Category: Uncategorized

April 21st

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Billy Collins

Featured Art: A Pond Near Rousillon by Adolphe Appian

It’s the birthday of John Muir and Charlotte Brontë,
born just 18 years apart,
she in Yorkshire and he somewhere in Scotland,
both in their basinets under the same gray clouds,
but then their lives diverge so radically
you might begin to question the claims of astrologers,
if you haven’t had the sense to do that already.

Muir heads off to Wisconsin (with his parents I guess),
whereas Charlotte is placed in a nearby boarding school.
Muir then stomps all over North America,
exulting in Nature and writing it all down,
while Charlotte stays mostly indoors composing poems
with her sisters, Emily and Anne.
He leaves us Picturesque California, she Jane Eyre.

I don’t have much on my calendar for today,
another April 21st featuring a walk around the lake,
then boxing up the cat and driving her to the vet.
It’s overwhelming to think of all the things
I’m not doing today, including being born.
But I will say that my life, maybe like yours,
falls somewhere between John Muir’s and Charlotte Brontë’s.

My morning walk takes under an hour,
but I do pay attention to the water and the birds,
and here I am writing a poem, just like the Brontë sisters. Muir was blinded for a spell,
Charlotte married then died still pregnant,
and I’ve had the same headache for more than a month.
And if that’s what ends up killing me,

would someone please slide this poem
into a side pocket of the coat they bury me in?
Until then, let us picture John Muir
on a windy mountaintop in Oregon
waving in the direction of the coastal dunes,
while Charlotte Brontë lifts her head
from her morning prayers, recalling that it’s her birthday.

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The Card Players

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Billy Collins

Featured Art: Playing Card by Piero Fornasetti

I’m glad Cezanne was not here in Key West
to set up an easel and paint
the card game I was in last night,
unless he was really good at depicting despondency.

Cezanne once said that a single carrot,
if painted in a completely fresh way,
would be enough to set off a revolution.
I’ll bet he was sitting in a café that day

where such observations are usually made,
but if I had been sitting in that café
across from Cezanne I would have quipped
“Maybe if Bugs Bunny were in charge of things,”

and I would have described in a fresh way
how the famous rabbit might be portrayed
pointing the mob to the Bastille with a carrot.

Beer and chips and more beer and chips
were served at the poker table,
but no carrot soup, a staple on every menu
in the bunny rabbit stories of Beatrix Potter

and a dish that would have warmed me
inside and out the way a good soup does
and made me feel much better
about losing all my money and then some.

But at least now I have found the answer
to the old question of who would you invite
to your ideal dinner party:
Paul Cezanne, Bugs Bunny, Beatrix Potter,

and okay, maybe at the last minute, Gore Vidal.

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Made-up Saints

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Claire Scott

Wile E. Coyote free-falling from a cliff,
Sylvester flattened by an iron safe,
scads of sodden Kleenex at my side.

I put my name on a waitlist for mercy
(a light-year long).
I murmur worn mantras,
send prayers to made-up saints:

Saint Jackson of bankruptcy,
Saint Tiffany of clogged toilets,
Saint Lester of shapeless days
& tedious tomorrows,
Saint Elmer of the toss-and-turn.

Someone else dreams my dreams at night.

Am I missing the point
or was it never there?
A diver yanks a rope,
a wrestler taps out.
I tip over my King.
Checkmate.

Read More

Aubade with Looney Tunes

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Matthew Luzitano

Featured Art: Chelly Canyon by Alice Kagawa Parrott

Your love is a tunnel
painted on a canyon wall.
My love is an Acme,
ripped open despite

certain failure. The TV,
at least, is turned on,
and you say, “Well, that makes
one of us.” Years of this bickering—

can’t Bugs and Daffy
just kiss already? Instead,
the duck marches into the glade
of a dozen cocked rifles.

Why does desire keep ending
in violence? The cat catches
white paint and the skunk
tears apart Paris after her.

You want more thrills? Let’s run
over something in the road.
If the two of us follow the sunset
off a cliff but never look down

are we really falling? In this episode,
lover is a word that means
two people embracing
the same stick of dynamite.

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Tightrope

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By William Fargason

Featured Art: Young Couple by Emil Nolde

On the TV, a man is attempting
to cross the Grand Canyon by walking
on a tightrope. He holds
a large pole to balance himself,
slippered feet cupped around
the two-inch metal wire. What poise,
balance. We are watching this together
because you’ve driven over
to pick me up for dinner, but neither
of us will turn off the TV
or stand up. By now, we are invested
in the outcome. You pull closer

to me on the couch. Will he make it
across? Will the cameras keep rolling
if not? His family waits on the other
side of the canyon. Your hand
on my leg tightens when the wind
picks up, causes the man to bend
down, pivot the pole to regain balance.
I can smell the perfume you’re wearing
because we are going to a nice place
for once, that French restaurant
with all the candles. Your neck smells of lilacs,
or pancakes burning. I can never tell.

I know you won’t leave him
for me—and the man is halfway across
by now, the wind pushing against him,
forcing him to pause again—but I can
hope. I kiss your cheek. You smile.
Ten minutes of him moving one foot
at a time, holding his weight
against the wire, 1500 feet up
in the air, no safety net. You ask if
your car will be towed if you parked on
the street. I don’t think so. But we have
to leave for our reservation, we are
going to be late. I turn off the TV.
Looking back, how terrible
it might have been if you loved me.

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Loose Ends

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Gregory Djanikian

Featured Art: Starry Night and the Astronauts by Alma Thomas

I’ve been pacing the afternoon
like a high-wire walker
from room to room
counting the steps.

Dear Flying Wallendas,
help me reach out across the canyon
of lost connections.
Philippe Petit, speak to me
as if I were your balancing pole.

The letters I’ve written—
let them send me back a sign
they’ve been thumbed.
Let the numbers I’ve called
redial themselves till sun-up.

It’s the neighbor’s pickup driving away
pinging gravel with its tires,
it’s the geese barking the end of summer
that’s got me wishing for binoculars.

The fall leaves are floating down
as if they had something important
to say to the ground.

It’s been Sunday here all week.
I’m holding out for big-box deliveries.
I’m waiting in my soft-soled shoes
for the dog to bark.

Someone, come knock on my door.
Let’s see who’s inside.

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The Blue Goodness

.Reading time 51 minutes.

By Maureen McGranaghan

Franklin ducks into the janitor’s closet and mutters into the iPod Greg bought him. The Goodness is here. It is definitely here. Last night, the blue tarp stopped flapping, and it got very quiet. Then the Goodness filled the whole house like heat from the radiators. Greg and Kate stopped fighting and went to sleep. Now it is everywhere: The Blue Goodness

Franklin hears his name on the intercom. He is being called to Mr. Volpe’s office, so he puts his iPod in his pocket and emerges from the closet.

Mr. Volpe greets him, fiddling with his watch chain and rubbing the bald spot on his head. His voice sounds like rocks grinding against each other. Franklin thinks about the rocks when he speaks. How many?

“Your brother—is he sick?” Mr. Volpe asks.

Four rocks. Small. “Yes. He is. He has walking pneumonia.”

“Tell him to get an excuse.”

“Okay.”

“Have your mom write an excuse.”

Kate won’t do this because she says Roger deserves to have the book thrown at him, but Franklin says, “I’ll tell her.”

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Judgement Call

.Reading time 5 minutes.

By James Lineberger

Featured Art: Man with a Pipe by Pablo Picasso

I don’t know why you won’t show
your face maybe you
don’t know how maybe there’s some
rule about it
or you might be still sleeping or lost
somewhere in
between but if that’s the case
then why do you send these butterflies
to land on Barbara’s
arm and make her candle lights
switch on all
by themselves at four a.m.
and Robert said just yesterday
that you pop
up now and then in his dreams hands
in your pockets
leaning against a wall
and when he asks you what
it’s like you shrug and say it’s
okay which
is all right with me I don’t care how
much you share
with everybody else but unless
you mean to shut me out altogether
then isn’t it about
time we decided on something for
ourselves because
the way it is now I close my eyes
and I can’t even make
out your features your face is just a blank
like somebody wearing
a fencing mask or else I’ll try
to call you up

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In the Gas Station Bathroom With My New Son

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Amy O’Reilly

Someone scratched out the C so it reads “Baby hanging Station.”
What isn’t conspiring to kill Baby?
Pillow. Blanket. Mother’s sleeping body like an island
resort battened down for the wet season,
the beds stripped of their festive linens,
clink of glasses beneath the bar while outside
the storm rages.

Motherhood turns out to be
less spot the warning signs,
more choose which ones to heed—

Like this floating table, its baby-sized crater
inundated with other tiny humans’ feces.
Beneath the black safety strap
my son looks sacrificial,
like he’s about to be experimented on.
Even when I’ve chosen right I have surely chosen wrong.

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Guardian

.Reading time 8 minutes.

By Rebecca Haas

Featured Art: Angel by Luc Tuymans

The station wagon’s engine’s going faulty. We’re driving 20 mph on the right side of the highway, half in the slow lane, half on the shoulder. Mom’s got both hands clenched on the steering wheel, leaning over the dashboard like she’s urging the car forward with sheer will. The car moves in rhythmic gasps, pausing in between the surges, catching its breath. Mom whispers, quiet so the little ones can’t hear. Bad, bad, bad. This is baaaaaad.

She turns to me and says, “I’ve got the gas pedal pushed all the way to the floor.” Like, can you believe this shit?

We’re just outside of Gainesville, Florida, headed back home to Cincinnati. For ten years—since my brother Kevin was born—we’ve gone on a family vacation to Florida. Mom said it’d be no different this summer, even after the divorce. But we didn’t go to the coast, where we used to go when Dad was with us. We went to Central Florida, to Ocala, where Mom’s sister Florence lives.

“You’re batshit crazy driving four kids down to Florida by yourself,” Flo said.

The air coming in the car windows feels like steam from a hot shower and smells like Kevin’s farts. Sweat has my bare thighs glued to the pleather front seat. The baby’s asleep on a quilt in the way back. My sister Kate is sprawled out on her stomach over most of the back seat, reading Mom’s book, Flowers in the Attic, which she shouldn’t be reading because she’s only eight. Behind me, Kevin is squished against the door so no part of his body will touch Kate’s skin, his feet dancing a jig on the back of my seat.

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No One Dies in Fiction Anymore

.Reading time 10 minutes.

By Kaj Tanaka

Featured Art: Heart of Darkness by Sean Scully

I. Sherman Alexie

Once again last night, a dead woman appeared to me. She spoke my name and asked me to help her back into the world of the living. She said she was so close to me; it would only take a small caress and she would be flesh and blood again. I didn’t move. Her face hung over my bed until the dream resolved itself, and I was awake again, and this morning was gray and cold just like yesterday morning and the morning before.

This morning, I heard our neighbors’ little daughter crying in the room above us amid the crashing of furniture while her parents fought. The crying and the fighting were so loud my wife wondered if we should call the police—we decided not to, and then my wife left for work, and the fighting died down. I texted my wife to let her know things were quiet again. She texted me “okay.”

Today, I read Sherman Alexie’s poem “How to Write the Great American Indian Novel” for the first time. I have spent the last three years of my life writing a novel about the time I spent living on an Indian reservation in South Dakota, and when I read Sherman Alexie’s poem, I realized that what I had written, while true, was not useful. No one needed my novel, and I was stupid to think anyone did in the first place. I should have known a year ago when one of my Lakota friends ended our relationship because of this novel—when he heard what it was about, when I told him. We’d been drinking out in the bad-lands; the sun was coming up, and I asked for his approval—“blessing” I think I said. He threw an empty bottle at me. He told me I was selling him out just like all white people do eventually, which is pretty much what Sherman Alexie was saying also. And the next day, we were hungover, and we pretended to have blacked out the entire incident. Even so, we have not spoken since.

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At the Outpatient Clinic

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Andrea Hollander

Featured Art: Free Clinic by Jacob Lawrence

The young woman in the maroon hat
is tapping her left foot as she stares
into her empty lap. She’s kept her coat on,
its collar of fake fur buttoned at her throat.
The woman’s face is pale—blanched is the word
I was about to use, but my mother’s name was Blanche
and I don’t want to think of her, the way at the end
she grew so white and thin, her hair so black
I thought someone had rinsed it with ink. She lay so flat
beneath those hospital sheets, I thought at first
the bed empty, that they had taken her away.

Now a man I didn’t see before gawks at me,
his eyes earnest, green, and stern like my father’s.
“Angela,” he says. “No,” I say, but he keeps staring.
I’m saved when his name is called,
and he turns his head the way my mother did
that last time when I stood at the foot of her bed,
her name on a blue card inserted
into the slot beside the door.
She stirred when she heard my voice,
then turned away.

My mother’s head of ink-black hair
on that bleached white pillow,
her name typed out in block letters
on one of those little blue cards.
What do they do with them
afterwards?

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And Later I Will Forget About the Bread

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Andrea Hollander

Featured Art: From the Kitchen by Ruth Levy

I try to stop glancing at the clock, try
to focus instead on the task at hand, dusting
my palms with flour, lifting the round ball
of dough from the board, slapping it down again.

My son is driving home, his first solo trip,
his teenage eyes partially, I hope, fixed
on the highway’s center line.

