Safehouse

May 28, 2017.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.

Nightmare on Elm Street

May 28, 2017.Reading time 3 minutes.

By T. J. Sandella

Featured art by Vrouw aan kaptafel

Though they’re meant to be our protagonists,
we detest these teenagers
who fall for the same tricks and traps
in every film
and because they keep coming back
dumber and hotter
decade after decade
with their perky breasts and discernible abs
and the way they throw themselves mercilessly
against one another
in backseats and on twin beds
and because they smoke cigarettes
and slug soda and beer
and because dialysis and diabetes
will never creep like Freddy
into their dreams.
Because they’re always in love
and loneliness is as unimaginable
as feigning sleep
so the person next to you
will stop kissing your neck
though you still care for her
and he’s still beautiful
or maybe you don’t
and maybe he’s not
or maybe the workday has emptied you
of desire for anything
but seven hours of silence
and maybe these are the words you say
that can’t be forgiven. Curse the children
for not knowing
that if you live long enough
life is mostly washing dishes
and may they suffer
for not believing
that young love dies
when the first person
goes to college
and meets a sorority girl
who can put her legs behind her head
or the backup point guard with the bulging
biceps. Twelve bucks is a bargain
to see these brainless babes
pierced by pitchforks, their chiseled flanks flayed
and hung from hooks. It’s because
their failures will never grind them
into something so small
that they’ll go to a theater alone,
buy some popcorn, and sit in the glow
of another slasher reboot, trying to distract themselves
from their disappointing lives.

Loving by Numbers

May 28, 2017.Reading time 35 minutes.

By Frances Orrok

Featured Art: by Nick Fewings

10
my dog, climbing trees, apples, my sister
On two separate car journeys, one with my mother, one with my father, I ask each of them to choose the last thing they’d give up. At ten, my questions take this form with some regularity: exaggerated parameters, carefully explained rules. “It can be food or water or something solid, but it doesn’t have to be. You only have twenty-four hours to live.” Both ask if they can think about it. Both remember to answer by the end of the journey (a hastily added rule).

My father: “the capacity to love.”
My mother: “to know I am loved.”

11
anywhere outside the classroom; mud, cold, leaves, not sports, lists
I start smoking in ditches. I ask my father if he’d still love me if I went to prison. “Of course.” He doesn’t hesitate or ask what crime I will have committed. I think about this and watch the back of him digging. I don’t doubt his words but I am curious. “What if I joined the IRA?” There is a long pause and he straightens out for it. The Irish Republican Army is in the news a lot. They drive fear into every school child, make public transport and Saturdays anxious. There are no longer bins on the streets, litter blows frightened of b-o-m-b-s. “There will always be things you could do to make loving you harder. That’s not the same as not loving you. Difficult doesn’t mean no.”

Advice

May 28, 2017.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Emily Sernaker

Featured Art: by Fran Hogan

Don’t ever make him a take-me-back
mix CD. But if you do, open with Sam Cooke’s
“Bring It On Home To Me.”
If Kim from high school wants to wait
in the really long line for the panda
at the zoo, don’t complain.
That panda is going to be so cuddly cupping
its paw around the bamboo, your heart
will do a somersault. Besides,
you’ll miss Kim when you’re away
trying to tell her updates
before the metro goes underground.
“I’m going on a date and wearing eyeliner.”
“You’re going on a date with a minor?”
Distance can be so hard. If you take
a dance class at the gym don’t stand
in the very back. Halfway through they turn
around and that side becomes the leaders
of the choreographed dance
everyone knows but you. You want
a middle-back spot for minimal shame.
One more thing about boys—
sometimes they’re sending a message
by not sending a message. There are many
films and books about this. If you need
an easy Halloween costume
go with Clark Kent. You just wear
glasses, a button-up shirt, a loose tie,
and show a Superman logo
underneath. You can even make
a Daily Planet badge if there’s time.
That noise you hear in the morning
opening the coffee shop isn’t
the other barista sneezing.
It’s the espresso machine warming up—
you don’t need to say bless you.
Ask your mom how she’s doing. Early
in each phone call ask her and really listen.
If you don’t, she’ll let you talk and talk
and what kind of person
do you want to be? You should
probably read Dante, that gets referenced
a lot. Anyone who hates Bob Dylan,
especially the Blood On The Tracks album,
is wrong. He’s given us a road map
to life, they should be grateful.
One last thing—don’t be scared
when the Georgetown cross-country team
is running toward you full speed
on the bridge. I know
it’s the bridge with the narrow walkway
close to traffic, where there’s nowhere
for you to step to the side.
Just raise up both of your hands.
Sixty people will give you high-fives
and keep going.

Mawwage

May 28, 2017.Reading time 1 minute.

By Catherine Stearns

Featured Art: Rising Dove, 1934 by Harold Edgerton

Mawwage is what bwings us together.
—The Princess Bride

At five, a clamorous bird
proposed outside our window:
Will-ya will-ya will-ya, then?
when a high-pitched vireo
like a shotgun bride
interposed fuck-you fuck-you
before his liquid goddess
could reply, with a flirty little
who-me who-me? followed by
something like my mother’s
tch-tch-tch-ing at my father’s
stories she’d heard a million
times before, nattering
away as if strapped on
currents of confused desire,
but finally speeding up
to an ascendant trill—I do
I do, I do / aspire to—

broken off by our alarm clock’s
insistent beep. Aspire to . . . ?
Aspire to . . . ? Happiness?
Transcendence? Sleep?
I turned it off to hear
not the long-married coo
of doves I often do
upon waking, but the shameless
heart of a bird
quivering in song
that knows itself alone

except for you, afloat
among the highest shelves
of dark and light, singing
and singing the changes through.

Marriage at 17 Years

May 28, 2017.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Gary Dop

“Come here—quick!” You know it, her serious, nearly
               whispered call. She says, “I think it’s a squirrel.”
Brown bulb of fur, it’s tucked behind an old chair.
               The kids sleep upstairs; you have both abandoned
your evening’s screens. You are here,
               a step away from a baby flying squirrel. You grab
the wicker hamper. She says, “Don’t scare it.”
               Hamper in one hand, towel in the other, you wonder
how to catch it without scaring it. The big-eyed squirrel
               knows you’re there. “Be careful,” you hear as you swipe
at the squirrel who scampers, fast as life,
               into the wicker trap you lift and close.
Then she says, “It’s in there,” a statement of fact
               that feels like a question. You say, “It’s in there,”
your voice an octave too high. She peeks through
               the wicker gaps to snap a picture. You relax
your grip on the lid, and the wild thing wriggles free.
                You scream. She smacks you
upside the head, a gentle reminder of the hibernating children.
               You both scurry after the squirrel
which seems so scared until it’s near the stairs—
               then it’s a feral beast between you and your offspring.
With animalistic ease—her leap and block, your swipe
               and scoop—the rodent’s back in its cage,
and you’re out on the sidewalk, clutching the hamper,
               waiting for your neighbors—just pulling away—
to be far enough not to see your business. You both smile
               and wave too easily, like stoned teenagers startled by cops.
A moment later, the flying squirrel is off:
               The thing that just happened is over.
And you are outside, suddenly together.

The Double

May 28, 2017.Reading time 1 minute.

By Gary Dop

Featured Art: by Tim Mossholder

When I order fast food, I feel superior
to the place I am in, the people
who serve me, and the grease
about to grip my gut, but
the cashier asks “Is that poetry?”
pointing at the distressed volume I hold.
I say, “Yes,” and she says, “Yes,
I thought so,” her eyes bloom,
no longer machines. Her hand rests
on the input screen as she quotes Frost
or Dickinson: something about “long sleep,
a famous sleep,” and she adds, “Was ever idleness
like this?” Flustered, I reply: “I’ll take
the double with mustard and pickles.” She sees
into me, a mass-produced poetry patty
stamped for the look of flavor. She sees
my surprise and knows that beneath our exchange,
burger for cash, is deeper change:
The life I’ve slept inside, she takes, discards,
and watches me wake.

Red Beans and Rice

May 28, 2017.Reading time 1 minute.

By James Sprouse

Featured Art: ‘Modes et Manières de Torquat‘

The medium said you were not coming back.
So I ate my red beans and rice
same as on our wedding day
down in Algiers, Louisiana.

The next day you rode
off with the Russian, Porshenokov,
in a little MG, your long straw hair
whipping in the streets

in the wind of the French Quarter
and down on the bayous, where it’s
too hot to sleep. The cemetery on Ramparts
was a forest of stone, the dead

above ground. On account of
the hurricanes, they said, and high water
on the Mississippi that stirs underneath
and raises them up.

That time you came back,
in heat, in sweat, with cotton-mouth
and juju. The South was our
time to be hot.

Next day you shipped out
lithe as a dolphin
rolling and tumbling down to the delta
on whiskey and water we called our lives.

Beautiful dreamer, awake unto me . . .
on Lake Pontchartrain, in the boat
of our nights, your prodigal smile
alive with fabulous poison.

Year of the Rat

May 28, 2017.Reading time 26 minutes.

By Lucas Church

Featured Art: Chinese Zodiac Animals in Harmony by Kerima Swain

On my birthday, the twenty-fifth anniversary of a space shuttle disaster, I move in with Uncle, who lives next to a trash heap. The heap is privately owned, not the county dump, not open to just anybody, and it’s haloed with crows. I squirrel myself upstairs while Uncle watches the video of the spaceship disintegrating into smoke, repeating. I mention in passing an ex-boyfriend with fists like cans of beans, that he’s looking for me, probably. Outside the crows bicker while I hide under the covers, the house full of Uncle’s sobs back to the television.

The shuttle exploded hours before I was born. A question of timing, my mother said.

Fast forward to our routine each morning: Uncle sloughs to the door and asks if I am okay, if I need anything. I always say no, but offer to clean his pool, where trash from the heap sometimes catches. Uncle doesn’t ask about Ex, though he’s gleaned I’m running from Ex’s jealousies and agendas, but rattles out something about decisions, good and bad, where they end us all up.

After weeks of this dance, he finally needs something: We lack pudding. Uncle has a sweet tooth. Or maybe we could go for dinner, he says, talk about things, hit some of the friendly bars, etc. Two guys on the prowl then silence and we all feel embarrassed for him together.

My Mother’s Dogs

May 28, 2017.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Sandy Gingras

Featured Art: Three Dogs Fighting by Antonio Tempesta

They are big and smelly and mean,
and they’re living in her basement.
I think they are dogs, but they might be wolves.
Eight or eighteen of them, something like that.
They all would bite me if I gave them
the chance, so I’m really careful
when I herd them out into the yard.
What is it with my mother?
Most families just have pets—usually one dog
and a cat, nothing like this. How
did she let this happen to her?

She’s living in some decrepit house now on Rt. 9
in the next town over and she’s evidently lost
her taste in furniture. Everything is gold
with rickety legs. She and I watch
the dogs patrol around the yard
from behind a glass sliding door. My mother is angry
now that she’s old, and I think that maybe
she and the dogs deserve each other, but
I can tell that my mother is scared too,
and I want to help her out because
I’m the problem-solver in our family.

The dogs don’t play like normal dogs,
they just move around the yard
like big bullet-headed missiles. We have to get rid
of them somehow, I tell my mother who is
suddenly smaller than she was, and then I hold her
in my arms and she’s a little girl. Whatever you do,
don’t let them in, I whisper, but
she’s already dead of lung cancer.

Serenity Room

May 28, 2017.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Linda Hillringhouse

Featured Art: Buste van een oude vrouw by Anonymous

There are five recliners in a circle,
each with a spongy blanket.
The lights have been dimmed,
but an aide has left behind her walkie-talkie
and it sounds like it’s ready to lift off.
My mother is in one recliner, I’m in another,
an easy way to spend time now that she’s afraid
of the color red and distrusts windows
as if the glass weren’t there and the fingers
of the dwarf palmetto would reach in
and pull her down into its dark center
to cut out the last cluster of syllables
huddled beneath her tongue.

I look over to see if she’s sleeping
and her eyes are open as though
she’s forgotten to close them. Maybe
she’s on some dusky street where half-drawn
figures drift and sounds almost blossom
into meaning. Maybe she opens a door
and her aunts from Brooklyn are there
and clutch her to their mountainous breasts
where she could stay forever.

