Category: Uncategorized

Buckeye Sci-Fi: “Does Anything Exciting Ever Happen Around Here?”

.Reading time 26 minutes.

By Christopher A. Sims

Featured Art: Up In The Air by Emma Stefanoff

Ohio and Science Fiction. Perhaps unexpectedly, given the overwhelming normness of Ohio, the two have become inextricably linked. So, for the bene t of colonizing aliens and future AIs, busy consuming every spec of human information in an effort to understand us—where we went wrong, what were our occasional successes, what is meant by “Cincinnati Five-Way”—I’m happy to set out on a kind of fantastic discovery of my own, seeking to answer: Why do an inordinate amount of authors and directors set sf works in Ohio? What could the place represent that makes it such rich soil for these stories? And how might sf itself be enriched by Ohio-ness? Dust off your ray gun and wearable OSU memorabilia, I’m going to need some help.

First, to situate us. This essay will focus on two sf novels by Kurt Vonnegut— Breakfast of Champions (1973) and its “sequel” Deadeye Dick (1982)—both set in the fictional town of Midland City, Ohio. These novels propose, among other things, that a neutron bomb has destroyed Midland City, that an inconsequential sf writer named Kilgore Trout had been set to keynote the Midland City Arts Festival before its annihilation, and that one of Trout’s novels, which supposes that every Earthling but the reader is a robot, is about to be taken as gospel-truth by the dangerously unstable Dwayne Hoover. We’ll also look at Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One (2011), among other Spielbergian nuggets of pop culture, which casts Columbus, Ohio, as the technological mecca of America and features a fully immersive virtual reality called the OASIS which people prefer to reality.

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Sometimes a Vague Notion

.Reading time 15 minutes.

By David Armstrong

Featured Art: Rep2 by Felicity Gunn

Here in the backyard of our mutual friend in San Diego, holding a beer while a balmy twilight coats us in aquatic hues, a woman talks about Norway. Norway by way of Bulgaria.

“Bulgaria is awful,” she says. “But Norway is expensive.” She’s a systems analyst for a cyber-security company.

Another woman says San Francisco by way of Hong Kong by way of, originally, Thailand.

Among others in this six-week writers workshop are a couple of New Yorkers, two Baltimoreans, L.A. folks (with stints in Poland), a South African, and an energetic woman from Lake Charles, Louisiana, whose pale hands utter like scared doves when she revs up for a joke.

Chatter. Writers talking shop, life, travel.

I say Ohio. “I’m from Ohio.”

Someone says, “Oh.”

Like the abbreviation of the state itself.

Oh.

A sip of beer, eyes downcast, searching the dirt for a lost thread of conversation.

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New Ohio Review Issue 24 (Originally Published Fall 2018)

.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 24 compiled by Isaiah Underwood

My Hometown, the Hypothetical Guided Tour

.Reading time 5 minutes.

By Dan Wiencek

Featured Art: by Jasper Francis Cropsey

            First we come to the field
where I did not hit the winning
     home run, where no cheers rose
            up and the game ball went ungiven

     Beyond left field,
            the bleachers where I did not
    make out with my high-school
         crush, did not taste her perfume
                  or dodge her brother’s freckled glare

      This is the house where a family of
                color did not live, there, where
         that guy is hosing Chinese
                              menus off his car

     Then of course this tax attorney’s office, once
            the bookstore where I stole
                        Helter Skelter, which I still
                     visit in my dreams

                 Finally, this empty lot
          staring up at the sun like a vast
                   gravel eye, formerly the school where
     I never thought to imagine a future,
         where no one told me and I
             did not listen

                        that life could be a wave
      beating the rocks or

           a wind bouncing a kite—

                         taut string pinwheels,
               dips and swoops groundward only
    to right itself, to stay resolutely
                                                                in the air

                                              and here we are.

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Trouble

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Danusha Laméris

Featured Art: by Clara Peeters

He’d wanted the persimmons
and asked her for them, but when
she gave him the brown paper bag,
brimming over, he was taken
aback. Did he really need that many?
Still, he brought them home
to his wife, and soon
there were persimmons ripening
on the kitchen counters, lining
the windowsills. Each day,
growing more and more succulent
until the air was thick
and sweet with their scent.
At breakfast, he’d break one open
with his spoon—the skin supple
and ready to give—stir it into
his hot cereal. Indescribable,
the taste. And a texture he might
have described as sea creature
meets manna from heaven. When
he ate one, he thought of her.
And when he saw her, he thought
of the persimmons. When her arm
brushed, just barely, against his,
did he imagine they both felt
the same quickening? In myth,
fruit is usually the beginning
of disaster. And the way
they made themselves so obvious—
an almost audible orange
against the white walls—
made him wish he’d never asked
her for them, didn’t have to
smell them sugaring the air
with ruin, as he sat there,
face lowered to the bowl, spooning
the soft pulp into his mouth.

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Bird

.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Danusha Laméris

Featured Art: Young Woman on a Balcony Looking at Parakeets by Henri Matisse

We were sitting on the couch in the dark
talking about first pets, when I told him how,
as a girl, I kept a blue and white parakeet I let
y around the house and, sometimes, outside,
where he’d land on the branches of pine
and eucalyptus, balancing between seedpods
and spines. Only, while I was telling it,
my companion began to stroke, very lightly,
the indent of my palm, the way you do when you’re
sitting in the dark with someone you’ve never kissed
but have thought about kissing. And I told him
how my bird would sit on a high branch and sing,
loudly, at the wonder of it—the whole, green world—
while he traced the inside of my arm with his fingers,
opening another world of greenery and vines,
twisting toward the sun. I loved that bird for his singing,
and also for the way his small body, lifted skyward,
made my life larger. And then it was lip-to-lip,
a bramble, and it was hard to say who was who—
thumb to cheek to chest. The whole ravening.
When I told him I did not clip my bird’s wings,
I was talking about hunger. When he pressed me
hard against the back of the couch, named a litany
of things he’d do to me, I wanted them all.
I, too, have loved to live in a body. To feel the way
it lifts up the octaves of sky, cells spiraling
through smoke and mist, cumulus and stratus,
into that wild blue. And though I knew
there was always a hawk somewhere in the shadows
ready to snatch his heart in its claws, still,
I couldn’t help letting that parakeet free.

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Stopover on a Road Trip to L.A., 1981

.Reading time 1 minute.

By C.W. Emerson

Featured Art: by Arthur Lazar

Didn’t I stand there once,
nineteen, loose-limbed,

dripping water onto the catwalk
above the motel pool?

And weren’t we luminous then?—
our bodies glistening,

pale as the slice of winter moon
that hung in a Vegas sky.

Wasn’t there a door, a threshold,
one simple, white-walled room?

Didn’t we taste peyote’s fire,
christen ourselves with totemic names?—

wouldn’t I become Gray Wolf,
Bitter Oleander, Monkshead, Moss?

And you would have been
Bobcat, Lily of the Valley, my love,

Salt Cedar, Eucalyptus—
if only you’d lived a little longer.

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We Have Got to Get Out of L.A.

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Suzanne Lummis

Nights, the expanse of lit streets and lights
of mini-marts sends out an avid, sex-tinged and
discontented glow for planes to drift through.

Days, the men no one would marry stand
too close behind us, in lines dangling
through Food-4-Less, Rite Aid Drugs.

Friends, we have got to get out of L.A.
Downstairs a couple yelp their seedy
bare-boned love, and then fight.

Upstairs a woman rehearses, once again,
the awful song no one will buy.
Its unlucky-with-men news wobbles

out over The Donut Inn’s clientele—
guys dressed down and broke till Friday,
unlucky with women.

We have got to get out of L.A.
It’s built on sand with stolen water.
A burning thirst got under our skin.

And these hints of oasis, the bowings
of tall wand-like palms over
the avenues, stir up far-fetched desire.

It’s the palms and that cell talk
riding the waves. We believe
stuff. There’s, like, big plans in the air.

But the greedy nibbled our greatness
and it got small. Our agents
dumped us and moved on. Lovers

rode home on a Greyhound bus.
The dream we can’t wake up from
complained it’s not getting younger—

and left without paying the rent.
It woke up from us.

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To Inscribe

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Anne Starling

Featured Art: A Holiday by Edward Henry Potthast

The dead are with us to stay
                  —Charles Wright

But not the living, the fallible breathing.

For a while it seemed one thing
could be righted. One small piece at the
ocean’s bottom corner
or the bottom
dresser drawer with the scuffed
baby shoes and shoeboxes
               full of snapshots of kid parties, holidays, school picnics
               etcetera.

A comfort, even knowing that wrong
can’t be undone, is more like oceans plural
rushing in
               weighing in with their trick of
                no light, unfathomable.

The idea was to inscribe
the back of the photograph taken
on our last anniversary.
                        Simply to write, in everyday
permanent ink
his name                in the possessive
                then “Mom and Dad.”

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Asking for a Friend

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Emily Sernaker

Featured Art: Shop Girls by Elizabeth Sparhawk-Jones

What if you haven’t enjoyed dating
for a while? You’re tired of sharing pieces
of your life story with men
in crowded restaurants
all over the city who you know
within five minutes you won’t want
to see again? What if you get too excited
when you find a guy you like
at a holiday party? Becoming very
forward while wearing a Snoopy Christmas sweater,
because you believe it’s your power-outfit
and you only have a three-week window to rock it?
What if you’re having fun on a date swapping
embarrassing stories and then somehow
you’re outside the bar and he’s shaking
your hand saying it was nice to meet you,
and you realize that you’re actually in
an embarrassing story? It’s happening to you
right now. What if everyone keeps acting like
this is simple? You’ll only find love when
you’re not looking! To find love, you have to
put yourself out there! And you don’t want
to be dramatic about it, but some days
your heart feels like an ambulance
stuck in traffic. What if you keep
trying everything and nothing?
And when you look up at the sky
and spot a perfect hole-punched moon
you want to tell someone
that, if they hurry, they can see it
completely, all that brightness at once.

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Thing-Poem After the Social Event

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Karen Benning

Featured Art: Landscape with Two Poplars by Vasily Kandinsky

Did you have any fun? Tell me.
What did you do?”

—from The Cat in the Hat, by Dr. Seuss

Never speak aloud the thing that first
pops into your head, pops like a balloon, black,
bursting in a shock, pops like your bubble burst,
pops like a blister of blood, a BB gun at a bird,
a red blot on a white backdrop, thought precedent
to mismatched utterance precedent
to the stare, the crash into

silence, the inevitable turning
away as you stand there (again) staring into
your wine glass and facing newly open space

between yourself and a back. Never speak
to strangers, never say that first thing

(defined as material object without life
or consciousness; as inanimate object; as cannot be
precisely described) thing thing thing

no matter how often you say it, nothing
comes to mind except Dr. Seuss
creatures cursed with dumb grins
and bad hair and toys that crack walls
and priceless heirlooms now look
what you’ve done and though they meant no
harm harm they did and ruined everything

and they are the only specific things you can conjure but
you should definitely never speak of Thing One or Thing Two, much
less their leader who should not be about

much much less that first BUMP
of a thing that popped

into your own social klutz of a mind, that
perpetual source of embarrassment, that
maladroit blundering thing.

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Talking

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Christopher Brean Murray

Featured Art: by Alfred Stieglitz

Sometimes I talk too much. I tell myself
it’s good to socialize so I say almost anything
to get the conversation going, something
like “What’s your favorite crime film?” or
“The media really needs to tone it down.”
Then we’re off and talking about what
kind of dog to get or whether garlic
belongs in guacamole. I might not know
the person I’m talking to but we can
work that out on the fly like rolling a car
down a hill to get it started but what if
it has no brakes? Sometimes that happens
and you have to steer away from the river
rushing over the black rocks and turn
onto the lane that snakes through the trees
beside the reservoir and I’m still talking
trying to get a sense of this person
who tells me about her grade school
and the re drill that turned out to be real
but no one knew until years later
and in the room below the gymnasium
was a wallet-sized photo of a woman
who went missing and I wonder whether
the person telling me this is the person
in the photo or if there ever was a photo
how would I know? Then I’m telling a story
I’ve told many times but it’s going to be
good this time with the part about
the voices on the dunes and the man
waving from the other shore and I realize
the person I’m talking to reminds me of the girl
I went to camp with but can hardly remember
except for the birthmark and that night I heard her
crying in the tent while everyone slept.
She seemed fine the next day and I don’t
mention any of this but I wonder how my story
has changed over time. You’d think I would know
but I don’t. Anyway, I’m still on the road
that snakes through the trees. Here comes a tunnel.