From my kitchen radio, Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons.
I can never tell which one, the way I never remember
what Daylight Savings is supposed to save us.

I knead the dough to the music,
pick up the sluggish ball, slap it down,
push the heel of my hand into it,
fold it, pick it up, slap it down.

When my son was born he nearly died.
Now the clock declares him
five minutes late, then ten.

I place the dough into the ceramic bowl
he gave me for my birthday
and cover it with a damp cotton cloth.

The music moves from one season to the next,
the strings vibrant now and airy.
Twelve minutes late, says the clock.

The dough will surely rise. And spring
will come, then summer. But only
if the car pulls into the driveway,
his house key clicks in the lock.

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This Is How It Will Feel

.Reading time 23 minutes.

By Jennifer Watkins

Featured Art: Woman and Child by Mary Cassatt

At three years old, you will sit beside me in a rusty Ford as we head south on I-95. The air conditioning will blow lukewarm air, and you will feel hot and sticky. From the carrier in the backseat, our cat will growl long and low. Looking out of the passenger window, you will see stacks of steel lattice speed by, connected by strands of drooping lines. Through the back windshield, a shrinking ribbon of asphalt, lengthening and disappearing into the horizon. After many hours, the dirt will turn from brown to orange.

“I want my daddy,” you will say.

“Daddy’s staying in Maryland,” I will reply.

A few weeks later, after boxes have been unpacked in the Georgia apartment complex called Cherry Tree Hill, a card will arrive in the mail. Tearing open the envelope, you will find a photograph of your father. He’ll be sitting in a leather office chair, smiling for his daughter’s benefit and wearing neatly pressed blues. You will clutch the picture to your chest, pressing your cheek against its sharp edges. You will kiss the photo over and over. I will tell you to stop.

“You’ll ruin it,” I’ll say.

I will hold you as you cry, and you will hear my heart beat as you lie against my chest. At three years old, you will learn: your mother is flesh and blood. Your father is envelopes and stamps.

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Local News

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Christopher Kempf

                   Or dearest theater.
                                                      Aren’t we
all, the premise is, for one
                                    half hour, in tight zoom, suitable
for history? The Lyndhurst couple
         married, this weekend, at the bagel shop
                                                on Central. Who met
               among the jams & pumpernickels.
                                                                           The suspect
who fled the Chevron holdup
                                                on horseback.

               

                                          Athens, for instance,
was less its democracy—solemn
                  ecclesia, Plato
                                            bent to his parchment—than
the price of goat’s milk in the Way
                                         of Sheepherders. Ahead

               

           at five—teens
     skipping sleep. Teens
                                        at St. Cecilia’s filling the boot
                            for Alzheimer’s. Teens trend-
                                 huffing. Behind the co-hosts
the city poses on its screen. Sunset
                                       flashes. For a minute
  our sundry lesser dramas—our bodies
            pulled from retention ponds, holiday
                                              toy lineups—form
a single American skyline. Small nation
           of lotto & weather radar.
                                             The ecclesia—they

               

did so, they believed, to banish
                       the idea of distance—prohibited
                                  star-gazing, so faithful
       they were to the stage
                                         & polis.

               

                                                      At Taco Bell
yesterday, two men
                     pulled knives on each other because,
            they said, of a woman. One
                                 drove off with her. The other
sacked Troy. We take you
         live, now, to Friday’s parade route. We
                                    will stay with this story
      as it evolves.

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These People

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Anele Rubin

Featured Art: Green Park by Dorothea Tanning

These people strolling through the park
with baby carriages and frisbees
have no idea
my sister choked to death
on a sausage
after being released
from a mental hospital down south
but they may know I’ve been crying
and wonder what I’m writing
in my little yellow book
sitting in the grass next to the only dandelion
left in the park
with my big black dog
whose fur is shaven on one side
and they may notice
I’m wearing yesterday’s clothes
and my gray hair hasn’t been combed lately,
but maybe not,
because a young woman with a child
stops before me,
asks where the duck pond is
and waits, smiling,
as I explain the best route
and her little girl
looks right in my face,
asks if she can pet my dog
and what his name is, says
he’s pretty.

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Timeless Beauty

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Brian Hall

Featured Art: Costumes Parisiens by Manteau de Zibelin

What does she tell me, wind?
—Louis Aragon

My grandmother is a Louis Vuitton model.
Though she will never see the streets
of Île Saint-Louis or pose
along the Seine clutching a Monogram
Canvas Petite Malle iPhone case,
she does drift through grainy nostalgia
like Sora Choi; she does stare beyond
the moment like Sasha Lane, who yearns
to wear soigné dresses and be admired
near rue de la Femme-sans-Tête.

My grandmother is a flâneuse of Youngstown,
shuffling near the faded edges.
In the middle of the road,
she stops traffic because she is
elegance: the wind rippling
her white robe around her as she looks
over her shoulder, gazing
at an audience—drivers, police,
grandchildren, and daughters—
she no longer understands
and at the seasons forever lost.

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Black Sesame

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Adrienne Su

Featured Art: Flowers of a Hundred Worlds (Momoyogusa): Fulling Silk (Uchiginu) by Kamisaka Sekka 

Had I stayed in touch with black sesame,
much would have turned out differently.

For years I forgot the late nights with my mother,
the small bowls of hot sweetened water,

porcelain spoons, and white dumplings
with almost-black black-sesame filling

dwelling somewhere between dessert
and snack, erasing the not-quite hunger

that holds off sleep. At that hour
their strangeness didn’t register:

no one else could see them; the notion
of soup as dessert could be taken

for granted; the lack of an English
name caused no confusion. Packaged,

frozen, easy to heat, they could be served
within minutes of craving, all records

of indulgence swept away as quickly.
Perhaps it was this simplicity,

decades later, that made me feel at peace
in a void. It didn’t feel like sacrifice

to forgo a confection
I had left to oblivion.

What finally reminded me
that I had made myself lonely

was black sesame’s coming into fashion—
cakes, gelato, pastry—the recognition

a mild punch to the abdomen
like that moment in a museum

when a terracotta soldier, a Frida Kahlo,
or an archaic torso of Apollo

turns what you thought was satiety
into a quest for family.

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The News of Touch

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Craig van Rooyen

Featured Art: Geese amid Reeds by Ohara Koson

Since his illness, my father feeds
the crook-necked goose every day.
He walks to the pond on diabetic feet,
careful as the path pitches and rolls under him
like a swinging bridge.
He wears suspenders over sloped shoulders,
the shirt tucked over a sagging belly.
Of course he would share with me,
if I didn’t stay away. There’s enough seed
in his bag for both of us. But I’d rather pull weeds
two towns over than see his shaking.
They greet him with a mighty honking,
wings flapping and dripping with light,
then surround him, hoarse with need.
A preacher, he is used to feeling loved
for what he has in his pocket for the flock.
But his pulpit days are long over.
He pulls out his bag of seed
and teeters toward the water’s edge.
A tremor shakes his hand
and the seed spills beneath
writhing necks and thrashing wings.
When the honking stops and the birds leave,
he goes down on one knee, though it costs him.
There is enough seed left to cover a palm.
His good hand steadies the other, and he waits
for the crook-necked gander. Alone also,
the bird finally appears from bulrushes.
This is their agreement:
my father will save a shaking handful
for the crook-necked goose, and in return
the goose will touch him,
pushing its bill across his palm, nuzzling
his fingers long after the grain is gone.

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A Small Prayer

.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Craig van Rooyen

Featured Art: Ce fut un religieux mystère by Maurice Denis

—After Ada Limon

Behind the rotting fence in their first house,
my mom and dad are eating canned mushroom soup
over buttered toast in a one-bedroom Kentucky clapboard
where a turntable spins the same Bill Gaither Trio record,
“Because He Lives,” until they go almost mad
with their stained Formica floor and overflowing toilet
and their longing for heaven, and I love them so.
She is crying at the stove because today
she crashed the rusted Dodge Dart and he has no way
to drive the circuit of his churches in the morning—
preaching at each about the Second Coming
and how to get right with Jesus. I want to offer
her a beer, but there I am in her womb,
kicking to be noticed among their other troubles
and, in any event, she has never had a drink.
He is thinking about his sermon,
the one that will end in an altar call because
he knows people need to walk toward something together
after they have walked away from each other all week long.
First the white church, then the black one across town.
And my father is going to save the country, and then the world
by baptizing its citizens one by dripping one.
Nights, they watch the news on a black-and-white
Magnavox, wrestling with the rabbit ears
to see, through the snow of static
what the world is becoming, believing
it will end in the best way possible.
During the week, she delivers babies
in her starched white uniform, knowing,
in these last days, they will never die.
Years later, some might say their hope
was not a hope, or was not the right kind of hope,
but rather a sort of escape from the reality of their time,
but I want to tell you some hope is better than none.
Look at them there, on their knees, praying
their small prayer. Not for the healing
of the nation, or for an end to the war,
but something more manageable, more
imaginable—for a car to start, for something
in its crushed innards to turn over and catch fire.

Read More

Feature: Gems of the 21st

.Reading time 4 minutes.

Editors’ Note:

If, at the turn of the 22nd century, there is still such a thing as an anthology. If readers of poetry continue to entertain the sometimes troublesome idea that ten or twenty poems can reflect whole movements, schools, trends. If the looking-back literati—skeptical of Automaticism, 2101’s prevailing poetic tendency—seek some sense of our long-gone zeitgeist . . . If all that. Then what poems will be read as representative of the early 21st century? Say, from 2001 to 2018?

We asked some of our collaborators to take their best guess.

We suggested that, first, they consider poems that are great own their own—devastating, voicy, gut-busting. But, second, we wanted to hear about poems that address the Big Issues—or what might be remembered as the Big Issues—of our day.

Adrienne Su, Emily Mohn-Slate, Anders Carlson-Wee, Tony Hoagland, Chiyuma Elliott, Keith Kopka, Veronica Schuder, and Mario Chard took up the challenge. Here are their choices:

                                        “The Woman in the Moon,” by Carol Ann Duffy • “The Kind of Man
                                        I Am at the DMV,” by Stacey Waite • “Among the Prophets” and
                                        “Breakers, before the Feds shut it down,” by Essy Stone • “Statue
                                        of Liberty,” by Ann Killough • “Since You Ask,” by Carl Phillips •
                                        “Epithalamion Ex Post Facto” by Joshua Bell • “A Small Gesture of
                                        Gratitude,” by Mark Bibbins • “Another Poem on Blue,” by Claire
                                        Bateman • “Love at Thirty-Two Degrees,” by Katherine Larson •
                                        “Look,” by Solmaz Sharif

These are poems, to borrow from Mario Chard’s title, that see the present deeply. They’re some of the Gems of the 21st.

New Ohio Review Issue 22. Originally printed Fall 2017.

.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 22 compiled by Ali Nowac

Delectable Hazards at the Animal Dive

.Reading time 25 minutes.

By Michael Chaney

By the time the cow set down the samosas, covering the spot where he’d earlier hooved his name, Fox seemed different to Pig.

“Simply marvelous,” Pig said with an air, trying to play it off.

Fox coughed. “May I have more water?” Annoyance puckered her auburn snout.

“Not a problem,” said the cow. “Mind if I brag about our wines?”

“Please do, darling.” Fox had a lovey-dovey way of talking. To Pig, she was not so different from the elegant junk in herringbone patterns on the walls: bugles, radios, troughs, collars, toys, and white puffy gloves. Read More

Hilltop Cemetery

.Reading time less than 1 minute.

The poem, “Hilltop Cemetery” by Brendan Cooney, originally appeared in NOR 22. It became the inspiration for this short film, by Bridie Jackson.

The Burden of Humans

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Michael Lavers

Featured Art: Midnight at Midsummer Over the Antarctic Mainland by Frederick A. Cook

The grass just has to wave, the birds just have
to sing. The grapes don’t wonder what light is;
the light just lights them, and the grapes grape back.
The golden oaks just shed their summer dresses
on the lawn—but you? You have to read
Spinoza in the garden while the light
is good. You have to keep your focus as
the motorcycles scream out of the purple hills.
You have to sweat, and laugh, and weatherproof
the bedroom windows, and remember
names and dates, the town where your parents met—
Milk River or Swan Hills?—and when they died,
you have to sweep the kitchen floor and then
define the good, the true, the beautiful,
or try, because azaleas can’t see themselves,
the squirrels are busy, and the ferns have closed.
The frost tattoos its sermon on the rose,
but in a language only you can read;
you have to know that all things pass and perish,
and that what you’ve said is finite, but continue—
as if grand exceptions might be made—
raking the leaves, stacking the wood, hoping
the child falls asleep against your chest,
hoping the blizzard swerves, knowing the wreckage
of the present will be gathered but
not soon, and not by you, because you’re in it,
there somewhere, under the sheet of snow.

