Category: Uncategorized

The Stability of Floating Bodies

.Reading time 80 minutes.

By Craig Bernardini

Featured Art: Dublin Pond, New Hampshire by Abbott Handerson Thayer

It was never my intention, when my father came to live with us, that he would live in the pond. Things just worked out that way. This was shortly after my mother died. My wife and I had never really spoken about what we would do in the event that one of our parents died. It had always seemed a little premature to have that discussion, at least where my parents were concerned. They were in their mid-seventies, enviably lucid, and as healthy, according to their physicians, as most Americans ten years their junior. But then maybe it always seems too early to have that discussion. Or maybe it was just that I could never imagine them apart. They had done everything together, my parents, gone everywhere together. There had been something almost tyrannical in their solicitousness about each other’s welfare. One day, it occurred to me that I didn’t have a single picture with just one of them in it. Were I ever to try to crop one of them out, the other would remain in the shape of the border traced by my scissors. Growing together, my mother had said to me not long before she passed, was the key to a healthy relationship; and grow together they had, like skinny trees, the trunks of which wound round each other in acts of mutual strangulation.

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Little Red Book

.Reading time 4 minutes.

By Jeffrey Harrison

Featured Art: Le Code Noir by Pierre Prault

I unearth it while cleaning up my office,
The Little Book of Common Sense Investing
that my father sent me two years before he died,
its bright red cover like an accusation,
a yellow Post-it bearing his cheerful
half-script still attached: “Jeff—even if you read
only the first part of this book, you’ll get the gist.
Return it some time, no hurry. Love, Dad.”
I chose to place the emphasis on “no hurry”
and hadn’t cracked its little crimson spine
when, a year later, he asked me what I thought.
When I told him I hadn’t gotten to it yet,
he said he wanted it back, so he could lend it
“to someone who might actually read it.”
“But I might still read it,” I said half-heartedly.
“No, you won’t.” Which made me all the more
determined not to read it, so I said fine,
I’d send it back. But I never did—and then
he got sick, and our investment
in that particular contest seemed pointless.

But here it is again, this little red book
so unlike Mao’s, as if my father were making
a move from beyond the grave. Okay, my turn.
Is it because I need to prove him wrong
even now, or that I want to make amends
belatedly for disappointing him yet again
that I open the book and begin reading?
Or am I doing it in his honor? And is he
still trying to tell me I invested
in the wrong things?—poetry, for instance.
“Counting angels on a pin,” he said once.
Which is just the kind of cliché I find in the book.
Later, though, he claimed to like my poems,
the funny ones at least. And if we drew a graph
of our relationship over his last decades
it would look a lot like the Dow: a steady ascent
with several harrowing jagged downward spikes.
The little red book says nothing about those,
though it does advise not getting too caught up
in the market’s dramatic nose-dives.

Unless, perhaps, you’re trying to realize
your loss—another topic that the book,
with its rosy perspective, blithely avoids
as it enthuses on “the miracle of compounding.”
But instead of getting annoyed I feel an odd
joy: my father could have written this book.
He too was an optimist who liked to talk
about money, and so I used to ask him questions—
What’s the best kind of mortgage to get? Is life
insurance a good idea?—and those led
to some of our least fraught conversations.
That’s why he gave me the book. And he
was right: I get the gist after two chapters.
And the suggestions seem helpful, if limited—
I even underline a few sentences.
Still, that other book, the one about losses,
would be more complicated, and harder to write,
its author finally coming to understand
that, no matter what the future brings,
he won’t be able to ask his father’s advice.

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Sky

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Luiza Flynn-Goodlett

Featured Art: Dark Clouds by Louis Eilshemius

The caul we’re born beneath, its gaze drives
mystics to fits. Constant as parents never are,
it blinks back cumulus to examine us, offers
no opinion. Unlike old gods, nothing troubles
it—rains withheld, not censure, just drought.
Some tire of scrutiny, shelter in offices, under
newspapers. It doesn’t mind, proffers an open
eye to all—the seabirds that caw at its margins,
delayed ships, the drowned who clawed toward it.

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Black Ants

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Fay Dillof

Featured Art: Crumpled and Withered Leaf Edge Mimicking Caterpillar (study for book Concealing Coloration in the Animal Kingdom) by Emma Beach Thayer

Unable to sleep,
I imagine a blob
of ants, erupting
from a faucet.

If they puddle,
that will mean sleep.

But if each ant
descends on a crumb,
steals what it can
and lumbers robotically off,
which they do,
branching in veins across the tile floor,
then I’m left
listening to the sound
of my two sisters
downstairs
in the summer kitchen
where they’re making
my mother laugh
without me
again,
carrying their prize
over invisible trails.

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Etymologies

.Reading time 28 minutes.

By Krista Christensen

Featured Art: Abstract — Woman by Carl Newman

It is out of a need for precision that I search for words, wading through thesauri and dictionaries and -pedias, crawling into the tunnels of -ologies and -onomies and -ectomies, mining deep for a more accurate reflection of self than dry medical terms like bilateral salpingo-oophorectomy.

I’m not even sure how to pronounce that last word, though it’s a thing that’s been done to me. Perhaps the two o’s bleed together into one sound, like the two o’s in moon, my two ovaries like white orbs hovering in one sky: oophorectomy. Or possibly the two o’s mirror the guttural softness of the pair in brook, like the one tinkling through the lot behind my home: oophorectomy.

When I look it up, I find that both o’s get equal play. Medical dictionaries give the pronunciation oh-uh-for-ec-toh-mee. A perfect irony that even in sound, the two o’s are piled on top of one another in the beginning of the word, as if there are more than enough to go around. There’s a sense of excess, of plenty and abundance, when really the word is all about what’s missing, about evacuation, about empty space. An O, a zero, the absence of value.

Nothing is ever straightforward in female anatomy. Even using the term hysterectomy, a casual term in comparison, brings up more questions than it answers. Repercussions of this surgery are nebulous, confounding: it could mean that a woman has lost just her uterus, but kept her ovaries, and so would not need to make the choice between synthetic hormone therapy or instant menopause. Even if a woman loses just her uterus, it’s possible she’d keep her cervix, that her vagina wouldn’t be sewn shut at the top, that she wouldn’t become a dead-end, a U-turn, closed for business.

For me, the word hysterectomy doesn’t begin to cover it.

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Lieu d’hiver mémoire

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Angie Estes

Featured art: The Sky Simulated by White Flamingoes (study for book Concealing Coloration in the Animal Kingdom) by Abbott Handerson Thayer

You can find them each year
               for a brief while only
in winter—a drop of red and yellow
                              sealing wax dashed at the end of
               their stems to prevent the loss
of moisture—because the squat,
              copper-russeted pears of the ancient
variety Passe Crassane will not ripen
                             on the tree no matter how long
              you let them hang, as if they had taken
St. Catherine of Siena’s advice
               to Make yourself a cell in your
own mind from which you need never
                              come out, the way the goldfish
                on late autumn evenings
circle all night, flicking
                their tails in the fireplace.
What kind of pear is
                              sweetest? Bartlett, Seckel,
                Comice? Oboe d’amore—mezzo-
soprano of the oboes—is Armagnac
                brown, its mouth, a pear-shaped
opening. Autumn is so oboe,
                               but then winter is near, so close
                to hinter, to did you ever, no
never, to once I might have
                tried. En hiver it might
as well be hier, but who are
                               the dead of winter, are they
                the same as the dead of night?
In the Lumière brothers’ black
                and white film, le trottoir roulant
carries Parisians on its rolling sidewalk
                                across the bridge to the Exposition
                of 1900. We watch them move
toward us, though like Hamlet, they never
                take a step: “If it be now, ’tis not
to come; if it be not to come, it will
                               be now; if it be not now, yet
                it will come.” Our 1955
turquoise and white Pontiac smiles
                in the snow while my mother finishes
dressing for church. Stationed
                                in his suit and tie, my father rests
                his hands on the steering wheel
as the car idles and warms,
                while in the back seat, my brother
and I wait for my mother
                              to appear, our breath rising
                like smoke signals.

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Stick Season

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Sydney Lea

-For Peter Gilbert

The one that precedes my season is the one that always shows
in those quaint calendar photographs, the one that brings the tourists
to a scene that is sumptuous, granted—exorbitant on the sidehills,
most of the leaves incandescent, drifting or plunging downward
to scuttle along the roadbeds like little creatures reluctant
to be seen, yet wanting us to notice them after all.

But give me this: middle November, season of sticks,
of stubborn oak and beech leaves, umber and dun, which rattle
in gusts that smell so elemental they stab your heart.
The trees—the other, unclothed ones—are standing there,
gaunt but dignified, and you can look straight through them
to the contours of the mountains, stark, perhaps, but lovely

in their apparent constancy. That gap-toothed barn
houses space alone since its owner died. Do you remember
Studebakers? That’s one over there, a pickup truck,
flat-footed among the sumacs. Painted green way back,
these days it has taken the hue of these later leaves I love.
Old age has changed the mountains too. They’re rounder now

than once, worn smoother. Everything is for a time.

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Good for What Ails You

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Elton Glaser

Featured Art: Winter, Monadock by Abbott Handerson Thayer

                                                                                                  He too would live: like the rats among the ruins,
                                                                                                     but nonetheless alive.
                                                                                                                                  —Antal Szerb, trans. Len Rix

It’s the first fresh day
After a winter so hard
I disappeared inside myself,

Nothing out there but cardinals
Like drops of blood against
The creamy desecrations of the snow.

