Without Pain

January 30, 2019.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Kelly Michels

“Swing in the Right Direction with OxyContin”
—marketing slogan from Purdue Pharma

All day the rain spills onto the backyard deck.
The narcoleptic hours, darkened and dim, rewind and nod off.

My mother walks five miles to the emergency room on a Sunday.
She complains of a toothache, tells the doctors she needs something

to get by. It is predicted the temperature will rise 30 degrees in the next
twelve hours, then drop 20 more tomorrow, which means more talk

of global warming or the next ice age, more waiting for the Earth’s
fever to break like a sick child.

On television, people are dancing in a field of wildflowers.
The sun hits their faces, their pupils confetti.

A man appears in a lab jacket, claims he has found the cure for all pain.
He crushes the flowers, alkaloids running white across his chin.

You too can be like them, he says. And maybe we can.
But then, without pain—

What will the monks chant? What shrouded
music, what raspy voice will rise from the A.M.

radio, move like heat lightning against our spines?
Who will hear our minareted cries, our tangled

whispering, lowered breath pleading with
the moon? What hand will rock us

to sleep, float through our hair
like bath water, bring us to our knees,

lift our awkward heads
toward the frayed dawn?

Lucky

January 29, 2019.Reading time 1 minute.

By Steven Dawson

Featured Art: Firer by Felicity Gunn

The first time I watched Braveheart
was in the basement of Lucky’s dope house.
I remember the soft cone of light

reaching out from that small box TV
as if asking for spare change from the dark
and how that little glass frame made

blue-faced Wallace look so much
like an action figure (back when Mel
was somebody’s idea of a hero).

And in the downstairs bathroom hung
a cage with Lucky’s bird, a gray parrot
he took from a woman who couldn’t

pay him and that bird would pull
every dull feather from its back
and curse in Spanish as I watched.

I was nine or ten and alone with Braveheart,
that bird, and basement boxes I imagined filled
with a life before Lucky, when his name

might have been Greg or Brandon or even Mel.
This is how my brother babysat—
upstairs and horizontal with a needle

sleeping in his bowtied arm
like some guardian angel taking
work naps among hallway sleeping bags

swollen with strangers
practicing how to be dead
and Lucky’s bird downstairs

screaming chinga tu madre.

Repossession

January 28, 2019.Reading time 1 minute.

By Steven Dawson

To apologize for your vanishing
you brought me a loosey
and a rolled-up Hustler and we sat

in your new car trading smoke.
This happened every few months,
a kind of church service for holiday

Catholics. In that steel cathedral
you preached what you thought
I’d absolutely need: how to cheat

the cylinder inside a lock,
what words undress a virgin,
why I can’t confuse the compass

with the cross and how to blame
heaven if you went to hell.
From the passenger seat of that

stolen Cutlass you were a ruined
simile—the way the back
of an empty tow truck looks

like a crucifix and how in the small
light of that blinking patrol car
you blushed like a martyr.

Train Prayer

January 27, 2019.Reading time 1 minute.

By Steven Dawson

Featured Art: Indulge by Felicity Gunn

In Denver all days end standing up
packed like dried fish dry-humping
each other on the H Line. Some
passengers in their drunken wobble
or even in their haze of sobriety
pull down hard on the rubber handles,
the ones meant for standing,
the ones that swing dumbly above
our heads. They think this action
stops the locomotive but the train
is automated, stopping itself
at Broadway then Osage, Lincoln Blvd.
Since the train, as it always does, stops—
the travelers learn to keep tugging
& I can’t help but think this is how
prayer works. Like when I prayed
to a god I don’t believe in that your
morphine drip might soothe the wounds
that chemotherapy would not
& how I swear it worked sometimes
but didn’t others & yet in my drunken
sobriety I believe that it was me
who eased your pain, that it was my
failed pleas that bleached your blood.

An Oral History of Hands as Told by My Grandmother

January 26, 2019.Reading time 6 minutes.

By Mercedes Lucero

Featured Art: Seated Youth Writing in Book by Raffaello Sanzio

This all began because Mother was making tortillas. This all began with mothers and kitchens. We live in Crowley, Colorado, or maybe Rocky Ford, Colorado, a place where there are not a lot of doctors. We live in a place where there are always mothers in kitchens and daughters who wait nearby to watch their mothers watch the tortillas.