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Merriweather

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Christopher Brean Murray

I first heard his name in passing. Someone
was rinsing coffee from a spoon, saying, “That’s just
how Merriweather is . . .” I was new to the city.
I was emailing my CV around and smiling politely
at new faces. I noticed that people really deferred
to this Merriweather—his first name? A man I met
at a potluck had camped with Merriweather in Patagonia.
Merriweather had gotten him and his friends
out of a jam when the stove gas ran low and a sharp sleet
hemmed them in for days. Another guy explained
that Merriweather had secured for him and his fiancée
a cherry farm where they could have the wedding
they’d dreamt of. Merriweather’s band played,
and his bass solos shook bits of hay from the dusty catwalk.
People danced and cried out to Merriweather for more,
then laughed as a bale tumbled from the loft,
just missing the sweat-drenched drummer. Couples
snuck off to the guest cabins, and a young woman
claimed the pomegranate punch tasted like starlight.
A boy found a silver dollar on the freshly laid macadam.
Merriweather’s band debuted a Sam & Dave tune
they’d rearranged so that people looked at each other like
What the fuck, how can they be this good? During the break,
Merriweather spoke to a woman about her father’s death.
She was moved by how closely he listened,
and by the questions he asked that showed he understood.
She inquired whether Merriweather was married.
No one knew. Someone had glimpsed him at the wharf
with a much younger woman. The two stared
across the bay toward Bronson Island where
wild boar still roam and clusters of purple lichen
hang from the limbs of the vast spidery trees that vivisect
the tarnished sunlight. Tears filled Merriweather’s eyes
and the unreal eyes of the young woman beside him.

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Happy Lamp

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Catherine Carter

Featured Art: Under the Lamp, c. 1882 by Mary Cassatt

It’s made to make you glad
on dull cold days, keep you
from crying over car insurance,
made to stop the visions
of flogging your flesh with barbed
wire, gouges gone rust-brown,
swelling with tetanus.
Full spectrum, mock sun;
maybe it helps.
At least it makes nothing
any worse. Until you realize
there’s pressure. Even the lamp
is anxious as a border
collie, wanting work
and reassurance. Leave it on
while you go to lunch and afterward
its white radiance
is trembly. It whispers, I shone
and shone and no one came,
no one saw. Aren’t I bright
enough? Are you glad
now? And you don’t know
what to say.
Its light quivers like unfallen
tears. You sit still, regarding
the light like a dangerous
lunatic, like you’ve never heard
of barbed wire, trying
to look happy.

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Soulmates

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Peter Krumbach

Featured Art: by Claude Monet

I was sent a how-to-carve-a-whistle book.
I thought of whistles.
I thought of carving.
I bought a whistle-carving kit.
I stuffed tobacco in my pipe and sparked it.
I opened a buck knife, put a willow stick in my lap.
I carved a whistle.
I blew.
I tossed it in the fire and looked at the flames.
I carved another whistle, then another.
I carved nineteen whistles, the ground strewn with chips.
I carved the last one to sound a quarter-step above high C, a tone only
I and my soulmate could hear.
I blew it every morning, then listened.
I heard soulmates blow back from their graves.
I heard whistles from the Mariana Trench.
I heard them sound from Pluto’s moon.
I blew the other day, but no one blew back.
I blew louder. Still, no reply.
I filled my lungs with all the air of the garden.
I blew the loudest. And nothing. Only the neighbor calling if
I could keep it down.

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Box in a Closet

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Faith Shearin

Featured Art: by Emil Carlsen

I open a box
in a closet and here I find us,
stuck in scenes long forgotten: my uncle

disappearing down an oak alley
in a horse-drawn carriage,
my grandmother dressed for a garden party,

gloves to her elbows, posed in a stiff
southern parlor, 1953. Here is the trip
to Disney World where we drank from

plastic oranges, held balloons
with ears; oh, we grow younger
on beaches, until we are babies, naked

on blankets, and my grandfather
rises from the grave to sit
in a wood-paneled living room,

on a plaid couch, in a fedora.
I find my cousins beneath cypress trees,
in a river at sunset, and my sister,

age eight, dressed as a mosquito,
on her way to a costume party.
The van that floated away

in a hurricane reassembles itself in our
driveway and my father’s dog,
ten years dead, rides over the lagoon

where she will someday drown,
in a canoe: October falling,
my father’s hair black, his paddle

still in his hands.

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The Deluge

.Reading time 52 minutes.

By Alan Sincic

It wasn’t the voice that woke me, but the jolt of the trailer. It was Dad. He’d lurched out of bed. Fumbled upright as if in a dream, as if he’d skippered a boat upside a pier in the dark, struck a piling and—pow—off the pitch of the deck and onto the dock he stumbles.

Not that the camper was what you’d call terra firma. Less like a home on wheels and more like a traveling dollhouse, everything pretending to be more than it really was—parlor the size of a bathroom, bathroom the size of a fridge, fridge the size of a toaster, toaster the hearth around which we’d huddle when the rain shattered and the dark thickened and the cold rose up to stab us in  the ankles. The Cookie Tin’s what Mom called the trailer. Dad and Mom in the fold-out bed at the back, at the foot of which you got a curdle of flannel, Ben-Ben, not a toddler anymore but still squat enough (Tater-Tot we called him) to wedge in cross-wise. Up top of that the rack for Cece—canvas on a pair of poles, like a stretcher. Down below a carpet runner rolling out a luxurious four feet to the front-end boudoir—Len and me bull-dozed into the same bed together, head-to-toe across a table-top that, every morning at eight, we’d pop back up into place.

Oh. And Sal. Little Miss Bon-bon. Seems like the second a girl gets a couple of—what would be the polite word for it?—bosoms—you got the whole damn troposphere torqueing up to accommodate the blessed event. The VW van should’ve been for Len and me but no, Sal’s gotta have her privacy, her womanly solicitude, as if a girl who burns a whole afternoon spot-welding a girder of curls into a confectionary (what would be the word?) spectacle could give a damn about privacy.

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On the Ferry from Victoria to Port Angeles

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Kirsten Abel

Featured Art: by Hilaire Germain Edgar Degas

Bright squares of sunlight slosh across the ferry’s deck,
seesawing as the ship sways.

A pool of water flecked with coal threatens to seep up to our feet.
It drifts a little closer with each westward tilt.

You are sitting next to me reading.
The boat rocks worse than ever.

The window frames cast a bar of shadow
across your lap and book and I want to say something

to show you that I’m not freaking out
about any of this: us, the rough seas, the bad thing

my roommate told me about otters the other day.
I used to think it meant I was settling if I wasn’t going around

in a constant state of impassioned panic.
But it’s okay if you don’t like the hat I bought you

for your birthday. And it’s okay that I love you
at the speed of a slow ship full of cars.

The dirty water finally reaches us. It wets the soles of our sandals.
It swells around the bolts holding down our chairs.

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Calling Annie Oakley

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Kirsten Abel

Written on the side of a payphone
lashed to the wall of the bathroom in a Montreal café
is Annie Oakley’s telephone number.
I see it while I’m peeing.
That’s how close the payphone is.
Annie Oakley in black marker and then her number.
I’ve only touched a gun once.
Or maybe I didn’t touch it, I just thought about touching it
and then said, No, thank you.
It was my father’s gun. It was small, perfect
for fitting into a lady’s hand. Is that called a .38 Special?
Annie Oakley would know.
I didn’t grow up with guns.
I didn’t grow up with my father.
People sometimes think that is a great tragedy.
I did grow up near a little lake, beside
which lived two goats and a horse.
In spring and summer I would walk with my sisters
the dirt trail overlooking the mountain to the gravel path to the stables.
If the goats were out,
we’d pass them cabbage through the fence.
Back then I thought the greatest tragedy was August
ending or my eighth-grade crush dumping me
for a girl with nearly my same name.
I’ve always had trouble locating the appropriate level of sadness
about the father thing.
I’m not saying it doesn’t register.
I’ve just known from a young age there was nothing to do about it.
Here is me.
Here is my father.
The distance between us could be as close as me to this payphone
or as far as the mountain felt from the lake.
Either way it changes things.
Either way it’s done.
Annie Oakley shot a squirrel’s head clean off at age eight.
It was her first shot.
Here is me, I hear her saying.
Here is the squirrel.
Right through the head or right through the thigh or right through the gut.
Either way it’s done.

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Calchas Reading the Signs

.Reading time 2 minutes.


By George Kalogeris

Featured Art: by Piet Mondrian

It’s ’68. Whatever he saw, whatever he smelt
In that smoky, dripping handful of purple entrails
Just thawing out from the freezer, the news from Athens

Was ominous, and he wouldn’t haruspicate
On how and when the Colonels might react—
But the gobbets of offal keep piling up in the pail.

It’s not that he fully trusted the lordly voice
Of the BBC, but hearing Vietnam
He drops what he’s doing, and cranking up the volume

On that crackly plastic Panasonic—
That’s when I hear it too: Khe Sanh. It’s what
Comes through the speaker’s throbbing bamboo mesh

As I’m stamping prices on jars of baby food:
A staticky hiss like burning jungle grass . . .
My father wiping his hands on his butcher’s apron,

Oblivious to his customers as he listens
To a transistor radio broadcast the blood
Of a world in shambles. And then he’s back at his block.

Khe Sanh. My older cousins, Kosta and Jimmy,
Are loading up the van they’ll drive around Winthrop,
Delivering groceries and checking out girls.

I’m stamping the little glass jars of applesauce.
Nobody knows whose number will come up.
But our Calchas isn’t taking any chances.

Already he’s built another hecatomb,
And now he’s scrutinizing some gristly turkey
Intestines unfurling for all I know like the coils

Of giant lianas he saw in Guadalcanal
As a young recruit. But through that throbbing bamboo
Mesh I hear the Hydra’s serpentine hiss

He heard as a village boy way up in the Peloponnese.

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Europeans Wrapping Knickknacks

.Reading time 21 minutes.

By David Kirby

Featured Art: by Gustave Caillebotte

                                  They’re so meticulous, aren’t they? They take such care
             that I am ashamed for my country, that impatient farm boy,
      that factory hand with the sausage fingers. First there’s
                        the fragile object itself—vase, jewel, ornament—then tissue,
                      stiff paper, bubble wrap, tissue again, tape, a beautiful bag
      made from something more like gift wrap than the stern brown
                        stuff we use here in the States, then the actual carry bag

                         that has a little string handle but which is, in many ways,
                    the loveliest part of the package except for the object
    you can barely remember, it’s been so long since
                        you’ve seen it. In America, we just drop your trinket
                      in a sack and hand it to you. Oh, that’s right. We have cars
     in this country: whereas Stefano or Nathalie has to elbow his
                                or her way down a crowded street and take the bus or subway,

                        you get in the car, put the bag on the seat next to you,
                      and off you go, back to your bungalow in Centralia or Eau Claire.
      Of course, this doesn’t mean you’re culturally inferior
                        to Jacques or Magdalena just because, as Henry James
                    said in his book-length essay on Hawthorne, we have no sovereign
     in our country, no court, no aristocracy, no high church,
                        no palaces or castles or manors, no thatched cottages,

                        no ivied ruins. No, we just do things differently here:
                    whereas Pedro and Ilsa take the tram or trolley,
     you have your car, and now you’re on your way home
                        to Sheboygan or Dearborn, probably daydreaming
                   as you turn the wheel, no more aware of your surroundings
   than 53-year-old Michael Stepien was in 2006 when
                        he was walking home after work in Pittsburgh, which

                        is when a teenager robbed him and shot him in the head,
                    and as Mr. Stepien lay dying, his family decided
     “to accept the inevitable,” said his daughter Jeni,
                        and donate his heart to one Arthur Thomas
                    of Lawrenceville, NJ, who was within days of dying.
                That’s one thing you can say about life in the U.S.:
                        we have great medicine. Mr. Thomas recovered nicely

                        after the transplant, and he and the Stepiens
                        kept in touch, swapping holiday cards and flowers
               on birthdays. And then Jeni Stepien gets engaged to be
                        married and then thinks, Who will walk me down the aisle?
                        No cathedrals in America, says Henry James,
              no abbeys, no little Norman churches, no Oxford nor Eton
                        nor Harrow, no sporting class, no Epsom nor Ascot.