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I’m Trying to Write a Joyful Poem

.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Emily Mohn-Slate

Featured Art: Chrysanthemums by a Stream by Followers of Ogata Korin

after reading Ross Gay’s new book,
which makes me feel light
and giddy, like maybe
a world in which figs fall
from a city sky is possible,
but my poem becomes
about the collapse of long
love, how even the brightest
glint in the eye
becomes shadow eventually.
My son dances across
the room in a red
cowboy hat, he asks me
to chase him,
but the girl in the documentary
I watch lives in a landfill
outside Moscow—
she drinks water from
dirty milk jugs and—
why does joy always slide
into darkness?
My son laughs, his eight teeth
new and white, shining in the sun
while I tickle his belly.
Joy must be at least
as complicated as sorrow,
which is one reason
I hate those posed pictures
people take before
weddings, before babies,
hands clasped over the woman’s
belly—cupping warm skin
thinking they know
what’s inside.

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First Train Ride Together: Northeast Corridor

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Linda Bamber

Featured Art: Restoration work at the Reading Terminal and Market in the mid-1990s by Carol M. Highsmith

A procession of blessings
like incoming waves crowned with gold

like the beaches and marshes we passed
coming home

         and another and another
         as the light deepened and graced it all:

the water views, of course,
with shrink-wrapped boats in the marinas
and boat-lifts waiting in the cold;

but the train-side heaps of junk as well
the disappearing big box stores
the grimy buildings from another time.
Oh, see

the ice upheaved in inlets
both churning and silent at once!
         and,
in intermittent moors and swales,

the high wooden platforms
the legislature appropriated funds for

         duly topped with messy nests
the ospreys built last year.

If the birds aren’t grateful
for such civic thoughtfulness
I am

on their behalf. Thanks

to whom it may concern
for that; and for
the loveliness-conferring light out there
beyond your face. You
in the window seat turned toward me;

your face, and then Connecticut in glory.

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Ending the Poem

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Theresa Burns

Featured Art: Northern Lights over Iceland by Harald Moltke

Never on light or love.
Never, I’m told, on one of those
Poetry words like keening or wept.
Tears of any kind, in fact,
Are out, and even a rueful
Smile reads smug in the last line.
No small animals, or small
Hands, or anything especially
Beneficent. Don’t even think about
Children or old people. Or teenagers,
Lest they drive the poem
Into a ditch two blocks from home.
Nothing delicious or bitter.
Forget kisses and comeuppance,
As easily as you forget umbrellas
At parties; it’s not worth going back.
Don’t get moral. Nothing’s black
Or white in the end. Never
On silence. Or birdsong. Ever.
And the silence that utterly shadows
The yard at the end of birdsong?
I doubt it. Don’t be certain
About anything. Ask a question,
Leave a crumb, chase the tail
Of something down a black hole.
Just don’t make it black.
Make it that color at the throats
Of poppies, a kind of blue-gray black
Like crushed velvet. And feel it
Going down.

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Gentleman Caller

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Elton Glaser 

So this is death come walking, looking mighty fine,
Him with a firm stride and a dragon-headed cane,
Dandy with diamonds in his smile, all howdy-do
And sweet potato pie, him strutting right up
To your own front door, that big stick knocking
On the frame and tapping his spats, making
The neighbors stare and the dogs back down,
Him idling under the hum of the porch light,
Spreading his shine wherever he pleases, sounding
A little cocky when he calls your name—

And what’s your mama gonna do about that?

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Clean For Him the Ashes

.Reading time 42 minutes.

By David E. Yee
Winner, New Ohio Review Fiction Contest selected by Colm Tóibín

Featured Art: The Burning of the Houses of Lords and Commons, 16 October 1834 by Joseph Mallord William Turner

I remember watching the Cotton family’s kitchen burn, felt only a ripple of urgency. Knew it was the kitchen because the houses on this stretch are all the same split-levels built north of Ellicott City, the semi-rural bit just past 70—two main avenues laced together by branches of side streets, neighborhoods pocketed along them. I kept waiting for the flames to reach out like arms through the windows, but there were just these little tips of orange licking the gutter. Our plots were far enough apart that the heat didn’t warp my siding, but the pungent smell of that old wood burning, the paint peeling, felt toxic, jarred me from an otherwise peaceful Monday night.

Firefighters got it out in five. I had my face in the blinds, shifted to see the Cottons—father, mother, two boys—standing shoeless in the grass. It was warm for a September evening, but they huddled, heads tipped skyward as the tail of the smoke crept up past the alder trees lining our backyards. The Chief handed Mr. Cotton a phone, and he just stared at it like he was waiting for a call, didn’t dial, gave it back to the Chief when he was done talking to his crew. The crowd of neighbors gathered on the opposite curb began to thin as the trucks pulled away, and I went back to dusting my living room.

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Waitress in an All-Night Diner, West Virginia

.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Rebecca Baggett

Featured Art: A small portion of the Fanny Bennett Hemlock Grove on one side of Spruce Knob, West Virginia. Old Mammoth Road by Carol M. Highsmith

Angels visit sometimes, close to dawn.
They cluster by the door, seem to scan the cars
as they turn in, as if waiting for something—
what, she doesn’t have a clue.

She’s forty-three, a bad cough (first cigarette
at fourteen), two divorces, a dragonfly tattoo
on her left shoulder blade. Tumble
of chestnut curls—not a gray hair yet—
imprisoned in a net, magnificent when released.
Terrible feet. She hasn’t told a soul
about the angels, not even her sister,
who knows everything else worth telling.

They aren’t as glorious as she’d imagined.
Their wings, in particular—tight-folded
against their backs—surprise her by their drabness,
dusty-brown as the sparrows that hop around
the parking lot and gorge on stale biscuits
she crumbles on her break. The angels’ eyes—
washed-out blues and greens with strange,
cat-like pupil-slits—track her as she winds
through tables, a pot of coffee in each hand,
or delivers platters heaped with pancakes, sausages,
fries.
                       Why me? she wonders,
her back tickling under their eerie gaze,
but can’t imagine. Until the night the boy—
he can’t be more than boy yet—plunges
through the door, white as biscuit dough
except two spots, fever-red, high on either cheek.
The pistol he grips trembling with every
shuddering breath.

The cook’s whistling an old Alabama tune
she almost recognizes. The trucker
in the back booth drops his toast, lunges
to his feet. The pistol wavers toward him,
and then the angel by the door lifts its hand
to beckon her. She feels her lips curl
into the smile she offers worn-out mothers,
fractious teens, men who look as though
they can’t endure another night alone.
Yanks off the net. Shakes down her waterfall
of hair. Takes the first step
toward whatever’s come to her.

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Bag Lady Muse

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Rebecca Baggett 

My muse is an old bag lady,
who turns up every morning, grocery cart
heaped with rubber boots, starfish,
hula hoops, ruby vases, tattered children’s
books, ballet slippers, rhinestone pins,
and a fur stole with a fox head at one end,
expecting me to make a poem.

What am I supposed to do
with all this random crap? I ask.
Did I mention that one wheel
of her cart is catawampus, so it makes
a loud kerchunk kerchunk
as she maneuvers it up my drive
and into my living room, where she
insists on parking?

She shrugs, slumps into the recliner,
lights a cigarette.
                                   It’s your life,
lamb. I’m just collecting it.

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Laundromat

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Ted Kooser

Although it’s abandoned at two in the morning,
an empty white carton of buzzing fluorescence,
there’s always the feeling that someone was there
until only a moment before you walked in,
someone who reached up and popped a soap bubble
of fragrance, the last shimmer of color afloat
in this otherwise colorless storefront, then strolled past
the choir of top-loaders and opened their lids,
leaving them open, each of them holding its breath
before singing, two dollars in quarters per song.

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The Clipper Ship

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Ted Kooser

Featured Art: Early Morning After a Storm at Sea by Winslow Homer

There was a cheaply framed clipper flying in full sail
over the sofa, and it leaned just a little into the glass
as if to look down on me lying there bored, and it carried
more sail than anything in Iowa. It looked as if some boy
had broken a lot of white cups and saucers and stacked up
the pieces, just so, so they wouldn’t fall off of the sill
of that window that opened onto a faraway sea, a sea
that the ship had only recently ripped open, revealing
the world’s white cotton lining. That overstuffed sofa
was heavy and brown like a barge, and it smelled like
the one suit in my grandfather’s closet, an angry blue
like the sea in the picture, and as I lay there, climbing
the main mast’s springy rigging onto a lofty spar
where I could look down on myself, I could see the sofa
slowly sinking, the carpet all patterned with flotsam
slapping against it, and I wondered, as one might wonder,
if the ship would ever arrive in time to save me, or if I,
hanging high in the rigging, would simply wave it on.

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Hilltop Cemetery

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Brendan Cooney

Featured Art: River Village in a Rainstorm by Lu Wenying

How many of you said,
“How I prayed for the day to pass quickly.”

How many said,
“I didn’t care about the result
even if I did achieve it.”

How many of you said,
“I dreamed of making them like me,
if only for my elevation of thought
and unmistakable wit.”

How many of you said,
“I was ridiculously exaggerating the facts,
but how could I help it?”

How many said,
“I could not control myself and
was already shaking with fever.”

Who said,
“Then followed three years of gloomy memories.”

Did anyone say,
“If it’s gonna be shame, bring it;
if it’s gonna be disgrace, I’ll take it;
if it’s gonna be degradation, welcome;
the worse it is, the better.”

How many of you said,
“Strangeness is not a vice.”

How many said,
“I needed a friend, so much.”

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Delectable Hazards at the Animal Dive

.Reading time 26 minutes.

By Michael Chaney

Featured Art: Chinese painting featuring two birds on a flowering tree branch

By the time the cow set down the samosas, covering the spot where he’d earlier hooved his name, Fox seemed different to Pig.

“Simply marvelous,” Pig said with an air, trying to play it off.

Fox coughed. “May I have more water?” Annoyance puckered her auburn snout.

“Not a problem,” said the cow. “Mind if I brag about our wines?”

“Please do, darling.” Fox had a lovey-dovey way of talking. To Pig, she was not so different from the elegant junk in herringbone patterns on the walls: bugles, radios, troughs, collars, toys, and white puffy gloves.

“I don’t drink,” Fox said, touching the waiter’s hoof. It was gentle. His bell never so much as whispered as she did it. Anyone else would have gotten a bray from all four of his stomachs, Pig was thinking, distracted by the samosas. Their crispy folds smuggled the aroma of mudzhki, the kind Pig’s grandsow used to make with cabbage and sweet layings. Read More

Experiment. Kathryn Cowles. Metal, treadmill, buttons, psychiatrists, the artist. 2014

.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Kathryn Cowles

Featured Art: Hawkin’s Machine for writing and drawing

I must be present in the gallery
7 hours a day 7 days a week
with 25 minutes for lunch.
Water is always available to me in a tube
extended from the ceiling.
I have bolted to the wall and floor behind me
long, thin iron spikes like the ones
in the dungeon of the castle in the film
with the handsome anthropologist
when the floor breaks away and he falls
and his length of rope, hastily tied
around his middle
is just shorter than
the distance to
the longest of the long spikes.
The psychologists in the corner
in the white coats and with their clipboards
are part of the art piece,
though they fancy themselves to be
conducting an experiment.

The children who visit the gallery
are often cruel, though in the way
a winter is cruel, without intention.
They have visited the natural history museum
where a button lights up a portion
of the exhibit on
quadrupeds of the Sierra.
They are merely experimenting with cause and effect.
So they push each button in turn
just to try them out
and I am glad when they leave.
Most people only push up to 3
and then laugh uncomfortably and push 1 again.
Some people never go past 1.

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Heart 2. Kathryn Cowles. Mixed media (tuning forks, megaphones, windmill, catapult, volcano, bathtub, confettied heart, tissue-paper flowers, flamethrowers, pianos, etc.) 2014

.Reading time 17 minutes.