Ah, there’s the shit we need,
And the shit we don’t need,
And the shit we end up with.

I seem to be returning to
Some form of infantile intelligence,
On the sloppy side of the brain:

Mumblings over the oatmeal, nights
Broken by clumsy sleep, hands
At the mercy of small machines.

We come out of nowhere, and we go
Into nowhere. Should I stick
My fingers in my wounds,

Like a good little Dutch boy?

Even in the barren precincts
Of the cold, there must be love,

Though love does not travel well—
It needs its own terroir,
A discipline of flinty soil where

The roots struggle, where they work
Hard in the hot sun, until
Deprivation makes the fruit sweet.

And what wine will I have?
Here, at the open edge of things,
I’m like a spruce that hugs itself

Against the ice and the night wind.
But sometimes there’s comfort
In the certainties of burlap, and more

Sure footing on grit than marble gives.
And even a thin sun feels warm
After three dead months deep below zero.

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A Meadow

.Reading time 17 minutes.

By Lee Upton

Featured Art: Autumn (L’Automne) by Arthur B. Carles

The wife isn’t supposed to know, but Lucy knew. She knew about her husband and her best friend, Maria. Had known for nearly two years. And now Maria’s brother—a stranger—was coming to visit. Did he know about Maria and Owen? Did he think he was visiting to reveal the affair, to confess on Maria’s behalf? Lucy hoped not. She would resent that.

              

Lucy got the news from Owen before he left for work. He turned at the front door and told her—as if he almost forgot something so important. He didn’t want to be late, and so there wasn’t time to talk. She followed him outside.

“He’s coming? When?”

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Phone Call

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Stephanie Rogers

Featured Art: Figure with Guitar II by Henry Fitch Taylor

When I got the phone call, I listened
to my sister’s voice give
no hint, at first, that overnight,
like that, her life had changed.
I said hello and flipped through
a book on the nightstand, knowing
deep down, from all my missed
calls, that she was preparing
to tell me something
important. How are you? I asked,
trying to delay what I knew already
I didn’t want to hear. And after
her silence, then, I sat straight up—I was still
in bed—my eyes blinking
awake, the automatic
coffee pot dripping into the quiet,
and I said it: What’s wrong, Heather?
expecting for one singular moment the death
of our father, the sniffed
pills, the heroin finally ending
his life. But when she said
nothing, I demanded, this time, hearing
the pitch of her voice fill with the sound a brass
instrument might make breathing
a low note, barely
audible, into the crashing,
noisy universe. And she said it: Joel killed himself
last night, choking
on “killed,” and when I said, Oh
my god Heather
oh my god, she understood, she told me
later, for the first time,
that her husband was never
coming back. The sun peeked through
the window blinds. It flashed across
the framed faces of his daughters, who I pictured,
for a second, on the swing set
behind their house, their father pushing them
higher each time they swung back to him, further
away each time, further away.

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We Remember You for Now

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Stephanie Rogers

Featured Art: Figurative Abstraction by Unknown

Now when my heart beats, it sounds like
crunched leaves skittering, the revving up

of a broken-down Honda. I can’t visit him
at a cemetery, or even the park. Scatter

my ashes there, he asked, and then injected
god knows how much, enough to warrant

a coroner call. Hahaha. Joke is Heather said nope,
stuffed and stored him in the back

of our mother’s closet. He lives there now,
sucking up the radiator heat. Joel, damn,

man. Come back and lick the spilt fizz off
the Budweiser can again. No one here

is going anywhere if I have a say, and how
didn’t I have a say with you? You plunged,

you syringed, each time needling—gentle,
I hope, as my grandmother crocheting

a winter hat for your oldest girl. I won’t
for long torture myself for you, I thought,

biting into a string of candy hearts around
my neck, your kid insisting, eat it, the sick-

sweet sticky hands of a two-year-old with
a dad resting inside a shoebox next to

a bowling ball. You did it. Congratulations.
I’m elated. I’m devastated. I’m a copycat

singing your songs to your girls to sleep.
Listen, creep: we remember you for now,

but now is a ragged dog, dragging its bum
leg along the buzzing halls of a new house.

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Necessaries

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Tina Tocco

Featured Art: Still Life by Earl Horter

We’re in Omaha when I know. You’re out bootlegging—running, you call it—for that man from Tinker’s, a deacon at First Baptist, he says, though his name is Kinsky. I curl on a cardboard cot imagining my quilt from Pomeroy’s when the big Chicago woman, hair steam-strung from the laundry pots, stands downwind. “Only two reasons to stay with a man, but only one to stay with a man like that.” She has brought the necessaries. They clink in a feed sack the pattern of girls’ dresses. There is not much for me to do, but I do it quietly. It’s one jug of Tinker’s mash for quietly. The Boston girl, she warns, paid three.

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That Boy’s a Catch

.Reading time 10 minutes.

By Tina Tocco

Featured Art: Country Road in France by Henry Ossawa Tanner

“Your daddy and I just figured all this nonsense would be over by now.”

My mother has just dropped six spoonfuls of instant coffee into a mug filled with hot water from the bathroom sink. Her spoon chinks and chinks and chinks and chinks the side with the chip. I sip the tea I brought from Berkeley.

“You’re thirty-one, Tanya Grace. I hope someone’s told you what that means.”

My father has read what he can of the newspaper. He has shaved off the end of his pencil and is circling the houses locked in foreclosure. He and Uncle Rex can be in and out in under an hour, the knobs and faucets silent in the sacks my mother sews.

“Four sweatshirts wide,” she used to tutor, “so the stuff don’t clang so much, like.”

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Timestamps

.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Katie Condon

Ten hours ago, Adam Liddy liked my profile picture
alone in his Asheville apartment. My brown eyes coaxed him back
seven months to Bread Loaf where I pulled him by his shirtsleeve
onto the dance floor in the barn; poured him a shot of bourbon; shared
a blanket on the porch; asked him to close the flue of the woodstove
at the party because it was getting too hot. He must’ve remembered my
laughter as I climbed onto the puny wooden raft at midnight to listen to him
describe what being suddenly lusted after by many women feels like
& how he would never cheat on his girlfriend. Never, he said.

Nine hours ago, from his solitude in Asheville, Adam Liddy
wrote me an email to catch me up on his life: his non-existent & therefore
perfect teaching load, his Camargo Fellowship, & his recent breakup.
What he didn’t write but wanted to was that he’d convinced himself
desire isn’t tangible unless you act on it—that when we climbed into the trailer
storing the left-handed desks, that when I sat down in one & looked up at him,
just before a security guard shined his flashlight onto my shadowed face,
desire wasn’t thrashing around like a snake under his boot.

In the trailer seven months ago, what I didn’t say but could’ve was, Adam,
I’d never cheat on my boyfriend, either—& I wouldn’t.
But there’s nothing wrong with getting off on the shape tension takes in a
   small space,
with lifting your eyes up over the wall you’ve built & named Life
to see how you might be different.

Adam, there’s nothing wrong with desiring what you know you can’t have—
nothing wrong with playing with potential
like a housecat plays with a bird it won’t mean to kill.

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The Present

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Billy Collins

Featured Art: Oak Leaf Edge Caterpillar (study for book Concealing Coloration in the Animal Kingdom) by Gerald H. Thayer

Much has been said about being in the present. I
t’s the place to be, according to the gurus,
like the latest club on the downtown scene,
but no one, it seems, is able to give you directions.

It doesn’t seem desirable or even possible
to wake up every morning and begin
leaping from one second into the next
until you fall exhausted back into bed.

Plus, there’s the past to wander in,
so many scenes to savor and regret,
and the future, the place you will die
but not before flying around with a jet-pack.

The trouble with the present is
that it’s always in a state of vanishing.
Take the second it takes to end
this sentence with a period—already gone.

What about the moment that exists
between banging your thumb
with a hammer and realizing
you are in a whole lot of pain?

What about the one that occurs
after you hear the punch line
but before you get the joke?
Is that where the wise men want us to live

in that intervening tick, the tiny slot
that occurs after you have spent hours
searching downtown for that new club
and just before you give up and head back home?

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A Box of Records

.Reading time 1 minute.

By James Haug

Someone placed a box of records by the curb because it was hoped that someone would want to take them away. They’re records no one wants but maybe someone will want them. Someone driving will stop. Someone walking will stop. That is the pleasure of looking through records. Then the sun clears the tree across the street and shines on the records and makes the colors of the record jackets festive even as it robs them of their pigments. Someone will stop and rescue them from the sun. Someone will look up at the empty house behind the box of records at the curb to see if someone is watching. The people on the jackets smile and smile with their best hair, maintaining resolve all night in a box by the curb. Someone will stop and bring them home and listen to what they have to sing. Someone will carry them off out of the rain. Someone will spread them on the grass to dry.

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My This, My That

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Sarah Brown Weitzman

Featured Art: Paris Bridge by Arthur B. Carles

To live in the moment is probably good advice.
What else is there but the now
of which nothing will remain but memory
already fading and unreliable.
My past is a pile of losses: parents, pets,
childhood, a hometown, ideals, and god.
Born to a countdown yet I make claims
to “my this” and “my that.”

But what can we ever possess?
Last night’s symphony, the blurred faces
of our dead, the way the wind slid
through the dogwoods of youth
are what we may possess just as the sun
possesses the windowglass it shines through.

