Category: Uncategorized

Love Letters

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Susan Browne

autumn leaves glitter in their brittling
someone plays the french horn on the shore
beneath the blue flame of sky      the sound
like silver glinting across air like tinder

dear california
when I’m gone
will you still be here
will there still be a shore

someone stomps out of the reeds
holding a fishing pole
commands the horn player to stop
I walk by into silence

missing the music
wondering what else I want
on this hot november day
a cloud spilling rain

a voice that’s kind
not so many demands
not so many desires
I imagine mother earth is tired

our tumult & trash
our french horns & fishing poles
our eyelashes & elbows
our hands wanting to hold

dear humans
beautiful & dangerous
what will we do next
I keep thinking about love

about a man
who wrote to me years later
to say he was sorry for loving badly

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Icarus

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Robert Cording

After our son died, my wife found him
in coincidences—sightings of hawks, mostly,
at the oddest of times and places, and then
in a pair of redtails that took up residence,
nesting in a larch above our barn, and how
their low, frequent sweeps just a few feet above us
before rising over our kitchen roof
made it seem as if they were looking in on us.
In a way, it all made sense, our son so at home
in high places—the edges of mountain trails,
walking on a roof, or later, after he became
a house painter, at the top of a forty-foot ladder.
So many mornings we woke to the redtails’
jolting screeches and, even if I was a casual believer,
their presence multiplied my love
for the ordinary more every day. We never thought,
of course, any of those hawks was our son—
who would ever want that?—but, once,
watching one rise and rise on a draft of air,
I thought of Icarus soaring toward the sun—
as if an old story could provide the distance
I needed—waxed and feathered, his arms winged,
and remembered a babysitter’s frantic call
to come home, immediately, after she’d found
our ten-year-old nearly forty feet up
in an oak tree. I can almost hear him again, laughing
high up in the sky, throned on a branch,
his feet dangling, knowing nothing but the promise
of heights as he waved to me—
and I must have looked very small
calling up to him, staying calm
so falsely as I pleaded with him
to come down, to come down now.

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Epistle to Myself on my 70th Birthday

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Robert Cording

“How’s business?—
Slow as a white man in slippers.”
—The Wire

Listen, nobody wants another overworked sky
of Beethovian sun and cloud,

or starlings loop-the-looping as they gather.

You’re standard issue, friend. Where’s the market unrest,
the ups and downs of soybean and pork belly,

the tango of selfie and brazen litany of self-invention?

Where’s your Twitter handle and your presence
on Facebook? OMG, you’re an old white man in slippers,

still daydreaming about Truth and Beauty,
still earnest even, taken up once again

by a titmouse just outside your study window,
(who still calls it a study?)

lifting one translucent wing in the afternoon light,
its beak cleaning and rearranging a downy under-layer

of feathers. You’re incorrigible, a puppy splashing
in dirty puddles, unaware of your puppy-ness,

happy as your silly puppy-feet plunge.
Pal, the Four Horsemen are riding in, the planet’s

burning up, and there’s enough lies going around
to fill Baltimore’s dumpsters. And what are you

proposing to do?—give a good Wordsworthian Hark 
at some celandine or lark to lighten your mood?

Go on, schlep down to your rural mailbox—
you’re a fountain pen and letter guy, aren’t you,

and maybe someone’s written you, or at least
sent a birthday card rather than an email.

And, if not, there’s always this poem—
place it in its little stall, pull up the red flag,

and shuffle back tomorrow in your slippers
to open the door on yourself.

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Ode to the Impossible

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Matthew T. Birdsall

A cerulean warbler scrambled up and down the shaggy spine
of an elderly bitternut hickory whose reach darkens half of my backyard
and I tried to follow it, but it became impossible as the bird
vanished and appeared in the shadows numberless—
the futility of finding the bird again sharpened my focus
because I’ve always longed to experience the impossible

because looking for the impossible in blotters of LSD during high school classes
and staring out the window at the animated, neon leaves on oak trees
didn’t just make me look at leaves differently, it made me want
to whisper tales of anarchy in the waxy ears of greedy marketing majors,
to digitally protest the World Bank, to distribute loose doobies at Christian chemo clinics,
to dole out dollops of ranch dressing at the homeless shelter on Saturdays,
to slide in and out of varied segments of society looking for pieces of my dull brain

searching for winding, mossy ways to get into the Hegelian principle
far enough to see the overarching irony of oppositions and how
they are the mortar between the bricks of what I really want
to say since mostly my truth is tucked into an ellipsis
holding together fast-flying flippant phrases,

however,
my focus fled when a red-shouldered hawk alighted
on an adjacent ash tree and I lost the warbler entirely,
but I still readied myself for another round of watching
the viewless fringe of fantasy and chasing shadows I imagined
only Keats and I could see, because O, John, I want to hold on
to my trippy teenage faith that there is fractally-hued life
beyond interpretation, to believe in full-throated ease
and sunburnt mirth, that I’m awake and above ground,
which is only possible until it isn’t.

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(R)egret

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Danusha Laméris

I see the word egret, but read, instead,
                regret. A trick of the mind. Its reversals. One,
a white slash, rising from the marsh. The other

a stone, strapped to the heart. The way I’ve carried
                all the would-haves, all the ifs. Each alternate
exhausts. The egret wades in the dark water,

seeking fish. The heart, constancy. I doubt the egret
               has regrets. Hatch, fledge, breed, hunt.
And besides, a lovely name that comes from French.

“Aigrette,” for brush, after the long feathers
               that stream down its back. How do its legs,
bent reversed, move ahead? Who wouldn’t want

to walk like that? There are days I step
               outside my body, arise, fly over the field
of my life, and glimpse—not error—but river,

rock, and oak, a wide expanse. Here and there
               a meadow, dry grass dotted with—could
they be poppies?—some bright-blurred, orange flame.

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Anachronism

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Therese Gleason

One week after
the clock in your chest
clenched and froze forever
at half past fifty,
a crow careened through the door,
grazing my temple
like a stray bullet.
In the aftermath
of shock and startle,
irony registered
bitter in my craw.
I used to think a bird
crossing the threshold
was a harbinger of death,
but by the time
this transgressor
cut a crooked line
through the living room,
our windows
were already draped
in black crepe.
The old wives,
their feathered omen
arrived late, clucked
their tongues
and rent their garments.

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Blue Camaro

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Owen McLeod

I’m up at 6 A.M. to write, but all I do is stare
at the rain and the trees and watch the wind
strip away what remains of November’s leaves.
Somewhere in Virginia, my father is dying.
Not on the sidewalk of a sudden heart attack
from shoveling snow, or in a hospital room
monitored by nurses and beeping machines,
but at home, alone, and almost imperceptibly
from a sluggish, inoperable form of cancer.
That man was never satisfied with anything.
When leaves were green he wanted them red,
when red then brown, when brown then fallen
and gone. Once, after making me rake them
into a curbside pile, he tossed in a cinderblock
meant for the local punk who’d been plowing
his 1982 Camaro through the heaped up leaves
of our neighborhood. Two days later, the kid
blew through our pile without suffering a scratch.
My father didn’t realize that I, fearing for him
as much as for the boy, had fished out the brick
and chucked it in the ravine behind our house.
As punishment, I had to climb down in there,
retrieve the cinderblock, and bury it in the leaves
after I’d raked them back into a mound. My dad
said that was nothing if I dared to take it out.
I can still see him, stationed at the window,
watching and waiting for that boy to return—
but he never did, because I tipped him off
the next day after spotting him at 7-Eleven.
Decades later and hundreds of miles away,
a malignant brick buried deep inside him,
my father still waits at the living room window,
listening for the death rumble of that blue Camaro.

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The Elks at the Watering Hole

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Steve Myers

Sundays they’d meander down from surrounding hills
                                                                                                  to the watering hole
just south of French Creek, where it joins the Allegheny, maybe twenty,
thirty on a good day in summer, the fog in no hurry to lift off the river,
& if I were visiting,
                                 my father-in-law would take me along, because
this was the rhythm of Venango County men, week after week, season
on season, for the members who hadn’t lost wives to dementia, cancer,
or a cheating heart,
                                    a chance to get away from the women, bullshit, maybe
win some money in the big drawing,

                                                                 the Iron City flowing & Wild Turkey,
not yet noon, a thumb-flicked Zippo, cover clicking back, scratchy rachet
of the wheel, flame-sputter, flame, head bowing, a face
                                                                                                  sudden, illuminated,
the long fhhhhhhhhhhh, with smoke stream, & a story would begin:

an Army jeep bouncing into a bombed-out Rhineland town, & in an old church
cellar, great shattered wine casks, you drank as you sloshed through it, dark,
fuck-cold;
                   someone’s uncle down the Mon Valley, the Gold Gloves boxer
who lost an arm; a lieutenant’s first whorehouse.
                                                                                       That was the talk,
and everything was Eddie, almost whispered, a shibboleth:
duck boots, fly rods, the Eddie Bauer Ford Bronco—Elks Masonic
to the nth degree.

                                 Laugh, move among them, wear the flannel, stand them
a round—still, I carried the scent of a distant country. One slight shift
of wind & heads would lift, the circle tighten.

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Memorial Day on Fire Island w/ Laughing Buddha

.Reading time 60 minutes.

By Ed Falco

Arthur is, look, you don’t want to, fine; and Bee’s, good, I’m glad.

It’s about a billion degrees out. They’re on a clothing-optional beach. Arthur had to practically drag her.

He gets up and walks away, which makes her mad. She’s all about how men retreat to their caves. Arthur stops and puts his hands on his hips and looks out over the Atlantic Ocean. There’s a half dozen guys on blankets to the left and behind him chattering. They’re all young and nude, built like Greek gods. One guy’s putting sunblock on another guy like he’s practicing the art of sensuous massage. Next to them’s what looks like a straight couple, the girl’s young, topless, with a bikini bottom. She looks good. She’s in fact gorgeous. The guy’s probably at least twice her age, well into his forties. He’s tanned a golden bronze and built solid, stretched out, arms under his head, got on one of those skimpy bathing suits Olympic divers wear. No belly at all if not quite a six-pack. The girl’s sitting up looking off at the horizon, her hand wrapped around his kneecap like she’s holding a stick shift. Arthur goes back to their blanket.

You’re back.

Look, if you don’t want to, okay, but I’m going to.

Go right ahead. Who’s stopping you?

All I’m saying is, we’re here, right?

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Aubade From the Snake Pit Alehouse

.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Maggie Glover

—West Hollywood, November 2019

I get a whiskey. I do not call my father back. I text you. I try on my new dress
in the bathroom among the western decor. I get another whiskey. I write a poem
about cowboys. I text you. I finger out the cherry from the glass. I take the cherry
the bartender offers me, red-glow-glop in a bare palm. I don’t text you for 24
minutes (I count it). I let someone down. I smoke a cigarette. I think of my mother
smoking: outside restaurants, department stores, in the kitchen on Sunday mornings,
late-at-night while typing, the cigarette dangling from her mouth with its long,
tender arm of ash. I order a whiskey. I don’t answer my phone. I ask the bartender
for another cherry but I’m way ahead of you, he says, offering a dish of alien
jewel-fruit. I like the dish: shaped like a cowboy hat, porcelain. I am being
trusted with breakable things. I joke: I don’t need to eat dinner now thanks
to all these snacks. I know I’m not joking. I don’t text you. I write a poem in
which I am the cowboy and you are the O.K. Corral and I make good choices
and my father is sober and my mother remembers me. I smoke another cigarette
and the bartender joins me. I know what this is. I say it out loud: I know what
this is. I pretend I mean something different from what I mean. I order a whiskey.
I listen when he explains his tattoo. I text you. I let him touch my shoulder. I
go to the bathroom and change into my dress. I ask him to clip the tags from
the hem. I write a poem in which I know exactly what I’m doing though I don’t
know it yet, do you?

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Something Implausible

.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Gregory Djanikian

Death in his dark cowl is testing his scythe
against the roses in my garden named Hope-to-Be.

He says there is a mountain within you
that is shifting and the river is slick with feathers.