By Kathryn Cowles 

after The Way Things Go, by Peter Fischli
and David Weiss

I give the boot on a stick a push.
                                                          The boot circles round and kicks the light switch on, which, as the open bulb grows hot, melts the balloon full of red red paint, which drips down to fill up the glass precariously balanced until it tips over and breaks, tripping a wire on its way down,
                                                                                                                            and the wire sends a spoon attached to a little weighted car down a ramp, and the spoon hits against strategically placed tuning forks in different notes as it travels down, and the tuning forks are each pointed toward a red and white megaphone set at full volume, and the megaphones serve to amplify the little 12-note tune that I can’t get out of my head,
           and when the spoon car gets to the bottom of the ramp, it smacks into a striped target, which knocks a red bowling ball onto an oversized inflated black plastic bag, which releases its air into a long silver tube in a burst, causing the white canvas windmill at the other end of the tube to turn, which tips the wooden seesaw structure so that it releases its 1,000 one-inch rubber balls in various shades of red and pink and gray and black down a 25-foot wooden plank, and then into a metal chute, where they line up and twist and turn their way, roller-coaster-like, to the bottom of the track, picking up speed all the while,
                                                                                                                                                                   and at the bottom, they split into two tracks and collect in two separate tubs attached to two separate strings that will only pull once enough balls have accumulated in the tubs, given enough weight, one string attached to a trip wire attached to an oversized match, which quickly strikes against its measure of sandpaper and lights on fire, and the other string attached to the safety catch of a tightened, loaded bow above it,
                                                                                                                                                                   and the string slowly, slowly, as the waiting match burns down, as the tub fills with one-inch balls, slowly pulls at the safety catch until it, quite suddenly,
                                                                releases, letting loose the paraffin-soaked arrow, which passes through the flame of the oversized match and lights up as it shoots just feet above the heads of the seated spectators in the outdoor garden of the art museum, over, across the open space, grazing on the other side of the crowd a wick attached to the paraffin-soaked cardboard mannequin,
                                                                                                                                        which bursts into a flame that lights all the attached oversized sparklers from their shortened bases, and they burn in reverse, outward, and the mannequin sags, and the mannequin gets infinitesimally lighter, as the sparklers drop their ash to the ground and as the chemicals react and burn away, so that the enormous and sensitive scale holding the sparklered mannequin on one side becomes outweighed by the enormous pile of inflated red balloons on the platform on the other side of the scale and slowly lifts into the air,
                                                                                                                               and a metal ball rolls in a track along the edge of the platform and catches in a pocket on one end of a wooden plank,
                                                                                                                                                        causing the giant catapult full of red-dyed baking soda on the other end of the wooden plank to fling its contents in the air and, upon hitting the vat of red-dyed vinegar in the center of the giant papier-mâché model of a volcano, to bubble up over the edge and through a rugged papier-mâché channel painted to look like rock on the side of the volcano,
                            and the fake lava flows into a water wheel, which turns and turns, and the turning untwists a 50-foot length of rope from around a pole high above the crowd, out on the end of a crane,
                                                                                                                                                                    and the pole is attached to the side of a bathtub full of confetti made from hole-punching-to-pieces every letter or postcard you ever sent me every photograph I have of you every scrap of film every original thing every only-copy-that-exists and that might hurt to lose,
                                                                                         and the bathtub turns,
                                                                                                   and turns on its pole,
                                                                                                                       and upends its contents onto the crowd
as 12 pianos each tuned to a single note drop in succession,
                                                                                                         a literal kind of surround
sound,
          playing the little tune I can’t get out of my head,
                                                                                           as confetti cannons shoot red
tissue-paper flowers into the air,
                                                    as the tissue-paper flowers pass through the blaze
of the four flamethrowers, strategically placed,
                                                                                    as they light one after the other and burn completely to ash before landing gently and harmlessly alongside the confetti on the heads and shoulders of the crowd in the art museum garden 50 feet below.

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Cedar Waxwing, Late November

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By John Hazard

Featured Art: Flying magpies by Watanabe Seitei

In the crook of a bare maple branch
a lone cedar waxwing sits. I thought
they went south, but I guess not all, not yet.

There are big blue holes in the clouds today
and only a moderate chill, a day to be sociable—
and waxwings tend toward groups.

But there he sits, no berry calling him,
nor women, nor daring flights among thickets.
His high-pitched note is mute.

The breast of the cedar waxwing looks softer
than anything I’ve seen. No one’s discerned
a single feather etched in the fuzz

of his tan-gold-gray. That black mask
is a clown’s toy, more dandy than bandit.
Small orange beads dangle on his wingtips,

and look how the buff-gray tail concludes
in black and lemony stripes. But what good
is all that art on the eve of winter, this bird left

with his choice to stay put, and only me
to impress? I’ve heard that waxwings in courtship
pass fruit and bugs back and forth. They dance

and finish with a gentle touching of beaks.
Maybe my lone bird is lookout for his tribe,
or decoy—their offering to any hawk he can’t deceive.

December’s shouldering in, and here we are,
me wondering, him staring. His feathers fluff
in a bit of wind. Some twigs fall. We see each other.

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Topology

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Christine Gosnay

The universe expands understandably
because of its many edges, twisting

Its edges are everywhere and everywhere
are its edges

The cracked dial on the gas hob is the edge,
the blind kitten’s black ear,

All the earth’s hotbeaten glass, the belt
around my father’s neck,

And so forth, such as the limits of plotted expressions
and the cores of galaxies.

Edges. Tearing, however,
isn’t allowed.

It means that when I pull nothing out from the soft center
where my stomach, pale and useful, longs,

Pulling as if at a doll’s string to say ache
in a bright, unrecognizable voice,

I move my mind by the hand from the dark blue room
where it is thinking-feeling

Toward the edge of the blank graph
where it does its knowing-thinking,

A place where, like honey, time passes down glass
in delightful, jagged spiros,

sensibly different,
undifferently arranged.

Understandably, in this way, because of the infinite corners
where, shot with longing, longing springs,

I discover myself holding a small yellow book of mathematics
in one hand,

the fullness of my sunlit skin in the other.

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Yesterday, Northern Michigan, Interstate 75

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By John Hazard

Featured Art: Historic window detail, Port Huron, Michigan by Carol M. Highsmith

Four times today the bee has banged
his head against my window.
He wants erotic pollen and thinks
he smells it here, the indoor side of glass.

These days people say madness
is expecting something new
from old behavior. So this must be
a lunatic bee—bad wiring or bad parents,
the bad apple, the not-our-kind-of
bee. In the corner of my eye,
like a floater, but more sudden,
he breaks left and attacks the window,
throbbing with what he must have.

Yesterday in northern Michigan the blue sky
unzipped itself and let a swallow fall, fast,
beak first, so straight it seemed
he’d aimed for asphalt, saw a bug there,
had to have it. The bird bounced once,
twenty yards ahead. I had to steer
a little left to clear the body.

This May’s been cool and wet, such a daily, fresh
dawn breath that the season and the trees
did not expect it. Only crazy animals expect,

like bees, or a swallow lit gold in morning sun,
heading for his usual spot on a white pine branch
only two lanes east, where the world was
what he remembered and desired.

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My Lifelong Relationship with God

.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Julie Hanson 

Featured Art: blurred photo of a church in a remote area

We have not spoken for nearly thirty years.
It’s difficult to remember the precise moment when something stops.
I tried to quit smoking so many times, for example,
that I don’t know the date of my success.
I still like the same sensations I did as a girl in the 1950s.
Sun on my shoulder, a breeze on the nape of my neck.
Pulling the cotton laces of canvas shoes tight to tie them.
Losing myself in the thicket of a book.
The way my torso and limbs and neck feel after swimming.
Stirring with a wooden spoon. Hearing the wooden spoon
against the side of the bowl. Yards that invite a body
to run down the hill. Things that fit together.

Some did not want it to unfold as it did, but I came to be nonetheless.
We needn’t grow quiet now.
We all have had plans that are cancelled and plans that are not.
We all know that what disappoints isn’t always due to us.
If replacing God with another phrase would work, I would do it.
It would not be love, however. It would not be God is Love.
God is Love is like trying to climb up a string instead of a ladder.
When I count my blessings, and they are many,
I consider them as much or as little my fault as anyone else’s.
That it rains today, that I wrote something down,
that I was born in June when we have peas and lettuce
in the garden. If we have planted them. If we know how to do that.
If the yard has a garden. If a yard with a garden appealed
to our younger selves. If the groundhog has not found a way in.
If the owl in the oak does its work.

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The Getaway

.Reading time 17 minutes.

By Rebecca McClanahan

Featured Art: Haverstraw Bay by Sanford Robinson Gifford

“Is that our car?” my mother asks. She has rolled her walker over to the window and is pointing to the Buick LeSabre parked outside their condo. I keep it there so that Dad can see it from his recliner, where he spends most of his days and evenings. He hasn’t driven for several years and never will again, but he likes knowing the car is there, likes sitting in the co-pilot seat when I take them for doctor appointments or Sunday drives. The Buick has rarely moved from the space in the three years since my husband and I relocated them from Indiana, to a condo twenty feet from our own. But each day is a new day for my mother; thus, the question, which she will keep asking until I answer.

“Yes, Mother. That’s your car.”

“Mine?” Her brown eyes light up, her eyebrows lift.

“Yours and Dad’s.”

“Dad’s?”

“Paul’s, I mean.” Lately I’ve been trying to break my lifelong habit of calling my dad “Dad.” “Dad” only encourages her confusion: that her husband is her father, or sometimes her grandfather. No matter that her father has been dead nearly thirty years and her grandfather, over seventy. She still sometimes sets a place for them at the table, and worries when they’re late for dinner.

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Laundry

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Robert Cording

Featured Art: The Bathing Hour, Chester, Nova Scotia by William James Glackens

This morning, doing the laundry,
smoothing collars and shirt plackets
before placing it all in the dryer,
I saw the ghost of my recently dead mother,
her red-capillaried face looking on
approvingly in the steam.

I didn’t expect to see her,
and some of this must be pretend,
but she was there, making a place for herself
over by the baskets, in the light
that fell through the windows
at an angle that never seemed to change.

We got to talking—who doesn’t want
to talk with the dead again
when it’s morning and mostly sunny?—
about the telephone pole in our old backyard,
and the sound of the pulleys and ropes
that carried the wash in and out.

I was lingering over the way a drying sheet
took in a breeze and released it
as if it were breathing,
but my mother chattered away non-stop,
moving as she always did, from topic
to topic without transition,

only pausing here and there to punctuate
with one of her sayings—
Doing the wash makes you happy.
It says you can begin again.
And unlike when she was alive
that seemed true. As the light’s angle

sharpened, none of our mistakes,
our fights or failures, the old
argument about Dad—or even
the ridiculous, proper way
to fold a bottom sheet—held us back
as we finished the first load of darks.

And by the time she held a shirt
by the shoulders, folded it in thirds,
then flipped the bottom half under the top
and laid it in the pile for the living,
I was whistling, caught up entirely
in the rhythm and pace of our task.

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At Milward Funeral Home, Lexington, KY

.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Jeff Worley

Featured Art: Bloemenzee by Theo van Hoytema

Someone has to identify the body.
The funeral facilitator, Jeanne,
gestures me into the room and clicks
the door shut behind me.

You finally got your wish,
I say to my mother.
She’s wearing a shade of lipstick
that unbecomes her, a subtle peach
she would have hated. Her face
is her face and of course is not,
her hair parted in the middle,
a new look. Her hands, composed
across her sternum, are the color
of parchment, skin thin as vellum.

I don’t stroke her arm. I don’t kiss
her forehead, as I thought I would.
Instead, I wonder, oddly, if the funeral
people use the same gorgeous quilt
that covers my mother now,
with its sunbursts and bluebirds,
for everybody.

When I think I have stayed long enough,
Brahms trailing off in the corners,
Jeanne is sitting outside the door,
her long fingers forming a steeple.
I want to say to her I have no idea
who that is, I’m sorry, but levity
isn’t encouraged here. Although
I would only be speaking the truth:
Alzheimer’s riddled her brain
and sucked the marrow from her spirit;
she became a stranger and a stranger
to herself. What else was there to do
but believe along with her that Hoss
and his Bonanza brothers were indeed
aliens from another planet, that Pat Sajak
was “in on it,” along with everyone else
who came and went in Mom’s room,
stealing her clothes, her makeup,
the nursing home grand conspiracy . . .

I’m sorry it’s taking me so long,
Mom said in a rare lucid moment
last week, and I had nothing to say,
and I tugged the blanket snugly
under her chin, and I handed her
the plastic cup full of water which
she waved away.

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The Last Father Poem

.Reading time 1 minute.

By William Varner

Featured Art: Design for a Heart-shaped Box by Noritake Factory

Only the spittle
of AM radio in your car
those few times we met,
a swinging air freshener,
cigarettes little twisted
arms in the ashtray.
The waitress in the diner
brought coffee
and checked on us
too many times,
her apron the color
of the dried mustard
near the cap.
And I’ve forgotten
where the cemetery is,
on which street I looked away
as Amish buggies slowed,
and the men took off their black hats,
held them to their chests,
and gave a short, sharp nod.

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Meditation On My 44th Birthday

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Jason Irwin

Before going for a walk, I open the day’s newspaper.
NASA releases detailed photos of Charon,
Pluto’s largest moon. In a marketplace in Diyala Province, Iraq,
a suicide bomber kills one hundred and twenty.
On this day in 1959, Billie Holiday died
handcuffed to her hospital bed. My horoscope
tells me I will be extremely serious and earnest
in my emotions, that I will suffer
from the ailments of birds.

                                        Hard to believe half of my life
is just some thing that used to be.

On my walk I stop at the corner of Maple
and Elm, watch the sun sink behind the station,
I think about Charon, orbiting Pluto, and the Charon
who ferried the souls of the dead to the underworld. Maybe
he delivered the people killed in the marketplace,
or Lady Day. Instead of a coin for passage
she sang Baby why stop and cling to some fading
thing that used to be. Her lilting voice trailing off
as they reached the far shore.

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46 Years Old

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Karen Skolfied 

Featured Art: Pine Tree by Giovanni Segantini

I’m not really sure how I got to 46.
If I think about it, I could probably
come up with a dozen years, two dozen
if I include sleep or staring into space
and one more year with worrying
about the wild flax and campion
which never once needed me to do
more than mow around them.
The rest of it, who knows.
I don’t have a smartphone.
I don’t do a ton of zesting.
I will admit, there were some books
along the way and a few parking tickets.
I voted. Oh, how I voted. Tracy, I’d say,
tell me who’s running for school board
and how to vote. And she’d tell me—
that took up more of the 46 years than
you’d think. Good grief, Tracy, I’d say.
Just write down their initials for me.
Write it on my hand, so I won’t forget.
I am not writing on your hand, she’d say.
So I wrote her in as a candidate,
just so she’d have something to do
in the cordage of her own years.
The time spent touching Heather’s
bobbleheads—that adds up. Breaking down
cardboard boxes for my father-in-law.
This still won’t sum to 46, even with all
the pretzels and the time asking waiters
for mustard in a ketchup world.
Okay, the sporting events. Sometimes,
woooo, the cheering, and other times
all the play’s at your net and third period
goes on forever. More than a smidge
of my 46 years has been spent in ice rinks.
Is no one interested in clearing the zone?
The whistle works both ways, ref!
Yeah, I might have yelled that more
than once. How long does this guy
think I have, waiting for a good call?