Read More

My Father Visits Not Long After My Mother (His Wife Twenty Years Ago) Dies

.Reading time 5 minutes.

By Brock Guthrie

Featured Art: by Paul Gavarni

My father’s in town for a quick couple days
and it’s early morning and not much to do

and he needs some smokes and I need
a few things from Lowe’s. We walk to my car

and he says, “Man, you need a car wash,”
and I say, “Yeah, I’ve just been so busy,”

which isn’t really untrue, but I tell him
there’s a place on the way. We get in my car

and he says, “Go to McDonald’s, I’ll buy,”
and we wait in the drive-thru and he says,

“You need a vacuum too,” and I don’t reply
because the food is ready. I pass him his

Egg McMuffin and drive down the road,
carefully unwrapping my breakfast burrito,

and this commercial I’ve heard a dozen times
comes on the radio, some guy with a nasally

New York accent, but only now do I gather
it’s an advertisement for snoring remedies.

My father says, “If there are two vacuum hoses,
I can do one side and you can do the other.”

We drive past strip malls. I wave vaguely
toward a Mexican restaurant I kind of like

but I can’t think of what I want to say about it,
so I kind of mumble and my father does too

except his is more reply, like, “Is that right?”
The car wash kiosk has eight confusing options.

Read More

The Uber Diaries

.Reading time 35 minutes.

By Kyle Minor

Indianapolis, Indiana. Somewhere near Keystone Avenue and 62nd Street my iPhone pings. A college student from Hyderabad, India. He is pleased when I tell him he’s my first customer. He tips me two dollars.

*

I pick up my second customer in front of a bar in Broad Ripple. He gets in the front seat. His hair is grown to thigh length, and he is on some kind of party drug that makes him want to touch things.

“Please stop rubbing my arm,” I say.

He apologizes.

Near Rocky Ripple, he takes off his shoes and socks and rubs his bare feet
on the windshield.

His feet leave little rabbit marks. He is a large man with very tiny feet. When
I drop him off at the donut shop, he doesn’t leave a tip.

*

Read More

Leaf Blower

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Alan Shapiro

Featured Art: The Poet’s Garden by Vincent van Gogh

Swept up so suddenly in parabolic
spasms like a starling flock
or curtain swelling, billowing out
while all along the edges
this or that leaf frays
from the pack the force
keeps driving forward
over the courtyard bricks—

while in ear muffs and face
mask he points the havoc
this way and that as if
to see what happens because
he’s in no hurry, he’s peaceful,
calm, Laplace’s Demon
out for a stroll, cool source
of all that whirling, lost in

contemplation of the incalculable
force of every movement from
the greatest body to the smallest
atom, holding it all in mind—
working it out, in ear muffs
and face mask following behind
what whirls before him, fleeing,
which is why he strolls.

Read More

Hole in One

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Alan Shapiro

Since my dad was blind by then,
when David and I led him from his apartment
to the tee of the shrunken one hole
golf course that served as kitschy
courtyard for the complex
of retirees only well-off
enough for this unironic
aping of the rich, it was by habit
only that he looked down
at the ball he couldn’t see,
then up and out into the void
of stunted fairway and green
while first this foot then that
foot patted the fake grass, almost
kneading it cat-like till the tight
swing arced the ball up high

as the second-story windows
and I swear it was like a trick
ball the pin on an invisible line
reeled in straight down
into the hole—his first and only
hole in one, on the last swing
of a club he ever took, though
we didn’t know this then, and how
we whooped my brother and I
as we jumped and capered throwing
the other balls up into the air
while the old man baffled said what?
what happened? what? already wistful
for this best moment of a life it was
his luck the blindness made him miss.

And now it’s my luck, isn’t it just
my luck, to be the last one
remembering, as if I’m not just
there with them but also far
removed above it all and watching
as through the block glass of an upper-story
window high enough for the ruckus
not to reach me but too low
not to see the filmy blur of
bodies hugging one another
pumping fists as arm in arm
the three of them head out across
the fake grass of that single hole.

Read More

Closer

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Alan Shapiro

Featured Art: by William A. Harper

How the great closer—when the batter lunged
and swung through the curve for strike three—
turned his back to the plate as if there were no batter,
and his one concession to the moment
(that there even was a moment) was
to hitch one shoulder as if to shrug off
a slight annoyance while his face unbothered
by expression measured its mastery by what
it wouldn’t feel, or show, was like and not like us,
our faces, lips, how, when I tried to kiss yours,
they shut tight against what up to then, it seemed,
they’d opened to so eagerly I never thought
they ever wouldn’t or imagined you might ever
turn away not just as if I wasn’t there but
never had been. And weren’t we, maybe, like
the batter too, and not, the way he flipped the bat and
caught it and as he strolled back to the dugout,
holding the bat up, seemed to study it
with such rabbinical amazement
you could almost think he’d failed on purpose
so he could finally see within the bat
whatever lack the bat, not knowing it was lacking,
had hidden in the grain to show him now.

Read More

Bay Sunday

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By W.J. Herbert

Featured Art: Boys in a Dory by Winslow Homer

1.

Wind hits the cliff face and climbs the palisade
as three men at a slatted table play cards.
Two wear hats. A third faces the sun and smokes.
All three are gray-haired, but none is my father.
He wouldn’t have played without scotch
on a Sunday or sat on a park bench, anyway.

2.

A man holding a child speaks to her in Mandarin
as he touches a small seat attached to the back of a bike.
He pats handlebars and points to spokes, saying bike
every twenty words or so, then taps the front wheel gently,
the way you would touch the shoulder of an old friend.

3.

Some Sundays even if I’m not near the bay,
I imagine my father playing solitaire at a slatted table
as I lean over the cliff rail, watching waves
that grapple with the beach as they leave it.

On the bike path below, grit spins under a stream of cyclists
as a man wipes a child’s tear with the edge
of his sleeve and speaks to her in a language so soft and low
the bay curves like an ear to hear it.

Read More

Stateline Lake

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Arlyce Menzies

Featured Art: by William Guy Wall

Slipping through the shadow of trees
at dusk to the old strip mine, we took off
our clothes under the wide catalpa’s
strung slender pods. The lake
shone with the last evening light,
cicadas casting their long call over the water.

We both dove and you didn’t come up
for a while. Then, you broke out, fist first,
and shouted for me to come look.
I sheared the dim surface with dark strokes
and found you gripping a watersnake
that curled and whipped your wrist.

You were delighted, and I tried to imagine
the impulse, impossible for me, that made you
grab the slither against your ribs
underwater. And the jolt you rose with,
the triumph of your quick hands,
and the body with which you felt the world.

Read More

Real Things

.Reading time 43 minutes.

By Nicole Hebdon

Lorna tells her fiancé that we met in the cemetery. “Chloe was writing a paper on the War of 1812 graves,” she says. “And I was taking photos for my photography class. It’s a haunted site. Paranormal investigators have looked into it and everything.” This is partially true.

The Riverside Cemetery is known for disappearing children and hovering orbs, but I wasn’t writing a paper. I was writing an article for the supernatural edition of the school magazine.

And we didn’t meet there.

Lorna’s fiancé, Caleb, tells us how he and Lorna met, and she folds her hands in her lap, like a child at Sunday school. Whenever one of Lorna’s roommates stands to get a wine cooler, or giggles purposelessly, he starts his sentence over, so I’ve heard his story approximately three-and-a-half times when he finally lets someone else talk.

They met in high school. They met in high school. They met in high school. They met . . . Lorna and I met at an abandoned mini-golf course. The castle’s peak looked like a crumbling monument, and I was sure it would lead me to another gravesite for my article, but past the thick cattails, there were toppled bridges, a sputtering stream that emptied into a square-shaped pond and Lorna wearing a university T-shirt.

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The Petrified Man

.Reading time 3 minutes.


By Pamela Davis

Featured Art: by William Trost Richards

It’s dead August, a go nowhere night, and I take
Mom’s Chevy Monza, pick up a girlfriend,
head down to the Nu-Pike amusement park
at the shore. We’re sixteen and sunburnt,
peasant blouses, short-shorts, ready.

Dad taught me to swim in the park’s domed pool,
ankles glitter-kicking past mosaic tile,
but only the Cyclone Racer’s left now,
a tattoo booth, dime-toss swindles, some freak shows.
Mary Lee says the senior boys hang out by the roller coaster

and heads that way. A hand holds me back by the arm,
hoarse voice coaxes
             Hey girlie, wanna see a man hard as a rock?

Shoved from behind—I stumble—almost fall
onto a body, ageless, naked, diapered like a baby
on a table. It’s airless as a crypt. His face narrow.
Is he real? The barker’s dank breath, a nudge
toward the table,
                Touch him.

I reach my finger to the dry, shinydrab thigh.
Nothing moves but a black electric clock jerking
second-to-second, hands vacuuming time
from the room. The carny demands a dollar, I pull

a crumpled one from my pocket,
back out like a low-slung cat.
The Bearded Woman leans
against a wall, cigarillo loose
on her bottom lip. She spits,
                Look, it’s the girl who touched the Petrified Man.

I’m sixteen, sunburned, picking my way
along the gritty beach, screams falling
from the shuddering coaster. The moon
stares me down, the sand swallows
my steps, and the tide rushes forward,
slick with neon.

Read More

Ode on a Midlife VW

.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Craig van Rooyen

Featured Art: by Edouard Baldus

—After Matthew Dickman

Parked next to its German cousins,
the van’s a message to the office bourgeoisie:
Hey look, not me. I’ve got a 4-cylinder pop-top
escape pod back to 1983 with a picnic table in back,
motherfuckers. I could be a tortoise, tent in shell,
ambling away from a mortgage.
The kind of tortoise that shows up in Tallahassee
after ten years of grazing on roadside dandelions.
Driving home, I keep an eye out for Gandalf
like maybe he’ll have his thumb out at the city limit sign.
If I saw him I would stop like it’s no big deal
and tell him to throw his staff in back.
I need to believe there’s still time for me
to take a bro trip in a van with a wizard.
No questing anymore. No destination.
Mount Doom’s done its thing. Sauron’s dead.
Just a sort-of-old guy and a wizard in a VW van,
sharing a bag of Cheetos and a Dos Equis six-pack.
Maybe we’d drive back East where
things are still green this time of year.
It could be a little like rewinding time,
headlights unwinding the two lanes up ahead,
“The Grey One” pointing out a barn owl
flashing through the highbeams.
Maybe after three beers and a full moon
I’d finally see the really big picture—
how we’re all just hydrogen
squashed into other stuff by stars.
It could be the KLUV-in-the-desert-
Jesus-is-your-friend-drive-until-dawn road trip.
All my life I’ve tied my ties,
polished my shoes, said my vows,
then let my people down.
But Gandalf doesn’t care. The road trip
would be all honesty and wonder:
The you’ve-made-your-bed-and-slept-in-it-for-too-long-
now-drive-away-with-it-in-a-van road trip.
Road trip of acceptance. My arches
have collapsed and occasionally I shave my ears.
Who cares? No one’s coming to rescue us
because we’re way past rescuing. I loved you.
I hurt you. I changed the tire and drove away
in a VW van. And maybe just before dawn,
the wizard would elbow me and point with a shrug
to a Waffle House like why the hell not?
Inside, the night-shift waitress would be taking off
her apron and moving to a window
to watch the sun come up.
Maybe she’d call me Love and serve me bad coffee
in a chipped mug. Maybe her name would be Grace.
And maybe she’d pull off her hairnet and take out
the bobby pins one by one, shaking her head,
letting her long hair down at last.

Read More

Interstate 5 Ode

.Reading time 2 minutes.