He says the way inward is always more frightening
than any simple migration.

Sometimes I don’t know what he means.
He is all nuance and innuendo.

Sometimes he grins, showing his lighter side
as if he’s told a once-in-a-lifetime joke.

Sometimes he makes a sad face, pursing his lips,
his fingers sliding down his cheeks like imaginary tears.

I’ve spotted him driving around the neighborhood
in his rattletrap with a cracked windshield

and a bumper sticker that says
My second car is always available!

I’ve seen him rummaging through garbage cans
picking out slices of pizza.

I’ve seen him dining at Chez Philippe
sipping mignonette sauce from an oyster shell.

When my father lay curled on his bed,
he was there, spooning him, his body being of two bodies.

Once, I found him lying by my mother, cooing,
until she woke and swatted him off with her cane.

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Prenup

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Marcia LeBeau

Featured Art: Bonfire on Green Grass Field by Gantas Vaičiulėnas

I can’t promise you I know how to sit across from a man,
as he lights his campfire heart, without letting it
warm me. And I won’t pour water over it before it glows
down to embers in the lambent hours of the morning.
As shadow flames sashay across my face, I might throw in
the branches I’ve gathered from my forest. Make it blaze.

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Eleventh Anniversary

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Marcia LeBeau

Featured Art from rawpixel.com

We communicate like animals. I bark, he recoils.
I howl, he waits, howls back. It’s been like this

for over a decade. Sometimes our offspring try
to separate us. Last night the youngest guided me

into the dining room. The three working bulbs
of the chandelier spotlit smashed peas and a jack

under the table. We never learn. No, sometimes
we learn. A moment lying in bed ripples

for a week. We burrow into each other’s eyes, faces
slippery with tears. I have made him proclaim to himself

the scariest of truths: I am perfect. He has made me
do the same. Our perfection hangs in the air.

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Lucky

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Marcia LeBeau

Featured Art: Colorful carpets hanging on wall by Meruyert Gonullu

The Lucky store a few towns over is going out of business.
That doesn’t seem so lucky to me. Every year, my husband and I hit
their After Christmas sale. We try on jeans with zippers that tell us—
Lucky You! when the teeth unclench. I once got a sweater
with LUCKY that stretched across my breasts. We pile clothes
in dressing rooms facing each other. Yay or Nay outfits.
With conjugal knowledge, we are ruthlessly honest. Whoever finishes first
takes a seat and watches the other model consider and reconsider.
The other day, a woman I barely know told me how much she loves
my husband, the way he always refers to our life experiences with “we.”
We have decided. We went there. We bought that. She tells me how lucky I am.
When my husband and I leave the store, we clutch shopping bags,
we are satiated. Sometimes we hold hands, if we have one free.

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The Love Poem

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Marcia LeBeau

When he read it out loud in the small orange basement
on the street lined with old trees that fell
too early in storms, the wind lost its breath,
the molten core of the earth slowed slightly, and someone
poured a Slurpee down at the 7-Eleven. It might have been
just a poem meant for the whole group, who all playfully
fanned themselves and over-swooned after he’d lipped the last word—
but she sat knowing that everything she’d done
had brought her to this beige suede basement couch
to hear, to embody, to take these words
and press them into her—first shaking, but later softly
and with more force. Until they walked, ran, and flew
with her. So when she rose above that suburban town,
its baseball fields and slate-gray schools, on the days
when the screaming and demands and the mac-n-cheese dinners
became too much, they would be with her. He would be with her,
whether she wanted him or not.

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Fulminate

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Kimberly Johnson

Featured Art: Lightning coming from the Sky by Johannes Plenio

I saw you coming from a mile away,
               Thunder. You play
       Coy, sly your pretty in winks

Around the cumulus, but up close what colors
               You show, all shazam
       And tantrum while the Wham-bam

On the wireless crackles with static. What the swagger
               Are you after?
       Whose the heart you do not stagger

When you rattle through the bracken, knocking
               Branches at the casement?
       I betook me to the basement

When you batted first your lashes, flashed
               Your distant
       Dazzle—I’ve been whiplashed

By your type before: you come on easy
               But want me on my knees,
       Want to flutter my transformers

And shut off all my lights. You throw a glam show
               And then you blow
       Along to the next hapless,

Leaving blank fuzz across the radio dial—
               No tune, no storm
       Warning, no Thank you ma’am.

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Fusion

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Kimberly Johnson

Featured Art: Water Bubbles by Pixabay

Oh, my quantum soul—restive, sizzling
               In its nimbus
       Of need. How it dizzies

In the orbit of another’s passing
               Fancy, fickle
       As it flirts its vacant shells

Hey there sexy fella can you fill
               My spinning empties
       With your any loose electrons?

How in relentless ciphers it scrawls
               On any bathroom wall
       My atomic number.

It is a light element, an errant
               Sphere with strong wants:
       Come Lover, let’s charge ourselves

A spark, a star, a dark and secret
               Supernova, let
       Us cleave ourselves: attract,

Repel, attract, repel, let us fall
               In common gravity,
       By which I mean love, and then fall

Out.

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Ode to the Wild Heart

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Mary Jo Firth Gillett

Featured Art: Female making manicure to ethnic woman with tattoos by Skylar Kang

See how I clasp it to me, thunderclap
my way through. Oh constant invisible,
oh emperor of the unruly, tell me—
do I consume you or you me?
Downcast, you stain me indigo
but I love the blues—lapis lazuli
and Billie Holiday and the neon tetra’s
iridescence—is it biology?—
I the algae, you my luminescence?
But no, that’s too much—
a fleshless excuse for excess.
Hyper heart, you tattoo me,
every inch of skin inked,
but you are not indelible—
see how I embrace the pleasure
of erasure, the fleeting this, then this,
the smudge and blur,
the quickening pulse of swerve,
of word, the veiled, the reviled,
the revealed. And so, lost song
of nightingale, swoop of lark,
you are the ghosts of night,
the smidgen of hope,
the low-hanging, the high-flying—
my wisteria, my hysteria,
my gilt-edged book,
my glint in the dark.

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Prime Cuts

.Reading time 31 minutes.

By Lara Palmqvist

Their fights had always been drawn-out and passionate, thrilling in their possibility. The subjects of their arguments ran the gamut; Malcolm and Clare could employ almost anything as flint to spark the heat between them, setting their hearts leaping and their sharp tongues running wild: the empty soda can rolling around the Subaru, the knife marks grooved in the laminate countertop, the lack of remaining hot water in the morning, or that time, years ago, when the dog bowl had been left dry on a sultry day. The rhythm to their relationship was marked by peaks of tension, a pulse that proved their marriage was still alive—unlike those of some of their friends, whose flatlined politeness was so painfully false, resentment straining up beneath pert compliments and cute smiles. Malcolm and Clare were authentically in love, four years married and still willing to weather the turbulence of melding two lives together. Yet it was also true their latest fights seemed rote, their jibes more personal. The cause was lack of material, Clare felt. She blamed their unchanging surroundings.

“Your manner of blinking,” she said, interrupting Malcolm as he sat reading the golf report in his favorite recliner one February morning. “It’s bothersome.”

He glanced up, eyes fluttering, bewildered. “Excuse me?”

Clare set her turmeric milk on the coffee table. “There’s some kind of stutter to the way you blink.” She flicked her fingers off her thumb in two short bursts. “Like this,” she said. “I’m not sure you’re aware. It’s making me anxious.”

Clare spoke from her heart—she was genuinely bothered by Malcolm’s mannerisms, more so with each passing day. He’d developed a habit of repeatedly clearing his throat in the mornings that made her grab fistfuls of her dark hair and pull until her scalp felt strained. Just last week she’d noticed new strands of gray growing in along her part.

“I see,” Malcolm said. He creased the paper, eyes now flat and focused, strained wide.

Clare didn’t want this—she didn’t want him to suffer.

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Thursday Night, DivorceCare

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Jana-Lee Germaine

Featured Art: Faceless ballerina resting on floor with shade by Khoa Võ

Next to the Lost and Found,
our church basement folding chair circle.
Ten of us, week to week, scratch
words in workbooks, read copies
of How to Survive the Loss of a Love.

We pass or fail stages of grief.
Video clips from the other side:
a smiling blonde manages
her checking account, living debt-free;
gray men navigate dating and children.

Stories cycle in Share Time:
Billy the missionary served 25 years
with Kazakhstani orphans—
one day, home on furlough,
his wife drove to Walmart, never returned.

Dan’s wife ran off with the superintendent,
and Sharon’s husband left her at Denny’s
eating Moons Over My Hammy.
She hasn’t had an egg since.
I don’t know why, they said.
Blame always a stick to be thrown.

Not your fault, we agreed.
But maybe the fault was mine,
the unsupportive wife, the wastrel.
I drove 1700 miles, and still his voice,
obscured by barroom backnoise,

Insufferable woman, come home.
Each week I shift seats
on the circle’s farthest curve.
I’ve lost the knack for talking,
afraid the other eyes will shinny up my face
then flick away.

At Trader Joe’s, before group,
while cashiers flip French bread
into paper bags like a magic trick,
I practice words.
How to say I’ve left him,
that he was mean to me.
So I will be believed.

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The Measuring

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Veronica Corpuz

Featured Art: Vintage notebook among photo cameras on table by Rachel Claire

A married life is measured:
each grain of rice, coffee bean, and tea leaf,

ice cubes crackling in a glass of water upon the nightstand,
even the pinheads of steamed broccoli,

every hour of sleep lost when the baby is born
each hour you slept in before him,

the time you say, I am going to remember this walk forever—
the neon color of lichen after a long, hard winter,

how your son wobbles, falls down,
how you swoop him off the ground.

Until you walk into the Social Security office,
until you see the words printed in dot matrix—

the date your marriage begins, the date your spouse dies—
until you see what you did not know declared in writing,

then, you have new language for this feeling—
how your heart has become a singularity:

Your marriage has ended in death.

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The Bees

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Rick Viar

Featured Art: Bees on Purple Flower by Pixabay

My sister says I greeted the swarm
along the backyard slope, crawling, fat mouth slack,
sodden Pampers saggy with supplication.
Evidently, she scooped me up while they chased us
through our father’s lavender azaleas
where he dropped his shears and smashed yellow
jackets against my skin, yanking off the diaper
and waving it around his head like a lasso.
We won’t get spanked again until winter.
Everyone watches my sister declaim
the tragic tale at family gatherings for decades
as if she’s Dame Judi Dench. They love her
nuanced performance, the lively hand gestures
and operatic voice, how she tousles my hair
before her triumphant finale: I got stung
on my mouth, but he got stung in his asshole!
I’m always grateful Dad isn’t here to witness
this, or my marriage, or my career,
or my incompetent gardening, the limp cosmos.
I can’t believe you, a cousin smiles, shaking his head.
Me neither, I reply. I don’t even know what I did.

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how we end

.Reading time 7 minutes.

By Paula Harris

Featured Art: Light Inside Library by Janko Ferlic

it will be the day after our fifteenth anniversary

we started late, so we were already middle-aged at the start
so after fifteen years we’ll be what others call old

we will have lasted a solid fourteen years, ten months, and most of a day
longer than I expected
and so for fourteen years, ten months, and most of a day
I’ll have been confused by our continuing existence

how will you go through fifteen years and most of a day
without realising what a fuck-up I am?

during that time you’ll have been to more book launches
than you ever expected you would,
and since you never thought you’d ever be at a book launch
your showing up at each of them will be a personal gift;
you loiter at the back of the room with a bottle of whatever
cold beer is your current choice, maybe Heineken that day;
you don’t say much to the other people there,
you sit quietly through the post-launch celebratory dinners
when I’m buzzed and hyper or exhausted and freaked out
and we hold hands under the table;
once we get home we strip down and have sex
and you still look at me like I’m the best thing you’ve ever seen

I won’t watch a single rugby game
but I ask who won and if the All Blacks did alright,
if it was a good game, and you give me your thoughts
in a surprisingly detailed yet concise analysis
because you know this shit bores me
and from time to time I even remember
one of the players’ names and you smile at me
like you would a child trying to show off their knowledge of the alphabet
despite always misplacing the q

we still live in separate houses
because I’m smart enough to have figured out that living with someone
isn’t something I can cope with;
we spend time at each other’s homes
but more at yours, even though your kids hate it
when they drop by unannounced
and we’re naked on the kitchen floor
or I’m sucking you in the living room
or you’re going down on me on the dining table

so your kids always knock on the door, loudly,
then wait fifteen seconds before walking in

we always laugh at this

Read More

sisters

.Reading time 1 minute.