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Lunatic, Time

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Rachel Rinehart 

Featured Art: Trees on a Rocky Hillside by Asher Brown Durand

Sometimes, seeking desperately the measure
of her weeks, she dresses now for church
on Tuesdays or Saturdays, slides sideways
into the slick interior of the Oldsmobile.

So familiar the route, the car seems to know it,
nosing its gentle way like some peculiar
land-bound fish, and she leans in its belly
as it makes its one wide turn before the church.

But dim, the sanctuary withholds its promise.
She sits in the pew, hymnal poised, waiting
for the organ to thunder out
of its immaculate, peepless slumber.

Churchgoers flit in her periphery,
but she cannot fix them. The long dead
lingering beside her flee when she turns
to greet them. Even the eyes of Christ

flash impenetrable in the soft flush
of stained glass. Lunatic, time loops and tangles,
doubles back on itself. Somewhere in the hours
the pastor appears, or the woman

who fills the candles. They call up her son
to collect her. Behind the scrim at her windows
she baffles in the horrors of her dotage.
Someone has moved her husband’s truck.

It has been only days and decades since he slumped
dead against the dash in a hay-flecked shirt.
The chicken coop, too, is missing, the pasture fence.
Vagrant memory, like livestock loosed over the plain.

Always night obliterates. In the morning
she will gather her pocketbook and go again
to church, searching still for some low-lit beacon
to mark her faltering way toward the long home.

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Sometimes the Mother Eats Her Young

.Reading time 47 minutes.

By Rachel Cochran
Winner, New Ohio Review Nonfiction Contest selected by Phillip Lopate

I. Snakes

My parents divorce when I’m five, maybe six, at which point Mom takes the three of us and leaves the state, sardine-packs the whole (broken) family unit into the spare room of her parents’ place in Dallas, where she learns a new routine. Works at an ice cream shop. Avoids the kitchen phone when Dad calls each Saturday morning at 9:00. Cries most nights. (We learn to sleep over it.) She dates around, first a guy named Laslie, who takes us to the rodeo, and whose apartment I walk into one day to find that he’s napping naked on the couch. It’s the first naked man I’ve ever seen in person, and it strikes me that the space between his legs looks strangely melted, folded, mottled pink like ground meat. There’s another guy named Andy, the recently divorced brother of my grandparents’ across-the-street neighbor. Andy takes us to a theme park, gives us a day full of sweat and sky and sticky candy. Days later, in the toy aisle of a Family Dollar, my sister shakes a Magic 8-Ball, still in its packaging, and asks it, “Is Mom going to marry Laslie?”

Don’t count on it.

“Is Mom going to marry Andy?”

It is certain.

She marries Andy when he asks, and we follow him down to the Gulf, pile into a spare room at his parents’ place this time, even smaller than the first one (We learn to take up less space.)

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There Was a Young Woman With Cancer

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Susan Blackwell Ramsey

Featured Art: In the Spirit of Hoffmann by Paul Klee

With each remission she’d take it up again,
her search for proof her great love Edward Lear
was influenced by the Irish poet Mangan,
and while we weeded she would bend my ear
with her latest evidence: an owl here,
elsewhere a pussycat or a beard, a wren.
I was polite, but it was pretty thin.
There was one word, though,
some nonsense confabulation that occurred
in Mangan first, so odd that it could not
be accident. Then cancer, like a weed
we’d missed, some snapped-off root or dormant seed.
The last cure killed her. I would give a lot
to be able to recall that word.

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Ode to Texting

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Susan Blackwell Ramsey

Featured Art: Gray landline telephone on a wooden wall by Markus Spiske

Blowdart,
breath-message,
needle so fine
you penetrate even
the defensive hide
of sons,
excite reply.

In yourself
innocent,
language gnat,
midge,
mosquito,
but driving
distracted herds
over death cliffs.

The phone call
is a drunk uncle
barging in,
uninvited,
to slump
on the sofa,

and even e-mail
is a volume
of Trollope
for an elevator ride,
while you
are a wife’s light hand
on the sleeve
mid-party,
two words
barely suspending
the conversation.

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And Another Thing

.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Gregory Djanikian

Featured Art: Still Life with Violin by William Harnett

Such dislike for the woman who’s come late
to the concert making our whole row rise just
as the tenor sax hits its high E-flat and now
she’s sitting next to me and texting—my god!—
during the drummer’s lithe percussive
rhythms which are not my rhythms judging
by my heavy foot beats and my fingers
bending into little arcs of stone and I’m thinking
of some way to annihilate her phone invisibly
maybe with a squint of my eye and how lovely
to imagine the stark O of her mouth
her pretty hands holding nothing but the air
I allow her to breathe O most merciful zapper
that I’ve become father-confessor for all her sins
committed impending unthought-of
her stubborn knees bent to the spectacle
of my very unblind justice which I’d like to take
on tour now-and-then accosting scofflaws
speedsters unholy maître d’s smug
people of all sorts and let’s not forget
the dry cleaner who’s ruined my favorite shirt
through some occult chemical mishap
and of course this woman sitting next to me
whose soft knit-covered ribs I’m trying hard
not to jab my elbow into but she’s smiling now
as if she’d rather be here than anywhere else
riffing with the pianist moving her hips in time

and okay, maybe her lateness wasn’t her fault
maybe her husband needed a significant operation
maybe it was poor Aunt Lavinia texting her
that the vicious dog she heard at the door
was really her own little Shnoozy,
and shouldn’t I maybe introduce myself to her
say what a grand concert this has been judging
from the thunderous standing ovation
everyone’s giving the band including me

though didn’t the set-list seem so short
did they at least play “Splenectomy Blues”
or “Dry Bone Breakdown” and why are we
all filing out when there’s so much more
to be mulled over like an old song of the heart
you’ve carried with you a long time
but can barely hear above all the noise.

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You Are My Sunshine

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Alpay Ulku

Featured Art: Landscape by Paul Nash

We’re in the Taqueria Uptown. People are eating, or gazing out of windows, or talking to each other. The food is delicious and the coffee hot and fresh. A man walks in with a cheap guitar and pleads for our attention, then fumbles through three mangled songs.

You can hear the pain in his voice. If he were drowning in Lake Michigan, he would flail and grab the lifeguard in a bear hug.

How much do we owe this guy, who’s interrupted us at dinner? What is it we owe each other? Nothing at all?

Bless you all, I hope I’ve brought some sunshine to our lives. He looks around. All that playing has made me hungry for a nice steak taco.

Everyone tenses and ignores him.

It’s my dream to be a paid musician.

A jornalero says something in Spanish. The waitress shrugs and writes the order.

Could I have a side of sour cream with that? he asks her. You see, the peppers burn my mouth. He looks over to the jornalero. My mouth is very soft and sensitive.

The jornalero ducks his head, embarrassed and a little pissed. He nods okay.

It’s terrible to be so lonely, he says to no one in particular.

The waitress has laugh lines around her eyes, she likes to laugh. But her face is neutral now. She brings him the sour cream in a saucer with a plastic spoon, and the taco.

Everyone is hoping that nothing more is going to happen next.

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On Rereading Madame Bovary at Forty

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Erin Redfern

Featured Art: The Book of Light by Odilon Redon

Finally we got to read a book
with a woman’s name––your name.
One of the greats, our teacher said.

At fifteen I could not scorn
your far-flung, dark-horse longings.
I saw in you a girl like me seeking

something big as love.
I didn’t know you were Gustave’s
femme mâché, surrogate

for bourgeois greed, excuse
for risqué docudrama,
trumped-up thing riffling open

for anyone’s leisure.
And did he put some body
English on you! Your dainty

feet, your frothy knickers,
your India-ink eyes––
wordless telegraphs

vaulting everyone’s crumbling
moral breastwork.
He made you, mistress,

delectable, then grilled you
over an open flame
of quick trysts and heartbreak.

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Happiness

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Daniel Arias-Gomez

Sometimes it sneaks up on me, as I look out the window
of a bus, for example, and see a woman in huaraches running
in the rain—her right arm waving, her left
hand pulling a boy, a backpack bumping
against his shoulders. The woman opens
her mouth, but I only hear rain
against the glass—a black braid lashes
her neck, and from her arm
dangle two mesh bags with a plaid pattern
woven out of strands of plastic and filled with vegetables, beans, rice. My mother
used those same bags when we went to the market on Sundays. One day
she bought me a bag all for myself, the same
as hers but smaller, in which I dropped
tangerines, peanuts, mazapanes, as I followed her
through market stalls. The bus driver sees
the woman and the boy in time
and stops—her face loosens, and she smiles,
and her smile takes in all the rain
and all the mud on the street and on her huaraches, and she turns
to the boy and says
something to him,
and he smiles back.

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A Brief History of Hunger

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Mary Jo Firth Gillett

Up from the mire of the primordial soup
came one-celled, tiny cavernous bits
whose innards knew a hollow ache only cured
when their shape-shifting borders engulfed
smaller bits, and came a world more complicated,
the paramecium with its oral groove,
the surprising planaria—nick its frontispiece
and the split becomes two hungry heads!—
then came, as ever, competition begetting variation,
to move or not to move, that was the question—
whether it was more propitious to see
with eyes multitudinous or on stalks or both,
whether it was better to be safely anchored,
waiting in camouflage, or to mount an assault,
evolution’s choices simple, almost biblical—seek
and ye shall find or lurk with bait in the hope that all
will come to him who waits, and then came
specialized beaks and teeth, fanciful horns
and coloration prompting procreation,
as well as a multitude of eating adaptations—
the water bird’s fused nostrils, air sacs in head and neck
to absorb impact as the feathered darts, pillaging
angels, plummet—and came homo sapiens with a myriad
of tastes and ways to cook—sear and braise, sauté
and soufflé, pickle and brine—came table manners, the urge
to gorge, to purge, came sorbet and gourmet, foods
delectable and indigestible, epicurean delights, food fights,
and all the ravenous mouths of tomorrow and tomorrow.

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The Oregon Trail

.Reading time 21 minutes.

By Corey Van Landingham

Featured Art: Wooden fence with two black buffaloes by Markus Spiske

When my first boyfriend’s mother died of breast cancer, I spoke with him on the cordless, from the bathtub, trying to console him. He was calm in his grief, and I broke his heart soon after. A cruelty only vaguely acceptable at fourteen. A week before we had snuck out, in the middle of the night, and driven up the snaking mountain roads of southern Oregon. Toward what? Toward something. We could feel a pull all around us, the silence in the woods, the ghosts of the Shasta people passing below our windows.

What did we know of love? Across the screen, in the dark computer labs of our youth where we played The Oregon Trail on our soon-to-be-extinct Apple II computers, love was entering in the names of those you wanted to take with you, west, toward the promised land. We could all begin a new life together, if we purchased the right supplies. Unless we were in a particularly harsh environment, we knew to conduct a brief funeral. Here lies Laura. We wrote epitaphs across the virtual tombstones before continuing down the trail.

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Evening With Little Comfort

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Caitlin Vance

Featured Art: Heron in snow by Ohara Koson

8 p.m. and an even-ing out of the world’s darkness
I’d like to escape. I take comfort in headlights,

phone screens, a busy lawyer’s lamp still on
through the office window. Small resistances

to night’s tyranny. I take comfort in a heavy glass
filled with ice which catches glimmers of light

like wedding rings. There’s comfort in walking down the sidewalk
where matches flicker and last season’s tinsel hangs

on tree branches in a shop window, there’s comfort
in the glitter painted on the eyelids of a drunk woman,

and the voices of strangers saying look at that moon.
At home I lure a firefly in through my window.

My green-eyed cat chases it and scrapes her teeth
against its little light-bulb tail, so all that’s left

to flicker are her eyes and mine and not
the firefly’s tiny dead eyes, gone dark.

My cat goes to sleep. I climb into bed, lower
my eyelids, burn out my last little lamps, surrender.

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Where the Stars Are Hived

.Reading time 3 minutes.