The year is 1949 or 1950 or 1951. I am nine or ten or eleven and not allowed to touch the stove. We have a wood-burning stove with a large at surface for cooking. I stand on the pile of wood at the edge of the stove to see the tortillas. I like to stand close to watch Mother. Father has a habit of kissing me on the back of the neck and I fall. It is the middle of winter and water from the well is cold.

I want to be like Mother. I have a rolling pin Father made me, small enough to fit inside my hands. Father is always making things with his hands. He makes things for me out of wood. Father has a habit of kissing me on the back of the neck. I am the youngest of nine and they say I am his favorite.

Mother hands me a small mound of dough and I flatten it with my rolling pin. I watch Mother put dough on the stove. I stand on the pile of wood at the edge to see the tortillas. I stand close to watch Mother place dough, perfectly round, on the stove. I am not allowed to touch the stove. Father has a habit of kissing me on the back of the neck and I fall.

I can hear the sound of my hands sizzling on the stove. My hands sound like a stick of butter in a frying pan. We have a wood-burning stove, with a large at surface for cooking. I like to stand close to watch Mother watch the tortillas.

A Fistful of Dirt

January 25, 2019.Reading time 43 minutes.

By Sujatha Fernandes

Manuel relayed buckets of moist earth to the concrete stairwell. It was Héctor’s job to hoist the buckets up and ferry them over to the dumpster. They had to work quickly to keep the buckets moving or the Bangladeshi contractor, a slight man with a beard, would start yelling at them, “Taratari koro.”

The workers down below had broken up the existing basement floor of the six-story building with jackhammers and then used pickaxes to pry out the concrete. Now they were excavating eight to ten feet of earth to increase the height of the basement.

Héctor was grateful to work in the open air instead of underground like a mole with the thick damp air and the artificial light from lamps. It was also safer up here. The men in the basement would dig themselves into three-foot-square holes up to eight-feet deep and there weren’t even any planks of wood to brace the sides. Suddenly someone would look up to see the sides crumbling in on him. He suspected that the contractors didn’t know what they were doing. It was only a matter of time before a worker was buried alive.

Still, it was regular work, something Héctor hadn’t had in a while. He had spent several months going to the parada on Roosevelt Avenue, getting picked up occasionally for one- or two-day stints in demolition or renovation. He found this job through Jesús, a slim Oaxaqueño, always clean shaven with dimples and a broad smile. Jesús used to talk big on the corner about his influence in the construction world. The men would rib him. “So why are you here at the parada, dumbass?” It didn’t bother Jesús.

Then and Now, the Essex Street Market

January 24, 2019.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Roger Mitchell

Featured Art: Hollywood Africans by Jean-Michel Basquiat

The person who took this picture took it
well above the parking lot across the street.
“Malted Milk with Ice Cream” cost five cents
once. Leroy’s on the corner sold “knishes
frankfurters and root beer,” and the cars
and everyone stopped moving for a moment
so this proof could be snapped of the way
a few things stood at the corner of Essex
and Delancey sometime between the Fall
of Rome and now. Which is also falling.

In the upper-right-hand reaches of the shot,
a line of laundry sags out of a tenement window.
The other end seems suspended in air,
like everything else, both in and out
of the window, the photo, the cowl of dust
that wraps the earth in its own heat. Damn,
said Napoleon, and he turned his horse
and started back across the steppe toward Josephine.

The half dozen newly planted trees lined up
in their iron jackets along Essex were leafless,
so winter must have been on its way, in
or out, we can’t tell. The little lie the picture tells
is that, though everything is about to change, it brought
life to a halt, so someone could open the door, now,
and let in a large whack of dust and noise,
the kind they make no room for in pictures,
passing them on to the woman in the next booth
who is giving, maybe the air, maybe her mother,
a colorfully athletic lesson in Spanglish,
involving, from what little I can make out,
most of what we call history, as it’s apt to look
when the future gets here, and “that fucker
Reynaldo.” I have no idea what Reynaldo’s crime is,
but, if you are listening, Reynaldo, get over here,
quick, if you don’t want to be history.

Thief

January 23, 2019.Reading time 1 minute.

By Owen McLeod

Every Thursday, on his way to therapy,
he drives past the house of the woman
he’s having an affair with. What interests
his therapist isn’t the sin, which she views
as a symptom, but the root. So they dig,
or seem to, and today he talks about his wife—
how, before they take a trip, she makes him
connect those timers to lamps in certain rooms,
and how much this annoys him, even though
it didn’t used to. As if their belongings were
of value. As if an automatic light might stop
an addict from breaking in.
As if the thief,
awake beside her, had not already come and gone.