By James Lineberger

Featured Art: Children Playing on the Beach (1884) by Mary Cassatt

As I get you down from the closet shelf
and unwrap the brown shipping paper
to the square white box inside
I lift the lid for the first time and stick my fingers
deep inside you /
What does she feel like Barbara says and I say go on
see for yourself but she shushes me
and leads the way out back
to where the creek used to run
and we just do it quickly without any words
because words are a foolish way of asking forgiveness
for these five years we’ve left you
up there stacked amid the empty shoe boxes
and children’s playthings /
But now with both hands
I swing the box like sand in a pail
and scatter you
into the overhead cave of the old Judas tree
where your tiny parts
glow for a flickering moment
like early snow /
And Barbara whispers
yes Patsy I know
still trying to find your way home again
just like the whole rest
of your life
without somebody’s arm to hold on to

Read More

tree with ice, under amber light

.Reading time less than 1 minute.

By James Lineberger

Featured Art: A Pond Near Rousillon by Adolphe Appian

it glows in frozen streaks
each of its feathered limbs curved gently upward
and i find myself pausing
at the edge of the drive
to stand very still in the needles of rain
as if anchored here too
stretching my arms overhead
like some arthritic unpainted mime
not because i need to make
a statement about anything
just that every now and then
like the silent unfolding wings of the tree
something stirs within me trying to say
it believes

Read More

North River Shad, c. 1910

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Lindsay Atnip

Featured Art: Green Fish About to Eat the Fish Hook Wall Art by The Lazy Artist Gallery

William Merritt Chase painted numerous versions of fish still
lifes, many of which were quickly purchased by museums across
the country. Because of the popularity of these works, the artist
worried that he would be remembered only “as a painter of fish.”
—placard, Art Institute of Chicago

The real thing rots. Corrupts,
               Decays, time-lapses, hollow to holes.

But yours—immortal, silver-scaled, so round—
               (Why should its roundness be wrenching?)

               Realer than the real.

You were afraid this was what they’d remember you for.
               Afraid—as if there were somehow more than this.

Here one sees, forever, how it could fill the hand—
               How it would feel, filling one’s hand.

               One could do worse than be a painter of fishes.

Read More

Long Division

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Jessica Tanck

Featured Art: Green and White Press Drill on Table by Lisa Fotios

We have split the phone plan,
emptied the safety deposit box.

My dad is moving out of the house:
gone, the sentinel from his office

in the basement, plastic Star Wars
figurines tipped into a box.

It is hard not to imagine all of us
in our old places, hard not to fill

the house with past. Alesha (sister,
I still think, not ex-. ex-step.)

cross-legged on the futon, remote
in hand, a bowl of macaroni

in her lap. She peels home
on repeat, inside in a jangle

of keys, stays up with me all night,
perpetually lights and leaves.

Myranda (blood sister) half-absent
in her eyrie, moves from floor to desk,

floor to desk. My stepmom flickers
in the dark bedroom, in the mirrors,

on the stairs, in the corners of halls.
I am always underneath all of this,

in the skin of the basement or crossing
the yard. How many times do I tread that

bed of needles, climb to the freshly sawn-off
branches, wish a kinder mending, wish

an absence gone? Press my hands to trace
the drip of sap, what cannot be divided,

to touch what bubbles forth, what empties,
amber, from the knotted heart.

Read More

We Are the Bachelorettes and We Insist

.Reading time 37 minutes.

By Susan Finch
Winner, Editors’ Prize in Prose: selected by Mandy Berman

Featured Art: Woman in Silver V-neck Long-sleeved Dress by Inga Seliverstova

As bachelorettes, we solemnly promise the next forty-eight hours will include three brunches, two happy hours, fifteen moderate disagreements, one unforgettable fight, eight matching T-shirts, one bar crawl, one pedal tavern, one sprained wrist, three twisted ankles, sixteen hangovers, too many tearful promises to count, and one sober regret. We are the bachelorettes and we insist.

We must begin with brunch, and in order to fit three brunches into forty-eight hours, we will congregate Friday morning. After all, brunch is the most important meal of the day. We can eat French toast and French fries, and getting tipsy or emotional (i.e., Lydia has too many feelings after bottomless mimosas) will not be frowned upon. Not every restaurant serves brunch on Friday, so we must select carefully, find a place that has an all-day breakfast menu, and really, why shouldn’t a restaurant serve breakfast food all day. It’s not so hard to whip up a couple of poached eggs, is it? We will reserve the table for 10:30; the proper time to eat brunch is 11, but we already know that some of our bachelorettes will be late—particularly Tara, the bride’s sister. She’s a musician and runs on her own schedule, and of course, Felicia. She hasn’t been able to get anywhere on time since the new baby.

Event attire is outlined in the invitation—brunches are for sundresses or rompers paired with cute cowboy boots or wedge sandals. We do not do flats—flats are for business casual events or maybe if you’re trying to let someone down easy. Matching T-shirts will be provided for the pedal tavern that begins promptly at four. The shirts may be knotted at your hip or tucked in with a cute belt, but please do not leave your shirt untucked. Evening wear will have two themes: Friday red and Saturday sparkle, and the bride, of course, will wear white. No one else should plan to wear white or anything white adjacent —no cream, no ivory, no pearl, no silver, no soft grays, no misty light blues or sugary beige. Don’t pack it. Don’t even think about it. We don’t want anyone to steal the bride’s thunder. After all, we are the bachelorettes, and it is our job to insist.

Read More

Last Night I Told a Stranger

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Mary Leauna Christensen

Featured Art: Hand of crop woman on crumpled bed sheet by medium photoclub

I am very go with the flow—

I used to wipe down airplane
trays only when they were sticky.

Now my hands have dried
from soap and alcohol.

But they are still the same
hands that fixed your hair

and earring against the pillow
that most likely was not silk

because we did not buy
the premium package

from the funeral home.
Everything is packaged nowadays.

I try not to use plastic bags
for produce. Not because

I’m environmentally conscious
but because I want to slow down

rot. Just a few weeks ago
I finely chopped cilantro and

green onion while the man
I was cooking for drank wine.

He was nervous and high
so we danced to the music

that came from his phone.
He tasted like peach Moscato.

I led him to my room
though I knew nothing would happen.

And by nothing
I meant between the two of us

because here I am
in bed and alone

wishing I could live in that sentence—
nothing will happen.

Read More

Life Through Glass

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Jonathan Duckworth

Featured Art: by Giuseppe Barberi (1746-1809)

—for Kat Flinn

blurs become faces & eyes for me

as I see through layers of glass

& now that my fiancée is half

a continent away we speak through

a tunnel of light bound by twin

screens, more layers

& there are boats with bottoms

that let you see the underwater

in perfect safety & I wonder if the fish

in my fiancée’s tanks see us that way

huge ugly misshapen things safely

on the wrong side of the pane

lyretail mollies harlequin rasboras

bettas of swish & swirl green blue red

how they circle & gape & watch us

watch them & maybe sometimes

they wonder if we are happy & maybe

they see her on her couch as she

cradles my glowing face & they think

that’s how the finless frolic

& navigate this the sometimes

joy of being

Read More

Polar Bear

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By George Bilgere
Winner, Editors’ Prize in Poetry: selected by J. Allyn Rosser

Featured Art: Mounted Model of a Polar Bear from United States National Museum Photographic Laboratory

A father died heroically in some Alaskan park
while trying to save his kids from a polar bear.

Long ago, when his mother gave birth
one summer afternoon in Bakersfield, California,
could anyone have prophesied,
as in an old myth, that the baby crying
at her breast would one day be killed
and partially eaten by a polar bear?

Has anyone from Bakersfield, California been killed
and partially eaten by a polar bear? Yet her son
was. He looked up from making camp,
pitching the tent or lighting his Coleman stove,
and there it was, white and immense. His fate.

And he died heroically and was partially eaten.

Of course, the bear had to be killed. The rangers shot it,
which makes sense. You can’t have polar bears
running around in the wilderness!
The wilderness is a place for dads and kids
and Coleman stoves. Polar bears just . . .
they just kind of ruin the whole thing.

As for the bear, it didn’t die heroically.
It just got shot and fell over
and was sent to a lab for testing.

Read More

The Scar

.Reading time 1 minute.

By George Bilgere

My son slipped on the concrete
by the pool and smacked his head.
Blood cauling on his small shoulders.
The doctor stitching him whole.
Three years on, after a haircut,
the scar still rises, a quarter moon
a woman will ask about
as they lie there one night,
her fingers in his hair,
her voice in his ear, the secret
delight of him—a bit
like burnt toast—in her nostrils
as she takes his strangeness
into her. What she won’t know
is how the frail, Phidian skull
I held that day in my hands
resounded on the hot concrete.
It echoed all summer, less
like an egg cracking in a bowl,
or a world breaking, than the wild
knocking of love against my heart.
Dear girl who will one day win him,
that part of the boy is mine.

Read More

Homecoming

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Christopher Brean Murray

Featured Art: United States National Museum Library from United States National Museum Photographic Laboratory

At the edge of town, you pass a water tower beside train tracks.

A shopping cart blocks your path.

The telephone poles have no wires.

Someone has spray-painted Fuk Yo on the train station.

A breeze bathes your face

as seed pods click overhead.

How long’s it been since you sat in a theater?

The marquee says JAWS, but the ticket booth’s empty.

The jewelry store says: 40% off weeding rings.

Brass clips clink against the flagless pole.

The library is a house that’s rumored to be haunted.

The librarian recounts tales of the first settlers’ deaths.

She’s seen books flung from shelves,

a woman at the bottom of a staircase.

You pass a garage where mechanics yammer.

At the nursery, a sprinkler douses the curb, leaving shrubs parched.

A Corvette peels out in a mini-mart parking lot.

Smoke drifts over storefronts.

At the Dairy Queen, a woman buys cones for kids.

She snaps at them, but they remain buoyant.

Read More

Currency of Survival

.Reading time 4 minutes.

By Natalie Taylor

Featured Art: Scott Catalogue USA PC7 from National Postal Museum

A half-eaten waffle, syrup-logged in a plastic takeout container,
       dropped in the middle of the street. Bald man in a blue truck slows down,
cranes his head out the window to get a closer look. Suited folk

coming home from church swerve. It’s finally cool enough, after 37 days of dry heat,
       to turn off the air conditioning, open windows.
Hooting and hollering from the apartments as someone on TV scores a touchdown.

Last night a friend came over. She has 16 pets, most of them rescue animals:
       dogs, cats, rabbits, and ducks. She installed a heated pond in a spare bedroom. She’s worried
about how to transport them when she moves to Maine as a climate refugee.

A grandmother and grandkids carrying leftovers in Styrofoam walk past
       the waffle. Dark feathers brush across the storm-swift sky.
A car drives over it, wheels straddling the soggy breakfast. Something exciting happens in the game:

Yeah! Then clapping. My friend with 16 pets has no hope life on earth will get better.
       If you think we have an immigration crisis now, wait until Mumbai is uninhabitable,
she says. Everyone on the planet is moving to Canada.

I think of a fable where a rich man buries a bag of gold
       in the middle of the road and covers it with a boulder. Then he watches.
Some people are angry. Some ignore it and walk around it. Only one boy

thinks to move the stone. My friend thinks that by 2050 the high desert will be too hot to survive.
       We’ll run out of water. She thinks we are hurtling ourselves out of
the habitable zone. But I think of pyramids and vaccines and walking on the moon.

Humans adapt. Imagine, all of us trying to fit in the northernmost region
       of North America. She thinks it’s impossible because
the rich are already buying up all the land and building homes there.