By Craig van Rooyen

To adopt a highway, say
between Kettleman City and Coalinga,
you don’t need to love
the shorn stockyards or the Holsteins
drowsing in the haze of their own stink. But it helps.

You don’t have to sing
to the rows of uprooted almond trees
next to the angry sign about the “Dust Bowl”
Congress has created.
You don’t even have to believe
“Jesus Saves.”

To adopt a highway, you need
only walk its shoulder, bending from time
to time for a plastic lid
skewered by its straw, a pair
of pantyhose with reinforced toes
and a crotch thicket of goat head thorns.

When you come upon
a ruptured suitcase at the center of its galaxy
of intimates sprayed across two lanes,
look both ways before stepping
onto the scarred asphalt to harvest
the cloth pieces, worn soft on a stranger’s skin.

To adopt a highway, say
between Avenal and Chowchilla,
you don’t have to listen for the inmates
on their side of the gun towers or
even remember their names, the ones
whose sins you spoke aloud to cover your own.

If you walk the shoulder long enough,
stepping over roadkill gore and
tire carcasses, your face may dry up
and Haggard may rise from the heat shimmer
to sing his creosote songs; and still
you need not let the lonely in.

But it helps. To adopt
a highway you must walk
through the fumes of a spent afternoon
looking for its leavings. And if you’re lucky
a red-tail will swoop ahead of you in the dusk,
a hawk-flame lighting post after post.

Read More

Ode to My Backyard Gopher

.Reading time 2 minutes.


By Craig van Rooyen

Featured Art: by Thomas Cole

Oh blind digger, furred borer,
miner of nothing at the end of a tunnel
to nowhere. My nocturnal brother,
I can report up top
the screech owl sounds like
he’s ripping holes in a paper sky.
Tonight’s scent salad:
honeysuckle-jasmine served under
a thin glaze of starlight. Nothing
between me and Venus
but goosebumps. What gets you
through the long hours down there?
Now and then when I go inside
to pour coffee or smash graham crackers
in warm milk, I read a few lines
of William Carlos Williams
who can get high on open scissors, or
a waste of cinders sloping down
to the railroad. I’m looking
for things to tie myself to. Maybe
the chain-link backstop that, right now,
is making diamonds of the backlit clouds,
or the trembling peppercorn tree.
Anything to stay topsoil-side
for a few more decades. Do you fear
the sky as much as I fear the press of earth?
Do you stay awake imagining
the unbearable lightness of air?
The imagination, intoxicated by prohibitions,
rises to drunken heights, says Williams,
and I walk outside again. Everywhere
new leaves, so thin the moon
shines through. My neighbors cling
to each other in their sleep.
A three-legged stray totters out from shadow
to beg with a lopsided wag. Dig
oh warm-blooded rodent.
Bore your tunnels though no one sees
their dark patterns. Come morning,
the three-legged dog will hobble
from fresh mound to fresh mound,
quivering at the scent of your passage.

Read More

Costco Ode

.Reading time 4 minutes.

By Craig van Rooyen

Featured Art: by Joachim Beuckelaer

—After Marie Howe’s “The Star Market”

And they did all eat,
and were filled: and they took
up the fragments that remained,
twelve baskets full.
—Matthew 14:20

Today, my people—the people Jesus loves—
are shopping at Costco.
Membership checked, we’ve entered
the light-drenched Kingdom of More.
We’re sampling Finger Lake
Champaign Cheddar morsels nested
in tiny paper cups. We’re watching golden
chicken carcasses ride a Ferris wheel to nowhere.
Our carts are full to overflowing
with applesauce squeezes and shrink-wrapped
Siamese twin Nutella jars. Take. Eat.
Take some more. But it’s not enough.
Here you can buy a theme park
for your master bath, on credit.
You can buy buckets of pain
killers, boxed sets of princesses, a
Rebel 4-Pack of Star Wars Bobbleheads.
The crushed-ice battlements of the seafood kiosk
frame Wild Cooked Red King Crab Legs so big
it looks as if a dragon has been dismembered
by retirees in hairnets and aprons.
Though abundance assumes satisfaction,
maybe this is a place of famine.
But why shouldn’t a miracle happen
at Costco? Up the frozen-food aisle now
comes a woman on her electric “Amigo Value Shopper”
with a cow-catcher-sized basket up front and
an orange safety flag in back.

Read More

Weanie Tender, PO

.Reading time 41 minutes.

By Jennifer Christman

Like the dry, hot winds of Santa Ana itself, the sound came in waves. Pop-pop- pop-pop-pop. Weanie Tender didn’t know from where. Weanie Tender didn’t know from what. Staccato bursts of varying lengths and speed, then brief respites. Now, however, is a different story. There’s a constant vibrato. Take any moment—take this moment—Weanie can hear it, by God. Pop-pop-pop-pop- pop. He can feel it. He need only focus his mind to detect what’s on the order of a cosmic palpitation. Pop-pop-pop-pop-pop. Weanie is a low-level PO. He wants to be a detective someday.

“Force’s under attack,” says his partner, Dom, wolfing Chick-n-Minis from his own private 20-tray, steaming up the cruiser. Bag-of-bones Weanie is crumpled in the passenger seat.

“You hear it now?” says Weanie, drawing in a sharp, short breath.

He and Dom are on break outside the Chick-fil-A on Bristol. Weanie can’t sit still lately. He jiggles his legs and wrings his hands, listening, deeply, to what he’s now thinking must be an engine running—that’s it, an engine running rough, like an outboard motor, and snappy, pop-pop-pop-pop-pop. But that would require a boat, and water. And the city, the entire county, is landlocked. And the seismic index is low. Weanie checks daily.

Read More

Naked, Fierce, Yelling Stone Age Grannies

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Lisa Bellamy

Featured Art: by Evelyn De Morgan

I shudder when I think of the giant beavers—
tiny-brained, squinting Pleistocene thugs—
they bared rotting incisors longer than a human arm,
they infested ponds and rivers, smothered
gasping sh with their acid-spiked, toxic urine,
they slapped their murderous tails—bleating,
they dragged themselves up the riverbank,
spied sweetgrass; they charged the crawling babies,
the tiny baby bones, trampling, they didn’t care—
hurray for the naked, fierce, yelling Stone Age grannies—
they dropped their hammer stones, they grabbed
sharp sticks. Who can forget their skinny, bouncing breasts?
They beat the giant beavers, they speared; they smeared
hot, thick beaver blood over each other’s faces,
their bony, serviceable buttocks—who can forget the grannies—

Read More

Our Fathers

.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Lisa Bellamy

Our fathers never spoke to us of their wars.
Each morning, they girded their loins with tool belt
and slide rule, according to their appointed trades.
In the summer, as they backed out
our driveways, we ran after them. In the winter,
they left, whistling, as we slept.
They created Japanese–style goldfish ponds,
built backyard gazebos, sang barbershop harmony
and strummed the ukulele, but they refused
to call themselves makers of beauty.
They woke us at midnight to see
the Aurora Borealis, carried us out
to the rose and white light-waves streaming,
named for the goddess of dawn who brings life,
and the god of the north wind who brings death.
Our fathers grew restless. They started to pace,
walked outside to gawk at the stars.
When we asked, Can we come, they said, No.
When we asked Why, they said, Hush.
Our fathers stopped kissing our mothers.
They came home midday: red, laid-off, warned
for swearing at the foreman, said they were sick
unto death. They slammed screen doors, bedroom doors,
storage shed doors. They started to drink. They stood up
from couches, pushed dogs that nosed them, stumbled
outside, yodeling. Said they felt bigger
than the sky. They drank in bomb shelters,
at the Legion Post, watching TV. They drank
driving us to Scouts, bottles between their knees.
They drank when we begged them not to and when
we tried to ignore them. Sometimes
they slammed us against walls, sometimes
said they were sorry. One by one, they left:
in their sedans, vans, the pick-up, walking to the bus stop.
They left in the morning as we sat, silent,
at the kitchen table, eating cereal before school.
We watched them leave with their suitcases.
They left a goodbye note for us to find
after track practice. They left at night after fights.
Some stayed, but stopped talking, or faded
fast, eyes rolled back, clutching their heart.
Others left over time, from their wasting diseases.
They said they would never forget us.
Our fathers said they loved us, and we believed them.

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Moo

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Chrys Tobey

Featured Art: by Vincent van Gogh

Woman is not yet capable of friendship: women
are still cats and birds. Or, at best, cows.
—Nietzsche

Love, I’m sorry for the time we were walking home with groceries in our
arms—you carried the chicken and potatoes and I held the chocolate. As we

laughed about something I can’t remember, our dog barked
at someone, and I just bolted, ran off. Also, love, there were all

those mornings you’d wrap your arm around me—your hand
spread across my spotted stomach. Good morning, you’d whisper

and I’d reply, Moo. I’m sorry for that. I also hope you’ll one day
forgive me for the time you were weeping, your mom had just died,

and I charged as though you were red. Love, I regret
all the evenings I’d drive home from work and open the door to smell

roasting squash and garlic. We’d sit at our tiny kitchen table, and you’d
say I love you, but then I’d regurgitate the ratatouille. I’m sorry about that, too.

Love, I apologize for my aversion to leather and how we’d snuggle on
the sofa, my nose in your neck, but then you’d cry, Ah, my back

because unfortunately, I weighed 1,000 pounds. And Love, what remorse
I have for leaving you, for wandering away to graze in another pasture.

Read More

Cockadoodledoo

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Chrys Tobey

Our parson to the old women’s faces
That are cold and folded, like plucked dead hens’ arses.
—Ted Hughes

An old woman thought her face was a dead
hen’s arse. Maybe it was all the years
of plucking and waxing. The woman had no idea
what would make her think her face
was a dead hen’s arse and not a live hen’s
arse, and why the arse and not the beak, but
she did. It couldn’t be my age, the woman thought.

It couldn’t be the men, not when everyone knows men
love older women, especially much older, especially
with all the grandma porn, all the old women sex
costumes, all the men who ogle elderly women in walkers.
She had read so many books where men longed
for older women, where old women seduced helpless
wide-eyed men. She saw billboards where old women
modeled teenage clothing, modeled Brazilian
bathing suit bottoms. And she knew the trend: folding
wrinkles into one’s face using a Dumpling Dough Press.

People would stop her and take selfies. You look
like a movie star, they’d say. They wouldn’t leave her alone.
She’d shrug. Maybe it was the way she’d sometimes cluck
when she made love to her husband? This could be the reason
he’d whisper, One day I may trade you in for an older model.
Or maybe it was all the eggs she ate. Or her penchant for feathers.
Or how her mother used to call her my little chickadee. The woman
was unsure why she thought her face was a dead fowl’s
feces-extruding cloaca. She only knew she was tired
of seeing twenty-year-old men with women who could
be their grandmothers, old women who treated the men
like so many dimpled birds.

Read More

Coach O

.Reading time 40 minutes.

By Robert Hinderliter

Featured Art: by Owen Jones

Coach Oberman watched from his office window as a group of students prepared the bonfire by the south end zone. Two kids stacked tinder while another knelt beside a papier-mâché buffalo they would throw on the fire at the end of the pep rally. Oberman couldn’t wait to watch it burn.

He’d just gotten off the phone with Mike Treadwell—coach of the Ashland Buffaloes—who’d called to wish him luck in tomorrow’s game. Mike had been Oberman’s assistant for three years before taking the job at Ashland High. And now, after back-to-back state titles in his first two years, he’d been offered the defensive coordinator position at Emporia State University. This would be the last time they’d face off.

“I’ll miss seeing you across the field,” Mike had said. “Although I sure won’t miss trying to stop that Oberman offense.”

This was pandering bullshit. In their two head-to-head contests, Mike’s Buffaloes had routed Oberman’s Hornets by at least four touchdowns.

“I just wanted to say thanks,” Mike had said. “I couldn’t have gotten this far without you.”

He’d said it like he meant it, with no hint of sarcasm, but Oberman knew there was venom behind those words. In Mike’s two years as assistant, Oberman had treated him badly. Mike had a good mind for the game, there was no denying that, but he was a scrawny wuss with thick glasses and a girlish laugh. He didn’t belong on a football field. Oberman had banished him to working with the punter and made him the butt of jokes in front of the players. When Mike’s brother-in-law became superintendent at Ashland and handed Mike the coaching job, Oberman had scoffed. And now Mike was moving on to a Division II college while he was stuck muddling through another losing season with an eight-man team in Haskerville. He knew the irony wasn’t lost on either of them.