In Dog Dreams

January 22, 2019.Reading time 1 minute.

by Karla K. Morton

Featured Art:

I run,
palms like paws on the earth,
muscles, long and sinew.

I smell wet clover,
the musk of home,
cooking meat.

I do not think about tomorrow
or yesterday,
but I remember the cactus
and the snake,
and the music of your voice
even when language fails.

And when I wake, I roll
to the nest of your shoulder.

Your arm does not reminisce
when it first wrapped my waist,
yet it comes to me;
heals even as you sleep.

I feel the peace of gravity;
the subtle spin of planet;
the rise of the mountain.

In Dog Dreams,
I have known no other hand;
no other time
when I wasn’t yours,
or you, mine.

Whoop! you call in the deepening forest.
Whoop! my descant back.

Confirmation

January 22, 2019.Reading time 3 minutes.

By John McCarthy

You taught me how hands could be laid, how they could touch
     a head and heal, but all of those hands eventually fell limp
like a field bent by threshing or a lit match dropped in water. Once,
     we used to dance in The Corner Tavern’s neon light
where the pickup exhaust wafted inside like harvest dust.
     Life in the Midwest is like one long goodbye because it is the same
every day, and I didn’t realize you had left until there was nothing
     but hard work and long days ending with the wind’s silent dirge
that sounds like trying not to die but always dies in smaller ways—
     screen doors that slam closed but don’t shut all the way
because the house has settled and the roof is warping from the sky
     boiling over with thunder and rain. I wake up now to the flashing
falling from the gutters and the water dripping through the holes
     in the ceiling. All I do is recall your voice like a prayer thrashing
my skull that mines the night begging our fathers our fathers
     our fathers in prayer, but they are off begging other women
in other towns. This town is not the memory I want, but I know
     how sadness works. It’s like a kettle-bottom collapsing onto
the details of every thought. I shouldn’t have, but I stayed in town
     to try and keep what I love alive, but no that never works. We were
a long time ago and a long time ago is too hard to get back.
     The last time we talked you said, We will end up like our mothers—
waiting for nothing. Then you didn’t come back. No. Not ever.

Trattoria Tagliati, Positano

January 20, 2019.Reading time 1 minute.

By Karla K. Morton

Featured Art: Stowing Sail by Winslow Homer

Vesuvius will claim a day like today—
serene September winds
blowing ashen siren songs
through each sail,

disintegrating each white triangle
as they make their way
across Li Galli Islands,
through the Gulf of Sorrento,

and into this perfect bowl of carbonara,
this excellent Brunello,

sky blues replaced
by the dark dollop of death’s digestivo—
claiming the check
the café
the city of Positano;

the accordion player
pausing only at the thunder of eruption,
then slowing his tarantella
to the flow of lava.

Let them dig us up, love,
10,000 years from now—
with a full belly,
and a third glass of wine,

our legs entwined like spaghetti,
our charred hearts
served up to the gods
at the very same time.

The Illusion of Belief

January 19, 2019.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Kate Fox

Featured Art: Murnau Street with Women by Wassily Kandinsky

She took him as one would take a deep breath
or a second chance, though some days she doubted
her own judgment, as when his silence held them
hostage at the dinner table or rode with them
like a soldier sent to notify the next of kin.

She wondered then if she could ever know him
beyond the familiar stirrup of his collarbone, moles
forming a perfect Cassiopeia on his back, fingers
tying intricate knots in monofilament line. And what
could he possibly know of her? Dust, a whirling skirt,

between the windmill and the barn? Scent of juniper,
wild onion beside the garden shed? Her mother’s curls
pinned tightly against her scalp, or her father’s glacier blue
eyes gone milky with forgetting? How could these mean
anything to anyone but her, divorced as they were

from the lazy swing of the pendulum? And what
of those other lives smoldering now under dry grass?
Their stars are still there, she tells herself, even in daylight.
Even at night, their suns continue to circle and burn
in a world of space and time. We all should be so lucky.

Bliss

January 18, 2019.Reading time 48 minutes.

By Amber Wheeler Bacon

Sarah worked with Beth at a public library downtown. Chris was a biology professor at University of Louisville. They met at Beth’s birthday party.