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Pie

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Micheal Chitwood

Featured Art: Main Street, Montreal by Louis Wiesenberg

That his old Impala still ran
was a miracle. The blue puff of exhaust
and the way the engine rattled on
for a minute or two when he turned off the ignition.
A miracle. He shaved maybe once a week.
And his clothes. The wrinkles and stains
held them together.
But he came to the diner every Tuesday.
Where he got money no one knew.
He would nurse his black coffee
and have a piece of pie.
He wanted to talk about God,
mostly to the county deputies having lunch,
who talked to him as a way of keeping an eye on him.
“God’s grandeur is in his silence,” he told them.
“And the silence is immense and not all that quiet.”
He looked into the bowl of a spoon
as if he was looking into a river.
The deputies joshed with him.
They told the waitresses he was harmless
if a bit ripe.
There was plenty of coffee.
Sometimes a waitress would give him another wedge of pie,
cold lemon, warm apple with a dollop of whipped cream.
The deputies paid, winked, and left.
The leather of their holsters squeaked.
Outside, the afternoon filled the sky.

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Safety

.Reading time 31 minutes.

By Catherine Carberry

Featured Art: Abstract – Two Women With Tennis Racquets by Carl Newman

When we came to Montana we weren’t going to be cooks, but that’s how we ended up. Blair got me the job, she’s the real chef. In the kitchen, after the Eggs Benedict disaster, I mainly swat flies and hang amber strips of flypaper from the ceiling. The goal is to keep moving to outpace the flies. They’re everywhere and some of them bite.

Blair and I work together on this farm, feeding the owners and workers. Two of the workers are Mexican and the others are drifters with invented names: Bill, Bird, Slim Jim, G. The Mexicans are called León and Ernesto and say they’re brothers but they’re pulling our leg. They don’t know that when Blair and I lived in Whitefish for six months before our money ran out, we told people we were
sisters. We thought it would help us somehow, that the sister game would give us some footing and a tangible backstory, but it didn’t attract too much attention and Blair never found a ski instructor who would love her. By that time, it was too late for either of us to go back to our husbands. Just as we were losing momentum, Blair saw a sign posted for a cook on a farm only nine miles away. The job came with some money and a private trailer. She talked to the owners and convinced them to take both of us for the same pay. We’ve been here since then, avoiding the question of what we’re doing and when we’ll leave.

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Depleted Uranium and Other Facebook Posts

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Okla Elliott

Featured Art: Evening Tones by Oscar Bluemner

We read about depleted uranium
and try to imagine the scientific facts
about depleted uranium.
What does depleted even mean in the context of uranium?
So we Google it and learn something horrendous.
Or rather something interesting
that has been turned to horrendous purpose.
And so we join a protest against depleted uranium
even though our friends tell us there are more pressing
matters right here at home. How can you post
on Facebook about depleted uranium? our friends ask.
And so we post on Facebook about whatever
our friends have told us is most important to post
on Facebook about, and people stop thinking
about depleted uranium, though it still decays
its way into the cells of Iraqi children—and adults too,
but it is less effective to post on Facebook about the suffering
of adults, so I’ll only mention the children whose lymph nodes
and livers and lungs are mutating
due to depleted uranium. Or rather, I won’t,
since my friends tell me there are more pressing matters
here at home.

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Chemistry

.Reading time 32 minutes.

By Micheal George

Featured Art: Steps by Manierre Dawson

Sunday at one o’clock, my sister Denise arrives at my father’s house in Elizabeth, New Jersey. We don’t hug; I know that many siblings engage in this ritual, but it’s never been our way. Instead we share a kind of wry, shy smile, a brief flash of eye contact that’s almost like flirting. I ask her how she’s doing, and she says she’s great.

“And Dad?” She nods toward our father, who is reclined in his La-Z-Boy, watching the Cooking Channel.

“He’s great too.”

Denise doesn’t ask about me; such questions we probably both understand as unnecessary formalities. I can see through the window of my father’s one- story bungalow that her camera crew has arrived behind her, and are unloading equipment.

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Night Blind

.Reading time less than 1 minute.

By David Yezzi

Featured Art: (Untitled) Nightscene of Park in a City by Unidentified

There’s a spot
at the top
of the street,
where the lamp

is out, that’s
the darkest
part of the
block. I don’t

go that way
at night, though
it would be
all right,

I’m sure. No one’s
there, just
a chained-up dog
in the damp air,

and branches
too dark to see
like black water
churning.

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Aubade

.Reading time 1 minute.

By David Yezzi

Featured Art: (Untitled) City Scene with Playground by Unidentified

Some mornings I wake up in my old house,
half-conscious, squinting at the seam of light
gilding the edges of the flowered curtains.
I can imagine—actually feel, in fact—
that I am back there, where three flights down
the city’s up before me making noise:
a woman in green unchains the gated park
and the cross street fills with taxis. The light turns.
And in my half-lit bedroom, I am held
by a taut web of untold activity.
It surrounds me and carries on without me.
I breathe it in, smiling, lightened somehow.
For a moment then, I recognize myself,
before I’m back here where not all that much
goes on and the day begins its long goodbye.

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Face to Face

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By James Lineberger

Featured Art: Bowl of Flowers by Morton L. Schamberg

Back when our son died
I already suspected
that you and I would be having these
conversations sooner or later
but what I had not anticipated was your laughter,
the role-playing and costumes
and all the faces-on-parade,
as if you can’t decide which one to wear,
for there’s hardly a moment
when the one I’m talking to
is not some other you
like last night before I even had my apnea headgear
fastened securely
there you were peering at me up close
through the plastic mask,
only suddenly you weren’t you at all
but the image of my father
struggling to maintain his balance as he pisses
on the kitchen floor,
which forgive me I have a hard time accepting because
just ask yourself,
how are we supposed to have a serious conversation here,
where I come begging your forgiveness
for all the years of pain and deception you were married to,
when geez louise I just be damned if I owe that falling down alkie bastard
a single goddamn thing hear me
and answer me this:
if you’re so content being wife and daddy and everybody else,
what is it in there that sends out
your bird calls,
wears the hoodie, conveys itself behind the arras
and summons forth every one of you
who?

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Here’s My Love Poem

.Reading time 1 minute.

By James Lineberger

Featured Art: Flowers from the Mesa, by Mary Vaux Walcott

If I didn’t love you
would I stand
there holding the car door so you
don’t hit yourself in
the head with it no I could just
step back and let it
happen and who would know the difference
except me cause you wouldn’t
remember what
went on anyway and when
we finally hobble inside Hardee’s with you
holding on for dear life until
I get you seated while
I order and then I surprise you by
bringing us a couple of cinnamon raisin
biscuits you think if I didn’t
love you I would sit there unprotesting while
you ignore your bacon and eggs
and gobble down both cinnamons dripping
the icing all over your fingers
and brand new sweater
you insatiable self-centered helpless child
what else to do but
dip a napkin in my water cup and wash your hands
until you start to cry saying why
don’t you just leave me I’m not worth anything to anybody
and I say me too

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Old Married Couple

.Reading time 28 minutes.

By Robin Messing

Featured Art: (Untitled–Group of Flowers) by Mary Vaux Walcott

They couldn’t part with things, so in the end, they lived with everything. Two toaster ovens, two coffee makers, two waffle irons, two sets of dishes, two couches, two coffee tables, two beds. Their former spouses would not have tolerated it. But together, something different happened.

Ben toasted an English muffin in his toaster oven, and Sophie toasted a piece of leftover challah in hers. Ben poured coffee from the percolator pot that his former wife, Edna, had bought decades before at a hardware store on Avenue J. Sophie brewed coffee in a Mr. Coffee pot that her former husband, Sam, had purchased after their glass percolator pot, slippery with soap, splintered in the sink when Sophie dropped it.

Sam died first, four years earlier. Six months later, Edna passed, both from cancer. Two years ago, Sophie and Ben married—a small ceremony in a shul on Coney Island Avenue.

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They Used to Be So Valuable They Were Free

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Susan Blackwell Ramsey

Featured Art: 2019 Ohio State Map by Ohio Department of Transportation

Road maps may have gone to slide-rule heaven,
      but they were king. Swelling huge in glove compartments,
refusing to be refolded, snickering
      as we wrestled them wider. Marriages
foundered: thin lips, insults, tears,
      shouts as The Map went hurtling through the window
to pirouette in the car’s diminishing wake
      before drifting down to tent the roadside weeds.

Now GPS. Oh, there are always holdouts,
      Luddites who cite the morons who drove off cliffs,
glitch-guided, who claim it’s lousy in the Loop.
      And I grant that maps are glamorous, the world
wide in your lap, manageable, all places
      there simultaneously. Your past. Your future.

But that paper map can’t tell you where you are,
      which is half of navigation. Wasn’t that
always the problem? By the time you’d figured out 
      where you were and found it on the map,
you’d missed your exit. GPS lives in the moment.

Sometimes the good ones let you look ahead,
      pan out, zoom in, even overlay
a bird’s eye view of real trees, rivers, rooftops,
      but the beating heart is still that small blue dot,
like our planet seen from space, that stands for you,
      and the quiet voice that guides you through confusions,
absorbing your mistakes without reproach,
      recalculating a way to bring you home.

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Query

.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Sandy Gingras

Featured Art: Vase of Flowers by Unidentified 

(double space between paragraphs and indent throughout)

Use polite address: Dear Mr. Neil Augustus,

      How you picked aforementioned specific agent: I met you at a “A Hook for Every Book” writing workshop at the Holiday Inn and we made an interpersonal connection: At the opening reception, we both took an orange cheese cube from the buffet, and I said, “Hi.” I hope you remember me.