She tries to inch out of the recliner but an aide
intercedes with a cup of apple juice
which my mother examines closely
for poison and studies her hand as if it’s
screwed to her wrist. Then she brings the cup
to her lips as if it’s the last thing left
from the world when she was Shirley
and carried keys, lipstick, cash.

And I hope that the cold, sweet liquid
brings a moment’s pleasure, but how can it be
that it comes to this, that at the end you get
thrown in the ring for one more brutal round
without enough stamina to put on your shoes
or enough strength to say Thank you or Go to hell.

Catpants

May 28, 2017.Reading time 1 minute.

By Richard Allen

Featured Art: The cat at play, c.1860-1878 by Henriëtte Ronner

dead cat on the shoulder
my heart aches for a moment
until I realize it is only
a balled-up pair of sweatpants

why would I feel compassion
were it a cat lying dead there
and not a balled-up
pair of sweatpants

I think it is because
cats are defenseless
and innocent then
I re-evaluate

they are neither
the average housecat
has injured several people
in its short life

just for laughs
the person who had to throw
his sweatpants out the window
a moment’s thought for him

for his sweatpants
and for the sad conflict
that must have unfolded
between them

The Meat of It

May 28, 2017.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Michael Bazzett

To make a good book you need what William
Faulkner called “the raw meat on the floor.”
So before I started in I got some ground beef
and dropped it on the hardwood with a Spat!
It felt wrong. Like dropping a baby. But I did it
for art. When my son came home from school
he said, Why is there meat on the floor? I said,
Art. He nodded like maybe that made sense
and said, It’s kind of freaking me out. I know,
I said, me too. We all have to make sacrifices.
Is that blood leaking out or juice? he asked.
I’m not sure I’m one to make that distinction,
I said, mostly to avoid answering the question.
I didn’t tell him how strange it was to unwrap
the meat so carefully, the plastic peeling away
like a onesie on a warm day, and then just sort
of hurl it down at the hardwood with a Spat!
Are we still going to eat it? he asked after a bit.
I’m not sure, I said. I think it depends upon
a lot of different factors, a lot of ins and outs.
Is this a writing thing? he asked, because you
have that weird look in your eye. I’m your
father, I said. I held you as a baby. I’d never
use a moment like this just to make a poem.

Dune Cat

May 28, 2017.Reading time 48 minutes.

By Winnie Anderson

Featured Art: by Oliver Goldsmith

Eons ago, during the Pleistocene Epoch, the jaguar left his home and traveled across the cold arid grassland: his resolve set. The floods were coming again. If he stayed, the land would either be covered with water or be broken into land pockets, from which there’d be no escape. The time was now. He had to go.

In him the jaguar carried echoes of history, tens of millions of years’ worth of heat spikes, ice ages, tectonic upheavals, and mega-explosions. Time swirled uniquely around him. He felt two trajectories at once—like a stone cast into the deep lake of time, sinking down to the bottom where all life may have begun, as well as the outward rippling cat’s paw upon its surface. History. Present. Future. All there, his for the grappling.

Alone he headed south: crossing over what one day would be named the Bering land bridge. Well-suited to the task, weighing close to 400 pounds, the norm then, he ran through a dense mantle of cold and silence. In the morning light his rust-colored coat appeared red, broken only by dotted circular cave-black rosettes. The travel was hard, but the jaguar came into it, growing stronger as he went—proof he’d done the right thing by giving his instinct its due.

After months of traveling, and though he was not cold, his body began to shiver. Prescience told him change was imminent seconds before a rogue wind thrust the jaguar into a zigzag shudder of time, as if the stone sinking deep into the lake had jerked off course and suddenly crabbed sideways. Calling on everything he had by stirring up wells of power contained within him, the jaguar fought against this unknown force he could not fathom.

Now the Truth Can Be Told

May 28, 2017.Reading time 1 minute.

By David Gullette

Featured Art: by Francis Augustus Lathrop

While I was assailed by a gaggle of captious sighs
you were somewhere else groping for lost teeth
or something or otherwise empty of solace, of course.

Or the time my edges all fell away taking
gritty treads and guy wires with them, where were you?
Breathing ethereal! Moonstruck!

Jesu! Did you think I couldn’t see you
slithering down the pike on your twenty axles,
the wind in your snoot, the coontail aflap flopping

in as crisp a tornado as any whip since
the blow that beveled Dubuque? Eh?
God knows you have failed me in need,

in time, in every intrusion of ice through my
window or down my back, every
whine of the plastic slug through my inner ear.

Do you think my patience is gold as glue,
sturdy as wings, marmot, asleep in your own aura?
Gelatinous posture! Asterisk! Aspic! Strip for your lashes!

Nobody Can Pronounce the Name of This Volcano

May 28, 2017.Reading time 1 minute.

By Mike Wright

Featured Art: by Paweł Czerwiński

I was choosing a bag of almonds at the grocery
when a volcano erupted. These almonds
were an impulse buy, and now they commemorate
catastrophe. The volcano is elsewhere,
so I won’t experience cinders bruising the sky.
On another continent ash settles on buildings
and my snack is dusted in cocoa powder,
the packaging says semi-sweet. I’m realizing
this is the wrong flavor for a natural disaster.
Nobody can pronounce the name of this volcano.
I can’t speak its name and I want to know it,
to know destruction, the reality of molten
rock. Instead I’m standing around the store,
befuddled by almonds, by how to choose.
If enough pressure built under the surface,
I could be relieved of every decision.

A Friend Encourages Me to Travel to South America

May 28, 2017.Reading time 1 minute.

By Mike Wright

Featured Art: by Bertha E. Jaques

I can’t handle cherries. When I see
them at the store, full of tart surprise,
I pass them up; it’s the breaking of tight
skin and release of flesh. I want
the thing ten steps down from the ecstatic.
Instead of cherries, cherry soda.
So how could I handle South America?
What would I do with a sea, with salt
air winding through me like a shell?
I live the nub of life, the thumbnail
sketch, fish sticks and cigarettes.
I would never survive the cherries
of South America. What’s a cherry
soda after a cherry? What do I dream of
after Brazil?

Nomenomancy

May 28, 2017.Reading time 3 minutes.

—divination by names

By Mark Wagenaar

Like each of us, it could only guess at its own begetting. A careless cigarette, electrical spark, Molotov cocktail hurled by an angry senior who had his letter to the editor rejected, we never found out how the fire started. Only smoke suddenly billowing above the town. Shreds of ten thousand newspapers upon the air, in slow drift through open windows, coming to rest on the eyelids & lips of men sleeping off the night shift at the furnace. Embers floated for hours through the streets, through back alleys, & ended up in the black fur of cats, gray hair of old men playing checkers, on the tongues of children who didn’t know better. A shroud upon the impatiens & petunias in tire & barrel gardens, on the feathers of pigeons in rooftop cages. In the silos the tatters found space amid the grains, & our news made it across the oceans: liquidation sales, stories on the alderman’s affair, the mayor’s new dog. And one death—one obituary. Larry, the boy who jumped his dirt bike into the canal. His name now upon the air, with our questions for him. We looked up at a sky that whirled with clouds of his name, & saw on that air once more the arc of his bike between the bridge and the rest of his life. His name rained down upon us, confetti for a parade of his absence. For years we found his name—in our underwear drawers, in our cereal boxes, in the big hair of our pageant contestants. In the open bags of sugar in the Home Ec classroom, the ones that girls would name and care for, & come to remember when their own babies were held up, his half-burned name against the brilliance of the sugar crystals, these sugar babies, each one named Larry.

Bodies That Drift in the River Flow

May 28, 2017.Reading time 43 minutes.

By Scott Gould

Featured Art: by Oscar Bluemner

Sometimes you know things before you know things. Mrs. Tisdale comes to the door, and I know something is wrong. I know. From the top bunk of my bed, I watch her coming up the sidewalk, walking fast but walking like a woman who is already lost, her skirt moving quickly around her, like a wave to anyone who spies through the window.

I know the doorbell won’t ring. She is not a bell person. She is too good a friend of my mother’s to announce herself that way. She knocks once and opens the door. What she doesn’t know is the bell doesn’t work anyway. It is shorted out somewhere along its line and my father has never pulled the wires and traced down them to find the problem. I hear Mrs. Tisdale’s voice flow up the staircase, so faint I can barely make it out, strained and pitched higher than normal. Her voice sounds like an animal she is trying to keep on a leash, trying to make it heel. Because her voice wants to run away from her. I hear my mother fall back on her nurse’s voice, that healing tone. I climb off the top bunk and move closer to the doorway.

“Now, Roberta, we shouldn’t jump to conclusions,” my mother says. “Let’s not worry until we have something to worry about.”

“Something’s gone wrong,” Mrs. Tisdale says. “I feel it.”

Men’s League as January

May 28, 2017.Reading time 1 minute.

By Michael Pontacoloni

Featured Art: by Mark Landman

After we untie skate laces wound twice
around our ankles and knotted
like the ribbon of a plastic kitchen garbage bag,

and we pop our cold-socked feet from
stiff black Tacks and Grafs
like hard pits from leathery dates,

all the blood worked up in thighs
screws down our shins and
floods our numb feet new again.

We laugh through clenched teeth at the charge
and fuzz of it, our toes
swelling round to halogen bulbs and

buzzing with a filament of joyful pain,
that brittle wire.
Burning cold they

might shatter so in old gray sneakers we
hobble to the parking lot,
at the open trunk of Ryan’s gray Corolla wobble

under sweaty hats and clouds of breath
and dispute the long-gone referees
with Narragansett cans till midnight.

We cough. We kick a snowbank.
Our neck hairs
icen to filigrees. Geno
glows in a T-shirt. What bright glass,
this golden crescent of beer in a can rim
yearning to freeze.

Midnight Snack with Leon

May 28, 2017.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Darren Morris

Featured Art: by nrd

I ran into the boxer Leon Spinks in 1992.
Spinks had won the heavyweight belt 14 years before
from Muhammad Ali. He had also won bronze
in the Olympics and gone to the penitentiary
for possession. By the time he got to me
he was all done with fame and fortune.
But he still scrapped with life, just trying to be.
At that time, I was staying with my brother
in Springfield, Missouri. He ran a pool hall
and kept an apartment in back of the place.
I snuck into the kitchen late one night for a slice
of that industrial orange cheese that I was
addicted to. I flipped on a light and
there was a large man sleeping on a cot
in the middle of the white-tiled room. But
I went ahead and opened the fridge because
when you are visiting someone, nothing is
unusual. It should all be that way, every day,
everything new, but it rarely is. I reached in and
lifted out a long orange sleeve. That’s when
the sleeping man said, “Leon hungry,” and instantly
I remembered my brother telling me that Spinks
had started coming into the bar, but I did not
believe him. It had been so matter-of-fact
that I barely retained the anchor to the info.
I made sloppy towers of tomato and cheese
sandwiches for Spinks and me and we ate them
in silence except for all the tooth-sucking
that bread and cheese promoted, especially
for Spinks who had more than a few teeth missing.
I cleaned up and Spinks lay back down. There
was nothing really to say. But when I turned off
the light, as if still a boy, Spinks said, Nigh-night.
They call it American cheese because it is processed
from nothing much. In 1978, Ali taunted him
and Leon beat his ass in one of the biggest upsets ever.
I met a ton of people back then who ceased to matter.
But that did not stop them and they persisted.

By Feliphe Schiarolli

May 28, 2017.Reading time less than 1 minute.

By Karl Blossfeldt

May 28, 2017.Reading time less than 1 minute.

Coronation with Plastic Flowers

May 28, 2017.Reading time 6 minutes.

By Kelly Michels

Featured Art: by Karl Blossfeldt

She says it feels like flowers blooming in her veins.
                                The lilies watch her, unmoved
in the window.
                                She becomes the petals’
white polyester sheen, its rigid spine, slumped posture
                                leaning against the rim
of an old coffee mug filled with week-old cigarette butts.
                                This is how
I will remember her: bottles of pills, the walls scumbled
                                yellow, a flower blooming
in her veins, her gray breath rising

                              in a haze thirty years ago
the way she placed each plastic flower away from
                              the sun, the sting, anything
that could touch the color of the petal as if the light
                              could drag each one into the white,
worn sky, make it fade before her eyes. What else is beauty for?
                              but to be spun, set on a window sill
curtains drawn, petals hugged in dust, as she slept,
                              no sun to tell her if it was day or night,
the three of us kids trying to keep still, feeling our way
                              through the dark dreamt room,
unable to understand that this was the tick-tock of time.
                              This was what it meant
to live forever.