A girl in a striped shirt and red pants walks a dog with an upcurled
       toffee-colored tail. The dog stops to sniff as thunder growls across the valley.
Four teenagers on bicycles. Another couple with three dogs, hair and fur rising

in gusts. Wind rhythms the chimes, thunder drums closer
       and the first sweet slaps of rain hit burnt tips of leaves, brown grass, dried lily stalks.
Smell of wet cement. Soon, a miniature river bounces in the gutter.

Clatter of rain drowns out the game. A neighbor checking his mail—leopard-print kimono
       sticking to his long legs, arms waving wildly to shoo the storm, yelling out as if in pain—
bends to pick up the waffle. Raindrops plinking like millions of silver coins.

Read More

Gothic

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By SM Stubbs

Featured Art: Bird by Robert Frederick Blum

Upon a hill, a house. Upon the house,
a roof. On the roof, a bird. The bird—
oiled feathers, beak like an awl—grooms
the roof’s moss, subsists on ticks
and silverfish. Inside the house, a man
without a tongue and a woman
who loves him. The woman grooms
the house, subsists on potatoes and rice
and whatever rodents roam the slope.
The man hunts every day until noon.
Every day he returns empty-handed,
his shoulders tense as flywheels,
his jaw the floor of a collapsed cave,
crowded with everything he cannot say.
She brews his tea. She washes the corners
of the house. She chases the bird away.
At sundown the man leaves again, hunting.
Upon another hill, another house. Another
woman waits inside. The man without
a tongue feasts on rabbit she trapped
in a pit. From fireplace ashes she makes lye
and scrubs his back. She fills his canteen with it.
By the time her sister misses him, his body
has sunk to the bottom of the pond.

Read More

There Will Be Salvation Yet

.Reading time 24 minutes.

By Tania De Rozario
Winner, New Ohio Review Nonfiction Contest: selected by Ira Sukrungruang

Featured Art: The Last Supper By H. Siddons Mowbray

1993. That’s when it happens. Two months after your twelfth birthday. It’s a sweaty afternoon. This day which blisters with possibility. This day you learn that there are demons inside of you.

You’re on your way home from school. You know something is wrong the minute you get off the bus. Your mother waits at the bus stop, teary-eyed. Your relationship has grown monosyllabic, but the tears feel like a warning, so you ask.

What’s wrong?

It is when she smiles that something inside you unravels. You realize hers are happy tears. But her smile is vacant. Placid. A Stepford Wives smile. The tears fall but there is nothing behind them. She’s a mannequin crying on command. A talking-doll with electronics scrambled.

You don’t have the language for this yet.

She grabs you, holds you tight: Nana has been saved!

Read More

Jesus and My Way of Seeing Him Go

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Jeanine Walker

Featured Art: Jesus Christ, the Virgin and St. John the Baptist with Saints Paul and Catherine, ca. 1520 designed by Raphael, printed by Marc Antonio Raimondi

I was eighty-two again
and Jesus came perched like an angel
on top of my fridge, his palms spread open.

Almost old enough to be comfortable going,
I wondered if he had come to take me.
“Are you here for me?” I asked him.

I was eighty-two and my eyesight
was dimming, but I was in good health
for my age. And in my good health

I saw how lovely Jesus was, how physically
lovely, and I felt like kissing
his stomach. Not even where it was whipped

or wounded, or where the vinegar
dripped onto it as it overflowed
from the taunting sponge, but just

his belly, carefully haired, divinely
flat and strong and hungry and disciplined.
May I May I May I, I prayed,

and when finally he said I could
I pulled the stepladder out from under
the sink and gathered myself on top of it.

Then I kissed the stomach of Jesus.
It tasted like the steam that arises
from dry ice. I kept the wind at bay,

but it was difficult to do so, what
with the howling just then
picking up and all.

Read More

My IRS

.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Adam O. Davis

I am two vowels strung twenty years long.
                                                                                            My life a ransom
letter written by a cardiogram, tympanic as traffic & the lights of traffic

that renew the tercets of Esso stations standing violent as macaws
in the ululative night.
                                                      I need lithium or language, nurse.

I need words to fall like ricin from an envelope.
Clearly, my synapses need seeing to.
                                                                      So, please, repo the verb of me.

                                        Conduct me swiftly
through the conjunction of Tennessee where nouns loiter like limbs
languid with Quaaludes, where daylight breaks

like a mouthful of fentanyl over the teeth of a country that cares not
for such news.
                           Should a poem be the pill or the pharmacy?

Should I pledge myself to this business as if it were Gerard Manley Hopkins
or Jesus Christ?
                            Here I am, Lord, earnest as a rice cooker, lively as Superman

in his leotard, my spiritual fizz empirical as Pepsi & just as cheap.
                                                                                                           Jesus, Gerard—
who will irrigate these ears from error?

                                                                   Who will whisper that in the empire
of swans the black cygnet is Elvis?
                                                    All around me the malady of my unmaking

unmans me: roadside trash, unrecycled recyclables, my shadow laid
like a new suit over the bus bench & birds behind it.
                                                                                    All this urban tumbleweed,

all these words for worse.
                                           When whoever’s kingdom it is comes calling for it
will the last televangelist of grammar go angled like an angel in the direction

of their god?
                            Or will America just eat my opioids as it like Nemo poisons
its seas to peace?

When I was a verb I thought as a verb so I did as a verb, just like the police.
Tonight the moon slouches in its straitjacket of stars.
                                                                                            There’s a multinational

wind afoot, some merry beast loose, all pronoun without surcease.
                                What rooky woods will it rouse first?
                                                       What islands will it make of our bodies yet?

Read More

On Ongoingness: a Conversation with Ada Limón and Jaswinder Bolina

.Reading time 55 minutes.

Moderated by NOR editor, David Wanczyk

David Wanczyk: We’re talking on Zoom today with Ada Limón, author of five award-winning collections of poetry, and Jaswinder Bolina, author of three acclaimed collections and the recent book of essays Of Color. And we’re talking only 16 days after the police shooting of Jacob Blake, when months of predominantly peaceful protests have been met by ever more ominous counterprotest, when our election is threatened by a virus and dishonesty, when we simply miss our friends, and when many of us are even more exhausted than usual; and yet I’m happy to be having this conversation because these are two writers who have given me a clear-eyed bucking-up in the past, who refuse to ignore the struggle, but find—at least seem to find—a kind of dog-chewed, persevering, loveliness and electricity in their work. Even when, as Limón writes, quote, “the country plummets into a crepitating crater of hatred, isn’t there still something singing?”

And so I want to ask both of you—How are you? First, but also, how are you as artists listening for what’s still singing? How can we—can we resist what feels like the desperation of our country?

Ada Limón: Hmm. Hmm. Just start there? [laughs]

Jaswinder Bolina: An easy a softball to start, to lead off.

Read More

The Arachnologist

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Benjamin Gucciardi

Featured Art: Untitled (Hourglass) by Mary Vaux Walcott

When he told me his teeth felt too heavy
to study history, I excused him.
I knew he was headed for the aqueduct,

or the boarded-up houses choked
by trumpet vine where he found them.
Martel collected spiders with the discipline of a surgeon.

He kept them in empty soda bottles
under his bed. On his way into sixth period,
he touched my fist with his fist,

announced the genus of his catch,
Latrodectus, and his total, that’s nine this week!
Through this tally of arachnids captured

in sugary plastic, we learned to trust each other
the way men on tankers far out at sea
confide reluctantly in gray rippling water.

When his best friend broke the news,
they found Martel last night, her voice quavering,
stray bullet off International,

I went to his house to adopt a spider.
I imagined the red hourglass
on the female’s abdomen emptying itself

slowly, her segmented body imprisoned
in the glow of the green-tinted bottle,
but no one was home. Now when I hear

the old women gathering cans at dawn,
half-swallowed by blue waste bins,
I think of Martel finding containers

to bring to the canyon, Martel
inspecting stones, placing his fingers
delicately around the thorax,

the eight legs angry at the morning
as he lifts the arrowhead orb weaver
toward the sun, offering

what he loved to the old, hungry light.

Read More

Leaf Light

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Emily Tuszynska

Featured Art: Forest by Arnold William Brunner

We live in green
depths of trees
planted by those
who grew old
and died or moved
away our children
play in yards theirs left
behind and sleep
in rooms that held two
or even three until
they grew our children too
are growing in summer
we box outgrown
clothes repaint
the walls new tiles
for the bath new
shingles the trees
don’t seem to change
though of course
they must the backyard
beech and oaks
that will outlast us
casting a deeper
shade the front yard
holly reaching farther
over the drive we pull in
and out of always
in a rush someone
running back for what
they forgot the trees
keep some other kind
of time spend whole
seasons taking in
their sustenance
strange food
without substance
every summer a feast
of light

Read More

Night Train

.Reading time 5 minutes.

By Emily Tuszynska

Featured Art: Train by Edward Mitchell Bannister

The interior landscape shifts, erodes.
                While the children sleep we shore it up
                                with flotsam but the next day another

tide-bitten chunk of coastline
                crumbles. The trouble is we’re living
                                all at once. We keep rearranging the furniture

to try to make it fit. By day we push
                aside the clutter, lay the baby
                                on the floor she drums with open palms

as if to feel it’s there. Something solid
                underneath. Mostly everything sways.
                                A tree falls and the house next door

stands empty for years. The boy holds his sister
                to the window and shows her how
                                to wave goodbye, and that’s the morning,

fingerprints in the dust of it. Outside the day
                moves away in all directions. Streetlights
                                come on. When as I walk the baby the night train  

whistles through its distant crossing,
                why does it feel like we are the ones
                                hurtling toward some unknown destination?

I lean my forehead against the icy, rattling glass,
                look through our reflection at the moon
                                rushing through branches. Look, there’s a farmhouse,

miles from the lights of any town. Someone
                turns on a lamp in one of the windows;
                                someone stands there, watching us go past.

Read More

Awe

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Peter Krumbach

Featured Art: Blossoming Cherry Trees by Kano Sanraku (1559-1635)

I waited for it in the fork
of a cherry tree. On the LL
train. Made bed for it in my 8th
Street room. I left gaps in sentences
where it could land. Dug holes, smoked
ham, lost bets and innocence, granted
exculpation long before it sinned.
To track its scent, I stripped
and whorled, committed perfidy,
burned effigies and caramelized
figs. I rubbed nougat with licorice
and seven sprigs of dill. I renamed
myself after it, just to see
how I rang. Morning, midnight,
noon and dusk, I texted,
sexted, called and faxed it.
For years and years, I slept unkept,
sculpting pleas and letters
of regret. And then one day
it was in my palm. Smooth
as a peanut, smelling of pine.
Dzweep, said a jay from the elm
above my head, then bolt-like
he dove and snatched it away.
Beautiful hard-eyed thief, leaving
nothing but an ampersand.
My core cracked like a deer-
struck windshield. It splintered
into little hearts shuffled through
a deck. So I wrote this
in red.

Read More

Amtrak Psalm

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Craig van Rooyen

Featured Art: An Uhlan (mounted soldier with a pike) by Jean Baptiste Edouard Detaille (1848-1912)

The sway-backed horses of Lompoc don’t spook anymore.
They keep their muzzles pressed, sharing a pulse

while you clatter past, invisible in tinted business class.
And whose business are you minding anyway

as you peek into the pitbull’s backyard wreckage,
glimpse the bad cuts and dye-jobs of students smoking

behind Oxnard’s International College of Beauty? Camarillo,
Moorpark, Simi Valley, recede into heat-shimmer oblivion.

At home, your daughter’s behind a closed door
with Carnivorous Red nails posting stories that dissolve.

The entire universe big-bangs away from her irreducible center
of disdain. I’ll be gone soon enough, you want to say.

So this afternoon you’ve fallen in love with the common
mourning dove, tilting at the wind on his coil of razor wire.

You’re rooting for the tag crew artists
in their neverending arms race with Parks & Rec.