      Show that you’ve read this specific agent’s guidelines: I wrote 75,000 words exactly and used the font, Times New Roman, just the way you said to. Plus, I took out all the mentions of Tarot cards, trailer parks, and vampires in my book as your guidelines say you have a thing about them. I also spell-checked.

      Your novel is about: a serial killer. The sub-plot is about: another serial killer. It stands out from other novels in this genre because it has: two serial killers in it. Also, it has some good recipes. Your novel’s title is: Bodies and Brownies.

      The main character is: me except with shorter hair. The essence of the story is: I almost get killed a bunch of times and all sorts of hijinks ensue, but, in the end, I don’t die. So, no worries.

      The setting is: a hot climate. But I’m flexible and could switch it to a cold climate if you want that, Mr. Augustus. I’d just have to change the characters’ clothes and add snow and stuff.

      Your style of writing is: extremely marketable. Your novel compares favorably to: all of Stephen King’s novels. I’m like a female version of him, but I’m unique because my book is in all my own words.

      You are equipped to market your novel because: I enjoy travelling to other locales, particularly tropical vacation spots. For example, Orlando, Florida and/or The Bahamas. Your blog reaches: potentially millions of people worldwide.

      Who will like this novel? I know most people usually only read nonfiction nowadays, but I know plenty of people will like this fiction novel because it seems like it really could have happened.

                                                                                                            Sincerely or Respectfully,
                                                                                                            Your full name goes here: Ima Case

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When We Were Neanderthals

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Chrys Tobey

Featured Art: Peacock in the Woods (study for book Concealing Coloration in the Animal Kingdom) by Abbott Handerson Thayor & Richard S. Meryman

I hunted deer for you. I scratched your back with stone tools
and we swaddled each other in fur from sabre-tooth cats

and laughed as we said, burp me. We’d say things like, You know
what they say about a large cranium. I’d chase a woolly mammoth

just because you thought it was sexy. We’d snort chamomile
and talk about how after we’re dead others will ponder our

big toes and our inability to ice-skate. When we were Neanderthals,
you’d make me necklaces of shell, and because this was a few years

before the Pill, we had a kid, but because this was also a few years
before the Catholic Church, we eventually mastered when to pull out.

When we were Neanderthals, we had no buses to take, no offices
to be at, no flights from Germany to wherever. I was never

lonely. You’d run and hide in the woods and I’d try to spot you.
We thought the stars were ours. We thought the earth was square.

We thought the sky was a song, and then the Homo sapiens came.

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Like a Fish Needs a Bicycle

.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Ösel Jessica Plante

Featured Art: Group of Abstract Nudes by Carl Newman

There is something crooked about his mouth,
and though he’s obviously going to go bald soon,
his eyebrows are like kind, squat
temples above his eyes, one pupil dilated slightly
more than the other. This is what’s it’s like
to be single—to stare at a picture of a man online
and wonder, what does he smell like? What
would it feel like to wake up beside him
after two years of living together? I want
to believe that all relationships are mistakes
waiting to happen, have that built-in obsolescence
and are the reason why I finally like that saying
about the woman, a fish, and a bicycle. I like
imagining that fish upright underwater with its fins
spinning in loose circles the same way we pedaled
our feet in the air today during yoga to warm up
our thighs. Love’s made a fool of me once
too often. It’s like standing over a car engine—
I don’t know the rules for recalibrating
or even how to change the oil. It’s just that
every man looks like laundry and concession, even
the doctor with great abs my sister tells me she’s seen
at the soccer field with his son. I wonder if he wakes
in the morning and cooks his kid oatmeal,
I wonder where his ex-wife is now and whether she’s felt
it, how love is at first a greening, how even the bright
trees shuddering their shadows across our faces seem
a delicious sensation, I wonder that we’re able to hold
in abeyance the blade that will come to cut away all
that softness and leave in its place the ribs of something
enormous like the hull of a shipwreck, love having split
a way for something new, the bones of the world exposed.

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Critical Learning Period

.Reading time 22 minutes.

By Chelsea Biondolillo

Featured Art: Designs for Wallpaper and Textiles: Birds

1. CRITICAL LEARNING PERIOD

Songbirds, or suboscine Passeriformes, with fixed song repertoires learn to sing in four steps. The steps are studied, in part, because many linguists believe that these same four steps describe human language acquisition.

The first step in song acquisition is called the critical learning period. This is when chicks begin to recognize their parents’ voices along with neighbors of the same species, and they differentiate between those voices and other sounds.

*

My parents were married for three years before I was born, and they lived together for almost three years after. The shape and sound of their love is unknown to me. I have no idea how he courted her or when the courting became something else. I do not remember the words they spoke to each other in the days and months while I lay in my crib, listening.

I know what my mother said to me and what I said back. These are stories I’ve heard often. Before I could talk, I had night terrors, she tells me. I would scream inconsolably in my sleep. The pediatrician said this was normal for some babies. She tells me about the day I choked on bottle milk while lying in my crib, and how the sound of it sent her running to me; how afterwards, I would choke and gag whenever I wanted her to pick me up. It was a sound she could never ignore, she says, eyes squinted theatrically at the memory of my manipulation.

I would stand in my crib and yell (so early! so advanced!) MOM. MOM. MOM. MOM. And then one day, after a moment, DARLENE. I wonder, now, if I sounded like my father when I said it.

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Bank Shot

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Greg McBride

Featured Art: Horse Race, Siena, Italy by Walter Shirlaw

I asked about the old days, when they
were my age—my mother scrambling eggs,
Dad and I at the table. He aimed a glance
sidelong at her, then took a shot toward me:

             We’ve been very lucky, Son.

He must have meant their gamboling, teenage
marriage after weeks of jitterbug jokes
and getting-to-know-you’s in the Abilene
Lady Luck pool hall in 1941.

Her silence like the hush of a tournament
match, the cue’s tip skittish at the ball,
probing for angle and spin, velocity,
the all-important leave and follow-on.

By now—both gone so long, both unlucky—
I understand his game, how words can
travel in disguise, their spin covert,
as on that morning when his mumbled plea

caromed off me—sharply, as off
a felted cushion—and spun toward her,
determined at the stove:

             Come on, Honey, let’s play.
             Let’s keep the run alive.

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Cousin Scott on His Lizard

.Reading time 3 minutes.

by Anders Carlson-Wee

Featured Art: A Lizard, Jamaica by Frederic Edwin Church

-In memory of Scott Christopher Maxwell,
1961 – 2007

You ever had some loose screw try to tell you
your friends is the family you choose?
Well I wouldn’t bottle the breath of the minister
that delivered the message. The family you got
is the only family you’re gonna get,
take it or leave it. Wanna know what I got?
I got myself sisters. Two of em. But that’s all I got
to say about that. That’s all I ever knew
to say about my sisters: There’s two of em.
I bet I coulda stomached a brother better.
Even when I was a little grommet I wanted
a brother, so I practiced on this pet lizard I had.
He was one of them color-changers that could
change his skin to blend in with whatever’s
below him. I named him Tony and took him
around with me. Showed him how to do
whatever I was doin. Talked to him and tried
to explain things. I remember wearin tie-dyed shirts
and puttin Tony on my shoulder so I could
watch him change. One day I had him on the back
of my hand while I was hot-wheelin down the street
and he jumped off and I ran right over him.
What do you say about something like that?
Afterwards he was so flat he looked like one of them
outlines of a lizard in a coloring book. No blood
or nothin, like nothin was in him. I’ll be damned
if I know what else to say about that.
I don’t even know why I told you about it.
Would you believe me if I said I never got over it?
Never got over the fact that when he died
he was the color of my hand? You think that’s funny?
I can’t even look at a goddamn lizard anymore.

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Cousin Scott on Doomsday

.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Anders Carlson-Wee

Featured Art: Burning Oil Well at Night, near Rouseville, Pennsylvania by James Hamilton

It don’t matter what you believe. All the Christians
know it’s comin, all the scientists know it’s comin.
Could be a chunk of the sun wipin out the grid
just as likely as the Lord Himself snuffin us out
one by one like a bunch of candle wicks.
Could be a oil shortage. Or the souls of the dead
come back to reckon. My buddy Critter figures
it’ll be the Lake of Fire––all the flesh dripping off
our dicks while we drown at the same time
over and over forever––like it says in the Bible.
But most folks won’t tell you what they believe.
My ma, she never broke silence on the issue.
My old man, he says I’m crazy. Says I’m gonna drink
myself to death before anything else gets the chance.
Me myself, I got my chips pushed in for somethin natural.
A meteor maybe. Or a polar flip. But like I said:
when you’re throwin pies, it don’t matter much what the flavor is.
It’s more folks thinkin like me than you’d think.
And like most of us, I got a bug-in plan for stayin put,
but I also got a bug-out plan for gettin gone.
Not that I’m gonna tell you where I’m goin.
It’s high in the mountains––I’ll say that much––
but that’s all the scat this cat’s gonna leave in the sand
for you to track by. Let me ask you somethin:
You think I’m crazy to have a hundred pounds of Spam
buried in caches? You think I’m crazy to have Critter
shoot me with a .22 so I know what it feels like
to get hit in a bulletproof vest? Well, you know what?
I hope I am crazy. I hope I’m the craziest son of a bitch
you ever met.

