Winter Online Exclusive, December 2022
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,
Featured Art: The Toilers of the Sea by Albert Pinkham Ryder
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
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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 Read More
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.
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.
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.
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. Read More
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.
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