At the party, Chris quoted Winston Churchill and Hemingway in the same conversation, and Sarah couldn’t tell if she liked him. When she went to smoke a cigarette on the back porch, he followed. Muted voices came from the re pit at the side of the house, but they were alone on the porch. He took the lit cigarette from her fingers and flicked it over the railing. When he kissed her, she blew the last of the smoke into his mouth. They ended up at his apartment. The sex was drunk and sloppy. They kept laughing. Everything seemed hilarious back then.

Sarah woke up buzzing the next morning, as if Chris had flipped a switch somewhere inside her. Driving home, she had the thought that she would put up with a lot from a man who made her feel this way.

A month later, they walked in Cave Hill Cemetery behind his house while red sauce simmered on the stove. Sarah told Chris about her father’s death when she was twelve and how she still sometimes visited the funeral home. “It’s on my route to work and back,” she said. “When the parking lot’s packed, I can’t resist.”

She was embarrassed when Chris took her hand and squeezed it.

If Your Spouse Dies First

January 17, 2019.Reading time 8 minutes.

By Stephanie Johnson

Featured Art: Lady Lilith by Dante Rossetti

Option One

              Move to a different country.
              Take a new spouse.
              Make beautiful different-country babies
              with soft, different-country hair

and only speak your old-country language
late at night in between dreams.
Your new husband will ask the following morning
who this person is; you keep repeating his name.

Oh, you say, in your new language.
Don’t worry about it. Just an old friend.

Option Two

Build a house. Bake your late spouse’s remains
into the walls. Like the spectrophiliac Amethyst Realm,
feel paranormal hands on your legs and back
as you rub yourself on the corners of the foyer.

              Moan the name
              your ears haven’t heard
              since you reopened the coffin
              and saw silver bones.

Option Three

              Meet a woman with dark hair
              and patience longer than yours.
              Tell her a lie:
              you’ve never done this before.

                             She’ll grin and say, “Sure you haven’t.”
                            Later, in her shower, pressed against
                            the pink tile wall, you can’t help but notice
                            she uses his same shampoo.

Writing by Gari Melchers

January 16, 2019.Reading time less than 1 minute.

After the Date

January 16, 2019.Reading time 1 minute.

By Lana Spendl

Featured Art: Writing by Gari Melchers

I went on a date with a girl who knows how to live her life.
On the restaurant patio where we sat, I told her I needed to
finish my novel. And “Do you really?” she asked. She runs a
kindergarten business from her house. And she put up a
chicken coop out back. In overalls and workman gloves. I saw
the process later in pictures online. Dirt on forearms, easy
smiles. A stack of notebooks sits on a table in one shot, and
she peeks from behind with smiling eyes. Her book is
complete, she writes. She’s writing a book too? I am surprised.
And then the shot of the back windows of her house, and
suddenly I am looking out. At scraggly bushes and trees far
back. And I picture her standing before that glass, mug in
hands, in a sweater she knitted from yarn. And daylight wanes.
She turns off the lamp. The crickets chirp wild.

World Order

January 15, 2019.Reading time 1 minute.

By Lesley Wheeler

With a blunt knife, cheap, he slices the out-
of-season apple, applying reasonable force,
thump, thump, and the hiss of cells torn open.

Window beside him a polite shade of blue,
not too, too, and the maple gracefully
conveying leaves so tender and appropriate.

This is a civil kitchen. No need to explain itself.
Gritty clouds of fur beneath the fridge vibrate
in silence. Onions too chilled to express themselves.

No news of what’s mortgaged. Who ripped
that marble counter from what ground. Where
the apple grew. The grievous rain that swelled it.

The Trojans Pulling the Wooden Horse Into the City by Giulio Bonasone

January 14, 2019.Reading time less than 1 minute.

Uncivil

January 14, 2019.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Lesley Wheeler

Featured Art: The Trojans Pulling the Wooden Horse Into the City by Giulio Bonasone

The magnolia drops its anger pink by pink.
Eighteen-wheelers loaded with it rumble down interstates
aroused by their own dark momentum.
Cats rake claws through anger then nap on shredded upholstery.
Cables fizz high above gutters, looped and twisted, twanged by doves.
Flags snap in it. It propels the old woman and her encumbered cart.
A suburban circular. A city racket. A maritime breeze.
Some people give it away, but when they drive off
the cur of anger follows, homing unerringly.
You don’t love me, it snarls, but I will always want you.
Each cloud an anger of its own, dimming the alfalfa fields.
Some people exorcise it, smudging sage through anger’s rooms,
rinsing walls with vinegar and bleach. They claim
to have forgiven anger. Burned it off. God or Clorox granted peace.
Look, no anger here, I’m not angry, that’s not how I feel.
But you can detect the scent even on the street,
rising from his wool suit’s weave, caught in her hair, samara’s wing,
even in sighs, sick and sweet, because anger is born in the gut, feeds
on your nourishment, and you’ll never in life starve yourself clean.