                  Only nothing lives forever.
                                                The perfect moment—

the gardenias in full bloom
                                chatter staggering through a promenade,
the quivering flit of sparrows chasing
                                the listless light of noon
until suddenly even this ends,
                                 until suddenly a car alarm ruins everything,
the chatter dissolves into people
                                 screaming over each other,
birds fleeing, the owner trying to turn the damn thing off.

            Maybe there were too many moments
that could never stay quiet or whole in her hands
            like the day we took
our first steps, said our first words, or the day
            she fell in love,
slept all night in his open arms, dreamt of the way
            he looked at her as the ocean
wind tossed her floral dress,
            dreamt of the way time could stop,
only to wake up and find every living thing
            changed in some way

everything except
the flowers in her hands.

At the Edge of Everything

May 28, 2017.Reading time 47 minutes.

By Traci Skuce

Featured Art: by Alex Pasarelu

For the past hour, Alli had been sitting against the small oak, her eighteen-month-old son latched to her breast. His molars had finally—thank God— broken through, and now he suckled, cheeks sticky and eyes lolling with pleasure. Alli had hoped another mom would show up. Jeannie was off visiting her parents in Vancouver and Clay, well he was just plain off, so she hadn’t had an adult conversation in days. She wanted someone, anyone, to gab with about the impossibility of lost sleep, errant husbands, and teething. But there were only the crows, waddling around the rim of a garbage can, diving in for pizza crusts then flying off across the playground to the giant cedar.

Alli’s daughter, Tavia, looked at the birds from under her floppy sunhat, and then dumped a handful of sand onto an accumulating pile, patted it down. Alli mimed eating, mumbled yum-yum as she had been since they’d arrived. “Do you like it Mommy?” Without waiting for an answer, Tavia ran back to the production center beneath the slide.

Jack continued suckling. Both breasts were drained and she’d become a giant pacifier. His eyelids fluttered and his blond feathery hair stuck to his forehead, ear crusted with milk and peanut butter. She picked at it, and he swatted her, still sucking hard. Enjoy them while they’re young, people said, but she couldn’t wait to toss these days onto the slag heap of motherhood.

‘The Thirty-Six Star Flag of the United States of America’ by unknown

May 28, 2017.Reading time less than 1 minute.

Cousin Scott on Food Stamps

May 28, 2017.Reading time 4 minutes.

By Anders Carlson-Wee

Featured Art: ‘The Thirty-Six Star Flag of the United States of America’ by unknown

—in memory of Scott Christopher Maxwell
1961–2007

First thing is, I got as much right to get my foodstamps
as the next man. Second thing is, what I make of em
is my own Han Solo. State aint got no right
comin around sniffin halfway up my ass, tryin to catch
some little whiff of a goddamn infringement.
If I wanna fetch my breakfast with em, fine,
let a cowboy fry his bacon. If I wanna sell em for cash
or trade em for dope, that’s my own Han Solo.
You think I’m gettin rich outta this?
You think I’m puttin some greenbacks away someplace?
Saint me somebody if I’m flush in more than bellybutton lint.
And anyways I’m only sellin em to veterans.
That’s the third thing. A lotta vets can’t even get
no foodstamps, and you mind tellin me why?
You think them boys went off and lost a leg
in Iraq or some other ass crack of the planet
just to come back home to trade me a dime-sack
and some percocet? What? So they can hobble
their broke ass down to Deals Only and garner themselves
with nothin but a stone cold bite of somethin to eat?
You tell me. Me, I don’t even wanna guess.
And the other thing is, what’s the difference
if I got two-three a them food cards?
Who am I hurtin? I’m askin you––who am I hurtin?
And I know right off what you’re gonna lay on me.
You think I’m reachin in and stealin them tax dollars
right out your own privately owned ass crack.
But the thing is, I aint got your goddamn tax dollars.
Where you think all them sorry ass one-legged vets
is comin back from? Disneyland?
War aint the Lord’s plan, I can tell you that much.
Course, neither is foodstamps. Lord’s got two hands
and he aint askin for handouts with neither of em.
And you can bet your whole hard-on
he aint givin em away neither. That’s why I stopped
prayin. Lord aint givin and Lord aint takin.
Lord’s reachin out same way a tree reaches.
Real slow and easy. Sorta callin you in
without callin, cept maybe with the wind.
And your job’s as simple as goin to him, cause you’re lost
and you know it. And that’s the same shake
them vets was expectin to get when they come back
one-legged, but they didn’t get that, did they?
No they didn’t. Got percocet. And they’ll be dosin that shit
till the day they’re dead. What’s that old sayin?
Send me home in my casket. Well, tell you what,
the minute I’ve gone and dropped off dead
and been laid to rest, you got my god’s honest say-so
to bust open my casket and stick a straw
up my ass and suck and see if you find any flavors
that taste just even a little bit like your goddamn tax dollars.

Last Seen on a Milk Carton

May 28, 2017.Reading time 1 minute.

By Reese Conner

Featured Art: by Sebald Beham

In the photo on the left, the first Jesus poses
with a thorny crown scratching his skull
and his right arm slung around the cross
as if he and the cross are friends
or first-time prom dates,
while his mane, miraculous, immaculately
tumbles to his shoulders
in loose curlicues, the bounce of which
you can easily imagine
though scarcely believe
considering the dry, desert air,
and his skin (that skin!) is a goldilocks-bronze,
is light enough
not to alarm the whites
is dark enough
not to alarm the historians,
and his eyes are trustworthy
and inevitable—you don’t get to say
you’re the son of God
with any old eyes, no,
they need to be
more lamblike than lifelike—

meanwhile, in the photo on the right,
the second Jesus, age-progressed
two millennia since he went missing,
is a skeletal heap. And you begin to think
how sad it must be
that they keep looking for him.

The Resort

May 28, 2017.Reading time 1 minute.

By Preston Martin

He paces, half naked,
across his second-floor balcony,
phone against his ear.

A translucent mist moves on shore,
the swoosh of high tide hardly heard
across mannered dunes.

As the day moon hangs
over his building fresh sunlight sinks
low in the moist air like a lemon slice in soda,
sparkling dewy marigolds, dollar weeds.

The man paces, turns, punctuates
thoughts with a free hand, either
pleading or singing into the phone.
Please

let it be to an old love,
who loved him on this beach, loved him once,
on a tender morning like this morning.

Still now, he stares at the phone,
as if it were sentient, caring,
as if the conversation still goes on,

as if the greater part of life
isn’t our suitcase of memories,
handled everywhere,
the calling back

of times slipped through fingers,
the calling back
what can’t come back.

Sneakers

May 28, 2017.Reading time 7 minutes.

By Patrick Crerand

Featured Art: ‘blue sneakers’

My father never exercised. He chased me upstairs after a fresh word at the dinner table once or twice—quick sprints that ended with a face-slap photo finish—but no trips to the gym, hardly even a ball game on TV. On weekends, he wore sneakers—not tennis shoes—always sneakers, as if that’s what one did to hide silently from the world of sport.

But that day—my sixth birthday—after he made the cake and gave me the Frisbee, he said to my surprise, “Let’s see if it spins.” I was out the door in the backyard before he had laced up the first shoe. Neither one of us was very good, but there we stood, spinning the bee in front of the sugar snap peas he had planted, when we heard Aaron, the boy next door, scream in a high, inhuman pitch—a cartoonish noise I thought only diving eagles made, or the ricochet of bullets in old westerns. I almost laughed. My father knew better. He straightened and ran toward Aaron in the side yard between the houses. He leapt over the chainlink gate with a quick hop, following behind the crying boy until he caught him by the arm and saw where Aaron was pointing. “What?” my father asked.

“My sister,” Aaron screamed.

Detective Story

May 28, 2017.Reading time 2 minutes.

By James Lineberger

Featured Art: by sir Edwin Landseer

When I worked as a janitor at the courthouse
I met a detective in the Sheriff’s department
whose son, I learned, had committed suicide
some months earlier. Having lost a son myself
in a car-train collision, I tried to offer my condolences.
“Your boy kill himself?” the detective asked bluntly.
“We never knew,” I replied. The detective grunted
noncommittally and opened his desk drawer to take out
a photo of his son, a young man in his twenties, kneeling
and embracing a dog as he grinned for the camera.
“Two days before it happened,” the detective said.
“About the same age as our son,” I said.
The detective stared at the photo for a moment.
“You got a dog?” he asked.
“Two,” I said.
“Thing about a dog,” he said, “a person can screw up
a hundred ways, and his dog will love him when he can’t
even love his self.”
“Our son’s dog still sleeps at the foot of his bed,” I said.
The detective turned the photograph over on its face
and glanced up at me, his eyes as cold as stars.
“Ain’t his dog,” he said. “It’s mine.”

Sunny Day

May 28, 2017.Reading time 1 minute.

By Joyce Schmid

Featured Art: ‘Woman Lying in the Dunes near Noordwijk’ Jan Toorop

Verweile doch, du bist so schön.
—Goethe

I grab the young, unruly day
and say, Stand still, stand still.
I want to comb her hair and dress her up,

but she just laughs and wriggles in my grasp
and breaks away. She dances mockingly,
just out of reach, the little imp,

and runs ahead of me. I’m running
out of energy to try
to catch her in my arms,

warm, fragrant child,
her changeling eyes lit up
with winter sun.

Come here, you darling day,
and stay with me
a while, a little while.

Of Course Death

May 28, 2017.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Roy Mash

Of course death is on its way,
       and life’s a blink,
and yes the unexamined one sucks,
       and doubtless
we’re well-advised, periodically,
       to expose ourselves
to the nuisance of these truths,
       waggling their
fingers with their thumbs in
       their ears, ever
heckling us with the raspberry
        of our mortality.

Still, we cannot carpe every diem,
       squeegee the universe
of each last moment, shovel our
       noses 24/7 into
the coffee or the roses or
       what-have-you.
Virgin-bedding stratagems aside,
       some days, maybe
even most days, the unforgiving
       minute’s happy
just to be left alone, frittered
       on some dopey
soap opera, or stewing over
       a parking ticket.

Feature: The Villains of Poetry

May 28, 2017.Reading time less than 1 minute.

On Being Asked to Contribute to the Villains Feature

May 28, 2017.Reading time 1 minute.

By Richard Cecil

Featured Art: by Odilon Redon

I searched ten years of word files looking for
titles with names of politicians who
enrich the rich while trampling down the poor
and corporate criminal CEOs who screw
employees out of wages, rape the Earth,
and hide their stolen billions far offshore,
and drew a blank. I also found a dearth
of killer clowns and warlords steeped in gore,
religious rabble rousers, nasty nuns,
child-abusing Catholic priests—zero.
No bought congressmen who vote pro-gun;
no homicidal patriotic heroes.
What’s blinded me to monsters all those years?
The Frankenstein inside. It’s him I fear.

Villainous Villanelle

May 28, 2017.Reading time 1 minute.

By Denise Duhamel

My id spits and licks his lips, trips my conscience,
my ego, Miss Goody Two Shoes.
Her neon pink laces make him nauseous.

My ego finds my id monstrous—
His red face is bulbous. He reeks of booze
as he spits and licks his lips, trips my conscience

and my allegiance is split. My id’s obnoxious,
full of tattoos, a shower long overdue.
But my ego’s pink laces make me nauseous.

My ego and id live in a province
of my psyche, battling to be my muse.
My id spits and licks his lips, trips my conscience.

He tells me evil is the only constant,
that villains are cool. Who needs society’s rules?
My neon pink laces make him nauseous.

I go to a shrink to check my noggin.
Her pantsuit is blue. Her couch is chartreuse.
I spit and lick my lips. She trips my subconscious.
Her neon pink briefcase makes me nauseous.

The Villain Who Shut Down an Epic

May 28, 2017.Reading time 17 minutes.

By Jeanne Murray Walker

Recently, as I was on the way back from our usual early morning at the gym, I told my husband that the editors of New Ohio Review had asked me to write a piece about a villain in a poem.