By James Lineberger 
Winner, New Ohio Review Poetry Contest selected by Rosanna Warren

Featured Art: Beautiful woman portrait from Messiah by Samuel Johnson, LL.D

That Saturday, when The ABC’s
of Beekeeping arrived UPS,
he was already a very sick man, survivor
of several major surgeries, all of which were
successful, within limits, but what
could they do, all those
doctors and technicians, to halt the inevitable, which
he knew, of course, we all do, even in those
moments of temporary triumph
when we feel we have won something or other, when
that dratted parathyroid thing
gets plucked and dropped in the bucket, the scar artfully
hidden in a crease of skin, or the triple bypass pains have subsided
and become one of those historical blips
on the mind-screen, these and all the others
will have taken their toll, but when the book arrived
he was nonetheless grateful, knowing full well
he would never get around to the bees or a score
of other projects, but the pride was still there, and some
stubborn sense of accomplishment
that had nothing to do with the rest of his life, the marriages,
the lawyers, the pre-nuptials, and the money,
the money, all that goddamn money, and what did it mean,
any of it, next to this hillside filled with row
upon row of Silver Queen, and the praying mantids
and ladybugs, the chalcid wasps and the pungent
scent of the marigolds, how to speak
of these things or make anyone understand that the garden
is not a weapon against Death,
but a doorway to invite her in, a private place
where they can talk undisturbed
with a growing closeness and affection he never
dreamed possible,
he and this little girl in her denim coveralls with
the bear appliqué and the bottoms
rolled up, the way she holds his fingers in her tiny hand, and her shining face,
upturned, her lips parted in a daughter’s trusting smile.

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Convocation

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By James Lineberger

Featured Art: Hot air balloon by James Nisbet & Co.

Perhaps you’ll find it strange
you no longer appear in my dreams,
but on the other hand
it may serve
to fuel your belief that I never loved you
at all, that we were little
more than a scattering of pixels
in the ether,
the kind of momentary disturbance
a thrush will make
stabbing its bill into the leaves
and tossing them
about in search of food, shaking its head
to clear away the debris
and take whatever sustenance the god of thrushes
has promised
before the world settles back again,
asleep in the wake of a need
more primal than heaven and hell;
yet even when I think of us in that sense, as only
the leftovers at some Olympian event where we were not guests,
but mere canapés, nibbled at
and tossed aside,
left in the dead grass for worms to eat,
still it seems that even
birds and grubs, yea, our very comminuted dust, are cursed
with the memory
of a time when nothing could ever
go wrong,
and we knew all the words to every song.

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My Mother’s Neck

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Sarah Suhr

Trailer parks as a winding tire swing,
              as Zigzags and a one-dollar wine cooler.
                             Trailer parks as an ice cube in sweet tea.

Trailer parks as a drunk dad on a dirt bike,
              and that chunk of flesh gone from his head.
                             Trailer parks as a shatter, as a fist, as a scream.

Black–Camaro trailer parks.
              Black Sabbath, black leash.
                             Ticks-on-the-dog trailer parks.

Fingers-in-a-pussy trailer parks.
              Good-Lord-Grant-us-Grace trailer parks.
                             Trailer parks as Dad who called me shithead.

Naked-Barbie trailer parks,
              Moon-Pies and Welch’s Grape Soda.
                             I’m sorry, I’m sorry trailer parks.

Fish-smoker trailer parks.
              Pot-in-a-closet trailer parks.
                             An aluminum shed full of porn.

Trailer parks as loose underwear,
              lawn mattresses, CoverGirl.
                             Trailer parks as half a box of tree ornaments,

as a repossessed Ford Taurus (cream),
              as a shatter, a fist, a scream.
                             Trailer parks as cans of peas.

Piss-in-a-5-gallon-bucket trailer parks,
              cinderblocks and plywood.
                             Trailer parks as three shredded tires.

I’m sorry, I’m sorry trailer parks.
              Wild poppies growing alongside weeds,
                             and that police photo of Mom’s choked neck.

Unpaid-propane-bill, cold-water trailer parks.
              Trailer parks as a grip, a gasp, a little hand on a loaded gun.

                             A-phone-call-from-jail trailer parks.

Read More

Maintenance

.Reading time 6 minutes.

By David Gullette

Listen,
            while you were over ogling ogives and trefoils,
                                                                                           chancels and bays,
the things you left behind were quietly giving up,
flying to pieces, falling apart almost together.
            That grinding whine up front you thought was brakes failing?
It was, but that’s not all:
            the last shred of resistance is gone from the shocks,
            every bump is now like the thump of a flawed heart,
but that’s not all:
            the tires have gone slick and bland in your absence,
            unevenly worn like the martyr that marries a slob,
wait, there’s more:
             not only can’t you stop at will, you can’t get started,
             the juice is dead
             some slackness in belt or disc
            something not flowing
            the black box caked with inertia.
Listen,
            you cried at the Royal Wedding and swallowed the cream,
meanwhile the tube lost its sight: snow, garbled snow in its face
            and a twisting of speech unknown in Babel, O
things have been going to pot,
            the paint peeling off your house,
            leprous, obscene, what about that?
The food has vanished under the weed,
the path has forgotten where in the world it was headed,
the mower that might begin to set things aright
is all smoke and flame and missing parts,
shorn of its function.
            Maybe you thought as you turned away toward exotic joys
            the objects you’d secretly started to hate
            would await your return unchanged
            loyal and fixed in their whatness?
You forgot the revenge of decay, you forgot
how even immobile things, unloved, blindly careen and plummet,
how care is a constant curing,
our bulletin first last and always: Aid.

Okay
            you’re back: the fat and languor are through.
The wind has shifted to pelt what’s left of the garden.
Strange birds are swarming the shorter days.
            You dreamed and the world dissolved
            but already the perfumes of distant sugars
            begin to escape from your larder,
            and you open your eyes to the list of your derelictions,
            whelmed with the staggering costs of restitution.
It is time you accept your share in the damage
and spend what needs to be spent.
Repair.

Read More

Borges’s Farewell to Meadville, Pennsylvania

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Stephen Myers

Featured Art: brown leather arm chair by Markus Spiske

By then, old age had laid siege to Borges
for many years. That evening, two handlers
one at each elbow, guided him, bent
like a question mark, up a short staircase
to his seat before the assemblage.
His voice, at first, was an ancient raven’s.
But finally, out of the brain’s dark nest,
he brought forth two lines from Virgil’s Georgics.
They glittered before him. His tongue loosened.
The night heat pressed in. A fragment of
Sappho. Erato beat the blackness back.
His listeners perceived her as wanderers
hear wings among pyrocanthus branches
under a thin moon. A couplet from Dryden,
a silver chain. “Ulalume” a small chalice.
He shifted more easily. One of his men
stepped forward with a glass of water.
Outside, sudden thunder, intermittent
flashes. After he’d spoken, they brought on
the musicians. He sat tapping his cane
to “St. James Infirmary,” smiling,
leaning forward toward the low-lit stage
as if in submission, he who had loved
the Goddess, and she him, letting himself
be lifted and carried off on the shoulders
of Milt Hinton’s gold-greaved bass.

Read More

It Depends

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Lisa Rhoades 

Featured Art: Still Life with Bottle, Carafe, Bread, and Wine by Claude Monet

We are all sick. We are all dying.
This is more or less
the truth, depending on the day.
Depending on the location,
some more than others
are headed home with hospice, toward
a tragic confrontation, a chicken bone, black ice.
Maybe it’s because of breakfast—
years of bitter coffee, the eggs
we were warned away from,
bracelets of sweet cereal O’s.
Perhaps it would help
if more of us knew CPR,
unless it all depends
on the weather of our hearts.
Don’t be fooled
by how quickly flesh folds
back into itself to heal,
or by the ones who are limping,
waxy-skinned and quiet. They will not carry
your part of this forever.
Maybe you should cover your cough,
not be so careless with knives.

Read More

Florida Man Throws Alligator into Wendy’s Drive-Thru Window

.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Mitchell Jacobs

Featured Art: Alligators by John Singer Sargent

The attendant hands him a soda and turns her back, thinking
of straws—how she’s running low, and their candy-red stripes,
and the way everything here comes wrapped up in paper, and

then a 3½-foot alligator is clawing the air.
                                                                          As if she pressed
the wrong button on the register. Or maybe, during lunch rush,
she’d ignored an oncoming hurricane tossing them about.

In any case, she shrieks, finding for this alligator non sequitur
no earthly explanation. Back when the heavens functioned
with less subtlety, she might have turned to the logic of myth.

The god of rapacity took the shape of a lizard
to penetrate the food hall’s oil-glossed aperture.

Perhaps the oracle of Jupiter, FL on his faux-leather throne
delivers this cold-blooded message to confront corporate greed
teeth to teeth.
                        Not that the police have succeeded

in extracting a motive. The culprit’s Frosty-smeared lips are sealed.
His charge: assault with a deadly weapon. Yet it rings untrue.
For Florida Man, we need a more particular punishment:

accused of wielding a projectile reptile,
the defendant shall be flung naked
into the Loxahatchee Slough.

If indeed he is a criminal, there will be no proper dunking.
If he is a hero, he will don no duckweed laurel as he rises
from the mud. But the surveillance camera remembers:

it’s not so wide, the gap between the actual and the possible.
About the space from Nissan Frontier to take-out window
where an alligator, bewildered, sees the kitchen’s steam

like fog over a marsh in red bloom, smells the billows
of meaty fragrance, hears the gatekeeper’s yodel of welcome,
and for a moment
                                 flies.

Read More

The Reflex

.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Mitchell Jacobs

Featured Art: Boats and setting sun by Ohara Koson

The scent of shampoo reminds me of carrots.
There’s an explanation, I swear, surfacing
from a developing-Polaroid brown. It’s April.
At recess an upside-down pizza slab is gooing
into the cracked blacktop, and a grainy beat
blasts from some girl’s hot-orange earbuds.
On the grass all the boys are playing wallball
with one of those rubber balls like a big pink eraser,
and when I’m up I don’t chuck it far enough
so Austin says, “Come on, Mitchell, you can’t
even throw like the girls,” which is heartbreaking
for a bunch of reasons. Back home, Duran Duran’s
“The Reflex” spins in the Discman on my bathtub rim.
You’ve gone too far this time, and I’m dancing
on the Valentine. My tunes are twenty years out of date
but I know them by heart. I’ve been lying there half an hour,
tub empty, stoking a burn in my gut. Next day in L.A.
(that’s Language Arts), it’s Fat Shawn’s turn at vocab charades
but he just stands there thinking until somebody shouts
“Rotund!” and that’s not his word but it is the end
of the game. That’s how cruelty works around here.
I’m no Shawn but I am Tree Kid and no one
tells me why. The reflex is a lonely child . . .
Jake calls me a poser for wearing skate shoes,
which is how I learn I wear skate shoes, and then
I chase him and kick him with those shoes. Mostly
I’m a head-down kind of kid. I don’t peek at the pull-down map
during the geography quiz. I don’t snicker when
the health teacher says gluteus maximus, but I am
the one who laughs when she can’t spell epididymis.
Another night and it’s the tub again, lights off, interpreting
the song with nonsense lyrics I’m sure have something
to do with all this clench and spasm. The reflex is a door
to finding treasure in the dark. I un-twist-tie
the plastic produce bag and glob out more Pantene, hating
the boys who run around cocksure with their narrow
calves and their throwing arms with actual
visible muscles and those stupid impossible taut butts
and I’ll show them with this soaped-up carrot
what I can take, how it stings, how I tighten my fist
as I hear them spit out my name.

Read More

Love’s Been Good to Me

.Reading time 40 minutes.

By Andrew Robinson

Featured Art: Zurich by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner

The girl from Zurich is deathly quiet. But even in a king-sized bed her presence prickles me awake. Her fetal body rises, falls, a pillow wedged between us. A natural end approaches now; I’m sure she knows it too. We met six months ago, flotsamed onto the misfit table at a Chinese wedding. There was nothing to do but drink, and seven wines into the night we decided to go slumming at Orchard Towers—Singapore’s neon throwback of tacky sleaze. Sailors go there for the prostitutes, and bankers for the irony, but for her it was the Filipino bands. I love to dance to them, she said, they always try so hard. But she wouldn’t go there without a man, and so, still in my suit at 4 a.m., I held her as she cried on the sticky dancefloor. Cried with drunken empathy for the Indonesian whores she was dancing with. At their age I was still in school, she said, And they have to sell themselves to these fucking men. She feinted at the sweaty marines, bewildered with Burmese whisky and shore leave, and she had me at that. I’ve always been a sucker for compassion—it doesn’t always serve me well.

Then as she sniffed into the smoky bathroom I texted her something about goodness—I don’t remember what—which showed up as her Facebook status the next day. But like the young marines, she was shipping out in the morning, her company posting her to Paris. And it wasn’t until her stint was up—four months later—that we got to meet again. And all that texting and mailing and chatting online, it didn’t serve to warn us that after just a few weeks it wouldn’t be working the way we’d hoped. And now it’s coming to an end—no relish of redemption here—my thoughts rise on a sleepy surge of affection. The girl from Zurich: I’ll remember her—I will.

Read More

Seafaring

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Marie-Elizabeth Mali

Featured Art: Eddystone Lighthouse by Mary Altha Nims 

As if love were a lighthouse and I
the creaking rain-lashed vessel

heaving through the waves.
In the wheelhouse, a heart

that refuses to give up, despite
sharp coral under surface churn

waiting to turn the boat
into a rusted hull the sun vermillions

each morning for photographers
who revel in the sea’s dominion.

I’m tired of chop but don’t remember
calm, the hatches battened down

so long they’re salted shut.
No, that’s not true. That’s someone

else’s story, not mine. I say,
for every hungry ghost in the hold,

ten thousand iron-spined sailors
with rope-calloused hands navigate

around the coral minefields, eyes
on the lighthouse, its revolving beam.