Read More

Women in Treatment

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Theresa Burns

Featured Art by Dante Gabriel Rossetti

Why had I not noticed them
before? The women in treatment
on every block, it seems, leaving
the library, walking their dogs.
Once they hid themselves
beneath wigs, fashionable hats
in the city, or entered softly
in Birkenstocks and baseball caps,
stayed out of the way. Now they
show up, unannounced.
In offices, in waiting rooms,
in aisle seats with legs outstretched,
the women in treatment
flip the pages, reach the end,
bald, emboldened. One
outside a florist today arranges
lantana in time for evening
rush. A bright silk scarf
around her pale round head
calls attention to her Supermoon.
And one woman my own age,
in my own town, takes up a table
right in front. She nurses a chai latte
in a purple jacket, her hair
making its gentle comeback.
What she pens in a small
leather notebook: a grocery list?
Ode to her half-finished
French toast? The kind of poem
living people write.

Read More

My Babysitter Karen B Who Was Sent to Willard Asylum

.Reading time 2 minutes.

Winner, New Ohio Review Poetry Contest
selected by Kevin Prufer

By Jessica Cuello

There are only two photos of me as a child.
She took them, she had no child.

She had Kool Cigarettes and a job at the drugstore.
She gave me the Crayola box with the built-in sharpener.

Four hundred suitcases were stored in the attic
of Willard Asylum for the Chronic Insane.

She joined her twin brother there.
She wore her black hair down.

A child could admire it.
She bought me an Easter basket,

a stuffed rabbit whose fur rubbed off.
She walked everywhere.

She painted circles of blush on her cheeks.
Loony, people said so,

I mean grown-ups who saw signs
who passed her on our street before she

started to call and say Remember,
on the phone she said Remember,

Remember the date we killed her brother,
forgetting he’d been committed.

I took her hand and tagged along like an animal.
She was perfect to a child.

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Calculations

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Linda Hillringhouse

Featured Art: by Julia Margaret Cameron

We’re waiting for our copying jobs
at Staples, so she starts chatting me up,
says she’s a retired math teacher.
When I tell her I taught English,
she says that English teachers
are the worst and she always kept
her mouth shut at the book club
because they always wanted
evidence and she just wanted
to talk, have a cup of tea,
what’s the big deal?
And I’m being too nice as usual
making it clear to her I’m not
one of those book bitches.

Now I’m hearing about the math museum
in New York and I can tell she wants someone
to go with. I’m brainstorming excuses
but it’s my turn to say something so I say
how much I like zeros and that I even
tried to read a book about them.

Now she’s telling me how she used to prove
to her students that she can get 2 to equal 1
and keeps saying, Let A=B and it’s like
God’s saying it, but now she’s saying, Anything
can be anything and this is starting to sound
like patent bullshit and she’s droning on
and I’m so glazed out I can only nod and say hmmm
like I’m Bertrand Russell finally grasping the true nature
of mathematics when all she wants is some tea and company
and it’s her bad luck that it had to be me she ran into,
the Queen of Zero.

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An Education

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Molly Minturn

Featured Art: Still Life with Cake by Raphaelle Peale

It was spring and I walked
the streets in the late afternoon
with the best poet I knew.
She was tall with a severe face
like an early New Englander.
Her ancestors survived genocide.
We didn’t discuss our work, only
the weather, how the blossoms
were upsetting. The war was on.
We bought a hefty slice of cake
and walked slowly under a murder
of crows back to my apartment.
This seemed too evocative,
almost to the point of embarrassment.
The cake was coconut. We split
the slice, sitting at the small
table in my living room, away
from the sun. At the time,
it was the present. Here
in the future, I sometimes forget
to breathe, waiting
for the next catastrophe. That cake
was pure in its sweetness, the poet
alive with me, her eyes scanning
my face, both of our histories
neatly bound in our throats.
I wanted to ask if she was frightened
by living, by the change
in the light. Instead, she slid the plate
across to me, a Ouija planchette,
insisting I take the last bite.

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Here Comes Happy

.Reading time 22 minutes.

By Shauna Mackay

So, as I understand it, none of your children have died?

They die all the time, she says. Over and over.

The doctor, young as ever-dying sons, suggests a short course of medication and refers her to someone who might help her to change her thoughts.

On the way home her walk’s different: rocking, dodgy. This is how the embarrassed go. Shanks’s pony won’t trot nice: one two, onetwo, no, one, two, for God’s sake. She keeps a Bonaparte hand to pat the phone in the pocket of her shirt, there, there; can’t let it lie at the bottom of her bag, roofed over by crap and the birthday card for Lance. Her middle lad hasn’t answered the text she sent from the doctor’s reception area: he’s got an away game today, rugby, that bloody rugby; he must be injured, quadriplegic, on a ventilator, brain dead. How can she go on? She smoothes out the prescription in her hand, crosses the road to the chemist.

A text comes as she waits for the tablets to be dispensed. Her son is fine, all good, they won. She pictures him downing celebration pints, shots, being a daft sod, succumbing to fatal blood alcohol levels. She makes the pharmacist bide there for payment, stood like a plum, while she texts back. Well done son but mind you go canny x. As soon as the first text has gone she sends another to say on the coach journey home he should sit in a middle aisle seat opposite the driver’s side for she’s heard it’s the safest place in the event of a crash.

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Wex in Totus Taggle

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Owen Doyle

Featured Art by James McNeill Whistler

Words in an old notebook
prove (I was twenty-ish, then)
that mind-mud and dismally
tangled brain material
have causes other than old age
or illness. At the time,
they might have been explained
by the rum or beer in mind-
blowing excess the night before.
I don’t remember.
But surely those episodes
of binge and babble
are far outnumbered
by drier spells of helplessness:
me, frozen
over the neat rectangular form
of a blank page, compelled
to write totus to avoid
writing nothing.
It’s reason enough for terror
or self-pity, the thought
that those very things—the booze-
blasts and blackouts—were then
and are now the efficient
cause of wex and taggle:
furrows of gray matter, tilled
for art and wisdom, laid
waste, and the flood of those young
insults cascading still. But no,
I’ve heard that it’s very common:
this empty gaze, the pen loose
between a finger and a thumb,
its tip hovering
over absolutely nothing. And so,
as tragic as it all may be, finally,
I won’t let it bother me too
too much. Why taggle over wex
totus? I’ll pour myself a glass
of wine and see
what comes spilling out.

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At the Wives’ Coffee

.Reading time 9 minutes.

By Abby E. Murray

Featured Art: A Rose by Thomas Anshutz

You should know
             there is no coffee
                                at the Wives’ Coffee

There’s prosciutto
               and cream puffs
                               and conversation starters
                                               printed on glossy paper

And here’s a tip
               from the commander’s wife:

Wives who forget
               to wear the crest pin
                              will be fined a dollar
                                          because these pins
                                                             aren’t free ladies

and immediately
                I’m a stump
                      rolled into the river
                                               before a flood
                                                               I am uncooperative

a hollow log sheltering rebel fish
               a disruption of roots

But the conversation starters
                are required and my question is

What discussion topic bores you to sleep every time?

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Language Immersion

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Jeff Walker

Featured Art: by Martin Johnson Heade

Nobody, speaking of fluency, would remember
that party where I told the young woman
seated on the floor: this food tastes good. Nothing untoward.
She surprised me by crawling on all fours, her blouse fairly open
at the top by way of happy gravity, to gently
take the food from my hand with her teeth; alarmed me
because I was not young and
what could she be thinking by doing that?

Around us on sofas and out under the trees hummed
the language I would not understand after years of trying
and also of trying to understand why I couldn’t,
an easy-to-employ tongue with few options and simple
structure but when they speak to each other it’s unintelligible,
a giggle-babble, a bubbly stream of what I guess are words,
vain emptying of thought from one head to another,
like all language, really.

Why not give it up and run silent miles
through the mud and rice paddies with my jogging buddies,
or ride miles on a motorbike alongside a mute, jiggling citizenry,
my face contained and content behind its polycarbonate shield,
my mouth behind its filter mask, and who on the back
not speaking, only chewing?

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Return

.Reading time 35 minutes.

Winner, New Ohio Review Fiction Contest
selected by Mary Gaitskill

By Analía Villagra

He was gone for eleven years, and Jackie is still getting used to the idea that Victor is out. Exonerated. His release had warranted a few sentences on the local NPR station, so Jackie knows that he has been at his mother’s place, three blocks away, for a week. She has not yet run into him on the street. Each time she leaves her apartment she scans the sidewalks, and when he does not materialize she feels equal parts relief and disappointment. Thursday afternoon she goes out of her way to walk past his building, willing him to be on the front steps or looking out the window. She slows down. Would he even recognize her now? Her hair is short, with a few stray glints of gray, no longer halfway to her waist and shimmering black. Her eyes have shadows beneath them. Her hips have spread. She’s thirty years old, in good shape she thinks, unless you’ve spent a decade fantasizing about a nineteen-year-old body. Jackie blushes. This is the first time she’s admitted to herself that she wondered—hoped? assumed?—that Victor thought about her while he was away. Eleven years. Maybe he’ll recognize her, maybe he won’t. She can’t decide which is worse, so she stares down at the sidewalk and hurries past the building.

She goes to the Y to pick her daughter up from camp. Graciela is running around the outdoor play area with a group of other kids, their hair wild, their clothes and faces filthy.

“Mama!” Grace shrieks when she sees her.

Jackie waves. She locates the teenagers wearing staff T-shirts, and they hand her the sign-out sheet without pausing their conversation. Jackie half-listens to the latest counselor drama while Grace gathers her things.

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The Blackbird Whistling

.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Linda Bamber

Featured Art: by John Frederick Kensett

I do not know which to prefer,
         The beauty of inflections
  Or the beauty of innuendoes,
           The blackbird whistling
                             Or just after.
                    —Wallace Stevens

1. The Beauty of Innuendoes

Meaning in poems comes and goes
like a car speeding down a tree-lined road
sun-shade-sun-shade-sun-shade . . .

Poems’ secret places:
fleeting, hidden, close.

Closer yet I approach you, Whitman warmly says;
and then,
We understand, then, do we not?—never saying
what it is
we understand. As I understand a poem
by my friend
                         but mustn’t tell him
what about the poem makes me feel so
             not alone.

       

2. The Beauty of Inflections

             Yesterday I called my friend.
He was in a peaceful mood
(which he would be the first to say is kind of rare).
As if bubbles of CO2 some clams or scallops had exhaled
were calmly rising

in a steady/wavering
                                         surface-seeking

kind of way

up through his contentment
effortlessly rose some words of praise for me. Plain

and unadorned; clear; direct.
                                        The blackbird whistling,

you might say.
                                          In fact,

if my friends didn’t tell me plainly that they

love me
              sometimes,
I wouldn’t understand a single thing
I try to read at all.

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Trees in March

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Linda Bamber

We were seated near the back of the Chinese restaurant, and waiters were
rushing in and out of the swinging doors to the kitchen. At the time we had
not as yet so much as brushed shoulders. Resting on the formica table top, my
hand began to feel odd. Not bad-odd; but most unusual. Trees in early March,
aroused, their branches slightly reddened by the slightly stronger sun, may feel
something similar. They have a new sense of their importance in the scheme of
things; they remember (if I may say so) they are divine. He was looking at my
face, not my hand, so I don’t know how my hand, resting near the remains of
the General Gau’s chicken, intuited its sudden access of significance; but it did.
It had aura you could cut with a knife.

Shortly thereafter he took my hand.

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Mango Languages

.Reading time 4 minutes.

By Linda Bamber

Featured Art: by Winslow Homer

—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.

         ¡Tu hermano se parece más a tu abuelito que a ti!
         (Your brother looks more like your grandpa than you!)

People there are not tortured by thoughts of what they should have done to
prevent this; they do not endlessly analyze the causes of the disaster; or notice
how many of their friends are independently coming up with the metaphor of
a tsunami wiping away what is precious from the past and has been defended
by their devoted work.