Flower World

January 13, 2019.Reading time 42 minutes.

By Jeremy Schnotala

Featured Art: Still Life with Flowers by Odilon Redon

Cathy sat at the bedroom vanity and used a comb to separate a few of the dull curls in her hair. They always tightened up into something ugly by the afternoon. She thought about what she might buy when she and Bill got to Flower World. Maybe some flowers for the kitchen, fresh flowers, something red or orange to shock the dull ivory Bill had insisted on painting the kitchen walls, counters, trims, cupboards—what was it, twenty years ago? “Ivory is universal,” he’d said, as though their kitchen needed universality. The kitchen had faded now into a boring beige and all the flowers that came to mind were out of season—tulips, lilies, stuff like that. It was mum season and mums smelled like the dead. Maybe she wouldn’t buy anything. She would just accompany her husband like she promised. Smile when he put a garden gnome in the cart. Question whether he really needed two bags of fertilizer. She hoped they could just slip in and slip out without talking to a soul. Cathy could push an empty cart down empty aisles, unnoticed by anyone, some old tune from The Mamas & the Papas echoing from above. “Monday, Monday.” Was that the title?

But they would probably see someone. Likely the whole world.

Cathy dabbed on a little bit of lipstick. She didn’t need any more. It was just Flower World. Why did everything have to have a gimmick in its name now? she thought. Donut Den, Hot Dog Haven, Flower World. Cathy snapped the lipstick lid down tight—Ruby Roo—and dropped it on the vanity. No, she was going to be positive, she told herself. This outing was for Bill. Outing or outage, she couldn’t remember exactly what Bill was calling it. Whatever the name, for the first time Bill was going to leave their home dressed in one of Cathy’s old dresses, and likely wearing her exact shade of lipstick. Cathy kissed a clean tissue, looked at the red stain, then wiped off as much as she could and threw it in the trash can.

Monarch

January 12, 2019.Reading time 1 minute.

By Kathleen Radigan

Featured Art: Actaeon Nude by Jean Antoine Watteau

In the garden I cup a hand
before you, strain my wrist,
willing you to perch.

A nearby woman grips her cane.
“Young lady. If you touch them,
they die.”

Born again from a gauze
coffin, you’re blackwinged,
fragile on a wax leaf.

In the heat
of a weeklong life
you batter between

fluorescents and dahlias, legs
thinner than wires,
and float over tendriled

chrysanthemum heads.
Tease everything—hands,
canes, stem, with a feathery

suggestion. I want
to chew you.
Taste the metallic

powder of each wing.
If only to become
so beautiful

that being
touched just once
would kill me.

Quail on the Airfield

January 11, 2019.Reading time 1 minute.

By Ellen Seusy

Winner, Editors’ Prize for Poetry, selected by Bianca Lynne Spriggs

In Texas, near the Gulf, a man wakes up
and pulls on coveralls and heavy boots.
He drives his truck along a narrow road
to the strip where jets line up for fuel,
heat already shimmering near the ground.

He works alone all day in the exhaust
and roar of jets, as planes take off and land.
He’s paid to save their engines from the birds.
All day, the heat accumulates; his clothes
go dark with grime and sweat, while sickening

fumes waver in the air. He knows this dance;
the quail softly tumble in his net.
He closes it to carry them across
the runway to where the tarmac ends, then
frees them in the sedge where he knows they nest.

Some mornings, when I would rather sleep
than go to work, I remind myself that
in Texas, near the Gulf, a man wakes up
and pulls on regulation boots, then goes
to sweep the quail gently in a net.