Boomer and Lil’ G, Fatlip and The Dog, Fraho, Buzz,
Rollin’ Sixty and Bashr. Naming themselves

over and over in the middle of the night, learning
like Buddhist masters the lessons of impermanence.

And now you’re waving at ranks of garden gnomes—
little domestic terra cotta soldiers waiting to be found

in the Burbank Home Depot back lot. I see you, you whisper
through the glass at their earnest bearded faces.

I see every one of you.

Read More

“Take the Neck Step Against Aging”

.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Craig van Rooyen

Featured Art: by Giovanni Francesco Barbieri (1591-1666)

Today my wife bought a twin pack of neck-tightening cream
for me, and I’m trying not to take offense.

It’s not that I haven’t noticed the thinning crepe paper
over my Adam’s apple, or the way it bunches when I tie a tie,

but I guess I had hoped she would be my accomplice
in pretending. The book I’m reading’s called The Denial of Death.

It says civilization’s an elaborate symbolic defense mechanism
against the knowledge of our mortality. And yet I can’t help but hope

this cream will work. My wife learned from her mother
who learned from her mother, and so on, how the crushed

bark powder of a Thanaka tree, abraded in water and a stone dish,
will form a milky paste that protects the faces of the ones you love.

Do you know how it feels to have a woman massage her history
deep into your skin? So we pretend this is a Costco twin-pack of Thanaka

and that we have all the time in the world as she opens the jar,
warms the cream between her palms and wraps her slender fingers

around my throat. It’s one thing to try to bridge the basic duality between
the physical world of objects and the symbolic world of meaning

with neck cream. It’s another to trust a woman’s hands around your throat.
“Point your chin up,” she says, cradling my head in her lap.

I’m hoping we’re part of something eternal, but if not,
that the decline of our bodies will be gradual and in tandem, and

that we will continue to be startled every March when
the flock of cedar waxwings reappears in the clattering branches

of the apple tree outside our window. See how their little masks hide
fatigue as they settle in by the dozens, Lone Ranger faces all pointed

in the same direction. Just one night in our tree on their long trip
from the sun-lashed Yucatan to the tundra of the Northwest Territories

Read More

Requiem with “Little Wing”

.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Craig van Rooyen

Featured Art: by Kenyon Cox (1856-1919)

Perhaps, on your downtown lunch stroll
in unseasonably cheery weather,
you walk up on a flock of grackles
on the ground in front of Urban Outfitters,
their impact marks still drying on the window
recently washed to display Big Sur Ribbed Pullovers
and the Willow Fuzzy Drawstring Teddy,
as if anyone believes October’s still a sweater month.

Perhaps you become suddenly dizzy,
a strange gravity drawing you toward this constellation
of twitching black holes
opened in the sidewalk at your feet.
And perhaps this brings to mind
how it feels when your face falls from your face.

In the old days before the imminent apocalypse,
the pattern would be read as omen:
a toothache’s coming on, the breath of your bride-to-be
will sour every time she walks in moonlight,
your best cow will soon grow milk-sick.
The prescriptions would be just as clear:
wash your warp and dye it while a new moon waxes;
steal a neighbor’s crickets and install them in your hearth;
milk with one hand only.

Perhaps, even now, you try to read in the little bodies
some feathered correspondence: this relates to that.
If you step on a crack, the snowy plover will slip
into extinction; if you breathe out while passing a cemetery,
Greenland’s ice shelf will break off and float away.
But the letters blur and you can’t discern the news
from the wrecked wings and necks.

Read More

On Ongoingness: A Conversation with Ada Limon and Jaswinder Bolina

.Reading time 74 minutes.

Moderated by NOR editor, David Wanczyk

David Wanczyk: We’re talking on Zoom today with Ada Limón, author of five award-winning collections of poetry, and Jaswinder Bolina, author of three acclaimed collections and the recent book of essays Of Color. And we’re talking only 16 days after the police shooting of Jacob Blake, when months of predominantly peaceful protests have been met by ever more ominous counterprotest, when our election is threatened by a virus and dishonesty, when we simply miss our friends, and when many of us are even more exhausted than usual; and yet I’m happy to be having this conversation because these are two writers who have given me a clear-eyed bucking-up in the past, who refuse to ignore the struggle, but find—at least seem to find—a kind of dog-chewed, persevering, loveliness and electricity in their work. Even when, as Limón writes, quote “the country plummets into a crepitating crater of hatred, isn’t there still something singing?” 

And so I want to ask both of you—How are you? First, but also, how are you as artists listening for what’s still singing? How can we—can we resist what feels like the desperation of our country?

Ada Limón: Hmm. Hmm. Just start there? [laughs]

Jaswinder Bolina: An easy a softball to start, to lead off.

Read More

New Ohio Review Issue 16 (Originally printed Fall 2014)

.Reading time less than 1 minute.

Newohioreview.org is archiving previous editions as they originally appeared. We are pairing the pieces with curated art work, as well as select audio recordings. In collaboration with our past contributors, we are happy to (re)-present this outstanding work.

Issue 16 compiled by Hannah Hoover.

What Comes Next

.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Maxine Scates

Featured art: A Flowering Cactus: Heliocereus Speciosus by Pierre-Joseph Redouté

Life’s police car, lights flashing, on the sidewalk

in front of McDonald’s and two boys on the bus stop,

one boy moving quickly away from the other

who raised his hands and dropped his pack as the officer

approached, gun drawn. But how did the cop know

which one he wanted since both wore watch caps

and gray parkas and carried backpacks? He seemed

certain enough as he handcuffed the boy

then helped him into the back of the cruiser

his now gunless hand almost gently dipping the boy’s head

into what comes next, all we don’t see swallowing him, the

signal changing, day swallowing me until this morning

Read More

Small Boy

.Reading time 6 minutes.

By Joseph Scapellato

Selected as runner-up of the 2014 New Ohio Review Fiction Contest by Aimee Bender

Featured Art: Pepita by Robert Henri

The small boy says to his big sister, “Why did we kill all the Indians?”

They’re in the basement playing a video game. Both of them are white.

“We didn’t kill them,” says his big sister, “our ancestors did.”

“Why did our ancestors kill all the Indians?”

“Okay, not really our ancestors because Dad’s family came in the 20s and Mom’s in the Sixties and the Indians were already totally dead by then, mostly.”

“Why did ancestors kill all the Indians?”

“But I guess you could say it was us, pretty much, because today we’re basically the same culture as the culture of the people who killed the Indians back then. And it’s ‘Native Americans,’ not ‘Indians.’ ‘Indians’ is ignorant.”

The small boy says to his angry stepmom, “Why did we kill all the Native Americans?”

They’re returning from the grocery store in hardly any traffic. Plastic bags stuffed with food rustle in the back seat.

Read More

Someone Threw Down a Wildflower Garden in an Empty Lot in Newark

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Theresa Burns

Featured Art: Flowers in a Vase by Odilon Redon

And now, instead of staring at the weeds
and broken bottles from the train platform,
we’re taking in a scene from a Monet.
Asters, cosmos, little yellow fists
of something. All random and confetti.
I’m half expecting a lady in a high-waist
dress and bonnet to appear on a diagonal
stroll through its splendor, pausing
with her parasol so we can selfie with her.
Maybe she’ll hop aboard the light rail
to the Amtrak station, get off in D.C.,
step back into the painting she escaped from.
Who was the genius who thought of this?
What meadow-in-a-can Samaritan
got sick of passing the four-acre eyesore
on the way to work? Shook pity into blossom.
To whom do I write my thank you?
Mayor, surveyor, county clerk, church lady.
Who marched down to city hall, begged
anyone who would listen?

Read More

Putting Girls on the Map

.Reading time 34 minutes.

By Irene Keliher

Featured Art: Orchid Blossoms by Martin Johnson Heade

Only a few students competed in Kingston Junior High’s first geography bee  and nobody came to watch. We lined up in the band room submerged in our  flannel shirts, fidgeting, happy to escape sixth period. Pine trees pressed the  window. No one expected to win except me, though I wouldn’t admit it and  tried my best to look bored. I tucked my hands into my baggy Adidas jacket,  the only brand-name clothing I owned—I almost never took it off—poised to  triumph if I could answer the next question. Mrs. Raymond, chubby purveyor  of the world to our damp county, read us questions from a stapled packet  stamped National Geographic Society. 

“What world river has seen the greatest number of refugees cross its  shores?” She pronounced ref-u-gees in three careful beats and looked mournful, as if uncertain there could be an answer to such a question. 

Read More

Mango Languages

.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Linda Bamber

Featured Art: Still Life with Birds and Fruit by Giovanna Garzoni

—For Chris Bullock (in memoriam) and Carolyn Bernstein

In that world people are not discussing The End of the American Experiment.

Yo soy de los Estados Unidos. ¿De dónde es usted?
(I am from the United States. Where are you from?)

In that world people are not in a rage at their relatives for voting wrong and sticking to it.

Read More

“This Time I’m Going to Fool Somebody”: Willie Stark and the Politics of Humiliation

.Reading time 25 minutes.

By Dustin Faulstick

Featured Art: The politician’s corner by Honoré Daumier, 1864

“Folks,” roars Willie Stark on the eve of his impeachment trial, “there’s going to be a leetle mite of trouble back in town. Between me and that Legislature-ful of hyena-headed, feist-faced, belly-dragging sons of slack-gutted she-wolves. If you know what I mean. Well, I been looking at them and their kind so long, I just figured I’d take me a little trip and see what human folks looked like in the face before I clean forgot. Well, you all look human. More or less. And sensible. In spite of what they’re saying back in that Legislature and getting paid five dollars a day of your tax money for saying it. They’re saying you didn’t have bat sense or goose gumption when you cast your sacred ballot to elect me Governor of   this state.” From his colloquial diction and insults to his collegial banter with   his own supporters, from his invocation of corruptly used tax money to his reference to the sacredness of the ballot, Stark identifies himself as one of the people. Before neurosurgeon Ben Carson or business moguls Carly Fiorina and Donald Trump, farm-boy-turned-lawyer Willie Stark was the ultimate political outsider.

Read More

Take Me to Your Lady Leader

.Reading time 14 minutes.

By Kristen Lillvis

Featured Art: Profile of Shadow by Odilon Redon, 1895

Contact, Carl Sagan’s best-selling 1985 science-fiction novel, tells of alien shape-shifters, wormhole-traveling spacecraft, and—perhaps the most fantastical element of the bunch—a female president. Yet Contact’s protagonist, Eleanor “Ellie” Arroway, compares President Lasker to her predecessors with no acknowledgment of their gender difference, noting that Ms. President demonstrates an appreciation for science seen in “few previous American leaders since James Madison and John Quincy Adams.” Despite her tie to the presidential establishment—and regardless of Sagan’s attempt to make her gender unremarkable—President Lasker still fulfills the function particular to women world leaders in literature. Whether she erodes or extends existing gender stereotypes, the female president operates as a sign of the apocalypse or, at least, a harbinger of the unfamiliar, a reminder to readers that they have entered a world drastically different from their own.

The fictional female commander-in-chief, as she appears in texts such as Brian K. Vaughan’s Y: The Last Man (2002-2008) and Harold Coyle’s The Ten Thousand (1993), figures as both progressive and absurd: She points to future possibilities while highlighting our stunning lack of progress. Since literary representations both shape and are shaped by real-world situations, it may come as no surprise that Hillary Clinton’s own presidential run has had few fictional precursors and that reactions to it have followed their patterns of possibility and putrescence. Let’s look at some of the extreme responses that Clinton’s campaign has brought about. For every “I’m with Her” T-shirt  and tweet, we see misogynistic pins mocking the “otherness” of her body and hear public calls for her imprisonment or execution. Tens of thousands have “liked” or retweeted the claim that “corruption and devastation follows [sic] her wherever she goes,” a statement her opponent released the night Clinton accepted the Democratic Party’s nomination. The range of reactions indicates that a Clinton presidency marks an apocalypse of sorts for some, one that is widening as the election unfolds.

Read More

Of the People, for the People, by the Robots

.Reading time 22 minutes.