       No llame a la policía. No es una emergencia.
        (Do not call the police. It’s not an emergency.)

In that world they do not sit glumly when friends excitedly tell of recent
protest marches; they are not thinking, “Great, feel inspired; meanwhile,
they’ve got all three branches of government.”

         ¡Me encantaría que me dejaras accompañarte a la esta de Pablo!
         (I would love it if you would let me accompany you to Pablo’s party!)

People there are not suddenly crossing the border into Canada in the snow
with children in their arms; or trooping out of Jewish Community Centers on
a Tuesday because of death threats; or writing emergency numbers on their
children’s forearms in indelible ink in case Mamacita doesn’t come home from
work that day.

Every morning I cross the border into Mango Languages, my ticket to
oblivion. “Loading your adventure,” says my computer when I boot it up.
Every ten minutes a woman’s joyful voice says, “Isn’t this easy?” to encourage
me, and I admit I feel encouraged.

        Córtalos en pedacitos y échalos al agua que está hirviendo.
        (Cut them in little pieces and throw them in boiling water.)

They are speaking of nothing more precious than carrots and onions; not,
for example, the Constitution or the Bill of Rights. We are learning to use the
imperative mood, that’s all; and today we are making soup.

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Near the Campo Aponal, on My Father’s Birthday

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By David Brendan Hopes

Featured Art: A Rocky Coast by William Trost Richards

De Sandro’s café with the orange tablecloths
wades into the one stone street
without tourists, all the Venetians pushing
their big delivery carts at first of morning.
From what I understand of it,
the shouting is voluble,
happy, glad to be alive, almost never
without reference to anatomy.

Nine years after your death it is still your birthday.
I’m treating you to cappuccino and showing off
my lacework of Italian.
Ecco, I cry, pointing to the beautiful faces,
the beautiful things.

Everything was outlandish to you. Nothing is to me.
In that way balance is achieved across the long years.

But I think you would like these people.
They would pull out the orange chairs, sit down,
listen to what you have to say. You would be old
and wise in a city old and wise, and that would be
enough.

I’d better think of something else before the mood
turns heavy and hard to carry over the Rialto Bridge
with the shops just opening.
All those selfie-taking children,
all that brightness bearing down.

Happy birthday, I want to say,
from the last place on earth, where the earth dissolves
and the crazy towers lean out over
watching for what comes—sinuous, flowing,
unexpected—next.

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Of Seeing, the Unseen, and the Unseeable: Technology, Poetry, and “When It Rains in Gaza”

.Reading time 26 minutes.

by: Philip Metres

1. I Tap My Cell to See

In the beginning, I did not see but heard: news over the radio about the bombing of Gaza in 2014, triggered by a whole series of events—we say “triggered,” as if history itself were a weapon ready to be fired. Voices untranslated, the tone of panic rising, sometimes breaking into anguished cries, the wail of air raid sirens, and the smooth voiceover of journalists, trying to tuck the adrenaline beneath the language, trying to strike a tone that seems fair and balanced.

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On Language, Bombs, and Other Things That Exist

.Reading time 18 minutes.

by: Kimberly Grey

As poets, we often assemble language to disassemble meaning—or we disassemble language to assemble meaning—and this is all an effort to translate the ordinary (a pair of socks, the name of that place, subway car, chair versus shadow, the front of a sparrow, something afloat like a naked rock) into an extraordinary textual or speech act. The result, we hope, is something new and transformative.

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The Technology of the American Sonnet

.Reading time 20 minutes.

by: Brian Brodeur

If a poem, as William Carlos Williams claimed, is a machine made out of words, the sonnet can be viewed as a particularly compressed, dynamic, and efficient little gizmo, one that poets have been tinkering with since the 12th century. These tinkerers, of course, have included some of the most foundational poets of Western literature—from Dante and Petrarch through Hopkins and Frost—all of whom have used one variation or another to perform what Phillis Levin classifies as “a mode of introspection, a crystallization of the process of thought.”

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The Transitional Voice: Exploring Susan Blackwell Ramsey’s “Ode to Texting”

.Reading time 10 minutes.

by: Claire Bateman

There are currently three kinds of human in the world: the non-digital; digital natives; and adapters who have learned to communicate digitally but still remember an analog society though they cannot fully access that prior consciousness, just as no adult can fully access their sense of self prior to their awareness of death and sex. Susan Blackwell Ramsey’s “Ode to Texting” speaks in the voice of the third kind of human, a member of this historically unique transitional species, embodying a before-and-after in our culture in which babies swipe insouciantly on screens almost before they can sit up on their own. Interestingly, rather than relegating texting to the status of object, Ramsey personifies it as a shapeshifting subject she addresses in order to explore the range and complexity of an adapter’s experience. Consider how she opens the poem:

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Machines, Mortality, and the Lyric Poem

.Reading time 15 minutes.

by: Bethany Schultz Hurst

After my mother died, I kept reaching for my phone. I’d talked to her almost daily during the last years of her illness, when she’d been mostly housebound, watching Hallmark movies and BBC mysteries alongside my patient father and an ever-present small plate of toast she couldn’t bring herself to eat. Because I couldn’t reach her now, I found myself instead playing the matching game I’d downloaded in case I needed to occupy my young son on the flight back to Denver for the funeral. For brief periods, the game let me put my grief in the background and focus on the simple task of matching little clusters of fruit or flowers to earn points toward restoring a cartoon estate garden that had fallen into disrepair. The game offered order and arrangement, a small sense of accomplishment when other tasks (or even former pleasures, like reading) seemed to demand too much concentration.

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Yeats and Heaney: The Poetry Without the Pity

.Reading time 22 minutes.

by: C.L. Dallat

When W.B. Yeats dismissed Wilfred Owen’s World War I poetry as “all blood, dirt & sucked sugar stick” (and omitted Owen, Sassoon, and Rosenberg from his 1936 anthology), he was making a powerful statement, not just about distaste for sentimental language and the role of pity in poetry, but about the poet’s duties and limits. He had already excluded writing war poetry from his own list of obligations in 1915’s “On Being Asked for a War Poem,” but only later became more coherent on the abjuration of pity as an unfit subject.

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I Second That Emotion

.Reading time 18 minutes.

by: Rebecca McClanahan

A few years ago, I attended a literary gathering and heard four poets and memoirists read from their work. They were all accomplished writers, varied enough in their approaches to evoke laughter, sighs, nods of acknowledgment, a collective gasp at one point, and, toward the end of the evening, some tears as well. Tears are not uncommon at readings, of course—I have cried at several—but in this case the tears came not from audience members but rather from one of the readers, who had warned us that she might “choke up” because of the emotional content of the autobiographical piece she was about to read. Her introduction, followed by a tearful presentation, suggested either that the work was too new to share publicly or that she had planned her reaction and was intentionally manipulating us. As she spoke, I sensed listeners growing more and more uncomfortable, as I was. Some leaned back into their chairs, some crossed their arms. The more emotional the reader’s performance became, the less effect it seemed to have, an unfortunate outcome, especially given that the work was potentially moving in and of itself. But it was as if the writer did not trust the work, or perhaps did not trust us to do our job as listeners: to bring our own emotional response to the work.

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Staying with Argos: Odysseus and His Dog

.Reading time 17 minutes.

by: AJ Aronstein

Argos, the loyal dog of long-suffering, well-tanned, always-oiled Odysseus, appears only once in The Odyssey. At the sight of Odysseus, who returns to the island kingdom Ithaca after 20 years, Argos dies. Bam! Kaput. Struck down by a Zeusian thunderbolt. At this point in Book 17, no one other than the reader knows the true identity of the disguised and smelly Odysseus, who dresses like a beggar. Escorted by his loyal swineherd Eumaeus, Odysseus pauses to observe Argos from the distance of a few steps. But he can’t even pet the pup before steering back toward his wife’s suitors, whom he’ll slaughter in due course. Argos dies almost immediately after Odysseus turns away. Though the encounter takes fewer than one hundred lines, its brevity should not trick us into thinking about Argos’s death as a merely sad aside. A closer reading reveals how Homer manipulates his audience before the final act, using Argos to orient our empathy toward Odysseus. Moreover, if we stay with Argos a little longer, he reveals something essential about fiction’s capacity to wrap epic emotions into even the tiniest moments.

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New Ohio Review Issue 23. Originally printed Spring 2018.

.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 23 compiled by Darby Ricks

Midnight at the Anaconda Wire and Cable Company

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Sandy Gingras

Featured Art: Position Interplay: Midnight by Samia Halaby

The building is boarded up, but we know how to get in.
It’s the end of summer and we’re seventeen. We don’t have a car
and there’s nowhere to go in this town except down

the huge hills gliding our bikes past the A&P,
the Ben Sun store where my mother buys my gym uniform, past
the funeral home and the corner bar where Eddie’s father sits

in the same chair every afternoon. The air is humid,
and the stars look stalled out in the sky. Maybe they’re waiting
for us to try something or to grow up already like my mother tells

me to do. A train goes past and faces stare out of the fluorescent lights.
My flip-flops ring on the metal stairs. Eddie puts his shoulder on
a board, and we’re through. It’s just the way it always is—

the way they left it. Eddie sweeps his flashlight across
the cables and cogs and steel beams, the stacks of papers
next to the stapler. This place is leaking

PCPs into the Hudson River, my mother says, but we don’t know
what PCPs are. All I know is, this is where my father worked
before he left my mother. Eddie and I grew up two brick houses

away from each other. Tonight we’re here to take one last look at
the muscley machines. I’m leaving for school tomorrow.
See, some things last, Eddie says to me. I don’t tell him different.

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Los Angeles, 1990

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Jerry Williams

Featured Art: Motorcycle Race (Motorradrennen) by Oskar Nerlinger

I can recall riding a Kawasaki 750
down Sunset Boulevard
on a Saturday afternoon in light traffic.
Cruising along at thirty mph in fourth gear,
I let go of the handlebars,
braced myself on the fuel tank,
and slowly rose to my feet.
Helmetless, I stood like a surfer in the wind
on the imitation leather seat,
my longish hair blown back,
sunshine bursting through my goggles.
A thin membrane of fear lined
the inside of an urn made of pure joy.
After about an eighth of a mile,
I returned to the legal sitting position
and only then did I notice my runaway pulse.
When you’re twenty-three years old
the saddle of a thousand-pound motorcycle
feels as firm as the ground you walk on.
You get full access to your inner maniac.
Nowadays, doctors and sounder reasoning
have rescued me from worldly vices
and a rapid heartbeat often provokes alarm.
But I miss the brash torque of myself,
the quality of light in that urban desert,
all the midnights and years out in front of me
like the beautiful stupid jewels of infinity.

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May My Enemy Be Overcome By His Own Glitter

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Laura Paul Watson

Featured Art: Glittering the Being by Roberto Matta

May he wake to an empty house.
May every pleasure
be interrupted. May every wheel squeak.
When he reaches the front of the line
may he return to the end of it
and may everyone before him
pay by personal check.
May he receive a thousand e-mails a day,
none of them personal, every one of them personal. 
May he go nowhere in metaphor
but travel everywhere by bus.
May every road be under construction.
May he lose the last page of every book.
May he find no pillow in the field.
May he find no field.
When faced with stone, may he see only stone.
Because he is narrow, may he hold
no one but himself.
There is power in forgiveness.
There is power in withholding it.
May he have the life he wished for me.
May every way be the dark way home.

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Google Map

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Connie Zumpf

Featured Art: The House on the Edge of the Village by Théophile-Alexandre Steinlen

Today I Googlemapped your address
hoping to catch a glimpse of you.
You weren’t in the picture,

but must have been home because
your truck sat in the driveway.
It all looked calm and still—I was glad

to see the grass had been mowed
and the weeds kept at bay. I rotated
the street view to the little park

just north of your house, the one
where we walked through withered leaves
last November. You weren’t there either.