“What do you mean?” he asked.

“Well, it’s interesting, don’t you think, that poems might have villains? Like murder mysteries?”

“Oh, I get it,” he said. “In Robert Frost’s ‘Mending Wall,’ the villain is the wall.”

“No.” I laughed. After all, how can a wall be a villain? I had been thinking of narratives like The Odyssey and “My Last Duchess.”

But when I re-read Frost’s lyric, I saw what my husband meant. It is the power of evil, both the shadows of the trees and darkness of the heart, that builds and maintains the wall between Frost and his neighbor. I began to feel deeply curious: What can we learn from watching villains in poetry?

“Guilt Is Magical”: Adultery as Poetic Villainy

May 20, 2017.Reading time 12 minutes.

By Catherine Pierce

The best villains—or at least the most compelling—are those who own their villainy, and, in owning it, reckon with it. And the most compelling poems tend to be those that do the same kind of reckoning; as Yeats famously wrote, “We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.”

Adultery is, certainly, one of the quieter types of villainy—not nearly as flashy as murder, bank robbery, or comic-book citywide destruction—but also, like all domestic villainies, far more commonplace, and insidious precisely because of that. It’s no surprise, given poetry’s historical attraction to passion, high drama, romance, and regret, that the genre is lousy, so to speak, with cheaters and homewreckers quarrelling with themselves all the way to revelation.

New Ohio Review Issue 20 (Originally printed Fall 2016)

October 27, 2016.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.

New Ohio Review Issue 20 (Originally printed Fall 2016)

October 26, 2016.Reading time less than 1 minute.

Issue 20 compiled by Alli Mancz.

How to Survive on Land

October 25, 2016.Reading time 50 minutes.

By Joy Baglio

Featured Art: Playful Mermaid by Henri Héran, 1897

Let me tell you about my mother, a mermaid: For years, despite her handicaps, she embraced land life in Okanogan, Washington—the drizzly winters and sun-soaked summers—with a steadfastness both impressive and exhausting. She read us stories with the ardor of a human mother; bagged our lunches; brushed our hair. For years, she was just Mom: Mom who snuggled up to us on the couch with a book; Mom who packed Tupperware containers full of watermelon and whisked us away to the town pool on humid summer days; Mom who cooked themed meals (Tuna Tuesdays, Waffle Wednesdays); Mom with her perpetual ocean smell and unruly laughter. Of course, there were harmless omens of her first loyalties: shellfish for breakfast, kelp pods strewn like confetti around our living room, the shrill whale-speak whines that filled our house in the mornings, our Nereid names and Mom’s insistence that my sister Thetis and I explain to every curious land-dweller our sea-nymph heritage. (My name, Amphitrite, means Queen of the Ocean, after all.)

Bobcat

October 24, 2016.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Andrew Cox

Featured Art: Summer: Cat on a Balustrade by Théophile-Alexandre Steinlen, 1909

–For Jerry Lee (1934-2016)

There are bobcats in the neighborhood
Said the woman in the decked-out SUV
Do you have a whistle
As I walked off my grief in Texas
Where I came to see my mother die
And when I saw the bobcat
Come from the drainage system
And stare at me with black pupils
Drilling into those yellow eyes
I knew it wanted me to sit down and listen
Love your mother the bobcat asked
Not enough I said
I could have visited more
It said man hands on misery to man
One of your kind wrote that I think
Yes I said the poem is never enough
And neither are the sentences it hissed
They fail in situations like this
Yes I said punctuation doesn’t help
Nothing helps
Remember the bobcat said
You are no longer a son
You had one shot and the pistol is empty
I understand I said though I did not want to
I have two hearts it said
The one they will find when they cut me open
And the one I use to live forever
Think about that
Think about that face those hands her eyes
And it disappeared down the slit
Now I knew where my mother was
In the bobcat’s second heart
The one it uses when it growls into the night
And puts everything in its place
That face those hands her eyes
On the hunt until dawn
Only ready to sleep
When the rest of us are ready to wake

New Ohio Review Issue 20 (Originally printed Fall 2016)

October 24, 2016.Reading time less than 1 minute.

Reno Redux

October 23, 2016.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Ansie Baird

Featured Art: Man holding a horse by the bridle by Dirck Stoop

My father flew to Reno, Nevada, sixty
solemn years ago to sue for a divorce.
I had no idea where Nevada was or
why my parents were divorcing.
In the mail arrived a shiny photograph,
my father sitting tall on a horse.
I had no idea he knew how to ride.
He carried a rifle across his lap and
on his head he’d set a cowboy hat.
He was smiling like all-get-out.
I had no idea what there was to smile about.

He stayed away six weeks, at some
dude ranch where rattlesnakes curled
and lurked in the underbrush. I lived
in a cluttered city house without
rattlesnakes or a father. My mother
packed up all our winter coats and boots
and sold the house. We moved into a flat.
After that, everything was touch-and-go.

Reno was a place I planned to boycott.
Sixty years later, I’m at the Reno airport
waiting for a connection,
uncertain when it’s taking off.
All of us seem to be divorced.
Slot machines clack at my elbow,
crowds of men in cowboy hats lurk
in plush corridors, looking like they
might be someone’s father.

Chino, California

October 22, 2016.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Darla Himeles

Two crows claw down to cement
between the outer and inner fences—

beaks like swords, backs slick,
slashing wings and talons.

I watch them fight from my car today
as I watched my parents as a child: clutching

a book in my lap. I cannot read
the crows or my father, for whom I wait

in my locked car, his bag of belongings
in the back seat beside the maps I printed

to find him. At once, a line cuts
from one building to another: orange

jumpsuits shocking under smoggy, industrial sky.
I pinch my lip, examine their faces, their gaits.

Not my father, not my father—maybe? No,
not my father.

Hours pass, the crows disperse.
The prison yard empties.

Two hours after the designated release, a small
group of men gathers at the gate.

Escorted by officers, they wear stiff beige chinos,
white canvas loafers, and baggy T-shirts

to greet the other side. I see him
shaking his gray head to an officer, No,

there’s nobody here for me—must be a mistake—
Sir, I need the bus fare promised me.

Certain Things

October 21, 2016.Reading time 1 minute.

By David Brendan Hopes

Featured Art: Tinker with His Tools by Camille Pissarro, 1874/76

For the sake of my father, certain things
must be done in a certain way:
tightening of bolts, of nuts around threads;
coiling of hoses; firm, instant replacement of lids;
spreading of seed from the hand held just so,
in furrows dug to the joint or the knuckle, depending;
wash it when you use it, never put it up wet;
don’t be opening and closing the screen door
as if you were a cat.
Be grateful for a job, a meal, a leg up.
All that.
In the seasons set aside for such emotions,
of course I hated him.
All things, even hatred, wear away.
In the season set aside I became him,
doing what he did in the way he did it,
hiding the injured heart the way he hid it.
Waking so many hours before full day
from the dream
that something certain’s gone astray.

She-Monster Gets Fired

October 20, 2016.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Kim Farrar

Here you are again, running from the villagers
with their torches and pitchforks. You thought
you finally fit in. You filed down
your neck-bolts, got rid of your high-waters.
You watched Oprah, kept a dream diary,
a gratitude journal, pictures of your thinner self
on the fridge. You tried to keep your need
for electricity minimized: licking the outlets,
rubbing your hair with a balloon for just a crackle.

You knew it would happen. Every morning—
the affirmations, the meditation, the positive thinking.

You longed for lightning and rain.
You did everything right to escape
the old ways of staring into the well.
It took years of practicing the right laugh.
You did your best. Married up.
Got a job teaching ESL. Now and then,
a grunt would slip and
crickets crickets crickets.

People liked you. You were funny.

But one day you found refuge
eating flies in the faculty lounge;
soon you stopped hiding
your green undertones with foundation.
You missed being the girl
who loved her square head,
touched her thick-stitched scars like Braille.

The villagers yell, Kill her! Kill the monster!

You’re barreling through the woods,
nettle whips your ankles as you soar
over logs in your clodhoppers.
You’re filled with the old familiar joy
of being free and incredible.

Why It’s Hard to Write About My Brother

October 19, 2016.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Kim Farrar

Because he called me numbnut
            now no one calls me numbnut
Because in therapy I learned the word infantilize
            and stopped asking him if he was all right
Because I want to recite the titles of his paperbacks instead
           Dune       Silent Spring       Slaughterhouse-Five
Because he showed me how to give the finger when I was six
             and then I showed Mom
Because I listened to him curse in the bathroom
             after Dad buzz-cut his hair
Because at 54 he could still bruise the same spot
             with a knuckle-punch
Because we discussed the etymology of kerfuffle
             but never mentioned emphysema
Because the last time he lit a Marlboro to rest
             I joined him
Because he taught me Sudoku
             but said he couldn’t help with counting to ten
Because they took him away in a midnight body bag
Because he could pinch open the beak of a baby robin
             to feed it drops of milk
Because he once touched me and I cooperated
Because to wreck cars, to drive drunk, was a form of apology
             for being a disappointing son
Because he comforted my worry that his tetras were bored
             They have no memory, numbnut,
             each swim back is a new ocean
             and then I envied them
Because his longest relationship was with a club-footed lovebird
Because I’d ask about the impossible physics
             of the hummingbird’s flight to spin the conversation
             away from troubles
Because he said I couldn’t get good at Sudoku
             because he had to beat me at something
Because he drove me around the city
             to point out the cement he’d poured,
             the flagpole at the post office, the Kroger’s sidewalk
Because he said the one thing he liked about the job
             was leaving something permanent
Because his ashes are in a box and I worry about moisture
Because our last day together at Newport Aquarium
             we watched sharks swimming overhead
Because he would withdraw for months
             but I left messages anyway
Because he loved my dream of him

At the Threshold

October 18, 2016.Reading time 32 minutes.

By Marilyn Abildskov

Featured Art: Dilapidated House, 1811

She hesitates, then opens the unlocked door. The house is not hers. It’s nobody’s yet. That’s why she’s here. To walk on red tiles in the empty entryway. To see if there’s carpet yet in the bedrooms. To touch the smooth white marble fireplace that reaches the ceiling in the living room. To wander empty rooms before the rooms are filled.

Here in the entranceway of the new empty house she says out loud—hello hello—and listens for something, a spirit maybe, to say something back.

Nothing. Not even an echo.

From the kitchen window, she can see her home, the tip of a modernist triangle roof. In the distance, she can hear her mother playing the piano, lost in the music. Her shoes squeak against the floorboards of the hallway. No carpet. Not yet.

Two Boys Watching Schooners by Winslow Homer, 1880

October 17, 2016.Reading time less than 1 minute.

My Good Brother

October 17, 2016.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Young Smith

Featured Art: Two Boys Watching Schooners by Winslow Homer, 1880

If I had a brother, he would be called Enoch or Ephraim—
a name alive with the wisdom of some long forgotten past.
Though older than me, there would be no gray yet in his beard.

There would be no lines on his face, and his full hair—
not thinning yet, like mine—would be brown as the wings
of a thrush. He would whisper Roethke in his sleep,

my brother Ephraim or Enoch, and his poetry would lift
the weight of old bruises from my eyes. He would visit
our father’s grave and feel none of my dark anger there.

He would sing the dead man’s favorite songs, recalling
only his happiest hours. He would have learned to live gently,
my brother, and would teach me that secret with nothing more

than a nod or a warm arm across my shoulders. You, Enoch; you,
Ephraim—how I long for the cool press of your hand on the back
of my neck, my good brother, my quiet companion of cruel nights.

Here There Was a Stool with a Crippled Leg

October 16, 2016.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Young Smith

Featured Art: The Chair from The Raven by Édouard Manet, 1875

There are no ghosts in her rented house—
only the shadows of objects

removed by other tenants long ago.
Here there was a stool with a crippled leg,

here a bookshelf filled with fat Russian novels,
here an upright piano with wine-stained keys.

These furnishings have vanished, but their shapes continue—
like spots on the retina after looking at the sun . . .

Though she can find no path from one door
to the next where the shades of their sofas

don’t stand one within the other, of the former
tenants themselves, very little can be said . . .