Read More

I Never Met a Flower That Yelled At Me

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Julie Moore 

Featured Art: Flowers by L. Prang and Co

her neighbor always says, explaining why,
every year, he plants & hangs
geraniums, begonias, impatiens, petunias,
even blue lobelia, amid his blooming bulbs.

She wants that sentiment to infect her, too,
the summer her husband leaves.
So on the hottest day Ohio can muster, she faces
the roses her husband sank in soil ten years before.

On the side of the house, they grow weed-loud—
even cantankerous saplings push through
the bushes, silencing all the kind words in their red mouths.
Everything has to go.

As she digs, thorns & muscular weeds
thick with prickles recite
her husband’s remarks on her skin,
scratching, clawing, tearing:

I can’t commit to you 100%, only 75%.
Shovel meets hard earth again & again.
Gasping for air, feeling her back spasm in protest,
she clings to the wood handle. You’re too hardline.

You want too much. She lets the sun scold her,
lets the heavy air weigh on her shoulders,
lets all of it, the whole fucking force
of his question—What do you mean I ‘disregard’ you?—

fuel her resistance, her freedom to say,
No, you & your furious mess
will not stand, not here, not any longer.
In their place, she leaves behind

what perennial peace she can—
pink Asiatic lilies, purple coneflowers,
& threadleaf coreopsis shining
their favor without ridicule or question.

Read More

Here Below

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Sarah Carleton

Featured Art: The quadrille at the Moulin-Rouge by Louis Abel-Truchet

Before a careless bulldozer buried him under a ton of dirt
he played with impeccable pulse.
He anchored tunes with a standup bass,

left fingers spidering, right hand patting pauses,
a running commentary that thumped below the chitchat,
bristling with off-color intent.

Just as hothouse plants rooted and swelled
to his sweet, muttered, nasty guy’s-guy nothings,
we set our feet in the soil of his crude jokes and thrived.

His wife didn’t pay much mind to the dirty stories
and sly non-secrets. When he laid their deck,
he penciled women’s names on the underside of the planking,

like an ode to abundance, and she just laughed, shrugging.
We take our cue from her and refuse to fret,
but celebrate him in smut and subtext.

Without crawling among the snakes to check, we hope
we made the list––divas of warm skin and rayon dresses
immortalized on a two-by-ten––

and we also aspire to be like his wife,
who stands aboveboard, rolling her eyes, knowing
her name has been etched more than once in that slatted dark.

Read More

Giverny

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Emily Sernaker

Featured Art: Bridge over a Pond of Water Lilies by Claude Monet

I try not to think about falling in love
too much, although sometimes I look
at pictures of Giverny.

You can visit you know.
See Claude Monet’s lily pad garden,
that famous footbridge.

I enjoy a good trip with my girlfriends.
A walk with my sweet mother.
But I want to see Giverny

with my partner. Whom I haven’t met.
Who might not want to fly 3,585 miles
to see a lily pad garden in France,

all of those pastels up close and floating.
Sometimes I check the website
confirming it’s open. That anyone can go.

Read More

Breakup, Break Down, Break Open: Intimate Partner Violence and Life Inside a Daily Ending

.Reading time 14 minutes.

Feature: Of Essays and Exes

By Sonya Huber

Some relationships fall apart in a gradual and mutual cooling, and others rise toward a crescendo of irreconcilable differences. Still others are threaded with periodic or daily heartbreak and even violence. Imagine living a love in which every moment was a breakup, and every next moment was a reunion, over and over and over. The essay of domestic violence is the essay of a living bonfire of a breakup, an extreme breakup in slow motion, and in this writing we can see essayists shining a light on heartbreak, but also on thornier issues of identity and personal safety.

Many of the best essays in this genre have to deal with misconceptions about domestic violence first, since the query applied to an abused person in a relationship is often: “Why didn’t she leave?,” why wasn’t a simple breakup the solution, as if the abused had a decision to make and then failed to make it correctly. For some people affected by domestic violence, though, the breakup hovers as a longed-for destination, an impossible shore to reach. Others fear the breakup due to real hazards and the effects of trauma. And so the question reveals the asker’s naiveté. The nature of violence is that it won’t simply be left. Violence pursues, damages, threatens, and changes the reality that contains it. Several notable essays have dealt with this painful truth.

Read More

On Breaking Up with the Dream of Your Former Self: Megan Daum’s “My Misspent Youth”

.Reading time 10 minutes.

Feature: Of Essays and Exes

By Kelly Kathleen Ferguson

We all know “you can’t go home again,” but what does it mean to long for a place we’ve never inhabited, to love that idea so much that it feels like the beginning of a relationship? And what does it mean to finally admit defeat and break up with that ideal?

Megan Daum, in “My Misspent Youth,” writes of her infatuation with—and split from—New York City, and her long-cherished imagination of the life she would lead there. Daum begins by recounting a time in high school when she first saw a couple’s artsy, romantic Upper West Side apartment. From that moment she was driven by an “unwavering determination to live in a pre-war, oak-floored apartment on or at least in the immediate vicinity of 104th Street and West End Avenue.” Daum goes on to detail how this obsession influenced every major decision of her late teens and twenties, until she discovers—as in most relationships—there’s no escaping money trouble.

Read More

New Ohio Review Issue 21 (Originally Published Spring 2017)

.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 21 compiled by Averie Hicks

Push

.Reading time 3 minutes.

By George Bilgere
Featured Art: by Clay Banks

I’m trying to look as if I’m suffering.
I have this anguished expression on my face
but it’s wasted since I’m wearing a surgical mask
and anyway the focus here is really on my wife
and the doctor is right there between her legs
and he’s shouting Push, and my wife
is doing this astounding thing, she’s pushing
yet another human being into the world, a world
that so far seems to be pushing back,

and the baby’s heartbeat is down to 90
so the doc says, I think maybe one more try,
then we do the Caesarean, so things in the room
really are a bit tense, it’s definitely a moment
that demands a lot of attention, and my wife
is gathering whatever shreds of strength
remain in the shaking exhausted sleeve of flesh
her body has become, the blood and sweat and fluids
everywhere, and this is It!—when I hear
the attending nurse standing just behind me
saying to this guy in scrubs standing next to her,
I think he’s the anesthesiologist’s assistant,

Well, just because Karen says she has a boyfriend
doesn’t necessarily mean she won’t go out with you,
and the guy says, his voice rising because my wife
really is screaming quite loudly at this point,
Yeah, OK, I guess I should give it a try, I mean
what’s the worst that can happen, other than
getting shot down and looking like a total fool,

and the nurse says, as the doctor is shouting PUSH, 
Yeah, but hasn’t it been like a long dry spell for you?
Aren’t you getting a little desperate here? And the guy
laughs and my wife screams again and the doctor
says Yes and into the world comes the bloody head
followed by the naked lovely bloody little boy
insanely ill-prepared for any of this, and I guess
the guy actually is going to ask Karen out
and I say go for it.

Read More

Void Unfilled

.Reading time 3 minutes.

By George Bilgere
Featured Art: Long Exposure Couple by Jr Korpa

I walk past Erin’s house at dusk
and there she is at her kitchen table,
working on her book about the Reformation.

She needs to finish it if she wants to get tenure,
but it’s slow going because being a single mom
is very difficult what with child care and cooking dinner
and going in to teach her courses on the Reformation,
which I can see her writing about right now,
her face attractive yet harried in the glow
of her laptop as she searches for le mot juste.

Meanwhile Andrew, her nine-year-old son,
shoots forlorn baskets in the driveway
under the fatherless hoop bolted to the garage
by the father now remarried and living in Dayton,
as Andrew makes a move, a crossover dribble,
against the ghost father guarding him, just as I did
when I was nine, my daddy so immensely dead,
my mother inside looking harried and scared,
studying thick frightening books for her realtor’s exam.

And although I hardly know Erin,
I feel I should walk up, knock on her door,
and when she opens it (looking harried,
apologizing for the mess) ask her to marry me.
And she will smile with relief and say
yes, of course, what took you so long,
and she’ll finish her chapter on the Reformation
and start frying up some pork chops for us

as I walk out to the driveway and exorcise
the ghost father with my amazing Larry Bird jump shot,
and tomorrow I’ll mow the lawn and maybe
build a birdhouse with the power tools slumbering
on the basement workbench where the ghost
father left them on his way to Dayton.

I will fill the void, having left voids of my own,
except that my own wife and son are waiting
down the street for me to come home for dinner,
and so I just walk on by, leaving the void unfilled,
as Erin brushes her hair from her face and types out
a further contribution to the body of scholarship
concerning the Reformation, and Andrew
sinks a long beautiful jumper in the gloom.

Read More

Horseplay

.Reading time 1 minute.

By George Bilgere

Featured Art: Abstraction, 1906 by Abraham Walkowitz

I am floating in the public pool, an older guy
who has achieved much, including a mortgage,
a child, and health insurance including dental.

I have a Premier Rewards Gold Card
from American Express, and my car
is quite large. I have traveled to Finland.
In addition, I once met Toni Morrison
at an awards banquet and made some remarks
she found “extremely interesting.” And last month
I was the subject of a local news story
called “Recyclers: Neighbors Who Care.” In short,
I am not someone you would take lightly.

But when I begin to playfully splash my wife,
the teenaged lifeguard raises her megaphone
and calls down from her throne, “No horseplay in the pool,”
and suddenly I am twelve again, a pale worm
at the feet of a blonde and suntanned goddess,
and I just wish my mom would come pick me up.

Read More

I Tie My Shoes

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By George Bilgere

Featured art: ‘Sorrowing Old Man (At Eternity’s Gate)’ by Vincent Van Gogh

I’m walking home late after work
along Meadowbrook Road when I realize
the guy half a block ahead of me
is Bill, from Religious Studies.
I recognize his bald spot, like a pale moon
in the dusk, and his kind of shuffling,
inward-gazing gait. Bill walks
like a pilgrim, measuring his stride
for the long journey, for the next step
in the hard progression of steps.

And while I like Bill, and in some ways
even admire him (he wrote something important
maybe a decade ago on Vatican II),
I slow down a little bit. I even stop
and pretend to tie my shoes, not wanting
to overtake him, because I’m afraid
of the thing he’s carrying, which is big
and invisible and grotesque, a burden
he’s lugging through the twilight, its weight
and unwieldiness slowing him down,
as it has for five years, since a drunk
killed his teenaged son, and Bill’s bald spot
dawned like a tonsure and his gait
grew tentative and unsure, and his gaze
turned inward as his body curled itself
around the enormous, boy-shaped
emptiness, and the question
he spends his days asking God.

And if I caught up with him
and we walked together through the dusk
he would ask me about my own son,
who is three, and the vast prospect of the future
onto which that number opens, involving
Little League and camp-outs and touch
football in the backyard would hang there,
terrible and ablaze in the autumn twilight,
and the two of us would have to slog
down Meadowbrook Road like penitents,
adding its awful weight to the weight of his son
on our backs, our shoulders, and so I fail
Bill, and stop and pretend to tie my shoes.

Read More

Facebook Sonnet

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Tanya Grae

Featured Art: by Prateek Katyal

Someone thinks I’m beautiful again
                & likes posts of my day, comments.
I stifle smiles & feel uncontainable—
                bungeed off ether & the interplay.
Punch-drunk in this blue-sky space,
                a rush of the past, the in-between,
whole chapters, I open annuals
                & albums from storage. His change
in status: single. Papers in hand,
                this backlit man heaves toward
the kite’s trailing end: What if?—
                that butterfly. My youngest lights
onto my lap. Who’s that?—
                as a key turns the lock, I log off.

Read More

Your Mother Wouldn’t Approve

.Reading time 44 minutes.

By Krystal Sanders

Of the way you spend Saturday morning in your room, instead of helping Papaw with the lawn work. You watch him on the riding mower, in customary slacks and suspenders, coasting back and forth beneath your window as if the ragged scream of the machine will summon you like a siren to your manly duty. You raise the binoculars Papaw used when he was stationed in West Africa during WWII, long before his shoulders bowed and his skin darkened with liver spots. They are clunky, large in your hands even though you’ve had a growth spurt and you’re well on your way to catching up to Peter, who’s a whole six feet and had college basketball scouts watching him at every game last season. It was Peter’s senior year of high school, your freshman year. The fall had been glorious, riding the cloud of popularity as Peter Thompson’s younger brother. The other kids, the teachers and coaches, cafeteria ladies, librarians, all looking at you with an expectation that was not yet a burden. You joined the Fellowship of Christian Students, which Peter was president of, and took the Advanced Placement classes he’d taken. You had more friends than you’d ever had before. Through the lens, Papaw’s face jumps up at you. You’re intimately aware of every wrinkle, every nose hair. He guides the mower in long, straight lines, first in front of your window at the corner of the house, on the second floor, and then away toward the county road. The motor’s howl falls to a low growl, builds back up as he returns exactly two feet to the left, is eventually reduced to a low grumble at the back of the house.