Of course I know that’s not how it works;
the satellite photo was snapped a few
years ago, a scene from your life that may

no longer be true, a moment
just now opened for me, but long ago
over for you. It’s like staring up

at the Orion Nebula at night,
its light carrying sparks of cosmic news
from 1500 years ago. Here on Earth,

the Roman Empire was crumbling
and Arthur reigned as Britain’s king,
if he ever existed at all. We only know

outer space as it was, just as I can only
measure distance and time
from the us I knew

to who we’ve become. And now
I sit in front of my window
like a God-eye peering in

on your life, hoping
to catch you from a satellite view
at some yesterday-moment

when you were nowhere in sight.

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Strangers I Think I Know

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Connie Zumpf

Featured Art: The Siesta by Paul Gauguin

A woman steps off a bus or a train,
and something about her—
the way she holds her shoulders,
that straight-on walk—
swings my head around.

I am here, not over there. But maybe
there’s an occasional breach
where the skin of time thins,
and I glimpse unlived versions
of myself on a crowded street,
or through bookshelves in a library.

Where do lives go
when they peel off in parallel?

I could be the ghost of a small girl
who drowned, now hovering
like an imp over her mother’s life.

Or a woman married, now forty years,
a circle of pale skin under her ring,
eyes dimmed from years
of looking away—

some might-have-been me is a doctor
who teaches psychology and practices
Tai Chi alone on the beach.

Or is this an alternate life I’m in—
my real self’s hologram,
crept in under the tent flap while

embodied me pulls tankards of ale
in a pub in Dublin, relieved
she left Denver and loving her life
as an expat part-time bartender?

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Roland Raccoon

.Reading time 53 minutes.

By Karin Lin-Greenberg

Featured Art: Girl by Egon Schiele

Ms. Gardner had not been in support of the plan to drag Roland Raccoon to every middle school science class, but the principal said they’d paid Margery Martin a flat fee for the school visit, and it would be a waste if every student at Grisham Middle School did not have the opportunity to visit with Roland. Ms. Gardner was certain the eighth graders in her sixth period class were too old to learn life lessons about kindness and compassion and giving everyone and everything a chance from a twelve-year-old blind raccoon that was also deaf in one ear. “But he loves to be sung to,” Margery Martin had informed the class, adding, “in his good ear.” She cradled Roland in her lap as if he were a baby.

Margery leaned down, put her lips unsavorily close to Roland’s ear, and sang something that might have been Frank Sinatra. The boys who were sitting against a bookshelf near the rear of the classroom, as far away from Margery as they were allowed, snickered, and Ms. Gardner heard the word “rabies” whispered several times. Margery was in her seventies, wore a baggy sweatshirt with a large cartoon raccoon’s face on it, pink elastic-waist pants, and thick-soled orthopedic shoes. Perhaps the fifth graders might find something charming in her, might think she was similar in some way to their beloved grandmothers, but the eighth graders were surely too jaded to believe that spending an hour sitting cross-legged on the floor surrounding a woman crooning to a raccoon splayed on her lap was a good use of their time. There were twenty-four of them in a semi-circle on the floor. Well, twenty-three of them cross-legged on the ground and then Julia Fredericks in a wheelchair. During the summer, she’d been in a boating accident when she’d gone to visit her cousins on Long Island, and her legs had been crushed. Doctors were unsure if she would walk again. Some of the girls in the class treated Julia as if she were their wounded pet, making sure to follow her everywhere, offering to help her at all times, even when it was clear that she did not need help. These girls were well-intentioned, even though they were mostly unhelpful and in Julia’s way. Julia had been remarkably patient with the girls fussing over her, and Ms. Gardner had thought of nominating Julia for Eighth Grade Student of the Year for this patience and for her resilience in the face of adversity, but she was afraid others would believe Julia’s nomination (and likely win) to be the result of teachers feeling sorry for her.

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Not the Wolf but the Dog

.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Jacqueline Berger

Featured Art: Two Human Beings. The Lovely Ones by Edvard Munch

Not the zebra but the horse;
not buffalo but cows,
maybe camels,
who traded the wild for the stable,
a stall lined in straw,
the house with wee gables and eaves,
their name over the door—
Biscuit, Coco. Snowball, Ranger.
Traded the hunt for the daily bowl and dish,
predators for owners, collar and leash;
agreed to be a tool—plow or cart
or confidant—to breed in captivity.

So when the man in the elevator
at the Venetian holding his cardboard
tray of coffees and muffins
heading back to his room
says to no one in particular,
but most likely to the other man,
the three of us strangers,
I better get something in return for this, 
he means fetching breakfast
so his wife can sleep,
I better get something for all of this, 
gesturing with his head,
meaning the hotel, the dinners and shows,
I think about women
who prowl the midnight streets
in their staggering heels,
breasts like missiles
because they’d rather be feral than kept.
And about men who gave up
wilding to name their offspring,
their known code continuing on forever.

I’m carrying my own tray
of coffees and muffins,
will soon press the card against the lock,
open the room, rip off my clothes,
throw back the three hundred
thread-count sheets, waking
my husband. He’s met someone new
and now wants both
of his lives at once.
He can sleep later. These untamed
weeks, we’re savaging,
flesh against flesh, ravishing
our marriage.

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Another Version of My Confession

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Lara Egger

Featured Art: Form No. 5: Affection for Shapeless Things by Onchi Koshiro

My affection is a tabloid on sale at register three.
Citing moral reservations, the produce section

prefers not to get involved. Even the usually forgiving
cauliflower thinks my choices are questionable.

Have you noticed how some days the rush-hour light
makes the world look as if it’s snorkeling?

Stalled in the desperation of the strip-mall parking lot,
I tally my indiscretions, dog-eared romances

steadily expiring like glove-compartment coupons.
What would have been saved had I not agreed to love them?

Some nights my affection petrifies the lake,
a hush of ice tempering what lies beneath, and others,

a storm invites the water to trouble freely.
The clocks will be turned forward and then back.

Darkness falling, yet another way to describe twilight,
another way, dusk. Will you still think I’m a terrible person

if I tell you I meet emptiness everywhere and my heart
slips easily into its pockets? Up and down the supermarket aisles,

past cold-shouldered Kleenex and tight-lipped Lean Cuisines,
past the chorus of deli cuts chanting its condemnation: my affection

is a tabloid on sale at register three. When the night manager closes up
he pulls last week’s scandal from the rack—old stock

but his wife likes to read them. I write Catastrophe’s name
in steam on the shower door. I offer to give him a ride home.

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Day Residue in Winter

.Reading time 6 minutes.

By Wes Civilz

Featured Art: Murol in the Snow by Victor Charreton

« For three days, no coffee;
               there were headaches »

« On the fourth day, I have coffee again »
« My frozen intelligence melts open,
               sizzling with otherworldly light,
               but two hours later a slight sadness
               and a fading of the perfect coffee feeling »
« Then comes a desire for beer »
« Then a quick feeling that now
               is a moment I could be bored,
               if I was a person who got bored,
               but I am not »
« It is, however, too early in the day for beer
               so I do the dishes, and observe that soap bubbles
               are sly jokes told by the goddess of spheres »

« I drive to the dump, aka, the transfer station,
               where I will transfer the waste of my life
               into a cavernous compactor »
« (Other, more privileged things get to be recycled) »
« I behold the shapes of packaging
               that held the things that I used—
               that I used up »
« They are not lacking in beauty if looked at correctly:
               plastic casing with two bulb shapes for headphones;
               wax paper in the shape of a soap bar;
               browning skin of a banana »
« Someone else will worry about them now »

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Of a Burrito de Buche

.Reading time 31 minutes.

By Patrick Mainelli

Featured Art: Committed to Tradition (Uberlieferung verpflichtet) by Monika Baer

I’m not drinking anymore. It’s not a court-ordered thing or medical imperative. I didn’t crash a car or assault a neighbor or luridly graze my cousin’s leg at the reception of her wedding. No one has ever even told me to “take it easy there” as I poured three, four, five fingers of scotch over ice. As a drunk, I’m purely congenial. Maybe I’ve tipped over a plate of food here and there, fallen asleep on the toilet once or twice, sung in competing volume with the Midnight Mass choir, but who hasn’t? After a nightful of drinks I am more inclined to turn embarrassingly casual with my affections than to become anything close to mean or combative.

So this is a self-imposed drought. Denial might be the word.

The shit thing is it’s July. Beer’s favorite month. Because after mowing a lawn or trimming a tree there is no reward like the reward of beer, and because to swim in the lake, to rest tired and near-naked on the shore, and to not drink a beer feels an affront to God’s finer generosities—July demands a beer.

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Dragonflies

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Danusha Laméris

Featured Art: Blue-tipped Dragonfly illustration from The Naturalist’s Miscellany by George Shaw

I wish you could see them: two thin blue needles
hovering above a bed of loosestrife and clover,
slivers of electricity, humming, almost invisible—
a glimmer of azure against the hillside. How
do their bodies hold the requisite organs?
Never mind the pull that makes them want
to wend their forms together this way. A tangle
of wires working themselves into union
this Sunday afternoon. Which, come to think of it,
is something I’d like to do with you, the portion
of desire I carry that much greater—as are the consequences
of crossing over into that lush country of dry grass
and end-of-summer weeds, where, if we weren’t
otherwise attached, we could make the most
of our own fleshly burden, lay it down
on the soft earth, its fine dust and buried flint,
the scattered flecks of fool’s gold.
Don’t you want to? Doesn’t it seem unfair
to be outdone by these mere fragments?
Almost more air than matter? But timing,
after all, is everything. And it looks like
I’ll have to appease myself with this tableau:
these two writhing out their little ecstasy
in broad daylight, coming together and then apart
and then together again, as if they had all day.
Which, given the brevity of their lives,
is quite a decadent expanse. Let’s try
and be happy for them, living into their late hours
with such abandon, while we are still
relatively young, the gift of want
stretched out before us, limitless and absolute.

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The Problem

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Grant Clauser

Featured Art: Sketch for Beach Scene by Joaquín Sorolla y Bastida

The town decided
that blowing up the body
was the best way to move it,
but the only explosives expert
was a groundskeeper
who’d planted mines in the war.
Still, people set up beach chairs
and umbrellas on the dune
to watch. When it blew,
slabs the size of picnic tables
crushed cars a quarter mile away.
One man was killed by a bone shard
through the heart.
Another still walks with a limp
from the impact of blubber.

For days the town pretended
this had all been the plan, everything
was good, but then under cover
of night, we rented front loaders
from the neighboring towns,
buried what we could and burned
the rest in smoky mounds
that choked us when the wind
blew in from the ocean.
The beach was unusable all summer.

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Here’s the Plan

.Reading time 4 minutes.

By Patrick Meeds

Featured Art: Jacques and Berthe Lipchitz by Amedeo Modigliani

                                                                  —For Amy Dickinson

                                     You be a rubber bullet, and I’ll be fireworks
on TV. You dismantle your prejudices, and I’ll acquaint myself
with all the latest fads. You drag the river, I’ll manage expectations.
You shake your head and say yes, I’ll nod my head and say no.
I’ll call you Texas, and you can call me Nancy.

                                                                 Practical and precise, we
will compile a list of things we will need. Warm clothes
and synchronized watches. Miniature technology and hand-drawn
maps. Invisible ink and antique stationery. The music of Django
Reinhardt and a list of all the patron saints.

                                                                                    Things we will avoid?
Strict adherence to dogma and barbed-wire fences. Left-handed
compliments and uncomfortable shoes. Complex algorithms
and attempts at perpetual motion. Sing-alongs and potluck suppers.

                                                                   We will travel by train under
assumed identities and ride facing backwards. We will explain
ourselves to no one. Let’s be clear about one thing, reinvention
is the key. Look, there’s an abandoned car with a tree growing
through it. There’s an old bathtub with flowers planted in it.
There’s a fence made of old bicycle frames. There’s a car with an
antenna fashioned from an old coat hanger. These things were
one thing, now they are another.

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Wings of Wind

.Reading time 22 minutes.

By Eliot Fintushel

Featured Art: West Wind by Duncan Grant

“He goes on wings of wind,” is what a psalm says, one of the psalms. Another one says, “Happy is he who shall grab your babies and hurl them against a rock.” When I try to explain these scriptures to Miriam and Cassie, they look at me like I’m stupid. Do you call that a friend? In the Jesus times, friends even kissed each other on the lips for hello—Miriam would be caught dead first. Cassie, okay, actually, even on the lips, which I am going to tell you about it, except for the fact that she is damned to Hell.