By Christopher A. Sims

Featured Art: Triumph of the Moon by Monogrammist P.P., 1500/10

American fiction has its small share of memorable politician characters—Willie Stark in Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men and Robert Leffingwell in Allen Drury’s Advise and Consent to name a pair—but there’s a strand of this tradition that is becoming more relevant in 2016: Artificial Intelligence politician figures in the work of two of our most prominent science-fiction writers, Isaac Asimov and Philip K. Dick.

While SF traditionally serves as a space to explore futuristic ideas, Asimov’s 1950 I, Robot and Dick’s 1960 Vulcan’s Hammer can now be reread as prescient visions of the looming potentiality of an AI political leader (perhaps as early as 2024, if Joe Biden chooses not to run).

As the so-called “Internet of Things” takes shape and works to synthesize the physical with the cyber,  we can begin to speculate about how long it will be before AIs take over even our most complicated tasks, such as governance. But the genius of Asimov and Dick lies not in their depiction of the technologies that make AI leaders possible; instead, it’s in their assumption that we will one day, not too long from now, be faced with a critical choice between human and mechanical rule. That, it’s fair to say, will be a consequential election.

Read More

When a Friend Writes of her Pregnancy

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Josephine Yu

Heft up the door of the storage unit
where you sequestered the baby
things after the second miscarriage.
Board books, plush animals,
clothes sorted in file boxes
like evidence in a cold case. Kneel there

on the concrete floor. Choose a gift
to send her—act of penance
for the low sob that groaned
from your chest like the cry
of some prehistoric flightless bird.
Penance for the bad math that clacks
its abacus beads: one infant plus
one infant equals zero infants.

Fold footie pajamas in tissue,
as if relayering an onion. Scrape
curling ribbon with a scissor blade
until grief sloughs off
like charred skin debrided. This,

this is your feat of strength,
a woman lifting a car
off a toddler.

That terrified. That furious.

Josephine Yu is the author of Prayer Book of the Anxious (Elixir Press, 2016). Her poems have appeared in Ploughshares, The Southern Review, Crab Orchard Review, The Cincinnati Review, TriQuarterly, Best New Poets 2008, Welcome to the Neighborhood: An Anthology of American Coexistence, and other journals and anthologies. She is a faculty member at Keiser University and a hospice volunteer.

Originally appeared in NOR 27.

When the Doctor Calls After the Final Round of IVF

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Josephine Yu

It’s a good thing he caught you on the threshold
of Publix, so you can cross into
that tiled acreage of plenty.

When you’re pushing a cart with a temperamental
wheel, you won’t cry. When you’re putting
chicken salad with tarragon and almonds

into the cart, you won’t weep, and choosing
a tray of ground chuck, plump under Saran Wrap,
you won’t howl.

Stacking cups of fruit-on-the-bottom yogurt
into the cart, you wouldn’t dream
of collapsing on the tiles in a spectacular

Old Testament hair-pulling fit—not there
before the stoicism of buttermilk,
the solemn dignity of Greek yogurt.

As you reach into the frozen food case, hand above
a bag of mixed vegetables, an old voice
appears in your head, as clear

as the piped-in Billy Joel, that familiar voice
insisting calmly, I told you
you were worthless, didn’t I?

You and your moldy rat turd eggs that will never
make a living thing, and you wait, numb
in the artificial cold, and let that voice say

the truth it has to say with its smug authority,
and then lay the bag of peas, carrots, and lima beans
on the metal seat where the infant would sit.

Josephine Yu is the author of Prayer Book of the Anxious (Elixir Press, 2016). Her poems have appeared in Ploughshares, The Southern Review, Crab Orchard Review, The Cincinnati Review, TriQuarterly, Best New Poets 2008, Welcome to the Neighborhood: An Anthology of American Coexistence, and other journals and anthologies. She is a faculty member at Keiser University and a hospice volunteer.

Originally appeared in NOR 27.

American Horror

.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Jessica Alexander

You should have seen me then, under those yellow stadium bulbs, my lips so
full they’d burst in your fingers. I had this top on: a floral print and ruffles, red,
to match my lips, and my tight Levi jeans. And my sun-kissed cheekbones and
the sun-kissed bridge of my nose. And my smile was just like America—like
a cornfield stunned by its own golden beauty—my gorgeous delight! I went
braless, wore no makeup. It rained and the grass was slick. The way it goes is
that something happens next. It happens by a lake or in a parked car. You take
one look and know I’ll never survive it. My teeth were like a horse’s. A feeling
they mistake for a girl. A feeling they write songs for. The kind of songs that
played in pickup trucks and there’s me standing in the bed of one, hurling my
top into traffic. Could be a hitchhiker. Some guys carry knives. What is it about
blonde girls and America? Blonde girls and wherever? I was so all–American.
So cute I could have murdered my own goddamn self. What is it about a blonde
girl that breaks the world’s heart? I miss those days. Not Bobby or Leo or
James. Just miss that particular ache, which was not unlike a bulge in shorts,
that summer rage that could break my chest apart and hurl my beating heart
into the bleachers. Like them I could not keep myself. There is the stadium
again. There is Bobby, cheering. Isn’t that how it happens in America? Topless
in Texas. My little red shorts. In the back of a pickup, again. The window
breaks. In Tennessee? In Indiana? The sound of a power drill, a chainsaw. The
sound of summer. The bleachers, those bright white lights waiting to throw 
my shadow to the ground, and there I am, arriving, and it’s always like what
happens to me next has everything to do with every one of us.

Read More

The Tour

.Reading time 49 minutes.

By. Erica S. Arkin

It occurred to Dennis six hours into the road trip that he might have made a terrible mistake. His daughter Natalie sat on a fold-down seat in the back of his pickup’s not-so-extended cab, plugged into her Discman and propped against the small window behind the empty passenger seat. She was reading a magazine with a cover that said something about Bedroom Tricks to Blow . . . Dennis only caught a glance when she’d pulled it from her backpack at the last rest area. He was glad he couldn’t see the whole thing in the rearview mirror.

Read More

One Night

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Jeff Knorr

Featured Art: Sarina’s Flowers by Sarina Winner, Nancy Dick, Wendy Minor Viny

But not just any night,

on the 26th floor of the New Otani Hotel

the night of your aunt’s wedding

your new uncle and I threw centerpieces,

beautiful flowers in glass volleyball-sized

vases out of the window of their hotel room

in downtown L.A.  We dropped them, in 

amazement, the air flattening petals of roses,

the baby’s breath.  They blew out

like cannon balls on the sidewalk—

flowers, soil, Styrofoam, glass.  Ten times

we could have killed someone with one of those

centerpieces, our drunkenness—

it could have been over as soon as it started.

Your aunt’s anger flared hot as a brand.

We could be wearing the same prison orange. 

I escaped some wild death, manslaughter

by wind, by stupid luck, but you on the other hand

drive the car through our neighborhood,

stop for a cigarette with friends, have brown skin–

you ride, get pulled over, the cops

looking for you and your brothers.

Read More

California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitations: Dial 2 for Inmate Information

.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Jeff Knorr

Featured Art: Winter Dreaming of Spring by Nancy Dick, Norman Calkanic, Kate Goreman, Patty Mitchell, and David Dewey 

What information could you possibly deliver—

            that he’s safe, that the kite he put in

                        for the GED has come through.

 

If you know the party’s extension you wish

            to speak to, you may dial it at any time.

 

To dial his reference number

            and have a phone ring in his cell.

 

Otherwise hold for a representative—

 

            Information, Officer Medeiros speaking.

 

Yes, Officer Medeiros, can you wander

over to dorm C, bed 211 

and check on my son for me?

 

Can you tell me what he’s been fed the last two weeks?

            Can you check if the light flickering

                        above his bed at all hours has been fixed,

 

            Instead I ask, is he allowed to

                        receive packages yet, new books?

Read More

Passion Works

.Reading time less than 1 minute.

The art in this summer online edition emerges from Passion Works Studio, a collaborative community arts center located in Athens, Ohio, at the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains. “At the heart and soul of Passion Works is a core group of practicing professional artists with developmental differences. Offered a responsive structure, quality materials and welcoming space the artists reciprocate with wildly imaginative, beautiful creations that are fresh and approachable. Passion Works Studio invites makers of all abilities to work and thrive within partnerships celebrating the power of creativity, connection, and purpose.” New Ohio Review is proud to present these vibrant pieces as complements to our contributors’ writing. 

We Can Fry Anything

.Reading time 4 minutes.

By Abby E. Murray

Featured Art: Sunshine by Bill Dooley, John Marquis, Wendy Minor Viny

I’m at the fair to test

   how American my blood cells are

      and whether my heart

is the monster pumpkin I forced

   from the mouth of a flower,

      big as a tractor and thirsty AF.

When I say give me something fried

   I don’t mean cubes of cheesecake

      or spools of battered bacon,

I mean give me what I never thought

   could be skewered in the first place,

      give me executive orders,

give me stolen land

   served on a stick and wrapped

      in white paper smeared with oil.

I want to put my failures

   on a Ferris wheel then watch them

      pause at the top, ready to jump.

Read More

As Always

.Reading time 4 minutes.

By Robert Lynn

on the first not quite warm day of March the park filled with the delusion of spring       

our friends napped by the half dozen against a tree           dogs gathered loose             

bikini tops from sunbathers made maenads by 53 degrees          we gave time away        

in handfuls to the ducks              pairs of men emerged from winter to wave lures        

at the water an excuse to love each other without looking       I read your        

cheekbones’ anger at how I got more time than you before the good earth was       

over     fed you grapes the closest I could get to an apology for something I didn’t         

choose      someone sitting at our tree and very high asked Is this the Golden        

Hour?    and the light answered with yellow silence the way it does all questions        

so obvious       later walking you home I told a story how my parents fell in love       

first drunk then again sober only after I existed              I didn’t think you were         

listening until the moment you stopped mid path mid sentence a way of making       

me turn around        you told me There isn’t time to do anything twice        How        

come?     you let the light give its yellow reply      I don’t want the world to end        

you said     when it does I will remember it this way     the sun picking mulch from        

your backlit hair      your fresh burnt shoulders making the gesture for All this?        

and I give up at the same time       this last first day before the good earth was done        

Read More

Fourteen Meals

.Reading time 42 minutes.

By Stephanie Early Green

Featured Art: Happy Couple Jason Douglas and Mallory Valentour

The first meal we share is ribeye steak with scalloped potatoes and three wilted strands of asparagus cowering on the side of each plate. He takes one bite of potato. I pretend to cut my steak but don’t eat any. I don’t want to ruin my lipstick, or get steak-fat caught in my teeth. We talk about our families, and how we both value the concept of family, and how we both hope to have families of our own someday. We agree that we have a ton in common. We find out that we both enjoy country music and have corny senses of humor. We tell each other knock-knock jokes. Mine are better, but I laugh at his, while still trying to look pretty. It’s difficult to laugh out loud and not look a little ugly, a little wild. The trick is to keep your eyes open, and gently scrunch your nose, but not open your mouth too wide, so as not to expose your gums. When a man sees a woman’s gums, he is put in mind of a horse, or a chimpanzee. That’s what my grandmother always said, anyway, and she was a smart woman.

After dinner, we kiss. His breath tastes like white wine and scalloped potato. I hope my breath smells minty fresh, since I snuck a breath-mint while no one was looking. When the date is over, I’m ravenous. I go to my hotel room and order a burger, no bun. It comes with French fries, even though I didn’t order them. I eat the burger with a fork and knife while sitting on the vast hotel bed. I watch a trashy reality show in which women drink and cry and hug and scream. I would never make such a spectacle of myself on television, shrieking and clawing, mascara running down my cheeks. I’d sooner die. As I take the last bite of hamburger, a blotch of ketchup falls on my white hotel bathrobe. Later, I fall asleep with the television on, and have strange dreams. When I wake up, there’s a French fry on my pillow, curled sweetly next to my cheek.

Read More

I Should Know a Millionaire

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Erik Wilbur

Featured Art: Family by Harry Grimm, Nancy Dick, and Carolyn Williams 

two-jobs-having-scrubbers-of-piss-stains-from-pitted-grout-in-fast-food-bathrooms.