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White Earth, Minnesota

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Anders Carlson-Wee

Featured Art: Hudson Valley, New York in Winter by Frederic Edwin Church

The volunteer staff at Saint Vincent de Paul
made too many sandwiches, expecting more.
When the drunk Indian came in from the winter
wearing some kind of neck-warmer pulled up
over his nose, they were able to give him
three for now and seven in a Ziploc bag. He sat down
at a fold-out table by himself and began eating
all of them. The icicles in his wild eyebrows
melted slowly. He mumbled orders as he chewed,
demanding bacon and a woman. From his pocket
he unfolded a photo of heck horses and held it up
whenever someone dared to look at him.
Partway through the meal he overheated
and took off most of his clothes. There was a hole
in his neck clearly made by a bullet, and made
recently. The rush of blood should never have clotted,
but it had. Maybe from the unbearable cold.
When the cop showed up he knocked back his hood
and pulled off his gloves to rub his nose.
He asked the staff if anyone had come in wearing
a ski mask. They shook their heads in unison
and kept shaking as the officer described the rough
features of the drunk Indian sitting by himself
with a hole in his neck eating sandwiches.

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A Million Tigers Who Aren’t Mad at You

.Reading time 52 minutes.

By Sandy Nietling

Featured Art: Abstract–Flowers in the Left by Carl Newman

My Mexican boyfriend cannot tell me if he’s ever killed a person. This is not because of a language barrier on either side. I asked my question clearly enough, and he is a good conversationalist with a decent English vocabulary. Still, Raf furrows his dark brows for a long moment, apparently needing time to puzzle through the facts as he knows them. Finally he frowns. “I’m not sure.”

When I ask my American boyfriends if they’ve killed someone, they laugh the way that they’re meant to laugh. Then, while they’re busy being surprised or trying to work up a clever response, I can worry about the papers I have to grade or how much longer the sliced pineapple in the refrigerator will last before I have to give it to the orioles in my backyard. That’s why you ask about death in the first place. It’s supposed to buy conversational elbow room, but Rafael has done the unexpected and provoked my attention instead of letting it drift away. It is not until later, in the dark of my bedroom, that he is relaxed enough to explain his crime.

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Jenny Perowski is Ahead of Me in the Grocery Store Line

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Julie Danho

Featured Art:  (Untitled–Flower Study) by Mary Vaux Walcott

If an Amish family can forgive the man who burned
their land, surely I can say hello to Jenny Perowski,
who used to call me “fattie fat” in seventh grade math
and had boys call my house, pretending to ask me out.
That was twenty years ago. Now Jenny, if not fat exactly,
is puffy as a slightly overstuffed chair. I’m thinner than her,
and my pleasure feels more whiskey than cream, makes me
want to pour out her Kors bag to rifle for candy, then slowly
eat it in front of her like she once did to me. I know
her cruelty was, at best, a misdemeanor. But anger
is like a peppermint in a pocketbook—everything inside
takes on its smell and taste. I could break it in my teeth,
make it disappear. Instead, I savor the mint, let the sugar
line my mouth like fur, linger far past what can be called
pleasure. How good it would be to be better than this.

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Siccità

.Reading time 31 minutes.

By Stephan Jarret

Featured Art: The Hills by Preston Dickinson

To my grandmother, Francesca, the cliffs of Wilmerding, Pennsylvania resembled Italy’s Amalfi coast. Only, when she looked over the edge, the valley was waterless. Not even a polluted stream that dried out in the summer months. “Siccità”—drought—she used to say, when she led me into our backyard and squinted with high-angle menace toward the neighboring town of Pitcairn. At night, the phosphorescent sign of Randy’s Brew House shrouded the valley in faux-oceanic cobalt blue, offering “HOT GIRLS” and “FREE PRETZELS.” Still, the lower hillside was anything but arid—peppered with trees, I thought— so I tried to mention that something was sustaining them. “What?” she’d say, either incredulous or deaf.
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If I Could Have Your Attention

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Jonathan Louis Duckworth

Featured Art: Sunrise or Sunset (study for book Concealing Coloration in the Animal Kingdom) by Abbott Handerson Thayer

-To S. S.

              and if I could make of my hands a hammock
for the sinuous long-S slope of your spine
              if I could flocculate moonlight into a salve
to rub away our fears as fingers smooth a bedsheet’s creases         
              if I could scan the abjad calligraphy of your curls
and wake with long strands coiled lamia-like under my tongue
              if we could lie enmeshed under night’s aspect
our spooned bodies a crescent luna under the folds
                if I could rise first to cook you breakfast
and convince you basil pesto is morning fare
                if I could recite to you all sixty-three octaves
of Keats’s Isabella with pungent pesto breath
                if we could exhume for each other our buried poems
to pry vital marrow from those discarded bones
                and if we could distill the essential incanti
like sweet incense extracted from fetid agarwood
                if I could breathe my favorite words to you:
“gloaming,” “Ewigkeit,” “azimuth,” “garrigues,” “laverock”
                if I could settle into entire stillness
while you whisper your own treasured motes into my ear
                and if I could only compose the words
that could incite in you half what yours have in me
                I could be with you, or else write no more

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Directions

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Matthew J. Spireng

Featured Art: Village Street by Alice Pike Barney

This time, giving directions to a place
I have never been, an address
I have only passed so I could tell another where

it is, I have explained: across the street from,
a few blocks down from, between this
cross street and that, a little yellow awning

across the front, the name in big letters above it,
and if it is dark, will there be
light on the awning, or will its color be gone,

indeterminate? Tell me, will you, if I arrive
first and find a better way to describe, how
can I reach you, or must the first suffice?

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Fantaisie

.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Donald Platt

Featured Art: Garden Flowers by Edna Boies Hopkins

                               Each person is
a solar system, the bits of birth’s Big Bang orbiting
                               some sun that both attracts

and repels. Elliptically, my mother orbits her own death,
                               that great shining
ball of fire I cannot look directly at. She draws closer to it,

                              then pulls away. She rotates
as she revolves. Together we write her obituary. Born.
                              Schooled. Worked as.

Married to. Gave birth. Resided. Retired. Is survived by.
                               The old story
we all get to write if we’re lucky, or one that will willy-nilly

                              get written for us.
I leave the day she’ll die blank. She gives me the notes
                              she wrote last night:

“Funeral in Christ Church and Bill Eakins to preach.
                              Ask Women’s Guild
to serve a simple refreshment. Give $100 to organist.

                              Give $5,000
to church. Give $500 to Bill Eakins. Give $1,000 to women.
                              Give $250

to soloist. No calling hours. Only the church service.
                              Nobody
getting up and saying nice things about me. Everyone

                              has their own
memories—good, bad, and indifferent. Chief purpose
                              of a funeral

is to pray for the departed. Also to give comfort
                              to those who grieve.
Call Hickey Funeral Home.” As an afterthought, she added

                              “Ask Charlene
to play Saint-Saëns’ Fantaisie for violin and harp.
                              You’ll need to find

a harpist.” Everyone needs a harpist to accompany her living
                              and her dying.
No one to turn to but the seated, marble harp player

                              at the Metropolitan Museum
of Art, early Cycladic, eleven and a half inches high
                              He embraces

the D-shaped instrument, whose top is ornamented
                              with the head
of a waterfowl. Against his right thigh and stone shoulder, he rests

                              the weight
of the instrument. It has no strings. His raised right thumb plucks
                              five thousand years of silence.

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NOR 19 Feature: Manipulating the Reader

.Reading time less than 1 minute.

Featured Art: Sketch of Church Tower and Roof Top by Arnold William Brunner

We often say that a story, a movie, a song, or even a commercial about sad dogs is “emotionally manipulative.” We use this phrase not only to discount a particular piece, but to condemn it. What, though, constitutes literary emotional manipulation? Is there such a thing as a benign manipulation, a justifiable heart- tugging? And what specific moves can we identify that make the difference between effective and ineffective narrative manipulation, between a moving poem and a mawkish one?

We asked five writers—Rebecca McClanahan, Debra Marquart, A-J Aronstein, C.L. Dallat, and Matthew VanWinkle—to respond to those questions.

I Second That Emotion

.Reading time 18 minutes.

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

As I listened, I kept thinking of Chekhov’s advice to a writer who had sent him a story: If you “want to touch the reader’s heart, try to be colder . . . As it is, your heroes weep and you sigh.” John Gardner has a similar take on this issue in The Art of Fiction. “In great fiction,” Gardner writes, “we are moved by what happens, not by the whimpering or bawling of the writer’s presentation of what happens. That is, in great fiction, we are moved by characters and events, not by the emotion of the person who happens to be telling the story.” Certainly Chekhov and Gardner are not suggesting that the writer herself be unmoved by events and characters, but rather that she allow the reader the space to complete the transaction her words set into motion. For isn’t that what readers of literary fiction, poetry, and nonfiction want the chance to do? To, in the words of that Smokey Robinson hit, “second that emotion”?

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Tell it Cool: On Writing with Restraint

.Reading time 16 minutes.

By Debra Marquart

Featured Art: Hill with Trees by Eleanor Harris

For years, I’ve encouraged students to “tell it cool” when narrating a tale that is harrowing or emotional. A cool narrator can be a buoy in rough waters. I’ve always thought this advice came from Hemingway, but at this moment as I search my bookshelves for the place where Hemingway said it, I can’t put my finger on the quote. I know it’s in there somewhere, likely in one of the letters (bossy letters full of unsolicited advice and signed “Papa” when friends were just writing to ask for money).

In A Moveable Feast, Hemingway famously wrote about knowing what to leave out. In his discussion of the short story, “Out of Season,” for example, he remarks that he left out a key event connected to the real story: “I had omitted the real end of it which was that the old man hanged himself.” According to a letter that Hemingway wrote to F. Scott Fitzgerald in 1925, the story was “an almost literal transcription” of an experience he’d had while traveling in Europe with his first wife, Hadley.