Drag Heavy Pot to Shed (Ars Poetica)

January 10, 2019.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Janine Certo

Squint at the barred owl, then race down
the steep hill of your childhood. You lost
the dog but found your grandmother
who drank a bottle of rubbing alcohol. Shake
her ten times. Prepare a fine cheese, sliced peach,
hazelnuts. Drizzle with honey. Slide it under
the bed to the monster. Hear the crack in a mother’s
voice who says it would be so easy to go down
to the garage, turn the ignition on. What will you do with all this
moonlight on the pond, at once galaxy, scattered photons,
shards of glass? If you want to know Truth, see
the Pope’s Swiss Guard cursing at tourists,
throwing stones at pigeons in the square. Play a game
of Chase the Trees for leaves like wine in a human
heart—darker than the blood it pumps, the beating silence
in those hours cleaning after they took away
your father’s body. I tell you, we cannot say love
enough times. The vacuum’s defective, so it sings.
Write until the sage & fir candle kills the smell
of the wall’s rotting mouse. Look over your
shoulder for the child you never had, the sibling
you left in the front yard, the dog returning, bread
in her mouth. Revisit title. Now your words are the
loose parts of a rocking chair, the longing for meadow—
some ground of consciousness, what the philosopher
called the dialectic of inside-outside. And when you’re
close, smear the shapes of ghosts. Draw grief a warm bath.
Lately, there is little spring or fall, but keep the large bright
mum in its pot until the flowers are dull, their necks broken.

Feature: Ohio Stories

January 9, 2019.Reading time 2 minutes.

Editors’ Note:

Ohio. How is the state, the landscape, the word itself used in literature? As a community to be idolized or escaped, as a locale of unexpected mystery? Or, simply, as a bouncy amphibrach (unstressed-stressed-unstressed) to end a line?

In stories and poems, Ohio often seems to stand for America itself, or at least a certain slice of America. It is sometimes meant to indicate Industrial and Rural and Suburban. It can be gritty or pure, used for nostalgia, or to create a par- ticular kind of speaker. And its history has certainly contributed to its literary import. But we were curious about the speci c ways writers have employed our home in the past, and how they might use it today.

Certainly, it is a place that characters love and hate, an idea that must be contended with. And we are convinced, having read thousands of poems and stories mentioning particular spots, that Ohio is one of the most versatile (and sonically pleasing) of all of them.

For the following feature, we asked five writers to reflect on the state that’s often referred to as “The Heart of It All.”

Shadow and Shine: Ohio in the Literary Imagination

January 8, 2019.Reading time 18 minutes.

By Jana Tigchelaar

Featured Art: In The Sky Somewhere Else by Emma Stefanoff

In his preface to The Marble Faun (1860), Nathaniel Hawthorne infamously recounted the limitations of America as material for art and artists, citing the “difficulty of writing a romance about a country where there is no shadow, no antiquity, no mystery, no picturesque and gloomy wrong, nor anything but a commonplace prosperity, in broad and simple daylight, as is happily the case with my dear native land.” Hawthorne’s words were and are astonishing in their obtuse, perhaps willful ignorance of one particular “gloomy wrong” shadowing America’s “commonplace prosperity” as the nation careened toward the Civil War. But they also set up the persistent idea that America is a contented and peaceful country, one without a shadowy past that is ripe for romantic literary exploration.

The notion of America as a young, fresh, tabula rasa had its inception long before Hawthorne set pen to paper, and even then, in its earlier colonial and Revolutionary-era iterations, it was a lie. While Hawthorne’s description of America suggests a blithe happiness that characterizes the nation and its inhabitants, the specific literature of Ohio, for instance, would suggest otherwise. In fact, literary portrayals of Ohio seem particularly in tune with the tension between shining surface and hidden shadows. It is as if Ohio is, as Bill Ashcraft notes on returning home to the fictional New Canaan in Stephen Markley’s novel Ohio (2018), “the microcosm poster child of middle-American angst.”

People Growing Pink by Emma Stefanoff

January 7, 2019.Reading time less than 1 minute.

“On the Lip of Lake Erie”: Toni Morrison’s Ohio Aesthetic

January 7, 2019.Reading time 30 minutes.

By Dustin Faulstick

Featured Art: People Growing Pink by Emma Stefanoff

In an interview with Claudia Tate, Toni Morrison had this to say about her home state of Ohio:

                          The northern part of the state had underground railroad stations and a
                          history of black people escaping into Canada, but the southern part of the
                          state is as much Kentucky as there is, complete with cross burnings. Ohio
                          is a curious juxtaposition of what was ideal in this country and what was
                          base. It was also a Mecca for black people; they came to the mills and
                          plants because Ohio offered the possibility of a good life, the possibility
                          of freedom, even though there were some terrible obstacles.