The mirrors have collected the pale stories of their eyes,
but the glass is too crowded to tell them clearly—

yet even now, among the wraiths of hat trees
and recliners, where the dust of their voices

drifts like smoke along the baseboards,
she can often feel their sorrows, breathing

slowly in the corners, still alive
with a helpless longing to sleep.

Gorilla

October 15, 2016.Reading time 1 minute.

By Young Smith

“Sullen” only begins to describe it—
his all too lucid, all too human stare.

His mate sits nursing an infant behind him
in the mouth of an artificial cave, while,

just to busy his hands, it seems, he strips
leaves from a twig of bamboo. His gestures

are slow and deliberate, but as his fingers work,
his eyes never leave us, moving in turn

from one face, from one camera to the next.
This, of course, is what holds us at the rail—

that he watches back, like no other animal
in the zoo—and there is only one way

to understand his expression: he has little
hope for the health of our souls.

Moksha

October 14, 2016.Reading time 30 minutes.

By Alexander Weinstein

Featured Art: Street at Saverne by James McNeill Whistler, 1858

Rumor was you could still find enlightenment in Nepal, and for cheap. There were back rooms down the spider-webbed streets of Kathmandu where they wired you in, kicked on the generator, and sent data flowing through your brain for fifteen thousand rupees a session. It was true, Jeff from the coop had assured Abe, though passport control could be a bitch when you returned to the States.

“They pulled my buddy when we hit Newark,” Jeff had said, sipping maté from a gourd. “But he was showing. His third eye was completely open and he wanted to hug everyone. Just think about porn and you’ll be fine.” Jeff had handed Abe a crinkled business card. Namaste Imports. “Go to this place.”

So Abe had saved his money, bought the ticket, and traveled the endless hours, numbed by bad sleep and bland airline food, to find himself in Kathmandu. Finding Namaste Imports, however, had proved impossible. The streets had no names, and looking up, all Abe saw was a tangle of electrical wires and lights blinking on in the dusk. Around him, masses of tourists, heavy with backpacks and vacant looks, milled about. And amid all this churned a perpetual stream of cars and mopeds, nudging their way around pedestrians, honking, yelling out of windows, and raising endless dust. It all seemed far from enlightenment.

Bluebirds Are Cavity Nesters

October 13, 2016.Reading time 2 minutes.

By W. J. Herbert

Featured Art: Bird’s Nest and Ferns by Fidelia Bridges, 1863

Cement truck crushing stones
at 3 a.m. on a Flatbush side street?
No, must be the double bass player
grinding his seven-foot case along broken sidewalks,
as if inside his sarcophagus
whose fist-sized wheels are screaming
there’s a mummy dressed in lead,
and it’s so hot again my ceiling fan’s blade
is a soldier’s lame leg that is drooping
and each time he turns,
it drums on the inverted edge of the light bowl
while someone upstairs
drops the booted foot he just cut from a corpse,
but he keeps cutting and dropping,
cutting and dropping,
so it must be a dozen corpses, or
maybe it’s a frozen hen landing again and again,
as though my landlady’s niece, still drunk,
has made up a game in which you get ten points if,
when you drop it from the top of a ladder,
the hen lands on her severed neck.
I can’t sleep. Even if Sialia sialis
relies on dead trees for nest sites,
it’s smart enough to live deep away from the world.

Anniversary Gift

October 12, 2016.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Robert Cording

Featured Art: Peacock and Dragon by William Morris, 1878

After reading that hummingbirds
are so light eight of them can be mailed
for the price of a first-class stamp,
I close my eyes and see them, fully revived,
rising out of some envelope of old memories.
I’ll name them again as we once did
so long ago—Rufous, Anna’s, and Broad-tailed—
darting to and from the feeders, sipping,
then retreating, flying jewels
the Spanish called them, and now I recall
how one of the Anna’s, its garnet head
and throat glowing in the misted air,
hung like a jewel at your ear.

Here they are, or the memory of them.
Remember that trying-too-hard-to-be-hip
B&B in Telluride, a hot tub on the roof;
above the water, crisscrossing strings
decorated with Japanese lanterns
and four red heart-shaped feeders that brought
close the ebullience of the hummingbirds.
They surged around us, their kaleidoscope
of iridescent colors lightening
the cool, rainy day and helping us forget
the fogged-in, dim presence of the Rockies
we had come for and couldn’t see.
Curtained in the tub’s steaming air,
soon enough our eyes were in love
with birds we couldn’t stop looking at,
their scintillant existence drawing
jeweled lines we swore we could see.

Which is why I’m bringing back the past,
those tiny birds disappearing
into all the years behind us now,
but today returning all at once,
as if some blessing had been conferred
without my asking; and so
I offer them to you, hoping these words,
even though they dim the colors as they must,
will draw for you their sweet transport.

The Cave

October 11, 2016.Reading time 3 minutes.

By David Gullette

Coming back from Escamequita past the curve at the peak
there was the valley of Carrizal with its steep mountain rising above it.

What’s that up there? I asked. Looks like the entrance to a mine.
Oh, the old man said, That’s the Cueva de los Duendes.

I knew the word from Lorca’s great essay
but he meant some dark flamenco trance when strummed sheepguts
and a shout beyond reason jam in our ears the mesmerizing song of death.

Here in the back woods of Nicaragua it just means little people,
fairies, minor local deities, trolls, semi-domesticated goblins.
Or witches. Things that rustle the bushes after the moon rises
or borrowing feathers shriek in the sky above your chickens.

Why do I feel this perverse relief that something remains here
to challenge the cult of the soft Galilean and his stay-at-home Mom?
Some trace of the pre-Columbian, or something from the hills and caves
of Spain, smuggled in with the priests and horses?

Once I was in Yucatan: An afternoon storm was brewing
and when the thunder shook the limestone world
the Mayan lady at the kiosk looked up and said “Xac!”
The old god of lightning, rain, and fertility.

Remember how Wallace Stevens’ Crispin, hearing
a rumbling west of Mexico fled, and knelt in the cathedral
with the rest? The thunder unleashed a self possessing him,
some quintessential fact that was, he says, not in him in Connecticut.

My idle thought passing through Carrizal was to find a way to climb the hill,
enter the giant portal of the cave, probe the interior with my LED.
But “to know a thing is to kill it,” says Lawrence,
and I’m too old to court more disenchantment,

so back to town: a little rum, check the banality of the Internet,
news of winter’s vacancy back in Boston, a little European music
to sprinkle on the sizzling red snapper . . . How easy to live it,
this our minimal unhaunted twenty-first-century life.

Still

October 10, 2016.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Alison Jarvis

Featured Art: The Artist’s Sitting Room in Ritterstrasse by Adolph Menzel, 1851

Somewhere up in the Bronx,
in rented space I’ve never seen, seven
rooms of the old life, waiting
in storage. Shrouded wing chairs,
Persian rugs, your mother’s
engraved silver, nesting and spooning
in a mahogany box. Racks
of your oils. The body of the grand piano
had to be separated from its legs
so everything could fit—

I miss our music.

Sunday, on the little radio
I heard Lotte Lenya sing
that song about searching, her urgency
tilted the room, I was that
off-balance

and dying to hear it again,
even in my own voice. The ether
offers up dozens of versions, none
the one I wanted. One night,
years into your illness—I was whirling—
singing “Pirate Jenny”
when you calmed me—Wait
sweetheart, you said, Lenya
is perfectly still
when she sings that
in the movie.

It’s true. This morning, the light
a slit in the blind, I finally found it
on YouTube. Her body
never moves, only her eyes
and even they stop
near the end. Rapt,
I watched it for hours—

Typed your ghost email,
pressed send.

A Creature, Stirring

October 9, 2016.Reading time 35 minutes.

Winner, New Ohio Review Nonfiction Contest
selected by Elena Passarello

By Gail Griffin

Featured Art: The Kitchen by James McNeill Whistler, 1858

It is Christmas night—or, more accurately, two in the morning of December 26th. I am on the small porch at the side of my house. My cat is in my lap. The door to the living room is closed. Every window inside the house is wide open, because the house is full of smoke—a vile, stinky smoke. The porch is winterized, but I have opened one window about six inches because of the smoke escaping from the house. And what I am saying to myself is Well, at least the temperature’s up in the twenties.

The cat is unusually docile. He knows that something fairly strange is going on, and he is cold. I murmur to him that we’ll be all right, over and over. With sudden, crystalline clarity I know that I am absolutely alone in the universe, except for this small animal.

Will it reassure you or just make the whole scene weirder if I tell you that the smoke is from burnt cat food?

November 1st

October 7, 2016.Reading time 1 minute.

By Chanel Brenner

Dia De Los Muertos was Riley’s favorite holiday.

He loved smelling the sugar skulls.

Didn’t mind that he couldn’t eat them.

My husband asks what we should do with Riley’s bicycle.

Who wants a dead kid’s bike?

He puts it in the alley for someone to take.

He rummages through boxes in our garage like we are having a fire sale.

He finds my dead father’s rare coins in a sock, a card from my dead grandmother.

Many believe the dead would be insulted by sadness.

Today, I realized sugar skulls have a space on the forehead for a name.

November 1st is marked as a day to honor lost children.

I open Riley’s closet and look at his clothes.

It is silent, and airless as a church.

My husband runs back out to get Riley’s bike.

January 12th

October 6, 2016.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Heather Bowlan

Featured Art: Woman Combing Her Hair by Edgar Degas, 1888-90

the day I told M
I loved her, we were at her new Dom’s
midcentury modern
in Hollywood, the one
with the surprisingly small bedroom.
I always pretend the best version
is what really happened, so I pretended
I didn’t need the wine, didn’t drink
myself to floating while we texted him
photos of our cheery breasts
and matching cherry-bordered
aprons for his birthday, that I wasn’t hungry
for her, that kissing for the camera, lips
open, waiting for him to come
home from work was just a great story for later—
which it is. And she said she would never
love me and I said no chance, really none, never?
and she said no. M always said
L.A. was her town, her true home, and she tiptoed
naked onto the terrace later that night,
a ballerina watching the traffic lights change
on Santa Monica, and I want to pretend
we glided a grand jeté entrance onto
some carcinogenic highway, quick-fast away
from every bare inch of that small room
out into her great city, one I almost knew,
city of spaces, boulevards, exits, of sun
and shifting ground, valleys
and parking lots, an algorithm of streets and
lanes that open out and don’t stop
opening, a mirage city of merges, a city
I nearly loved when its skyline framed the arch
of her neck—even now I see it, I speak it, that sailing
second, it’s the moment I wake up to
every morning I’m in the world.

Facebook Friends

October 5, 2016.Reading time 1 minute.

By Lisa Badner

Fran is my Friend on Facebook.
In the 90s, Fran and I were roommates, then girlfriends.
Dina is my Friend on Facebook too.
I cheated on Fran to be with Dina.
It was in Jerusalem and very dramatic.
Fran can see that I am Friends with Dina on Facebook
because Dina is on my list of Friends.
I Friend Fran’s new girlfriend Ellie,
since we are all pretty friendly.
Ellie Friends Dina. Ellie doesn’t know Dina,
but Ellie Friends all of her Facebook Friends’ Friends.
Ellie is Friends with Alan.
Alan and Ellie were boyfriend and girlfriend in the 80s,
before Ellie was gay.
Alan Friends me. I have never met Alan,
but I was girlfriends with his first wife, Deb,
when Deb was still dabbling.
We weren’t very friendly after that.
Alan and Deb are Friends on Facebook,
though I hear Deb may have recently died.
Fran and Ellie and Dina are also Friends with Deb on Facebook.
Tomorrow I’m going to Friend Deb too.

Parent/Teacher Conference

October 4, 2016.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Lisa Badner

Featured Art: Chrysanthemums in the Garden at Petit-Gennevilliers by Gustave Caillebotte, 1893

My son’s third grade music teacher
was the girlfriend of my piano teacher
in nineteen eighty-three.
I was a teenager.
She was hip and grown-up with long hair.
She has no clue we ever met.
But I remember her.
I remember hearing her scat sing
while I walked up the stairs.
She also doesn’t know
that I had sex with her thirty-something boyfriend,
rather—that I let him have sex with me—after she’d leave
and after I played the Bach French Suites—
in their Bleecker Street walk-up.
I was desperately trying to be straight
(it didn’t work).
We are sitting on little-kid chairs
and she is discussing my son’s musical prowess,
in spite of his bad behavior in chorus.
She still has long hair, now dyed blonde.
She tells me my son is a little lost,
struggling to find his place.
I know from lost—I want to yell out.
This conference is about my son.
So I nod and smile thinking
about being sprawled out numb
in nineteen eighty-three.
I want to talk about me.
I want to curl up into her arms
and go to sleep.