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Staying with Argos: Odysseus and His Dog

.Reading time 17 minutes.

By A-J Aronstein

Featured Art: Clearing after September Gale–Maine Coast by Howard Russell Butler

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

To see a doggie’s demise in any medium will always make us blubber. So too will reunions between pets and soldiers. Witness the strange phenomenon of YouTube compilations documenting first meetings between dogs and American troops returning home from Middle Eastern war zones. These clips depict pure cathartic joy. Fido or Georgie or Lady jump and drool all over their patriotic owners, howling with disbelief, filmed by someone holding an iPhone that trembles with the cinematographer’s barely-constrained sobs. Music swells, the major cries, and before we have time to think about the trauma lurking in the background, we cut to another dog jumping into the arms of another deep-eyed master in fatigues. These are fragmented blips of pure joy. They don’t ask us to think: They constitute a conveyor belt of emotive force.

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Yeats and Heaney: The Poetry Without the Pity

.Reading time 22 minutes.

By C. L. Dallat

Featured Art: Genip Tree in the Mountains, Jamaica by Frederic Edwin Church

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

This is, of course, the Yeats whose career started in the mists and myths of a Celtic twilight amidst a flurry of pre-Raphaelite sentimentalism and romance, who wrote of tragic heroes, of “The Pity of Love” and “The Sorrow of Love.” So before reaching for his famous poem, “Easter 1916,” where Yeats does appear to address war and politics, we should take a momentary look at that early work.

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Designs Less Palpable: Emotional Manipulation and Even-Handedness in Keats

.Reading time 18 minutes.

By Matthew VanWinkle

Featured Art: Flowery Meadow by William Henry Holmes

In a February 3, 1818 letter to his friend Reynolds, Keats rejects a reading experience that he associates primarily with Wordsworth: “We hate poetry that has a palpable design upon us—and if we do not agree, seems to put its hand in its breeches pocket.” The reproach is so scathing because it acutely observes how rapidly the poetry’s interest in its audience cools, from the importunate heat of the design to the indifferent withdrawal to the pocket. Keats is fuming primarily at Wordsworth’s dogmatism and propensity for self-congratulation, as we hear earlier in the letter, where Keats complains of being “bullied into a certain Philosophy engendered in the whims of an Egotist.”

At first glance, this might seem like a rarefied chafing, a protest against an intellectual irritation or an effusion of rivalry peculiar to talented writers. Yet the kind of readerly hatred that Keats memorably articulates becomes more comprehensible when we think of art that has palpable designs not on our ideas but on our feelings: the swelling soundtrack that jerks at our tears, the so-cute cartoon kitty kitty that beguiles us into wuv. Every reader has caved in to this sort of appeal at one time or another, and many readers look back on such acquiescence abashedly, or worse. How to admit, even in hindsight, to having been manipulated, to having feelings that can be summoned and practiced upon with such infuriating confidence?

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New Ohio Review Issue 18 (originally printed Fall 2015)

.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 18 compiled by Meah McCallister.

Believe that Even in My Deliberateness I Was Not Deliberate

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Gail Mazur

Featured Art: Butterfly by Mary Altha Nims

Believe that even in my deliberateness I was not deliberate
—The end words form this line from Gwendolyn Brooks’
poem, “the mother”

We’d be calm, we’d be serene, as long as we could believe

in the blue dragonflies and balletic monarchs that

hovered near us in a kind of peaceable kingdom even

while my love’s illness menaced the peace in

the summer yard, in the fragile house, in the air I breathed in my

deliberateness. My only stratagem, deliberateness:

to accept our lot in that pathless time. I

thought I’d know what he’d want; what I’d want was-

n’t any different. Wouldn’t it be, wouldn’t it finally be, not

to consider how finite our August? Not to deliberate?

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Sintra

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Gail Mazur

Featured Art: Composition by Otto Freundlich

In your office, you, mastering the art of Photoshop,
scanning a crumpled snapshot, 3 inches square,

of your father, poolside, jaunty in a blue swimsuit,
his straw fedora at a rakish angle,

carrying two splashing cups of bica toward your mother.
Beaming, gallant, tanned, grinning for her camera.

That was in Portugal, in Sintra—
the village Byron called “most beautiful in the world.”

In the old cracked photo,
part of his naked chest had flaked away:

under the glossy surface an ashen patch.
Forty years later at your desk,

filial, in a fantasy of surgery,
you worked your laptop to repair the wound,

dragging pixels of skin tone, of mortal coloration,
from his right side to his left.

A new skill mastered, new language, new tools
that restored but couldn’t save.

I watched you transplant a blush of skin—
a tender ministry, your digital touch

lighter than a kiss—not unlike a kiss—

exactly where his heart four decades
earlier began to falter. As yours, invisibly, did now.

—One of those days we both still thought that somehow
with the proper tools, there was nothing you couldn’t fix.

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Neighbors

.Reading time 69 minutes.

By Suzanne McConnell

Selected as winner of the 2015 New Ohio Review Fiction Contest by Maud Casey

Featured Art: Gardener’s House at Antibes by Claude Monet

I wake to the phone ringing like an alarm. It’s the middle of the night. I clamber out of bed, hard-won sleep, into the living room, grope for the receiver. “Isabella,” my neighbor Viv says in her throaty, demanding voice. “I’ve lost my keys. I’m at the booth two blocks away. Come downstairs and let me in.” The phone clicks off.

I light a cigarette, and now I hear her raving like a maniac coming down the street. I move to the kitchen window and stand in the dark in my nightgown, trembling with rage, waiting for her figure to catch up with her voice shattering the night, and now I see her at the edge of the streetlight.

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The Anatomy Lesson

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Bruce Bond

Featured Art: The Brook by Paul Cézanne

after Rembrandt

Why they look away is anyone’s guess,
these men apprenticed to the evidence,

gathered at the corpse the dark context
makes bright inside the surgical forum.

Anyone’s guess why, at this instant,
even the teacher looks past his subject,

the harp strings of these extended tendons
raised up from the bed of the open wound.

A spectacle, it seems, for no one there,
for though they lean in, wide-eyed, severe,

they look instead at the anatomy volume
propped up in the center of the room,

or at us, the viewer, the painter, the future
that stares back with the blindness of a mirror.

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Girl with the Red Stockings

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Julie Hassett

Featured Art: The Red Kerchief by Claude Monet

after a painting by Winslow Homer, Boston MFA

Blue skirt a bell, percussive
on her calves, basket full of mussels,
unable to quell the surge,
red hair a banner,
she glares at a ship which lifts,
smacks the swell.
Spumes geyser over hull.
Black shoes plant on granite,
root to her core,
a ballast that will not crack
no matter the force
of gusts from the north,

a gush that rushes her sternum,
alone, again, by the ocean.

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Sisters Peeling

.Reading time 34 minutes.

By Julie Henson

Featured Art: A Fisherman’s Daughter by Winslow Homer

Late in the night after my father’s memorial service, my sisters and I stopped our small caravan at a Speedway in the stretch of US-40 between Greencastle and Indianapolis. It was early November.

“Come with me,” my sister Emily said, leading me to the back of her car and opening the trunk. She pointed to a box in the corner. “You want some?” she asked sounding like a drug dealer, which at one point she had been. I saw her slipping back in easy—my dad’s ashes were valuable and sort of dangerous—I felt like it may have even been against Indiana state law to have them, let alone scatter them, though I never checked. When I said nothing, she prodded, “You want even just a little? There’s so much to go around.” Sarah, our oldest sister, was waiting in the passenger seat—she had already been dealt her ash-inheritance. It was late and it was cold; I wanted to go to sleep. Emily looked at me intently. The way the gas station lights slanted cast a shadow across the top of her face, and I could not make out her expression.

“No,” I finally said. “I’m trying to quit.”

The nozzle on the gas pump clicked, and she sighed, shut the trunk.

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Talking to My Dead Mother About Dogs

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Stephanie Gangi

Featured Art: Dog with pups by India, Rajasthan, Ajmer, probably Sawar school

          That damn dog.
Which one, Ma?
          The first one.
There is no first one, there was always a dog, Ma.
          The shepherd, the one who kept the baby
          from rolling in to the road down the hill in front of the house.
That was me, Ma. I was the baby.
          I know that. Rex. Rex.
          And what about your father’s, who jumped
          out the car window at a toll booth, headed for the hills. Skippy,
          ungrateful mutt.
          Then we got Duchess, because of Lassie on television.
          Duchess was weak. Duchess didn’t last.
          The toy poodle came in a hat box. She matched the décor!
          I swear to god, she did.
Your chateau phase.
          What about your dogs?
My dogs? My dogs, Ma?
The fear biter who darted in the dark at the ankles of my bad choices?
The herder who swam himself spent, circling me circling me when I was at sea?
The too-happy dog, who I couldn’t keep, I forget why?
Now this one, the big one, this horse of a dog who braces himself
so I can stand? Who, the slower I go, the stronger he gets?
Who can’t rest until I rest? This dog, Ma?
This last one? Ma?

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At the Columbarium

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Jackie Craven

Featured Art: Edge of the Woods Near L’Hermitage, Pontoise by Camille Pissarro

“We’d invite you in,” my mother said, “but where
would we put you?” I must have seemed enormous
squatting before her door, third drawer from center.

If not for the marble nameplate, I might’ve seen
a diorama of Jacobean chairs, tiny forks and spoons,
and my stepfather’s bonsai.