I’ve met my fair share of honest hunched-over-the-dish-pit-scraping-
nibbled-on-fork-fucked-duck-confit-into-trash-bins-SOBs.

You’ve hauled that trash to the alley tons of times. I’ve seen beads of sweat
on many American faces. I’ve seen a bead of sweat catch the right light        

on a man’s brow and then fall into a scrap-metal bin like a lost diamond.
Each of us should have how-we-made-it stories, instead of stories about waiting          

all day in a line that runs down a city sidewalk for nothing. Man, I’m tired
of only knowing broke-ass-just-tryin-to-get-by-motherfuckers,         

tired of seeing skinny dudes my age at intersections twirling cardboard arrows
or watching mothers put items back on grocery shelves after silently adding up     

the contents of their shopping carts. America, by now I thought
I’d know one millionaire, at least, ‘cause I’ve seen enough bootstrap-pulling     

to pull whole ghettos out of crab grass and chain link, enough to pull the bars off
every window and every kid off stray-bullet-stray-chihuahua-streets—

if no one were pushing down on them, I mean.

Read More

Preparations

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Madeleine Cravens

Featured Art: Bats by Jason Douglas and Wendy Minor

I worry what it says about my character,
that I cannot picture the reality of sickness,
I just wake and read Whitman
and watch the sun on the brick 
of the next-door apartment.
I have three cans of chickpeas,
freezer-burned strawberries,
half a bottle of wine. You have
a stronger sense of the anthropocene. 
You buy soup, talk with your father. 
You know microbes are alive 
as they move across the grid.
And in France each small town 
has a street named for Pasteur, 
who made men dig drains,
convinced them to stop spitting.
I wash my hands with hot water.
I don’t want to be clean. What does it say
that I am fully on my knees to this,
that I admit such weakness willingly,
that should you want company 
after any of your transatlantic flights
I would take a cab immediately
to your red and burning door. 

Read More

The World We Wanted Shone So Briefly

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Gail Martin

Featured Art: Cicadas by Scott Brooks and Wendy Minor Viny

Real life was finally about to begin.

Remember the romance of the silver cigarette case

in college? The integrity of your firstborn’s eyelashes?

 

We discarded alternate destinies like tired cards

in the Flinch deck.  We were only looking forward.

 

Of course, like the teeth of beavers and horses, there

are parts of the past that never stop growing.

Garage – tree house – vacant lot kinds of cruelty–

how we took turns being mean.

 

And later, some serrated evenings, dinners

of bluster and recoil, dodge. Flowers sent

or not sent to someone’s funeral.

 

Mostly there are the years you watch

your neighbors’ cars slide in and out of their garage.

Between blue herons and tumors, you change

the sheets.

 

We were all surprised to find ourselves old

but really the signs were everywhere, and we

acknowledge we’d been told. Name one

important thing that has not already happened.

Read More

The Helms Man

.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Kathryn Jordan

Featured Art: Creative Abundance Flower by Wendy Minor Viny

The Helms Man, we called him. I mean the man in white

baker’s trousers who drove the Helms Bakery van

around our bright California cul-de-sacs and streets —

coastal hills carved to asphalt, tract, and pink ice

plant that we broke open to write on sidewalks.

               

He drove slowly down our block, stopping to open

wide temptation’s door, inviting adolescent girls in

to view his wares:  jelly and glazed doughnuts,

cinnamon twists, sparkling crystal sugar.  We ponied

up quarters for paper bags of treats, to be consumed

out of sight of perfect mothers, lying out in lawn chairs,

all Coppertone and Tab gleam, who gave us Teen Magazine,

left us to banana and milk diets, vertical stripes, and scales.

 

Left us to ripe womanhood and the gaze of men,

to shape and flavor we could never taste ourselves. 

To motherhood and stretching of skin, joint loosening,

the joy of being food.  Then cronehood with arroyo

of wrinkle, slump of breast, lump of belly.

 

Each one alone now sees herself in hollow mirror,

flattened chest, belly bulge assessed, while outside

the window, teenage girls parade in short cutoffs,

long legs supple and smooth.  And our long-gone

mothers watch us watch them.  We, who still hear

the van coming and run, hurry, to be ready, radiant

and thin for the helmsman, just turning the corner.

Read More

The Pathologist’s Wife (or, When My Daughter Leaves the House I Will Go Watch Baby Sea-Turtles Being Born in Savannah)

.Reading time 4 minutes.

By Jeff Tigchelaar 

Featured Art: American Gothic by Jason Douglas and Wendy Minor Viny

Volunteer vacations. That’s what

I’ll do, so help me. Go away

for a week at a time or two. You know, have fun,

help out. Save some

baby turtles. And I’m not going

to ask. It’s my money too. Money’s not

an issue. My husband’s

a doctor. Well not

just a doctor, my Lord: a forensic pathologist.

More of a scientist, really. He puts away

murderers. We’ve had – he’s had

death threats. We’re absolutely

not in the phone book. And he is

so addicted to his work. He’s always thought

he can just hand me money and

that’s it. Though, he does expect his

meals.

Read More

Laywoman

.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Jeff Tigchelaar

Featured Art: Blue Cat by Dar Whitlatch, Jason Douglas, Mallory Valentour

Evenings, let me tell you, are for

coming down. Going home and getting

into bed. Or slippers, at least. Yeah I’ve got bunny slippers

and there’s no shame in that. My only child

is insane. I don’t care who thinks

what about my PJs, either. I sleep

in a faded 4X orange and green T-shirt worn for years

by my father before me. So thin you can see my nips.

If you were looking, that is.

At the mercantile today I couldn’t stop thinking

about how I always just keep looking – nodding –

at Dr. Prajeet even when I haven’t

the slightest what he’s on about.

How hard would it be

– wink – just to say “Dr. Prajeet,

if you wouldn’t mind reiterating a bit –

you know . . . in laywoman’s terms?” Just ask him.

Laywoman, Dr. Prajeet. That’s me.

I wonder what I’d say if Dr. P. asked me

to elope. Off to some far land. Or even if he just asked me

out. Dancing, maybe. Here in town. I wonder what my little

Richie would think about that. If you don’t want mommy

coming home with doctors, don’t be a grown man living

with mom. Maybe I’d say that to old Mr. Ricardo.

Read More

He’s Fine with a Little College (or, All Those Pups)

.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Jeff Tigchelaar 

Featured Art: Atlas the Pup by Troy Goins and Mallory Valentour

College is for people who think

they’re too good to work.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m fine

with a little college, as long as it’s

in a Lego set, like.

But the kind with full-size

buildings and professors . . .

that right there’s a different sack of bait.

 

But you know what? Life’s like a dogsled team.

Unless you’re in the lead, the scene don’t change.

All those pups, yipping and chomping

to get ahead and be up front . . . but

the top dog’s been chosen from the start.

And that one mutt might not have to

have his nose up the asshole in front of him,

but guess what he’s got right behind him. A dog.

And another dog, and another and another. A whole

damn pack, and a few feet back there’s a sled

and you know who’s standing on that sled?

The man.

Read More

Smart Girl

.Reading time 45 minutes.

By Sydney Rende

Featured Art: Cicada by Scott Brooks and Mallory Valentour

My ex-boyfriend calls from Florida to talk about his pubes.

“Are they weird?” he asks.

We go to schools in different time zones. Over the summer he broke up with me on the patio furniture in his backyard. I cried into his lap. He carried me to my car, then went inside to eat dinner with his family.

Now he plays lacrosse on scholarship at a school with palm trees and a rape problem.

“Why would your pubes be weird,” I say. My roommate, Jenny, shuts her laptop and listens from her bed.

“You tell me.” He’s angry with me for not telling him about the strangeness of his pubic hair. Why would I care about his pubic hair? One time he shaved the peachy space between his eyebrows with a disposable razor. I thought that was weird, but I never told him.

“The guys on the team are saying my pubes are weird,” he says. “Like I have too many.”

“Did you tell them you’re from New Jersey?” I ask. Jenny moves to my bed, holds her ear to the phone. She covers her mouth so he can’t hear her breathing. I want to tell her that her breath is the last thing on his mind. His pubes take precedent over her breath or my breath or even his own breath, and he needs to sort out the pube situation before he asphyxiates.

 “Tell them how cold it gets at home,” I say. “How you need all the hair you can get to stay warm in the winter.”

Read More

Donna Was Not a Cat Person

.Reading time 40 minutes.

By Halle Ruth

Featured Art: Chowder by Troy Goins

Donna forgot about the cat. She had promised to take care of it when her sister went on another one of her vacations. But the cat slipped to the bottom of Donna’s to-do list until he was barely hanging on, his presence barely noticed and left to his own devices, roaming her sister’s home on his lonesome. Donna did not want the cat staying in her own home, choosing to sacrifice the time it would take to drive to her sister’s to feed it every other day rather than let its fur coat her hardwood floors.  

She woke early that morning and decided to take advantage of the rare combination of a day off and unusually warm October weather to tackle the overgrown landscaping surrounding the house. At the beginning of summer, she paid a neighborhood kid to pull weeds and lay mulch, but the upkeep fell to her, and she hadn’t been particularly diligent about keeping the crab grass at bay. Her husband suggested hiring the kid again, but Donna refused. Everyone else in the neighborhood either cared for their yards themselves or hired professionals who drove around in logo-covered trucks that hauled riding lawnmowers, hedge trimmers, and leaf blowers. None of them cheaped out and hired a teenager to do a half-assed job to save a few dollars. It was embarrassing that they even hired him in the first place, like they couldn’t afford to do any better than that. Ella, who lived across the street, would have never done such a thing. Donna was sure of it.

Read More

You Start To Grow Old

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Haolun Xu 

You start to grow old so fast, you notice how much you love home.
Home means a local mall, it means a place with a little Thai stand with all the world in the pocket.

You walk in with mystery.
People ask you with curiosity if you’re a student, if you work, if you have kids.

You laugh with charisma. You say you’re looking forward to all your time in the world.
London, maybe, next week. But next week never comes. Today just has too much of you in it.

But you’re adventurous, right? You order a new thing everyday. A meal that can be held in your hands, it is the best part of your day. It’s the biggest pillar of your lunchtime.

One day, you have a beautiful combo. Pineapple and shrimp, rice and chopped veggies.
It’s perfect. It’s yours,

you eat it more and more each next month, every other day, every day. You gorge yourself in it,
you start to smile more and more each time,

they start to cheer whenever you come over. You ask, do you know me, and they say yes! of course we know you! They’re all so happy, you’re family now.

But they stop asking about London. They stop asking where you’re going,
they suddenly have all the jokes of a lifetime to tell you.

And they stop asking for your name,
they don’t need to know what it is to know who you are.

Read More

Memoir: Sacred

.Reading time 25 minutes.

By Shelagh Connor Shapiro

Featured Art: Birds by Jonathan Salzman and Tibetan Monks visiting Passion Works Studio

Ohio 

We sit in the car, my mother and I, outside a large white barn with black trim. It’s a pretty barn—less than a mile from our home—and my sister Maura keeps her horse here. The horse is Culotte. His previous owner called him “Just Cool It,” but Dad said that was too much of a hippy name. He is a proud Republican. During the last election, I picked up one of the dropped campaign buttons outside the voting booths. You aren’t allowed to wear the buttons inside. The vote is private, sacrosanct. 

We have stopped, as we do each morning, for Maura to feed Culotte. In March 1972, I am nine. In five minutes or ten minutes, when Maura comes back to the car, Mom will drive me to the William E. Miller Elementary School. She will drive Maura to the parking lot of the A&P, where Mrs. Besaunceny and three other students meet every day to drive to Columbus School for Girls, an hour away. CSG has no room for me in the fourth grade class. I’ll join the fifth graders next year. 

Our breath is frosty in the car. I ask my mother to repeat her question.

“If your Dad and I ever got a divorce, who would you want to live with?”