In Ohio, there’s a distinct feeling of being in the middle—not only in the physical middle, mostly landlocked near the center of the country, but also in the ideological middle, politically, morally—having been on the right side of history regarding the question of slavery, but, even during the same time period, often in the wrong on questions of justice: at least as supportive of fugitive slave laws as of the underground railroad. Morrison not only grew up in this contradictory state, it pervades her fiction. “In my work, no matter where it’s set,” she once told an Ohio audience, “the imaginative process always starts right here on the lip of Lake Erie.”

In their emphasis on a non-linear historicity, their cyclicality, and through her comprehensive storytelling, Morrison’s novels are intimately tied to her Ohio roots. The distinct seasons of northern Ohio—its agricultural rhythms and proximity to the eternal crash of recycling Lake Erie waves—inspired an aesthetic insistent upon return. Central to that aesthetic is Morrison’s initial refusal to reveal everything straight away. Early in her novels, readers are left momentarily confused, uncertain we have what we need. And often, we don’t, yet. This aesthetic style models a return to history that Morrison encourages—both in her novels, where she ashes back to revisit stories and add details from characters’ pasts to illuminate their complex realities, and in our own worldview, where we’re encouraged to look again at our own stories and the injustices that are never merely past. Ohio’s specific place in United States history and its natural rhythms inform Morrison’s style—which we can see from a brief look at her widely explored Ohio novels The Bluest Eye and Beloved. Moreover, the spirit of Ohio—its promise and precariousness—is so strong in Morrison’s work that it extends to later novels set outside of Ohio as well, particularly her slightly less appreciated Great Migration novel Jazz.

The Importance and Depth of “Ohio” in Two Poems by Rita Dove and Ai

January 6, 2019.Reading time 19 minutes.

By Marcus Jackson

Featured Art: Linez and Boxez by Felicity Gunn

In poems, Ohio—as word, as a set of landscapes, as a cradle for psychological, emotional, and cultural exploration—exists with significance and versatility. Derived from the Iroquois word that means “beautiful river,” Ohio, as a name, is vowel wealthy, bookended by o’s, assuring that its mention brings a sonic vitality and depth. Ohio, in terms of topography, is rolling plains, glacial plateaus, Appalachian hills, stretches of bluegrass. Due to its proximity to the Great Lakes, and its general position on the continent, Ohio has hosted all of the following: major, ancient routes used by Native American tribes to travel and trade; pivotal exchanges between Native American and European fur traders; the ruthlessness and violence brought on by the heightened European demand for exportable goods and by the grueling process of colonization; numerous battles fought during extended, armed confrontations or wars (Pontiac’s Rebellion, the American Revolutionary War, the Northwest Indian War, the War of 1812, and the American Civil War); hubs and final stops for freedom-seeking slaves along the Underground Railroad; early industrialization; and destinations for African Americans leaving the Jim Crow south during the Great Migration. To many poets and readers, the mention or involvement of Ohio can at least subconsciously educe some of the locale’s extensive identity. Looking closely at two poems by Rita Dove and Ai, we will examine a few of the elements and forces that the incorporation of Ohio brings to the texts.

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

January 5, 2019.Reading time 26 minutes.

By Christopher A. Sims

Featured Art: Up In The Air by Emma Stefanoff

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

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

Sometimes a Vague Notion

January 4, 2019.Reading time 15 minutes.

By David Armstrong

Featured Art: Rep2 by Felicity Gunn

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

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

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

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

Chatter. Writers talking shop, life, travel.

I say Ohio. “I’m from Ohio.”

Someone says, “Oh.”

Like the abbreviation of the state itself.

Oh.

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

Contributors’ Notes

January 2, 2019.Reading time 22 minutes.

New Ohio Review Issue 24 (Originally Published Fall 2018)

December 2, 2018.Reading time less than 1 minute.

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

Issue 24 compiled by Isaiah Underwood

My Hometown, the Hypothetical Guided Tour

December 1, 2018.Reading time 5 minutes.

By Dan Wiencek

Featured Art: by Jasper Francis Cropsey

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

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

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

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

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

that life could be a wave
beating the rocks or

           a wind bouncing a kite—

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

and here we are.

Trouble

November 30, 2018.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Danusha Laméris

Featured Art: by Clara Peeters

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

Bird

November 29, 2018.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Danusha Laméris

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

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

Stopover on a Road Trip to L.A., 1981

November 28, 2018.Reading time 1 minute.

By C.W. Emerson

Featured Art: by Arthur Lazar

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

dripping water onto the catwalk
above the motel pool?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We Have Got to Get Out of L.A.