“There’s barely enough room for the two of us,”
my mother went on. Deep inside the granite walls,
my stepfather growled, “I blame the Realtor.”

Dogwoods fluttered, casting stained blossoms
into the fountain. Down the hill, a procession of bagpipes
let out a skirl. “She promised us a view,” my mother shrilled.

I think my parents imagined themselves still
at the retirement home, rolling along a tulip-edged path
from the Independent Wing, past Assisted Living,

over to Memory Care, where the Admissions Lady
touched my arm and whispered, “Don’t worry.
We’ll help them downsize.”

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After the Funeral

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Holly Day

Featured Art: A Funeral by Jean-Paul Laurens

When my father was ten, his mother died
and he went outside into the street after her funeral and screamed
at God. He said, “Take me,
you fucker!” to God, and his younger brother, my
uncle, was so scared he ran
into the room they both shared and hid. Later, when
my father came back, my uncle asked him what Hell was like,
why God had let him come back, if he had seen
their mother, what she was wearing.

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An Evolution of Prayer

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Stephen Dunn

Featured Art: Genesis II by Franz Marc

As a child, some of his prayers were answered
because he prayed out loud for a kite or bike,
which his mother would overhear, and pass on
to her husband, his father, the Lord.

Later, he understood that when he prayed
he was mostly talking to himself—albeit a better,
more moral part of himself—which accounted
for why he heard nothing back from the void.

Lord, he’d begin, because he was afraid
to alter the language of prayer, Lord, deliver
me from envy and mean-spiritedness,
allow me to love people as I love animals.

Then his father died, and he became the sad Lord
of himself, praying for pleasures immediate and grantable.
Let me tango the night long with Margot the receptionist,
he’d say to no one. Let me do unto others.

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Rock Harbor

.Reading time 52 minutes.

Selected as runner-up for the 2015 New Ohio Review Fiction Contest by Maud Casey

By Susan Finch

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

When Bob Miller slipped and fell from the rooftop deck of his ex-wife’s houseboat into the inky black of Rock Harbor, it almost appeared as if he’d done it on purpose. The fall took him feet over head, his flailing arms tightening into a V like he was performing a cartwheel. His fingers spread open in sunbursts, his legs stretched wide and long like a dancer’s, and his toes tensed into sharp points. As he tumbled the twenty-five feet into the shadowy water, his whole body seemed to expand and explode into a star.

The entire party saw Bob’s fall or, at least, when the police conducted the official investigation, partygoers would claim they had. And in truth, the spinning and twisting of Bob Miller’s body end-over-end was so spectacular that in hearing the story later in whispers passing across the marina from slip to slip, everyone felt they had seen it. Those who knew Bob assumed he’d been dared to do it. He had always been a bit of a showoff and couldn’t say no to a challenge. When he was thirteen, he’d purchased a dirt bike and had performed stunts for his friends on the weekend, vaulting over a campfire, navigating the narrow wall between the cornfield and the river, and once, after a double-dog-dare, he’d launched the bike from the hayloft of his father’s dilapidated barn and taken a nasty spill on the landing, fracturing his femur.

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Gray Whale

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Sally Bliumis-Dunn

Featured Art: Submarine Series Introductory Lithograph by Eric Ravilious

When they read the metal tag
on her pectoral fin—
a surprise of dark Cyrillic letters

on this Gray Whale
who had swum some fourteen thousand miles,
inter-braiding continent

with continent—
strange that I think of you now, father
though you too had lived

mostly below a surface,
the breadth of which we could not know—

until they read her tag,
the cetologists had thought
the gray whales off the coast of Baja

were of a different species
from the ones in Minsk.

When I found your lacquer boxes,
so small they fit into my hand,
with their depictions of our home,

the pots above the stove,
their odd discolorations,
the cheerful curtained window

that looked out at the pines,
I felt sad I had not known your heart
would swim such distance for us—

you had never shown us one.
And how small you had to make yourself
to see each scene and paint it

like an ant stepping carefully along
one of those dark passages
in its hill of dirt that nobody sees inside.

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Aesthetics to Change the Way You Live

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Sally Bliumis-Dunn

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

“Aesthetics to Change the Way You Live”
—Growth Magazine

For instance wabi sabi,
a Japanese view of life
that celebrates the imperfect,

the light-hearted sound
of the two words
like figures balanced on a seesaw,

behind them, cloudless sky,
and in the spread, the photograph
of nicked and tarnished silver spoons

arranged in rows on lilac velvet—
how perfectly imperfect.
But separate from the printed page,

the air around me darkens—
and then the sound
like thunder pressing closer

as I think of my own flaws—
and then they all
come charging toward me

like a herd of bison,
so dense it’s hard to see
from all the kicked-up dust.

So loud I cannot think.
How much easier to be won over
by a living room’s worn rug,

the reds and blues, faded,
even threadbare in those places
I have most often stood.

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Plato and You

.Reading time less than 1 minute.

By Christopher Flannery

Featured Art: Reading by Berthe Morisot

I was reading Plato

and thinking about you.

So I wasn’t really reading.

I was thinking.

And I wasn’t thinking about reading,

if you get the idea.

And that’s the thing.

With Plato,

it’s all about the idea.

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This Contract is Complete

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Kyle Norwood

Featured Art: Crescent Moon from Album of Paintings by the Venerable Zeshin by Shibata Zeshin 柴田 是真

    “This contract,” this machine with knobs
to be pulled, buttons to be pushed, inexorable gears
leading from A to B, but so easily sabotaged,
mucked up by a fallen coin or shirtsleeve or
dangled lock of hair caught in the works—

    “is complete,” encompasses entirely the world
of its transaction, has an inside but no outside,
everything else is forever foreign and beneath notice
in the penumbra of this dazzling light,

    “and all promises, representations, understandings,
and agreements,” theories, whispered assurances,
messages in code, three-martini lunchtime conversations,
husky-voiced proposals to meet in back of the bank by moonlight,
“have been expressed herein, and all prior negotiations

    and agreements are merged herein,” forgotten, a haze,
only this document remembers, everything else is indistinct.
Nonetheless, “no change, modification, or assignment hereof”
shall surprise the sociologists, or Erda the earth-spirit
who knows how all things end,

    and no contract, no music or poem worth the paper,
no valedictory address or deathbed testament,
no blood sacrifices, voodoo rituals, fire sales,
or promises spoken out of a burning bush,
no house finch spilling its enthusiasm into the gutters,
no final snow covering the earth like a last sigh,
“shall be binding against the Company unless in writing
and signed by one of its officers.”

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Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: PINK

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Bryan Owens

Featured Art: Ananas (Pineapples) by Charles Martin

Is it against school dress code for a student to wear sweatpants
that say PINK across the rear? I have CC’d the school director.
Please advise.

Though it is not stated explicitly in the student handbook,
I think it is safe to say this article of clothing
is not school appropriate.

If we do not adhere to the dress code policy
as it is stated explicitly, we are doing these kids
a tragic disservice in their preparation for the real world.

I agree, given the suggestiveness of the images it raises
& its placement in relative context with that which
it is alluding to, this article of clothing should not be tolerated at school.

Well, to what extent do we implement
school policy based on our individual theories of how one article,
not explicitly referred to in the handbook, defies or complies
with the fundamental principles of the guidelines?

So does that mean we let slide what is merely not stated
in the handbook?

How is PINK suggestive it’s just a brand name
I have my own pair at home super comfortable

Of course we don’t merely let it slide!!! but if every member
of the faculty is meant to uphold the dress code policy
through individual subjectivity, how can we have any consistency
throughout the faculty? The student has gone the whole morning
with no faculty sending her to the office!!!

PINK is suggestive as sexual innuendo or metonym
for female reproductive parts. Our dress code is in place
to protect our female students from themselves,
thinking it is good to provoke what teenage boys are already thinking.

Comfortable??? I’m so glad for you, but would you wear them to school???

I would if I could! : )

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This Bed You’ve Made

.Reading time 9 minutes.

By Samuel Ligon

Featured Art: The Large Plane Trees (Road Menders at Saint-Rémy) by Vincent van Gogh

We killed Kitty’s husband with a harpoon her grandfather had given her, but it could have been a skillet or the steel ashtray from her kitchen table. The band would sit around that table at night, smoking and drinking and filling the house with music, and as it got late, Billy Wayne would make Kitty feel bad about who she was and what was best in her, calling her ignorant hillbilly trash and blaming her for everything that was small in him. He married her when she was fifteen, two months after he discovered her in Spokane, though everybody knew she didn’t need to be discovered. She only needed to sing the sweet, sad songs we wrote, and America’s heart would melt.

Our first single, “A Stone of Ice,” told the story of Billy Wayne trampling Kitty’s love with whiskey and womanizing, leaching all the goodness from her once pure soul. Every song we sang was about him. We wrote “This Bed You’ve Made” a month before he died, with the chorus that would make Kitty famous:

                       This bed you’ve made of cheating nights
                       This bed you’ve made of sin
                       This bed you’ve made of drunken lies
                       Is the bed I’m in with him

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Open Mic

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Jesse Wallis

Featured Art: Dancers by Edgar Degas

I don’t know how, but I knew as soon as he said it, he would get lost
after the bridge. “I’m still working on this one,” he began, tightening
the strings. “Hope I make it through.” It was the third song the young
man played. He was really quite good, if new. His tenor voice earnest,
fingers deliberate in finding the chords along the neck of the acoustic.
But exactly where I had thought, he forgot the lyrics, shook his head
while he strummed on in circles. Until he whispered under his breath,
“I’m sorry,” and I called out, Muriel plays piano. With a broad smile,
he nodded, “Very good. Thank you.” Then picked it up, Muriel plays
piano every Friday at The Hollywood, and brought it home as strong
as he’d started. This was at a small coffee shop in Carefree, Arizona.
On the patio strung with white lights, maybe a dozen people, a night
in November cold enough to recollect. My wife and I had separated
recently. A friend was trying to get me out in the world, to keep me
busy. And at least for that moment, I felt like I belonged someplace
again. I had something someone needed. Realized anyone could get
lost, even in Carefree. Yet every now and then, the invisible chords
connecting us—even with a complete stranger—sway in the breeze
like silk filaments of a web and catch the light. And you can follow
that flashing back, the path familiar as a song. You know the words.