Your mother wouldn’t approve of the way you watch the world, binoculars pressed to your face, aimed into the neighborhood across the county road. The man who owns the nearest corner lot, 5371, has some kind of shepherd. The dog roams along its chainlink fence, pants in the heat, takes a shit. You catch a glimpse of motion deeper in the neighborhood and sit up straight. You focus on the door that caught your eye, at 5377 striding out of the back of her house in shorts and a man’s plaid shirt. She is headed to the metal trash barrel at the back of the lot. You know she will stand there for a long time, and then go back inside. You imagine burying your fingers in the tangle of her long hair. She is barefoot, and the thought of the stiff crunchiness of the yellow grass against the tender arches of her feet almost makes you moan.

Read More

The Worn-Out West

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Pamela Davis

Featured Art: by Jannes Glas

I drive past motel signs advertising
free cable for bikers, truckers numbed
by cracked asphalt. A looseness,
as if everything is slipping
away, and the sky shaved thin as mica.

Stretch of dusty storefronts hung
with local art—warriors astride
painted horses, mesas. The Rio Grande
cuts in and out, shape-shifting
between cottonwoods. In the café,
regulars remove their hats, sit alone.

One gathers himself judge-straight
as the waitress refills his mug,
her bar rag slung over a bare shoulder.
She gifts him a sudden, chipped-tooth
grin. Yesterday she banned
a drifter for fouling the toilet she lets
everyone use. Today she walks a cup
of coffee across the street for
a homeless guy wrapped in his own arms.

On her own this young, every new boss—
town, lover—will treat her like a stolen car.

Smooth, how she glides
from radio to grill. Easy, her talk,
comebacks quick. And outside, a mountain
looms, split long ago by a blast. Wire mesh hugs
some of it back. I want to tell her temporary
lasts a long time. The air is thin
up here. It’s nobody’s idea of home.

Read More

What My Massage Therapist Girlfriend Discovers When I’m On Her Table For the First Time

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Robert Wilder

Featured Art: ‘Avocado’ (1916) by Amada Almira Newton

Your right leg is shorter than your left.
There’s something funny happening in your left shoulder.
You should change your detergent and go fragrance-free.
Is this too much pressure?

You once had a girlfriend who threw bottles at your head.
You haven’t slept well in decades.
You store all the grief for your dead mother in your solar plexus.
Breathe.

You grind your teeth.
You have the musical tastes of a seventeen-year-old girl.
There’s tension in your neck which runs down your left side.
No one believes that you are not attracted to Rebecca.

Does this hurt?
Let me stretch you out a bit more.

For someone with such little flexibility, you have a surprisingly good vertical.
You’ve wounded more people than you’re willing to admit.
Your father will die soon and you’ll have no clue where to turn.
You and your brothers will drift apart.
Sorry about that. Just trying to break it up.

Nothing will get easier for a long time.
You loved the bottle thrower something fierce.
You can’t hear your mother’s voice anymore.
Turn on your side, please.

You still love the sun sneaking through cracked windows.
You have a closet full of clothes that no longer fit.
Holding your breath won’t help either of us.
There you are.

Read More

Stuff

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Claudia Monpere

Featured Art: [Villa d’un Chiffonier (Ragpicker’s Shack)], 1920 by Eugène Atget

I saw you, daughter, sneaking
a garbage bag of my treasures
into your car. Those heaps of eyeglasses are art.

Never mind the cracked lenses
and broken hinges, the bent frames.
Some day I’ll make a sculpture or hanging lamp.
I’ll make a mobile.

The broken picture frames and dried-out
pens. Even the bottle caps beg
to be known. And how patient
those stacks of hotel soap.
Waiting. Just in case.

Yes newspapers haystack the walls.
But it’s all there: knowledge at my
fingertips. The postman will bring more.

There is an ocean liner inside my heart
that waits to set sail. The crowds wave
at the dock. My shades are drawn.
Bring me, daughter.
Don’t take. Bring me a basket 
brimming with words.

Not fester, not filth—
fang words that surgeon my heart.
Bring me gossamer, lagoon, violet-crowned
hummingbird.
Bring me, daughter, elixir of cloud.

Read More

A Race Car Made of Sand

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Margot Wizansky

Featured Art: “Beach of Bass Rocks, Gloucester, Massachusetts” by Frank Knox Morton Rehn

Everything made my mother nervous:
the baby crying, sand on the floor, the flies.
So we went out to the beach.
I took my bucket and shovel.
My mother sat my little brother up on her shoulders
and carried the towels and a canvas chair for my father,
who was too weak to carry anything.
He wore his cabaña suit, light green with white palm trees,
his legs, pale like the sheets in the hotel room.
He hadn’t shaved.
His face had been blue for weeks,
the circles under his eyes, dark as his beard.
Mother said I was too heavy to sit in his lap.
All afternoon I dug a string of frantic little ponds.
Nothing was right; my back was sunburnt;
my father hardly moved.
Uncle Robert came, like a bus from the city,
to build me a race car of sand, with jar lids
for hubcaps and for headlights, clamshells,
and he found a quoit on the beach for the steering wheel.
He dug me a driver’s seat that just fit,
and a rumble seat for my little brother.
My father peeled me an apple with his penknife,
in one long piece, that didn’t ever break.

Read More

Some Things Rosa Can’t Tell Little Esmeralda

.Reading time 35 minutes.

By Barbara de la Cuesta

Featured Art: by Farrukh Beg

A late afternoon after work, Rosa puts the flame down under the rice and beans and sits with her feet up in Laureano’s recliner. The knock on the front door Rosa thinks must be Mondo’s social worker, the only person she knows who doesn’t just walk in the back door. Mondo is in detention again for defacing a wall, or an overpass, something.

But it isn’t the social worker, it’s little Esmeralda, daughter of the Mexican grocer on Moody Street, who comes in politely, sits opposite her with a notebook, and asks Rosa can she ask her some questions. Hah, like the social worker, Rosa thinks, then corrects herself. This is a child she used to see sitting on the floor of her father’s abasto sorting red beans. The girl tells Rosa she needs to write a biography of an older person for her fifth grade class.

Ah, Rosa, with her aching feet, feels old.

Not old, old; just older than me, says the child. She used to be in Rosa’s catechism class at St. Justin’s and was notably better behaved and brighter than any of the others.

Hokay, says Rosa, not yet realizing what will happen to her.

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Miles

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Craig van Rooyen

Featured Art: by Mike Lewinski

It was dark, sure, but the city’s halo
whitewashed the stars.
We drank good bourbon from Dixie cups
to mock our sophistication.
Two black men and a white one
who needed a brother.
We drank to Ghana advancing,
not so naïve to believe
they had a chance against England.
We toasted our wives of many colors
and our barefoot children chasing fireflies
like the first night in Eden.
But it was Oakland.
So when the boy climbed the porch steps
cupping a winged and glowing offering,
I called him by the wrong name, as if
I did not know him, as if his father
was not my friend.
The brothers exchanged their look,
too polite to call me out
on a summer night in paradise.
And we all pretended not to notice
the bats that let go their roosts
to flap old patterns in our chests.
Suddenly I felt like humming
“Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” professing my love
for Serena, telling them all about my black Scout leader
whom I hadn’t thought about in years,
assembling, in other words, my own minstrel show
to prove how down I am.
All the while, the party soundtrack plays on
through hidden speakers, Kind of Blue 
from the end of that gorgeous terrible horn:
Live, no net, each note feeling its way
into the dark as if we can still improvise,
as if there is always another chance
to get it right before the night ends.
The boy, who isn’t Miles after all,
keeps coming closer
to show me his gift, opening the dark
hemispheres of his hands so I can see
the pulsing fireflies lift off
to join the others in the city’s halo
far above our heads.

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Mitigation

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Craig van Rooyen

Featured Art: by Romina Farías

Somehow it’s good to know
the wildfires have not touched the face
of our local TV anchor
delivering her lines
with a touch of sadness that never approaches
despair, even as her bangs cascade
onto her forehead like evening clouds
descending the Coast Range.
I think of her in her dressing room
before she offers her face to us—
the one that will help us fall asleep—
while a line of flames somewhere far away
descends the ridge and licks into a kitchen,
melting the refrigerator magnets,
popping cans of spray oil, and setting
the dog out back to howling, jerking
against its chain.
I see her in front of the mirror,
surrendering to the ministrations of tiny brushes— 
a makeup artist leaning in like a lover.
Foundation first, an A-side attack
on brow furrows and laugh lines.
Then concealer to suppress the advance
of crow’s feet into the Botox buffer zone.
Within a half-hour, the spread of creases
and fissures 95% contained.
The brushes flit across her face
like prayer flags, and I can almost smell
the warm breath of the girl who sticks out
the tip of her tongue, leaning close
to line the boundary
where the fullness of a lower lip
begins its concave plunge
into smooth white chin.
Our TV anchor practicing her lines,
mastering her face.
We need to love her for this.
For the way she shows us how to keep
a chin from trembling, an eye from twitching
even while the chained dog
curls in on itself in the burning.

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Parrots Over Suburbia

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Craig van Rooyen

Featured Art: by McGill Library

There are two,
as if some ark came to rest
on the high school football field
and Noah flung them through an open window
to test whether this cement-skinned town
can sustain life.
See them there, trimming
lava-dipped wings in the sky above Costco,
bills curved like question marks.
And what do they ask, out of earshot
of the man with sunflower seeds?
Do you know what it means
to circle, to draw and redraw the tightening
circumference of your life
above the grid of 50-year roofs,
in steak smoke risen from backyard barbecues?
The parrots’ owner is no prophet.
Summer evenings, he wrenches
on a ’67 Mustang that drips its innards
onto his Avenue L driveway.
And at dusk, he makes his arm a perch,
takes the two from their cage,
feeds them from his lips, knowing
if they love him he need not maim their wings.
So they fly in circles
and on every pass above the fenced playground,
swoop near to watch the girl in high-tops and earbuds
swinging, head thrown back to reveal
her pale and wild throat.

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Steno

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Mark Kraushaar

“Hypergraphia is a behavioral condition
characterized by the intense desire to write . . . ”
“It is a symptom associated with temporal lobe epilepsy.”

It’s as if . . . , he says, It’s like . . . , or, It’s ABOUT
things being simply THERE, molecular,
blue, strewn, flattened, aflame.
He pulls up the shade and looks out.
There’s this kind of accounting he does:
sidewalk, hedgerow, phone pole.
He lists the round and the ready-made.
He notes the hand-carved and the curved.
He sorts by color and shape.
He lists by size and by brightness.
He notes the nautical, normal and nameless.
It’s Wednesday and he’s moved from columns
to rows: alphabetic, magnetic, majestic . . .

He lists the unowned and the changed,
the charged, unsuitable and smooth.
He leans forward turning the page.
It’s like . . . , It’s as if . . . , he says,
as if these THINGS, this STUFF:
hunk and clod, object and article, gizmo,
whatnot, doodad, exactingly placid, substantial
and actual, for knowing nothing,
know it all: guruish shoe-tree, savvy axle.
He opens the door and sits on the stoop.
It’s as if each thought over-laps the last.
A girl on a bike goes by.

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Fable

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Sally Bliumis-Dunn

Featured Art: Formerly attributed to Zhao Boju (ca. 1120s-ca.1162)

People often spoke
about her mousy behavior,

her gray squeaky voice,
but no one made the connection

that the words they used,
which she devoured like giant crumbs,

commenced her change,
so that when she drew the curtains

to darken the air
it was not a sign of depression

as they had begun to suppose
but simply a trait as she became

more and more nocturnal,
scurrying about the rooms, the tail

of her housecoat trailing.

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Other People’s Ranch Dressing

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Kate Maclam

Featured Art: by Au Lido Plate no.14 (1920)

I wanted to smell less like
a restaurant and more like
a woman.
I tried my best.
All the women I know could
have sex with famous men
like J Hamm or Leo D or BJ.
All the women I know smell like
French Vanilla perfume
and fresh cigarettes.
They smell like thin people.
When I describe them I say,
she is thin like a rich person.
I say, she eats paper
and melts diamonds,
to stay thin—
she huffs paint thinner.
I say, she has never touched
another person’s ranch dressing
or brushed it onto her thigh
where it looked like
the seed of a famous man
or anyone really.

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Safehouse

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Sandy Gingras

Featured Art: by Pierre Châtel-Innocenti

Pull up any rug, there’s a hole.
An easy chair sits on a trap door, which leads to
a slide. I am still surprised, after all these years,
how many tunnels are in my house.

In the basement, which is under the place
you would consider the basement, is
what I call “the secret room.” But all my rooms
are really secret rooms. It has a large
colored map on the wall, a folding table under
a fluorescent light, a red couch.

I go down there to find
a way to slip something into my dreams or to
block my escape routes. I am a spy, don’t
you know? I don’t look like a spy, and I’m paid
nothing for my work, but I do it anyway.
I was called, as they say, to duty.

Under my clothes, I’m naked.
Within my ID card is another identity.
I can change at will. I have a machine
that scrambles my words into code,
a pill I can bite to shift my mood,
a certification to never sleep.

Now I must run.
Even though there is no such thing as a
hiding spot in this house. Even if I put on
my invisible suit. Even if I cover my face
so I can’t see myself.
In the bathroom cupboard is a shelf that lifts
to reveal a chute which looks like it’s for laundry,
but it isn’t. I can’t hear when I hit bottom.

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