Like, I’m the one who is stupid! This is what the Bible says about sinners like Miriam and Cassie: “They have their reward.” Namely, shit.

Miriam wears this, like, Nazi dirndl, which she thinks is cool, with her curly once-upon-a-time blonde hair and with sunglasses with red rims, and she looks like melted cheese with a worm in it, but she walks like she thinks she is a beauty queen, you know, with, like, her one heel right in front of, like, the toe of her other foot, in a straight line, supposedly, except that it’s crooked!

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Creed for Atheists

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Matthew Buckley Smith

Featured Art: Bright Nothing by Sam Francis

     Let us not speak of God
As if He were the nightmare of a naughty child,
     Or a white lie for a widow,
Or a conscript’s consolation on the battlefield.
     Let us instead be awed
By the nothingness we’ve chosen not to be awed by,
     The shade whose earthly shadow
We’re standing in, the lie cast by a happy lie.
     The face we turn away,
Let us turn it toward the others, let us find them out,
     The ones who know the way
A sure thing looks when rounded with a little doubt,
     The same ones every day
Who, kneeling all together in a common room,
     Pray for their pets and pray
As well for us, their company in a common doom.
     Let’s take no satisfaction,
But concentrate on what we say when we say no:
     That dead we are the same,
That time falls fast across the fading light like snow,
     That man is an anxious motion
Of matter upon matter, liquor upon tongue,
     The neurotransmitter’s flame
Upon the dendrite’s kindling—bright, and not for long.

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The Spiritual Exercises

.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Lisa Ampleman

Everyone on television is apologizing.
      I’m sorry I kissed your sister. I’m sorry
I sold the dog. We watch, each with our own

TV screen we walk or run toward. The treadmills’
      wheels whine louder and louder.
In the strength training area, a man grunts

and drops a heavy weight. I wish I hadn’t eaten
      so many foods with high fructose corn syrup.
I’m sorry I got you addicted to sugar.

On one wall-mounted TV, two men in an octagon
      with netted sides try to kick each other
in the face. When one pins the other,

he moves gradually, pulling the loser’s arm
      further up, maximum pain. The other
struggles to buck him off. It makes me feel sick.

There are two minutes left in the round.
      I’m sorry I voted against you. I didn’t come here
to make friends. A few men shout

as they play hoops on a half court,
      but the rest of us are silent and alone
in our movement. We must contort our bodies

to give them fitness, here in the kingdom
      of calisthenics, our feet dully hitting
the treads. I’m useless; I can’t get rid of

this stack of Sears Catalogs
      or this broken walking cane. I’m sorry
that the house is full of trash.

“Exercises,” too, Ignatius called
      the spiritual retreats that “have
as their purpose the conquest of self.”

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The Jesus Bus

.Reading time 4 minutes.

By Melissa Studdard

Featured Art: Children’s Games by Édouard Jean Vuillard

came early, sputtering and spilling
Kumbaya from the windows,
the little punks inside eating a breakfast
of Pop Rocks and candy cigarettes left over from Halloween
and hiding the wrappers in the creases
between seatback and seat. I never sang
but floated instead in my own world of thought.
All you had to do was look at an issue
of National Geographic to know everything
was extraordinary and people’s bones were full of stars.
Cecil, the driver, got his neighbors
to help paint the Jesus bus into a roll of Lifesavers candies—
all bright and vertically striped—green, yellow, red, and orange, 
Lifesaver in perfect white script across a strip of blue. Cecil,
tenderhearted conveyor of children to the terrible glory of New
Light Baptist Church, Cecil, who after nearly hitting a squirrel,
had to pull to the side of the highway to pray. Who could blame him
for not understanding that the grace he sought was already on his bus,
packed into forty-two little sugar-smacking bodies?
And hadn’t I once killed a frog by trying to save it?
Spilled it hard on the sidewalk like the spoils of an egg?
If the sky had ruptured above me, I would have cleaned up the clouds
and apologized for the mess. But the rebel gods kept
hanging around me like Woodstock hippies, so I dared some revival
to happen with the Christ frog. I was six and still
decades away from translating the voices tiptoeing through my mind.
Everywhere I went, I looked for spiderwebs with secret messages.
Maybe there was a pig to save. And when the bus backfired,
I thought I saw an afterlife emerge. Weeks later,
when I awoke screaming the fourth night in a row, I wanted
my parents to tell me it was possible for us to be alive
without hurting each other. I wasn’t dreaming of squirrels
or frogs. Just the Sunday School lesson on wartime and atheism:
how the good of us, when commanded by soldiers,
refused to stomp on a picture of Jesus
and so had their heads chopped off,
how I too should be willing at all costs
to keep my feet clean of my lord.
I was a good girl and learned my lessons well.
From others’ non-Christian necks would grow something
as secular and boring
as heads. But from my neck, an endless field,
and in that field,
congregations upon congregations of daisies—
all of them wearing the sad face of night.

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Fez Postcard / Call to Prayer

.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Jacqueline Osherow

Featured Art: North Avenue Market by Aaron Bohrod

A jeweler holds a magnet to his silver
to prove its purity (there’s no pull)

A seller wraps a package for a buyer
who’s never quite assented to the sale

A flash and then another as a weaver
shuttles spun agave silk through wool

and then a blast of sound / a change of air
at once the market’s hustle-bustle trivial

Allahu akbar, Allahu akbar
even if business does go on as usual.

The world seems to refine itself, each color
more acute, each syllable, each smell:

the sharp scent of cedar where a carpenter
planes and sands an ornate floral grille

cumin laced with cardamom and coriander
(the spice seller’s stall) rose petal, fennel

or orange blossom just pressed to attar
escaping from a shapely crystal vial

Allahu akbar, Allahu akbar
every vista turns devotional:

the gorgeous rows of vats for dyeing leather
(for yellow, saffron, for red, poppy flower,

spearmint mixed with indigo for teal)
are bright-robed worshippers who’ve joined to kneel

in unison and chant Allahu akbar
God is great and powerful

as stragglers head to fountains to splash water
on hands and feet and face and then unroll

the mats they keep with them, each a small
but resolutely holy house of prayer.

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Blessed Is He

.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Jeff Tigchelaar

Featured Art: Christ Blessing by Martin Schongauer

How am I?
Blessed. Blessed. I am
just blessed. God is good. Not afraid
to brag on God. Brag all day
on Big Man. My fiancée
just graduated. Junior college right across the street.
Four point O. See? God. He’s good. I’m looking
for work. The other day who do
I happen to meet
but the owner of Huntington Steel.
If that’s not God right there.
You can’t tell me that’s not a God Thing.
He’s workin’ it. Every day. Everywhere. I’m going
to Israel, by the way. Jerusalem. Judah. Judah, you know,
was Jacob’s fourth son. Now
Moses, though—God didn’t let just anybody
bury Moses. Dude was holy. An angel
had to put old Moses in the ground. Archangel Michael.
Jude 9. Look it up. Good Book.
Moses was so holy. Up there
two weeks with God on that mountain.
Gettin’ those Commandments. No Moses, no tablets.
Moses got blessed like nobody’s business.
Love me some Ten Commandments, though.
Love me some Shalt Nots and Covets. Don’t Covets.
God bless Moses. I’m just
blessed to be able to tell you about Moses. Share that
Word with you today. The man was like God’s Number Three.
Maybe Two. Right behind Jesus. Blessed as hell.
I’m about to be blessed with that steel job, though.
Think how hard Moses would work that. Mr. Bulrushes.
Mr. Burning Bush. Mr. Hold Up That Rod,
Throw Down That Staff . . . but now he’s dead and can’t
so I’m the man. Work my ass off get that good reward.

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This Is a .50-Caliber Wound

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Jeff Tigchelaar

Featured Art: The Lonely Farm, Nantucket by George Inness

Knee surgery? Hell no
I didn’t have knee surgery.
That’s a .50-caliber wound.
I got bullet holes
up and down this leg.
Running through rice paddies.
                 Never mind that.
I need people to work. Know anybody?
People don’t want
to work no more. I need people
to throw hay. People can’t
throw hay no more.
Hundred-thirty-eight-pound bales, all day
out in the sun. It’s good work. If you’re strong. I pay
twelve-thirteen dollars an hour
so spread the word. The silt
in the air’s a bitch to deal with, though.
Especially if you’re not used to it. I’m used to it
and still it gives me fits. I got to cough
and puke it out and believe me, it takes a while.
                                   Purple Heart?
No. No I didn’t get one. It’s complicated. I wasn’t that
“good” a soldier, we’ll say.
Purple hearts are for . . .
Never mind. It’s just—it’s not worth it.
Never worth it. Especially today. Kids
come back fucked.
I’d never go. I’d stay,
work the family farm.
That’s where I am. Now.
I’ve got five brothers, four sisters,
and we keep about three guys full-time.
And my dad keeps timberwolves.
Gets ’em from a friend of his in Canada.
We got so many deer out there—we shoot
about ten a year for jerky. I only come into town
to donate plasma. I hate the city.
And I hate people, to be honest.
                 Know anybody
up for throwing hay, though—
send ’em my way.
I need people.

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Reverse Sculpture

.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Richard Dey

Featured Art: Untitled by Richard M. Loving

As the stone shrinks, the form expands.
—Michaelangelo

It’s like sculpting in reverse,
       learning about love:
Here’s a Maiden or Aphrodite or Venus,
       naked and polished
or is it the Doryphorus or David or . . .
Isn’t s/he nice? The Ideal in spirit and form?
       Miss or Mister Universe!

Then, in reverse, as you learn
about the apple of your eye
       in revelations you can hardly believe,
       (marble with veins like that!
       granite with such cracks!),
the stone chipped away chips back
       chip by chip, and chunk by chunk,
       all superfluous fugitives reuniting,
and not without the dusty air re-ringing
               with the tap-tapping of
       chisel and mallet, point and hammer,

refilling all the subtle negative spaces
that defined the planes and rhythms—
       mound and hollow, ridgeline and gap—
and the warmth that passed
       from the sculptor’s hands into the work,
all his perseverance, passes back . . .
until before you grandly stands, unhewn
and cold, a breathless, glacial block of stone,
       Lovelessness now reappointed
whose last words (whispered
       with chiseled lips lastly parted) were,
“Darling, are you disappointed?”

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Arrangement in Gray and Black

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Laurie Rosenblatt

Featured Art: Composition with Black and Gray by Claude Ronald Bentley

In the straight-backed chair
for hours for hours after
a drug-stilled night for hours
after dream-hungry sleep she sits
in the straight-backed chair
unmoving for night
after night after leaning spent
against the steel surface
of sleep after staying by habit
on the right side of the bed
as if as if—

although some time does go missing

as if an owl passed like a ghost
its wing-beats deepening the silence
before the milkweed
from that half-dreaming
streams away.

And because the skin knows
after the brain does
and the reptile brain knows
after the self
the arm believes and reaches palm held out flat
seeking that other skin
and animal comfort.

Because the palm is capable
because a limb if lost may still feel
and because it feels may find grass-itch,
wind-brush, the love-mad path of fingers,
and pain. Because this is so

the palm believes
and finds the ghost it seeks
but the streaming milkweed
is carried away by the sun
that leaps onto the bed
and sinks its claws in.

Then dream-hungry she sits
on the straight-backed chair a
figure in gray and black.

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Ye Are of More Value than Many Sparrows

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Elton Glaser

Featured Art: Sparrows and wisteria by Utagawa Hiroshige

Luke 12:7

How many sparrows are enough? I can’t tell
If there are more this afternoon than yesterday.

And if there’s one missing, or two, or eight,
What does it matter? All I know is

They are not so many since I took the feeders down
After your death. They came for the seeds

Your kind hands set out. I give them nothing.
Now, if they come, they come only

For reasons of their own, these quick birds
Dowdy in their grays and browns, and leave behind

That whistle and trill, or the echo of it,
Singing not for me, but for the moment’s pleasure

Of lifting their wings in warm air, alive
To the light. And in their easy glide and sweep,

Oblivious of anything but song, I find myself
A listener outside the choir, and still

Inside those memories of the missing kindness
That drew them here, however many, however few.

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