The Funeral by Edouard Manet, 1867

October 3, 2016.Reading time less than 1 minute.

This Is Not an Obituary

October 3, 2016.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Lisa Badner

Featured Art: The Funeral by Edouard Manet, 1867

–For Claudia Card

Claudia, you asked me (in advance) to write your obituary.
You gave me your 37-page single-spaced CV.
Now the time has come,
I have not written an obituary.

After the biopsy results last year
You said I would inherit your music library.
I used to play piano.
I stopped playing piano in 1984.

You nominated me for a graduate fellowship.
You said I would have been a good philosopher.
I got the fellowship. Thank you.
Then I dropped out.

I went back to New York, eventually to law school
to pursue a mediocre career. After your lung surgery
you told your other visitors that I was a judge.
You seemed so proud. Claudia, I kept telling you, administrative judge.

In the 90s I took you on a walking tour
all over Manhattan.
You developed plantar fasciitis
from the hard city pavement.

I took your Ethics class in 1984. You held the chalk like the cigarettes
you used to chain-smoke. Your mother died of lung cancer.
You told me your family was so poor she barely went to the doctor—
the lung tumor protruded from her chest by the time she got someone to look at it.
So in 1989 I lied when you asked me if I smoked.

I still have the coat and blazer I bought
the day I gave you plantar fasciitis.
I don’t have the letters you wrote and the papers you sent me.

The last time I ever saw you,
I hugged you goodbye when my taxi arrived to take me to the airport.
You were in bed, cancer in your brain, maybe your spine.
My heavy backpack fell over me onto your abdomen.

When they moved you to hospice
you said you’d rather I come see you again at this new facility
than come to your funeral.
I didn’t see you at hospice.
I didn’t go to your funeral.

Response to Medical Questionnaire Furnished by Mount Sinai

October 2, 2016.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Graham Coppin

I had chicken pox as a child. Rubella and the mumps.
My tonsils came out when I was three. I am not currently
under a physician’s care for any ailment or injury although
see below. I have lived outside the United States because
I was born outside the United States. My left ring toe has
a callus, same spot same toe as my father. He passed away
of bladder cancer and a broken heart. My mother before him
died of stomach cancer and a broken heart. I used to smoke.
Quit years ago and took up other things much worse for me.
I drink when I can’t. I am allergic to penicillin. At least
that’s what my mother told me. One of the many things
I was taught would be my undoing. I am undetectable.
Genvoya keeps it that way. I take Doxepin when I can’t sleep
or need to sleep. I sleep on average seven hours a night.
Today I have high creatinine. Ask me again tomorrow.
Yes, I use a seat belt. My uncle Michael is a schizophrenic
and survives in a state institution. My uncle Mervyn developed
adult onset diabetes and got both legs amputated, leaving me
to carry him up the stairs at my parents’ fiftieth. His wife
my aunt Betty is still going strong spending the money that
there’s no need to bequeath to anyone especially me. She’s barren
my mother used to whisper. I inject testosterone cypionate once
a fortnight into my ass to combat low T. I don’t eat red meat.
I exercise. Pray mostly. My father’s father died of lung
cancer. His wife my grandmother Flo went of dementia,
breathing her last in a pool of her own waste in a home
that used to be a hotel when I was a teen. The hotel where
an older man once lured me to his room and did things.

The Killing Square

October 1, 2016.Reading time 33 minutes.

By Michael Credico

Featured Art: Unfinished Study of Sheep by Constant Troyon, 1850

It’s the manipulations that end you. I was told this by Sam Shaw after he learned he’d been promoted to the inside. We were on the outside of the outside in the designated smoking area. I was smoking. Sam Shaw said, “What’s suffering worth?” He broke off the shards of animal blood that had froze to his overalls.

I shook like I was caught in electric wires. The cigarette butt hissed when I let it drop into a snowdrift. I could hardly feel myself living, felt like I was alive as a series of smoke breaks.

Sam Shaw said, “Nothing’s dead-end as it seems.”

“Easy for you to think,” I said. “You’re on the inside now.”

I warmed my hands with the heat of the conveyor’s gear motor, clenched and unclenched until my circulation was good enough that I could reach for my cutter and hand it off to Sam Shaw without either of us losing a precious something. Sam Shaw cut into a plastic clamshell that contained a dress shirt and tie combo. He pulled the tie too tight. I told him he couldn’t breathe. He called himself a real professional. I lined up the next group of animals.

“You ain’t dressed for this no more,” I said.

Sam Shaw looked at me and then the cutter. “Take it easy on me,” he said, taking an animal by its pit, cutting it with no regard for the stainlessness of the shirt.

Horse on a Plane

September 30, 2016.Reading time 1 minute.

By Joyce Peseroff

Featured Art: Horses Running Free from The Caprices by Jacques Callot, 1622

A horse on a plane is a dangerous thing
if the box he’s persuaded to enter shifts
like a boulder or a coffin fragrant with hay
but no exit and midflight he decides no way,
time to bomb this pop stand, burst out
of his lofty corral into a tufted field
asway with timothy, feathers, and prance.
You ask a horse—you don’t tell him—to trot
or whoa, easy there fella, and cross-tie him
with a knot meant to fail if he pulls back.
When the plane bucks, a horse can launch
steel shoes through aluminum, the hiss
of oxygen dropping down the masks.
Then his groom must place a pistol barrel
in the nearest ear and whisper, Easy;
carried on with apples, sugar, and oats,
the gun follows the horse on every flight.

Ammo

September 29, 2016.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Marc Tretin

Featured Art: Snap-the-Whip by Winslow Homer, 1873

In ’69, to avoid the draft, I taught at Mt. Tryon
Boarding School for Troubled Boys and there
I hit a child. Afterward I imagined
I was on top of an explosive ammo truck
manning a gun, squeezing off bullets
at young bodies of boys who’d tried
to run to the back of our truck to soft-toss
a grenade that could blow us into
strips of meat. It seemed better to be scared
in that V.C.-controlled village I’d
never been to than to think of squeaky-voiced
and fat Gerry, who at thirteen, threw chalk
at me, hit a younger boy,
and always grabbed that kid’s crotch.

I was in charge of him and ten others. For punishment
they’d have to sit without making a sound, but Gerry
sang, “Try to shut me up. Try to shut
me up.” I was afraid the others would join him.
My hands felt like clubs. Then
I swung and his nose spurted surprised
blood that dripped to his shirt from his chin.
The principal came from the main office.
I was gone.

So this is why, my son,
when you, at thirteen, said,
“I don’t know who I am. I don’t know
who I am!” I said, “Be glad you
haven’t done anything that makes you choke
on who you are,” and I put up
my paper to read about how, somewhere,
a soldier was shooting civilians.

Princess Summer-Fall-Winter-Spring

September 28, 2016.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Charles Harper Webb

What serpentine producer snuck her past the censors
to corrupt the Peanut Gallery boys? Oh Princess
of the Tinka Tonka tribe, I loved you more than Dolores
at the swimming pool, Janey next door, or Bobbi Jo,

the best baseball player on my block. I loved
the beaded buckskin dress that couldn’t hide your curvy
hips and thighs. I loved your black braids, your dark
eyes that shocked me through the new TV, smudged

by my lips. Indian girl with skin as pale as mine—
birds and butterflies flocked to your singing drum.
Native royalty, whose name evoked School’s Out /
Trick or Treat / Santa Claus / Home Run Derby—

daughter (I guessed) of Big Chief Thunderthud—
you dumped Howdy, and left me to stomp
the flowers I plucked for you, and shred
the blue-jay plume I’d saved to slide behind your ear.

Starring with Elvis in Jailhouse Rock, you helped
to crown him King before you married a loser
named Lafayette who, driving through Wyoming
(near where Tinka Tonkan warriors ruled?) hit a car

towing a trailer that sliced your car and you in two,
ten years before Jayne Mansfield lost half
of her head the same way. The stone that bears
your white-girl name, Judy Tyler, says you were 25.

Elvis skipped your funeral, wanting (his mother said)
to remember you alive. I would have gone.
But no one told me. And I was still (“Thank God,”
my mother would have said) too young to drive.

Audition

September 27, 2016.Reading time 37 minutes.

Winner, New Ohio Review Fiction Contest
selected by Charles Johnson

By Leslie Rodd

Featured Art: Nymphs and Satyrs Playing Musical Instruments by Claude Lorrain

San Francisco, 1969

Outside the jazz club where I’ve been audience, player, and piano tuner over the years, it’s quiet at this sunstruck ten o’clock, and I have a shivery thought of a guitar and a girl that began inside my head last night. No rocking, no rhythm, no foot-stomping or window-shaking. Only the fifty measured strides I’ve counted from the corner where the 30 Stockton dropped me off, past the police station to the alley, the dip in the pavement and the sloping rise, the manhole cover to my left, yes, here it is, the last of my landmarks, reassuring me I’m in the right place. A thought of a girl, who used to make my music glow.

I rap the metal tip of my cane against the partly opened steel door, the tradesman’s entrance.

“Easy does it there, fella,” a man calls out to me.

“Jimmy McGee,” I identify myself.

He says, in a voice that’s smoother than Roscoe’s, “Come on in, Jimmy. Mustafa Monroe, at your service. Roscoe’s on-again bass, as of yesterday.”

Watching Nature on PBS

September 26, 2016.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Angela Voras-Hills

The caribou calf is separated from the herd, pursued
by the wolf. Unless it slips up, the calf could escape,
outrun it. The toddler grows restless and runs to the window,
watching the garbage truck back up, lift bins, and dump
our trash into itself. I don’t redirect her. My own childhood
window looked into a tree. All year, there were branches. Sometimes
covered in leaves, but by winter, they were bare. I often prayed
for a way out. I once spoke directly to God, said: “God, if you know everything,
what am I thinking now?” And I tried to think the opposite of anything
he’d expect me to think. Another time I said, “God, if you help me
leave this place,” but could think of nothing worth giving in return.
No matter how much we bargained, I never asked God to save our house
from fire, even after a house on our block burned down. I didn’t
ask him to spare us from cancer, Alzheimer’s, any other death. I believed
there was a reason for everything. When my mother asked me
to blow into her cup of dice for luck before she rolled them onto the bar,
I didn’t wonder what it meant if she didn’t win. Then, in high school,
a classmate was found dead in her bed. Her mother had gone to wake her,
but her heart had stopped beating. The parenting books say it’s good
to establish rituals. I run a bath, wash peanut butter from the toddler’s hair.
I rock her, sing folk songs about birds, and she sits up, pointing to a spider
climbing the wall. I watch it as I lay her in the crib, still singing
as her eyes close. I wait until she falls asleep.

Full Disclosure

September 25, 2016.Reading time 1 minute.

By Emily Sernaker

When someone says a mental math problem
I usually act like I’m trying to solve it but secretly

wait it out until someone else does the work.
I tend to think of today’s date in the announcer’s voice

from The Daily Show. I sometimes sit next to handsome
men in coffee shops, pretend we’re together reading

different sides of the same newspaper. My family
loves watching 24 reruns. Dad yells “there’s no time,”

accuses my mother of being a Russian spy. When I’m
let down I feel like a game of Jenga with a log taken out.

I can feel myself tumbling. I don’t like people who
over-use the word “obviously.” I got a month-to-month

lease so I could leave Washington D.C. any time.
The Lincoln Memorial steps are still the best place to sit.

I could learn to pack a better snowball. Could save M&Ms
in trail mix for someone good. I have a sneaking

suspicion the man I end up with will own a Ghostbusters
T-shirt. I’d like to know more about Saint Francis.

History Will Remember

September 24, 2016.Reading time 2 minutes.

By David O’Connell

Featured Art: Showers by Louis Auguste Lepère, 1890

maybe not today, but this July,
surely, the way the city wakes up
to brunch, the café windows

thrown open to foot traffic.
It rained overnight. But now sun.
Or if not this July, certainly the skyline,

the bar graph of midtown, the Empire
State Building, the Chrysler, all that was
accomplished. And that we were?

