with the televised crowd as she quickens
at the flick of the jockey, as the grandstand churns
at the distance beginning to close, as the line comes closer.

And we know it as her rider leans forward,
as Zenyatta knows it in her legs
as the horse before her turns
and knows it’s over, the brown mane flying by
in a whip of color and dust, as the stands become a flicker
of white tickets, as her name is spoken skyward like a chant.

Just Say No

May 28, 2017.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Kelly Michels

Featured Art: by Feliphe Schiarolli

We didn’t say a word when the officer visited our classroom.
We didn’t pass a note or mumble, didn’t blink when the TV
flickered on, when the stats, wrapped in white, settled
on the screen. We didn’t dare color outside the lines
of the worry-eyed cartoon character buying weed from a teenage
bully or the gang of stick figures shouting in the margins.

We pretended not to see each other,
not to know the smell of bong smoke, late at night,
how it would drift through the air vents with their
laughter, how it would rise in a fog as we slept.

We pretended not to flinch when the egg hit the pan,
the yolk thundering against the cladded aluminum,
or when the officer pointed to the display of syringes
on the screen, the scenes of cherubic teens
snorting a line for the first time, the background darkening,
their eyes, lifeless, because the result is death,
the officer said, while pointing to a photo of a casket.

We pretended not to know how the dead could rise,
how they rose each morning to put away our cereal boxes
and make our beds, how they were waiting for us now
in their long white robes smeared with peanut butter
and hair dye, their tired bodies floating across the pearly
linoleum floors, the bones in their fingers thrumming
the edge of the kitchen sink to the sound of Clarence Clemons
in their heads, “The Promised Land” rising like a dark cloud
from the desert floor, their eyes lost in the throbbing
autumnal light, the snaking of branches across
the kitchen window, the tick-tock of the wind against
the leaves, how it feels like eternity, as they watch
for the bus, the broken ice maker buzzing,
the dishwasher rumbling, milk parting their burned coffee,
waiting for their children to return to them
to wipe their small skulls clean.

Jenny Perowski is Ahead of Me in the Grocery Store Line

January 15, 2016.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Julie Danho

Featured Art: (Untitled–Flower Study) by Mary Vaux Walcott

If an Amish family can forgive the man who burned
their land, surely I can say hello to Jenny Perowski,
who used to call me “fattie fat” in seventh grade math
and had boys call my house, pretending to ask me out.
That was twenty years ago. Now Jenny, if not fat exactly,
is puffy as a slightly overstuffed chair. I’m thinner than her,
and my pleasure feels more whiskey than cream, makes me
want to pour out her Kors bag to rifle for candy, then slowly
eat it in front of her like she once did to me. I know
her cruelty was, at best, a misdemeanor. But anger
is like a peppermint in a pocketbook—everything inside
takes on its smell and taste. I could break it in my teeth,
make it disappear. Instead, I savor the mint, let the sugar
line my mouth like fur, linger far past what can be called
pleasure. How good it would be to be better than this.

Grammar School

January 13, 2016.Reading time 1 minute.

By Mark Belair

Featured Art: Project for an Overdoor by Carlo Marchionni or Filippo Marchionni

Through the municipal green, overpainted wire mesh
obscuring the grammar school basement windows

comes the spank of a basketball not engaged in any game,
just pounded in place in an empty, echoing cafeteria, then

an outside metal door gets gut-punched open to release
gruff-voiced janitor, belt keys jangling, cursing at the world

while from a first-floor office a stretch of plastic packing tape
screaks off a roll as a phone rings and a copy machine whumps

as if providing a bass line to a class that, upstairs,
bursts into a trebly, mocking laugh, after which,

yet farther up, in a distantly reverberant bathroom, a toilet
flushes and keeps running even after a door slams shut and

all the old, hard memories flood
back enough for me to know

that if a documentary film was made
about daily life in grammar school—

with shot after shot of small, solemn faces
taring out at us—

its scoreless soundtrack
would be this.

When Mr. Bridges Died

January 12, 2016.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Mark Kraushaar

Featured Art: (Children Swimming) by Unidentified

When Mr. Bridges died I knew
the whole eighth grade would have to gather
in the gym and sit there on those cheerless,
folding metal chairs set up by string-bean
Donny Graf the constant burper.
Mr. Bridges was a substitute,
we hardly knew him, but
I knew that there we’d be, all of us,
and there would be our stiff-grinning
twitchy principal, Mr. Albert Fraze, to slowly,
slowly stand and tell us what a deep
and lasting loss this was for all of us.
And later, sitting there three rows from the exit
by fatso Robert Randall who’d socked me
in the stomach on the 8 bus once,
I knew that Mr. Fraze would drill us
with the first long look that said, Every one of you
should be ashamed, ashamed for even thinking about,
for even thinking about thinking about
turning your gaze away one ten
thousandth of an inch:
a man is dead today.
And then would come this clumsy, freighted
metaphor and though I doubt I knew the word
(metaphor) I knew our Mr. Fraze: Mr. Bridges
was a kind of bridge, he’d say,
or found a bridge, or formed a bridge, or built
a bridge, or was a bridge from ignorance to wisdom,
from confusion to compassion, blah, blah, blah,
which is exactly what he said so that
sitting there I thought of that four-cabled
quarter-mile Roebling tower bridge
and I thought of its glittering
river city Cincinnati since we’d studied it all week.
I pictured its reaching, curving waterway, the great
Ohio and I thought of the circling terns and swirling slicks
and chemical froths and then I thought of a row of houseboats
and a paddlewheel steamer with a single, smiling
tourist, anyone and no one, waving once.

Kalypso

April 6, 2010.Reading time 1 minute.

By Ernest Hilbert

The city is cat piss and dog shit. It stinks,
And the humid air molders. I lie in bed,
Too hot to move, slick with sweat, wait for dark.
Blue flies eddy over the cluttered sink.
I’m broke. The change dish is exhausted.
A Western Union stub is my bookmark.
You never knew me. You’re in a Victorian
Sea home, slicing, tasting a sweet cool peach,
As an ocean wind lifts your long light hair.
Your songs are old, your dresses European,
And your view is vast down the empty beach.
You pause, as long as you like on the stair.
Memories sink, and I am forced to bear
Life’s last thought: that you were never there.