November 27, 2018.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Suzanne Lummis

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

To Inscribe

November 26, 2018.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Anne Starling

Featured Art: A Holiday by Edward Henry Potthast

The dead are with us to stay
—Charles Wright

But not the living, the fallible breathing.

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

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

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

Asking for a Friend

November 24, 2018.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Emily Sernaker

Featured Art: Shop Girls by Elizabeth Sparhawk-Jones

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

Thing-Poem After the Social Event

November 23, 2018.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Karen Benning

Featured Art: Landscape with Two Poplars by Vasily Kandinsky

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

much much less that first BUMP
of a thing that popped

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

Talking

November 22, 2018.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Christopher Brean Murray

Featured Art: by Alfred Stieglitz

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

Merriweather

November 21, 2018.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Christopher Brean Murray

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

Happy Lamp

November 21, 2018.Reading time 1 minute.

By Catherine Carter

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

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

By Claude Monet

November 20, 2018.Reading time less than 1 minute.

Soulmates

November 20, 2018.Reading time 1 minute.

By Peter Krumbach

Featured Art: by Claude Monet

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

Box in a Closet

November 18, 2018.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Faith Shearin

Featured Art: by Emil Carlsen

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

still in his hands.

The Deluge

November 17, 2018.Reading time 52 minutes.

By Alan Sincic

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

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

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

By Hilaire Germain Edgar Degas

November 16, 2018.Reading time less than 1 minute.

On the Ferry from Victoria to Port Angeles

November 16, 2018.Reading time 1 minute.

By Kirsten Abel

Featured Art: by Hilaire Germain Edgar Degas

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Calling Annie Oakley

November 15, 2018.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Kirsten Abel

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

Calchas Reading the Signs

November 14, 2018.Reading time 2 minutes.

By George Kalogeris

Featured Art: by Piet Mondrian

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By Gustave Caillebotte

November 13, 2018.Reading time less than 1 minute.

Europeans Wrapping Knickknacks

November 13, 2018.Reading time 21 minutes.

By David Kirby

Featured Art: by Gustave Caillebotte

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

November 12, 2018.Reading time 5 minutes.

By Brock Guthrie

Featured Art: by Paul Gavarni

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Uber Diaries

November 9, 2018.Reading time 35 minutes.

By Kyle Minor

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

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

“Please stop rubbing my arm,” I say.

He apologizes.

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

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

Leaf Blower

November 8, 2018.Reading time 1 minute.

By Alan Shapiro

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

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

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

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

Hole in One

November 7, 2018.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Alan Shapiro

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

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

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

Closer

November 6, 2018.Reading time 1 minute.

By Alan Shapiro

Featured Art: by William A. Harper

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

Boys in a Dory by Winslow Homer

November 5, 2018.Reading time less than 1 minute.

Bay Sunday

November 5, 2018.Reading time 2 minutes.

By W.J. Herbert

Featured Art: Boys in a Dory by Winslow Homer

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

2.

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

3.

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

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

Stateline Lake

November 4, 2018.Reading time 1 minute.

By Arlyce Menzies

Featured Art: by William Guy Wall

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

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

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

Real Things

November 3, 2018.Reading time 43 minutes.

By Nicole Hebdon

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

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

And we didn’t meet there.

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

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

The Petrified Man

November 2, 2018.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Pamela Davis

Featured Art: by William Trost Richards

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ode on a Midlife VW

November 1, 2018.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Craig van Rooyen

Featured Art: by Edouard Baldus

—After Matthew Dickman

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

Interstate 5 Ode

October 31, 2018.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Craig van Rooyen

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ode to My Backyard Gopher

October 30, 2018.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Craig van Rooyen

Featured Art: by Thomas Cole

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

Costco Ode

October 29, 2018.Reading time 4 minutes.

By Craig van Rooyen

Featured Art: by Joachim Beuckelaer

—After Marie Howe’s “The Star Market”

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

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

Weanie Tender, PO

October 28, 2018.Reading time 41 minutes.

By Jennifer Christman

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

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

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

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

By Evelyn De Morgan

October 27, 2018.Reading time less than 1 minute.

Naked, Fierce, Yelling Stone Age Grannies

October 27, 2018.Reading time 1 minute.

By Lisa Bellamy

Featured Art: by Evelyn De Morgan

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

Our Fathers

October 26, 2018.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Lisa Bellamy

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

By Vincent van Gogh

October 25, 2018.Reading time less than 1 minute.