Not we, as in you and me,
but we all? Impossible
that the record could be garbled

beyond translation. Centuries on,
careers will be made retelling
what’s . . . sorry, a cabbie’s honking

at a bike messenger, and the newsstand
on the corner’s glossy with everything
you’d ever need to know

about red carpet nip slips, double
truffle burgers, how soon the West
Antarctic ice sheet’s likely to collapse.

I’ve got weekend plans. My wife’s
friend’s rented a place in the Hamptons
we could never afford. She doesn’t buy

she says, because it’ll be under water
in a decade. I’m hoping, like last year,
for clear nights. We’re crossing through

the Perseids, that annual shower
of meteors: traces of a comet’s tail
that flared some time ago.

Black Telephone

September 23, 2016.Reading time 41 minutes.

By Robert Long Foreman

Featured Art: Death: “My Irony Surpasses All Others” by Odilon Redon, 1888

Michael, you are gone, and in this house where you once were there is an antique telephone as black as your coffin. Heavier than it looks, it is as full as the hole the men dug for you, early one morning, as they talked about summer and things they saw on TV.

Old things weigh more than they look—dead, leaden things like you and the black telephone.

You have been gone three weeks, and now my mother is gone, too. When she left for Providence she left me here with Michael, whom you left behind like a copy of yourself when you went. He doesn’t ask where you are anymore. Instead he says, nine times a day, that he’s going to call you on his telephone.

He found it at the flea market where my mother took him, to take him off my hands and take me off of his.

When I’m not looking, he lifts the receiver and talks to you. He doesn’t say your name, and I don’t ask who is on the line. I know it’s you.

The Potter’s Field

September 22, 2016.Reading time 1 minute.

By Amit Majmudar

Featured Art: Study of Arms for “The Cadence of Autumn” by Evelyn De Morgan, 1905

Something lumpen, something slapped
Wet on a wheel, cupped and spun,
Sculpted; something hollowed, bellied,
Shapely; something held, watered,
Coaxed into a poised amphora.

Soiled hands smooth their own prints
Like still winds pressed to the spinning earth.
Brittle even after the fire,
The vessel is what it holds:
Ashes, ouzo, roses, olive oil.

I never understood your choice,
Or what that haggard savior held
For you, until you told me the part
Of the cemetery where the dirt poor
Returned their poverty to the dirt,

Repossessed, anonymous,
No grave-goods but a prayer,
Used to be called the potter’s field—
Barren furrows, fruitful now with clay
Scooped and pulsing in your hand.

The Skeleton in My Grandfather’s Closet

September 21, 2016.Reading time 1 minute.

By Peter Schmitt

Featured Art: The Print Collector by Honoré Victorin Daumier, 1857/63

hung in their bedroom
for years after he died,
my grandmother dutifully dusting
the yellowing lifesize model
from his surgical days.
Who can say

if she ever let time settle
on the stack of letters
she found from the nurse—
but she took my father with her
(he was six) from Brooklyn
to Oakland on the Zephyr,

booking so late
every berth was reserved.
The nerve of that woman,
she might’ve muttered, and How
could he bring them home?
Unsure she’d bring herself

home, or their son.
Sleeping upright was no bargain
while he roamed the observation car,
a storm out over the Rockies
lighting up the glassed-in deck
like an x-ray.

By the time the Bay
washed into view, sun burning
through fog, she saw how it was,
and penned my grandfather a letter
of her own—one he saved
only he knew where—

because it saved him.

Checkup

September 20, 2016.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Daryl Jones

Featured Art: Woman Bathing by Mary Cassatt, 1890–91

Two weeks they didn’t speak,
my father sleeping on the couch
and rising early, spooning cold cereal
into his mouth like a metronome,
while my mother stood at the stove
in her white nightgown, back turned,
stirring the silence. And all because
the handsome new doctor, I’d gathered
from muffled shouts through the wall,
had asked her, at her annual checkup,
to take off all of her clothes
and she did. Every day at school,
the words chalked on the blackboard
all spelled DIVORCE, and I figured,
homeless, I’d grab my paper route cash
stashed under my socks in the dresser
and thumb my way west
to Frisco, jam out on bop and poetry
like Sal and Dean, eat
chocolate-covered ants and sip
jasmine tea, maybe smoke some Mary Jane.
But who would take care of my dog? Read More

Bag It, Box It, Haul It Away

September 19, 2016.Reading time 5 minutes.

By Jay Leeming

What’s the matter? Stuff is the matter and our basement
is filthy with it, our ignored understory grown lumber-
cluttered and impossible so my wife and I descend
to wrestle with the rusted-out wheelbarrow festering

tilted beside the unstartable lawnmower and the extra

freezer, the two of us tangling with moldy drywall, broken
bicycles and that heap of gray peeling stair treads
their half-pulled nails all askew like arrows fired
at ten different targets. Matter is mother, is milk crates

a-clatter with extra faucets and so in a faded T-shirt

and ragged jeans I go huffing the leftover porcelain
toilet top, cracked desk drawer and crate of tile down
the low corridor up three battered stairs then out
under the sky, each trip a rebirth, a bringing of things

to light, the shadow-world made conscious but like dreams

remembered later they seem silly, unimportant now.
Two previous owners plus our neglect means multiple
jelly-jars full of nails, a bucket of gravel, a torque-
wrench and a rusty alternator, every clogged caulk-gun

and bent window screen witness to dramas unknown, mute

Black-Eyed Susan

September 18, 2016.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Lisa Bellamy

I just cannot bloom endlessly, you know—this is November, I’m
pale, a dry stalk—I can barely stand, I’m shaking, I need Me time,
I need to center myself—this summer was horrific: It was all about
the aphids, crawling, depositing God knows what without my
permission, from who knows what hollows of slime; it was all about the
jays—“by mistake” they smashed into me, to try to grab
the crickets—I had to hear the swallowing, I had to see the bulging
gullets; it was all about the bees, their selfishness and their overall
lack of tenderness. Oh, bees are sly—they say they buzz for
beauty, for splendor, and they preen, like debutantes in frilly
hats—people, it’s a racket, a con job—they trampled on my
privates, they scurried back, mobsters with their booty (my pollen!)
to their dank, little clubs, their “hives.” This summer was all about
the deer, their nibbling, their slobbering, ticks crawling in and out
of their noses—sweet Jesus, a sight no one should have to
endure—and who, in the meadow, ever thought to pause, ever
thought to kiss my petals? People, I’m on my own here—I need T-L-C.
Look, dormant does not mean down-for-the-count, I will re-
seed myself—I am a brilliant genius of reinvention, the hardiest of
the hardy perennials—but I need to be pumped from below, long
and slow, with the cool water brimming under the meadow—I
need the slathering, the mud pack sliding into my flowerets, the
wet leaves—damnit someone needs to soothe my pistil.

Our Family Walks

September 17, 2016.Reading time 49 minutes.

By N. R. Robinson

Featured Art: A Window Seen Through a Window by Theodore Roussel, 1897

“Y’all are hungry,” Mama said, no question in her downcast whispery voice. “I’ll be back quick.” There was something definite behind the distraction in Mama’s careless hair, and in her careless face, and in the blue-veined hands that wandered as she spoke. Too young to understand, Cookie’s puzzled brown eyes darted back and forth between Mama and me. Cookie was weeping that day because I was.

That autumn of 1963 people were walking, and we were among them. But our walks, at the time, seemed purposeless. Or perhaps I did not see then their purpose. I barely knew it, but ’63 was a dangerous time to be wandering the heat- and frost-blazed roads of America. Over the months surrounding what would be our last family trek across D.C., a quarter million folk marched on Washington, protesters were beaten in Birmingham, a U.S. President was assassinated in the street.

When Mama called our aimless ambles anything, they were Our Family Walks. We strolled that September day, just weeks after my seventh birthday, Mama on one side, five-year-old Cookie on the other. It was late afternoon when Mama crooned—face demure, fragile, resolute—“Don’ worry babies, th’ angels are beside y’all,” then walked away. Because I’d learned it was useless to protest, I pulled Cookie to the sidewalk curb. Snarling cars and trucks belched heat and grit in our direction as we watched Mama flicker and fade down North Capitol Street. Before she left, I’d searched her eyes. She was telling the truth, I decided. I promised Cookie, “Mama comin’ back this time.”

Grounded

September 16, 2016.Reading time 1 minute.

By Claire Bateman

Featured Art: Different Peoples Inhabit the Countries of the Ocean, plate 23 of 24 by Odilon Redon, 1896

Neither pulverized nor laid to rest,
the phone booths were loaded on container ships,
then consigned to the ocean floor
along with their superheroes
in various stages of undress
who, weary of perusing pulpy directories,
soggy Chick tracts, and obsolete graffiti,
now peer through glass at clouds of kelp,
anticipating a slo-mo emergency.

Ancient Stone Coin, Diameter Six Feet

September 15, 2016.Reading time 1 minute.

By Claire Bateman

In dreams it escapes its keepers,
rolls away, accelerating
as though trying to leave
its huge ungainliness behind,
sensing a destiny of shrinkage
through millennia of metals,
feeling its way toward pure ideation
so it can flow freely between hosts,
reunited with thought itself
from which it was first
thrust into the world
to thicken into matter.

The New Loneliness

September 14, 2016.Reading time 1 minute.

By Claire Bateman

Featured Art: Rocks in the Forest by Paul Cézanne, 1890s

Remember how it was before thought balloons,
when we all pondered in one huge lumpish murk,
a supercontinent of undifferentiated cognitive matter
floating just above our heads?

Remember the era before alphabets were sorted,
hieroglyphics and cuneiform all jumbled up together,
characters resembling machine parts
tangled with runes like forked and flaming branches?

Remember life before quotation marks,
when anything could be attributed to anyone,
so there was never a distinction
between generosity and return?

Not only is the world tidier these days,
but there’s no limit to what we may accomplish
now that each of us is equipped to take things personally.

Cake-o-Rama

September 13, 2016.Reading time 1 minute.

By Claire Bateman

Featured Art: Still Life with Cake by Raphaelle Peale, 1818

You can never speak of the cake that rises up
without implying the cake that sinks into itself,
languorous as liquid glass;

the cake that’s all scaffolding and prestidigitation,
so precisely calibrated,
you must not even whisper in its presence;

and the inversely incendiary cake,
candles ablaze in its hollow center.

To attempt to do otherwise
would be like trying to extricate
taste from the tongue,
duration from time,
the world from the world.

This is not to say, however,
either that all cakes are one,
or that there is only one cake,

for each, sculpted out of
everything it is not,
embodies a largesse
particular to itself,

especially the event-horizon cake
that the fork never reaches,
known also as the cake
of ineluctable sweetness.

We Handle It

September 12, 2016.Reading time 24 minutes.

By Gwen E. Kirby

Featured Art: Fisherman’s Cottage by Harald Sohlberg, 1906

We see him first at the reservoir, a middle-aged man with an oval of fur on his chest, nipples like button eyes, and blue swim trunks with yellow Hawaiian flowers. We are swimming, and he regards us from the shore in that way we are learning to expect from a certain kind of man.

Like every day in Tennessee, it is hot, and in the early afternoon, we walk from the stone campus of this small college to the lake. We are at a summer music camp, our fingertips sore from strings, our backs sticky with sweat, and when we reach the lake we shed our summer dresses and leap from a boulder into the water, which is deep and clean. Around the lake, tall pines and the heavy hum of Southern bug life. We float on our backs, conscious of how our breasts protrude from the water, pleased that we are sixteen, except for Caisa who is seventeen and over-proud of it. For her birthday, she buzzed her head. Her cheekbones are sharp and high, and even if she were not older, she would be our leader because she walks with confidence and draws checkers on the white rubber of her Converse in ballpoint pen, cheap ink that shimmers like oilslick. We wish we could go home and buzz our heads, draw on our shoes, but our faces are round, we like our sneakers white, we like our mothers happy.

The man doesn’t jump into the water. He walks down the wooden stairs to the dock, sits, then eases himself into the water as if it pains him. Though we don’t say anything, we cease floating on our backs, tucking ourselves under the surface, our heads and shoulders bobbing in a circle.

Cooking with Fire

September 11, 2016.Reading time 12 minutes.