Read More

Second-Hand Tongue

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Tamara Miller

Once I bought a beautiful tongue at a second-hand store. It was an impulse buy; I probably paid more than it was worth, if it was even worth anything at all. After I got it home I felt a little ashamed and regretted my purchase. What did I need a second tongue for while my own just wasted away in my head, unused? But the thing about this new tongue was that it liked to wag. When my god-given tongue locked down tight against my teeth, this second tongue would start in, first about righteousness and then about salvation, until I realized something terrible: my new tongue had caught religion. It was a preaching kind of tongue, silvery and sly as the devil. I tried to silence it, with candy and pride and fear, the way you do with tongues, but it would not deviate from the path of righteousness it liked to march up and down my esophagus like a parade of Stormtroopers. Shut-up, I called with my other tongue. Please. Shut-up before someone hears us. Before someone realizes we are not who we say we are.

Read More

Difference

.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Sara Moore Wagner

Featured Art: Floating Guy, collaboration between Passion Works Studio (Athens, Ohio) and Colores del Alma (Chile)

When I used to read my son the book
where the outcast girl becomes friends
with the alligator, where they dance
in the sewer to the burt-burp of her
tuba, I would imagine he was the gator,
that one day he might find someone
to teach him not to put everything
in his mouth, to go into the water
where he’s meant to return—when
I read my daughter that book, suddenly
I see the girl, tiny soft body in the mouth
of the gator, being pulled down into the
swamp with her tuba blaring. And
the story has always been about this gator,
how he’s not meant to live in regular
society, how neither is the girl so they
find each other and even though he eats
all the local dogs, he leaves her alone
and she saves him. When I am walking
with my daughter downtown, a man
comes up to me and moves his hands
around in my face, gestures at
my daughter until I’m lying
on the sidewalk with my arms around her,
folding her into me like a pair of socks
in a suitcase, like a lolling tongue into
a mouth. And I’m yelling at the construction
workers come help me—and they do,
rushing out in their orange vests. And I think
in that book, these would have been the villains;
in that book, my girl would have risen and danced
for the man who wanted to pull her out of me
like a tooth, would have shown him how to live
in the civilized world, how to cover
his fangs, let them out at night when the slow
lull of the Ohio river takes them so far away
from her home, from her mother that he
thinks about his nature. How even this
little make believe world wasn’t built
for the girl. How even still, it’s my girl’s favorite
book. How even still, I read it.

Read More

Iguana

.Reading time 23 minutes.

By Jim Cole

Featured Art: Chameleon by Scott Brooks and Mallory Valentour 

The New Girl’s boss was fired. Then, her boss’s boss was fired.

People said her boss’s boss had, like, this vein of ore trapped deep down in his large body – imbedded, inscrutable. When he said Good morning that wasn’t usually what he meant. When he laughed it was not at what you supposed. Inside, he longed to fire you. 

Everyone said it. Her boss said it. Then he was fired. Her boss’s boss fired an old woman with a limp and a new pair of high heels, he fired a guy who went to his college, he fired a husband and wife who said they loved the company because they got to work together. Then, they got fired together. Everyone knew it: her boss’s boss yearned to fire; avoid him if you could. How many he’d fired, nobody could say. A dozen? Maybe twice that. His hit list was long – everyone. From a distance, and around corners, in the elevator and hallways and restroom stalls, outside on cigarette breaks, they talked about him, they joked nervous, and they called him something: the Reptile. When you talked to the Reptile, the air you breathed grew clammy. He smiled and was polite, he asked about your family’s well-being and your home appliances, and if your weekend was satisfactory and busy, and he looked at your surroundings, and said you had a nice workspace and to have a nice day, then you were fired. It was what he wanted, what satisfied the Reptile. It showed in his eyes and his stiff hair and his gait, in the way he exhaled or didn’t, the way he wore a pearl tie clasp on a pearl-colored tie, and how he pronounced the word bagel. 

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Memoir: I Went, Running

.Reading time 24 minutes.

By Caroline Manring

Featured Art: Bird by Emmett Reese

. . .as if loss were a fire he was purified in again and again, until he wasn’t a ghost anymore.
–James Galvin, The Meadow

Running is the only thing that made sense to me after miscarrying at fifteen weeks pregnant. I had almost lost my own life as well, and spent three weeks in two different hospitals, linked by a trippy ambulance ride with an EMT who thought I couldn’t hear him singing along to U2. Pretty much everyone thought I was unconscious for much of my hospitalization. I wasn’t, of course, and between waves of Fentanyl I noted or hallucinated many searing moments, which, though warped by fear and pain, were still less bizarre than the daily life I had to get back to, eventually.

Even after I came home from the hospital, crying because I had to be wheeled out to the car, and even when I slept most of the day, propped on our eglantine couch with the help of ten or so lesser drugs, anything other than the thought of running again was absurd: people walking across the street? Ridiculous. They weren’t screaming. Sunsets? Ruthless. They ended everything, over and over and over. Someone else’s baby? An abrupt and tenacious violence; a violation of the possible, an extravagant body made radioactive by my pain, like a fur coat soaked with blood from a bucket I hurled myself.

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Radiology

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Kim Garcia

Sitting on the x-ray dolly, gown fastened front to back,
steel girders propping the tracks of the x-ray cam,
resting in half-dark with a lead blanket
size and weight of a doormat over my belly
while the tech disappears behind the wall
and a light flashes blue and white,
then more waiting, every joint in need
of repair.
                   The cam floats over my body.
The tech touches me gently. He’s nearly bald
and pale in his scrubs. I sit up, hearing
a soft popping of cartilage as I swing
my knees over the side. Knee-capped
by nothing. I am so poorly
designed and executed that one might call
this incarnation accidental, unintended.
And against accident, what can I do but keep
intending?
                   So, bless the half-hearted pinging
of the Philips logo saving the screen.
Bless the lead aprons and blankets,
the plastic stretcher board hung
on hooks on the wall, the stacks
of towels and plastic gloves, the cream
and cocoa checkerboard tiles, the tech
with his soft hands in this cheerful wing
that promises nothing
                   the lame will not walk
                   the deaf will not hear
but more light
to see our suffering by.

Read More

Essay: Olympia Traveller de Luxe

.Reading time 14 minutes.

By Robert Long Foreman

The Olympia Traveller de Luxe is not the same thing as the Olympia de Luxe.

They’re similar, sure. They’re both manual typewriters. They look like each other. But if someone said they were the same they’d be lying through their teeth. They’d be capable of anything.

The Olympia Traveller de Luxe does all the things the Olympia de Luxe does, but it’s far more compact. It doesn’t rise high off the table but keeps its head down; it’s three and a quarter inches tall, where the Olympia de Luxe is five and a half.

It can’t have been easy for Olympia’s engineers to take all the functions of the de Luxe and reproduce them in an even smaller model. But they did. And I’ve tried other typewriters of about the same size, like the Smith-Corona Skyriter and the Hermes Rocket. They’re nice, but they’re flawed. The page you’re typing on will slide out of place as you type. The hammers won’t strike hard unless you press hard.

Not so with the Olympia Traveller de Luxe. It’s small, but the letters it makes are bold—which helps convince its user that what they’re writing matters, that someone in the world will care about what’s on that page.

The words you make on it aren’t pixels on a screen but ink on paper. You can see them when the power goes out.

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Sonnet with Hound and Sequins

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Robert Thomas 

Featured Art: Yak by Mary Alice Woods, Jason Licht, and Tibetan Monks Visiting Passion Works Studio

I didn’t lose you to a matador
in flat slippers and a sequined jacket.
I didn’t lose you to a match’s glow
you followed into a hummingbird’s nest.
I didn’t lose you to Bruce or Abby,
though Bruce could bawl blues like a baying hound
and Abby danced like a leaf in a storm.
I didn’t lose you to a silent drum
or a curtain call or a summer sheen.
No, I lost you to incomparable
suave death in tights and tank top, his slick
disco two-step. While he took you for a spin
in his roadster, his red Alfa Spider,
I rode in the rain on his rumble seat.

Read More

Walker County Rites

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Cheyenne Taylor

Featured Art: Flea by Jason Douglas and Wendy Minor

One average night you catch yourself 
combing summer’s stour through your hair,

cutting the moon like fruit with a pocketknife.
The night undoes the hooks behind her back

for you, white freckles tossed across her skin.
Before the massless hoots of barred owls hail

you back to camp—your wet, unbaptized body
bruised by testing instinct—you’re convinced

that something’s watching. Fatwood fatigues. 
You loom up to the fire, trusting heat. You say

I sort-of think, and I would like to pray,
and marvel at the coal barge hauling

light between banks. When someone thanks
the Lord for camp potatoes, aluminum foil,

rootstalks spread for tortoises, a mammal howls,
and you want all the earthly knowledges.

You steel yourself with whiskey for the river.
You plant yourself ashore and eat the dirt.

Read More

Self-Portrait as Minor Prophet

.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Craig Van Rooyen

Not the one who foretells 
our city become a jackals’ haunt 
or our silver turned to dross.

Rather, the one who needs a grocery list
from his wife with the precise level of yogurt fat 
underlined and the aisle number

for the hypo-allergenic soap
so he will not wander, masked, into 
the floral section to be with orchids,

their double stems of moth wings 
looking nothing like fields stripped by foreigners 
or hands hinged in prayer.

Woe to you with more than 10 items
in express checkout, he may think.
Woe to you who do not stand six feet apart.

But he does not proclaim their downfall
or predict their cattle slaughtered, their
gardens trampled underfoot. 

I have seen enough buying and selling by now 
to know I am a product, packaged 
for someone else’s comfort, and to know

in this too I will fail. The truth is, my people, 
we were always sheltered alone 
and for mysterious reasons never knew it. 

After 24 years with one woman
I still wonder with whom I will awake:
Sword or plowshare; flint horse hoof

or threshing floor, wasteland or vineyard
where grape skins crack from the pressure
of flesh and juice answering sun.

Read More

The Universe is Just One of Those Things That Happens from Time to Time

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Jacob Griffin Hall

Featured Art: Stacked Animals by Jonathan Salzman

I deposit my tired universe of bones
beside the farmhouse. Discrete, the butterfly weed
with its leaves tapered to a soft point
leans against the lower stem of a coneflower.
I eat sweet bread and strawberries
and stare into the pocket of oaks dawdling
at the far edge of the field. I draw rings in the clouds
with my outstretched finger, the posture
not unlike accusation, the hair erect at the brush
of a spider against an exposed ankle. The only choice
is how far to carry a burden. I’ve known
the most ordinary people, autumn, untamed piles
of burning leaves. I’ve watched from a safe distance
and disregarded the intensity with which I scratched
my wrist, the skin slick and glinting
beneath a series of similar suns. I’ve negotiated
my right to fathom the bodies of insects.
It’s going well so far. I’ve given up
chocolate bars and late nights and thoughts
of making my life a metaphor. Still the coneflower
is nimble atop its spread of fibrous root.
I wait for the sun to stain the clouds
that shade of rattled yellow that announces evening,
the low light, a thing I know but still need to parse.

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I propose we worship the mud dauber

.Reading time 3 minutes.

by Jessica Pierce

 

The female in particular seems worthy.
She carries mud in her jaws to make her nest
one mouthful at a time, setting up
in a crevice or a corner. One egg,
one chamber. One egg, one chamber.
It’s better to keep them apart, as larvae don’t
know the difference between food and
a brother or a sister. They aren’t wicked,
just young and hungry. She has pirate
wasps to battle—they want her young
to feed their own offspring—and she does this
alone, drinking flower nectar to keep
herself going. Let’s just try

and see what happens when we raise up
this winged thing who will hover by your feet
without attacking. Covered with dense golden
hair and sometimes described as singing while
she works, all she wants is bits of damp dirt.
She has a slender thorax and two thin
sets of wings to carry her and
her earth. She is exactly strong enough
for what she needs to do. She doesn’t burn
or proclaim or fill your head with visions
as she hunts crab spiders and orb
weavers and black widows. Yes, let’s ask

her to pray for us as she stings
a black widow, brings it to its knees,
and sets off to feed her children,
singing as she holds up the world. Read More