By Cady Vishniac

Featured Art: Hunters resting in a forest at night by Kilian Christoffer Zoll, 1830–60

At the Retreat for Warriors at the Blundsheim Nature Reserve, Pete watches Dave shoot one of the docile young Blundsheim bucks square in the chest with his crossbow, and the buck falls neatly on the spot. Deer, Dave tells Pete, are like women—even though this particular one was actually male—because they’re skittish and must be wooed with a hunter’s silence.

Pete doesn’t get it. The warriors haven’t been especially silent, and women, in his experience, like to be talked to. Still, he nods. Dave is the Elder in this Circle of Responsibility, and Pete’s father-in-law. This is Pete’s first Retreat.

Another man in the Circle jokes that he hopes the deer was a feminist, but Dave ignores the guy, instead looking at Pete directly and saying, “We are harvesting this animal, like a farmer with an ear of corn.” He’s always tossing out these nuggets of homespun wisdom, which, Pete thinks, are annoying enough to explain why his wife, Pete’s mother-in-law, left him. Maybe Dave wasn’t silent enough.

Henry’s Horses

September 10, 2016.Reading time 4 minutes.

Winner, New Ohio Review Poetry Contest
selected by Tony Hoagland

By Michael Pearce

Featured Art: In the Valley of Wyoming, Pennsylvania (Interior of a Coal Mine, Susquehanna) by Thomas Addison Richards, 1852

The old barrel warehouse across the street
had a ceiling so high there was weather inside.
Henry Gutierrez lived there—they said
he’d been there since before the war,
though they never said which war.
He worked at Anger’s garage all day
rebuilding engines, then came home
and slept a few hours, and when
he woke up after dark he’d knock back
a bowl of cereal and a couple beers.

If you looked over there at midnight you’d see
brilliant flashes coming from inside,
silent explosions, like lightning
trapped in a thunderless cage.
But it was only Henry’s arc welder,
he worked all night fusing together
sheets and scraps of steel until
they seemed to breathe and shake
and prance and strike a noble pose.
He built animals, mostly horses,
and he said he knew he’d finished one
when he found himself talking to it.

One time Uncle Jack, my father’s brother,
invited Henry to his church, the one
where they forgive you for anything
as long as you let Jesus into your heart
and drop a twenty in the basket.
But Henry knew there was no forgiving
his sins, and it made him sick
to talk about the people he’d injured
then listen to the other craven souls
tell him he was absolved. He said
he had his own way of atoning that
was mostly about wrestling with steel.

The Pale Man

September 9, 2016.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Michael Pearce

Featured Art: We Both Saw a Large Pale Light, plate 2 of 6 by Odilon Redon, 1896

Last time I saw my dad was at
the cemetery on Pilgrim Hill,
pale as a ghost but he wasn’t dead.
He stood over the grave of his grandfather,
the hero of our family.
I called out to him and waved and
he turned my way—he looked sad
and then he looked ashamed and
I felt bad for him until I understood
that his shame was directed at me.

No point in pondering his disappointment,
I know I’m a failure in his eyes and
there’s no way back to the sunshine of his pride—
the boy of great promise is long dead and here I am.
And there he was—he turned away from me
and peered right through the gravestone
and into a glorious dream of the past
where a brave man stood against the mob
and brought reason to our torn-up town.

I tried to smile because I love him so much
and because I know he’ll be the next to go—
that’s why he was there on Pilgrim Hill
and in fact as I stood there watching
he got even paler and I could see
the silhouette of a fencepost behind him,
dim x-ray of a thick dead spine.

A full moon rose in the afternoon sky.
Oh Daddy, said the scream inside my head,
oh Papa, please don’t go without giving me
your blessing, the sweet sneeze of your blessing.
And then I knew that he didn’t have it in him
and never had, that he was too faint and frail
and too scared to issue blessing or curse.
And I forgave him, I did my best to forgive him
and when I wake up on these fullmoon nights
that’s what I do, I forgive him as best I can
because now I can’t see him anymore
that’s how pale he’s gotten but I know
he’s alive and still walks this town.

The Boy on the Ridge

September 8, 2016.Reading time 4 minutes.

By Michael Pearce

Featured Art: Precarious Glimmering, a Head Suspended from Infinity, plate 3 of 6 by Odilon Redon, 1891

I rode my bike down from Pilgrim Hill
toward the river that splits our town.
Along the way I waved to Sheriff Roy
and Mildred Floss, then wondered what
they were saying about me and my family.

It was fall and the road was littered
with goose shit and hyena shit and
shit-shadows shrinking in the rising sun,
and Estelle was bringing milk and muffins
to Mayor Bob’s bedside and pretending
his soul was alive inside its doltish husk
and my Noni was sitting in the bathtub
like a pile of wet clothes while Grappa
lay in bed dreaming of blood-hungry Cossacks
cruising the Steppe on thundering horses
and the town was still quiet enough
that you could hear the river’s bashful giggle.
I was headed to my shop
to build a desk for McElroy.

Up on Pilgrim Hill my mother’s voice
had spoken to me from her grave
in the Jewish section, had told me
about a little boy of few delights
and many sorrows who roams the high ridge
where Dorsell Quivers chases fox and deer.
My mother’s voice said only she
can see that little boy right now,
but he’ll saunter down and climb into
the belly of a comely maiden
as soon as I’m ready to be his dad.

I don’t want a boy of many sorrows,
I was such a boy and my heart
isn’t big enough to bear another,
to blaze the cul-de-sac of his youth
or watch his terror of his own hungry body
and the other demons of his undoing
hound him from his destiny.

Night Dodge

September 7, 2016.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Jill Leininger

Every philosopher I haven’t read is drunk and arguing
             in the same Dodge Chrysler. I swerve
to miss them, blinded in their sublime 60-mile-an-hour
             wake along the dotted divide. Looking back,
how odd! There was no way to distinguish one pipe from
             the other, Spinoza from Kant, yet I knew,
in the sudden, smoky fervor of that car, who they were:

in aggregate, the thoughts I haven’t formed, books skimmed
             and come alive, unified recklessly
behind headlights to make me pull off under the half-lit
             letters of this truck stop, Esso $3.89.
In the time it takes to remember the phrase “burn and dodge”—
             in fact, to misremember it—they’re gone.

I wake up hungry, of course, grasping for the words I’d heard
in my head as the reel of the almost-
crash replayed. But in the dissolve of daylight I find only
one image: a license plate, which someone had tied
to the bathroom key and, if memory serves, cleverly elided.

Abandoned Settlement

September 6, 2016.Reading time 5 minutes.

By Christopher Brean Murray

Featured Art: Frontier Cabin by William Louis Sonntag, 1894

We came upon it at midday. We were in need
of a rest. Our rucksacks were heavy,
and the trail we’d navigated wove serpentine
through mountain crags. It laced figure-eights
though fields of stone before tracing the lips
of cliffs that hung over the gaping abyss.
Eagles cried and soared through the cloudless
expanse. A violet lizard stared at us
before vanishing. Vegetation was sparse:
only trailside scrub and grass-clumps.
Yet, at the settlement we found shaggy spruces.
Aspen leaves flickered in the breeze.
The odor of Douglas fir streaked the air.
We advanced into the enclave, offering
a polite greeting to our anticipated hosts.
No answer. I kicked open the door of a cabin—
it smelled of urine. On dusty floorboards lay
a collapsed soccer ball and some thumb-tacks.
Pinned above a soiled bunk, a picture of
a sable-skinned seductress spreading her sex.
She wore high purple boots and a white derby.
Mouse shit speckled the floor. Otherwise,
the cabin was empty. We walked a trail
that hugged a creek into which someone
had hurled a mini-fridge. Did we hear music? Read More

Buzz Can Happen Here: Sinclair Lewis and the New American Fascism

September 4, 2016.Reading time 32 minutes.

By Michael Mark Cohen

Featured Art:

The exquisitely named Berzelius Windrip, known to all as “Buzz,” is the fictional politician and “Ringmaster Revolutionist” who ousts FDR from the Democratic ticket in 1936 and gets himself elected dictator in Sinclair Lewis’s speculative novel It Can’t Happen Here. No uniformed buffoon like Italy’s Il Duce, nor an awkward, vegetarian mystic like Adolf Hitler, President Buzz Windrip is a decidedly American kind of fascist.

Published in October 1935, in the sixth year of the Great Depression, It Can’t Happen Here was a major literary and political event. Not only was Sinclair Lewis famous for being the first American to win a Nobel Prize, in 1930, but this novel gave both name and narrative to Americans’ growing fears of whatever “It” was. Critics praised the book, written over the course of one summer, for its journalistic immediacy, and Lewis was so committed to capturing this sense of urgency that he insisted on changing the text at the printers after the September 10th assassination of Senator Huey Long.

After Hollywood spiked a film version (a decision made by the conservative head of MGM studios at the request of the German foreign office), Lewis wrote a play for the Federal Theater Project. On October 27, 1936, 21 companies in 18 cities debuted local productions of It Can’t Happen Here. “Out in Denver” reported the New York Times, “dictatorship came to a small Colorado town, and in Detroit it captured the factory district.” Companies performed in Yiddish in New York City, Spanish in Tampa, and an all-black cast focused on racial issues in Seattle.

Take Me to Your Lady Leader

September 2, 2016.Reading time 14 minutes.

By Kristen Lillvis

Featured Art: Profile of Shadow by Odilon Redon, 1895

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

Of the People, for the People, by the Robots

September 1, 2016.Reading time 22 minutes.

By Christopher A. Sims

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

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

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

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

New Ohio Review Issue 19 (Originally Published Spring 2016)

March 2, 2016.Reading time less than 1 minute.

Issue 19 compiled by Connor Beeman.

Letter to the Gone Lover, Late May

February 28, 2016.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Laura Maher

Featured Art: Idle Governer by Horatio C. Forjohn

If I needed to make a list for you
of all the beautiful things that have gone
on since you’ve left, the first thing

would be the line of bats leaving
the bridge at sunset, hundreds,
flying into the sky until they disappeared,

the effect making the mountains
to the west look more like a scrawled
suggestion of words than a skyline.

Or maybe what was beautiful
was that I could see something beautiful
that didn’t also make me sad, something

in the constant motion of so many wings,
the bat a thing that shouldn’t fly
but does, so unlike the easy lightness

of birds—something so beautiful in that
effort, the struggle of a bat against
the weight of its very bones.

Revery

February 27, 2016.Reading time 1 minute.

by Elizabeth Murawski

Featured Art: Sunset by Frederic Edwin Church

Too many women to count
rode behind him in helmets,
clung to his waist, wedded

to the wind in the dark
as the bike’s headlight pierced
the wooded hills, scaring

a deer, sending up an owl
in an explosion of wings.
I knew there were others

in line, grateful to share
one hour with the blue-eyed sun-god
worshiped for his light.

Always the nagging fear
he was never really there.
I saved his green bandanna for a year.

The Pink Cloud by Henri-Edmond Cross

February 26, 2016.Reading time less than 1 minute.

Prayer While Driving Home After My Yearly Physical

February 26, 2016.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Robert Cording

Featured Art: The Pink Cloud by Henri-Edmond Cross

Sixty-six, my shoulders rounded, my arches flattening, I am,
Lord, a small man, now a full inch shorter,
I’m told, than I once was. And so I pray

that my end-of-life diminishment might prove the occasion
for some late opening of my cramped borders,
this no-exit, small country of the self.

Lord, what I wouldn’t give for a lifting up,
to be free of this strange human gift of making
something less out of something,

each day stunting the fresh opportunity—
as your better servant William Blake saw—to become
the towering giant, the four-fold angelic power

you wanted us to be, if only we didn’t make ourselves
tiny with our incessant self-interest, our hearts
clamped around our enemies,

our narrow sympathies and unrelenting prideful gloom.
Lord, at every moment I have been a beginner,
lost in the bewildering wilderness of my ignorance.

Now that I am smaller, I pray that it will be
easier to recede from the center of my picture
and find this unexpected reprieve from vanity.

Let everything around me grow taller Lord
and more vivid, newly made, like these autumn maples
oranging the air, or this roadside red-tailed hawk,

its wingspan blinding as it crosses my windshield,
the road for a moment dark, then bright,
bearing me on, a small man nearing his exit.