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Accelerated Learning

.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Laura Read

Featured Art: Seated Man and Woman by Célestin François Nanteuil

At the middle school meeting for parents of children
in Accelerated Learning, I sit at a lunch table across

the cafeteria from him. At first he is just
part of the scene, like the board listing prices

for soda and chips, or the English teacher addressing us,
famous for tearing up a kid’s paper if it wasn’t

double-spaced. She is talking about the importance
of Latin roots, this new language made from taking apart

what they already know. On the first day of school,
my son recited them to me from the back seat,

wearing his new cool sweatshirt and no longer carrying
a lunchbox, his lunch jammed instead into a plastic

bag like the ones he told me the other kids would have.
Port. Carry. Co com con. With. The man’s face

is starting to look like two faces, like that optical
illusion of an old woman and a young woman,

the same line for the chin and the nose.
The teacher tells us, They’re going to struggle.

They’re going to fail. They’re twelve. Let’s face it—
no one here wants to go back to seventh grade.

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Mute Swan

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Fleda Brown

Featured Art: Swan by Mary Altha Nims

1
I am full of irritation this morning
which makes folding the fitted sheet
a disaster, wrinkles smashed inside.
Down at the dock, the swan hissed
at me and I thought, good for you,
swan, what business do we have
in your life, anyway, making up myths
in which you rape, or die?
Beautiful things often hiss if you get
too close. Or if you try to neaten them up
like clothes. A swan’s neck is tough
enough to twist you into knots.
Beauty, I don’t know how to feed it
without getting bitten.

2
Swan’s wings are heavy enough to kill you.
Eleven swans at once have traveled our lake
in perfect synchrony in the boat wakes,
their heads so far from the wild bucking,
they seem to have forgotten their bodies.
Terrible flowerings, they are going
somewhere else, to do what they do.

3
A male swan is a cob, the female a pen.
Who thought those up? They make a kind
of sense, though, the same kind of sense
that turns a swan’s neck plus its reflection
into an ice-hook.

4
If a challenger comes too near the nest
the cob climbs on him and shoves
his head down until he drowns. Not shoves.
He rests his beak quietly, relentlessly
on the neck as if it were the challenger’s
decision to bow under, and he were
helping him stay there. His big body
covers the other, except for one wingtip.
There’s a leisurely quality, like love.

When swans mate, their heads and necks
form a perfect valentine. Or, they intertwine
necks. Last night I wanted to watch
the movie unencumbered by your hand
on my breast. I was touchy. You were all
winding; I, all hiss.

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Leather Coat

.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Maxine Scates

Featured Art: Star Flower by Mary Altha Nims

“It’s only a matter of time before eternity,”
reads a sign in front of a church, turning the day
epigrammatic. But rather than think of the time I have left,
I think about all that goes wrong. For instance,
how did that cow, an Angus, red tag in its ear, die
by the side of the road? Did someone shoot it
because it stood as still as the time I’ve already spent
does not? Its coat was still shining, sleek as that coat
I’d only dreamed of buying all those years ago
until a boy asked me out on a date and I finally
had somewhere to go. I’d already saved the money,
and did not consider whether or not such a coat
was too hot for L.A. I thought instead of the stars
I ushered to their courtside seats in my hip-length toga
at the Fabulous Forum, the stars who followed the ass
I’d only gradually understood I’d been hired for,
the stars who wore leather coats, shiny and supple
as their skin when they stepped from the lengthening dusk
of fall days like the gods they were without ever
breaking a sweat. So on my day off I opened the door
to Discount Leathers, which smelled of barnyards
and fields I had never seen though now I think
of that smell as more like the roadside of lingering death
where I hope the cow’s carcass has mercifully
been picked clean by vultures leaving nothing behind
but bones and a dull hide. I picked my coat
quickly, laid my cash on the counter and got out, but
not before I saw the smirk on the salesman’s face,
not before he saw how I believed that cloaked
in my coat my skin would be soft, my hair glossy,
saw how I knew nothing about anything, all of it
a mystery in whose maze I was certain I wandered
alone. I don’t remember the boy or how the date went.
The coat was too hot. It was heavy and felt like the hide
that it was, stiff and unyielding. I took it to the cleaners
up by Sears Liquors and whatever they did turned it
whitish, marbled as a slab of meat. I stood at the counter
and paid for it and never asked what had gone wrong.

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The Devil’s Best Friend

.Reading time 22 minutes.

By Vincent Poturica

Featured Art: View of the City and London Bridge

About nine or ten years ago when I was not yet twenty, my friend Carlos asked me if he should sell his soul to the Devil’s best friend in exchange for a better world—I am not kidding, son. I told Carlos that selling his soul sounded a little hardcore, even for him, and that he should probably meditate on the potential consequences for at least a week. I also suggested that he contemplate his motives, i.e. whether or not he was really doing it for a good cause—though I confessed that I distrusted anyone who thought they knew what was best—or because he felt desperate regarding the recent death of our dear friend Ivan. I then told him—and he agreed—that he also probably needed to consider whether the Devil’s best friend was the best person or demon to sell his soul to, whether the Devil’s best friend was even certified to buy his soul—I admitted that I had never heard of someone selling their soul to the Devil’s best friend, but I was, of course, ignorant of many things. I then questioned the extreme subjectivity of better world, encouraging Carlos to make sure to specify as much as possible the criteria for what made this world better, for instance its natural resources, its climate, its historical record of oppression, among other factors, before he signed any contracts with his blood or whatever you did these days to officially seal transactions involving that most precious and contested conception of the self.

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Not Holding the Gun

.Reading time 3 minutes.

Selected as winner of the 2015 New Ohio Review Poetry Contest by Robert Pinsky

By Keith Kopka

Featured Art: Spring Flowers by Claude Monet

Knowledge of crime is a crime
even if one is not committed
by participation. At this cookout,
in a parallel universe, a version
of me lifts the gun, considers
its weight a handful of peanuts.
Another variant lets off a shot
into Godless sky, a traditional
celebration of manhood, in
the dimension of Texas oil barons.
I have a self who understands
breech-bolt action, another
who can separate grip cap
and butt stock, put them back
blindfolded, turn shotgun into
sawed off. In our current rotation
of speed and light, his pump
action is between us on the table.
The cookout has been great,
and I’m glad his sister, my date,
invited me. His mother is grilling
cow tongue. The whole gang’s
here to celebrate Marshmallow’s
release after three years in prison,
he’s at the grill asking for a fourth
helping. The word Rascal carved
in his chest like a pacemaker scar.
In the universe of wooden nickels,
I am best friends with this blunt
instrument. Of course, this isn’t
the universe where we live. My date’s
brother is asking if I’m interested
in a job, simple robbery, I get a part
of the product, but he needs me
because I’m white, because it won’t
get back to his gang, or the black
gangs, if a white man robs a white
man of some drugs. I’ve noticed
I’m the only guy at the cookout
wearing a shirt. Her brother
has a tattoo of two devils balanced
on the top of a mountain range.
It covers his whole stomach.
He tells me if I shoot the guy,
when I rob him, it’s okay, but if I kill
there’s nothing in this world
he can do to help me. Marshmallow
settles himself in a deck chair,
eyes closed, the meat on the grill
smells like warm wood. Hungry
is the only word I can think of.

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You, Strung

.Reading time 6 minutes.

By Keith Kopka

Selected as winner of the 2015 New Ohio Review Poetry Contest by Robert Pinsky

Featured Art: The Race Track (Death on a Pale Horse) by Albert Pinkham Ryder

Young John Wayne leaps, without effort,
onto the back of a Palomino, and I know
he’ll catch the leader of the Taylor Gang
for what he’s done to his woman. He’ll swing
for this one. Wayne is ruthless, but it’s hard

to forget him cut open for cancer research,
the forty pounds of meat wadding through
his colon like a saddle strap. You and Wayne
have a lot in common: doctor’s hands

searched the mineshaft of your stomach,
catalogued what they took, then fastened
you with a wandering stitch. Still, nothing
extracted from anyone can explain why
the body takes revenge on the body.

                             ***
Hanging is the ninth most popular
suicide method behind gunshot to chest;
it has an almost seventy-eight percent

success rate, and takes seven minutes.
In the west, thousands gathered
to watch hanging judges size bight

and neck, and after the bags dropped
some took pieces of the scaffold or rope
as keepsakes. You hung, too.

I still have the pair of shoes you loaned
me in gym class on a nail hook
in the back of my closet.

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Change in Hat or Glove Size

.Reading time 48 minutes.

By Darrell Spencer

Featured Art: Twilight in the Wilderness by Frederic Edwin Church

Our joke was either Molly sells a kidney—under the radar, off the books, $40,000 cash up front in England we discovered online, no questions asked, wink-wink, and also, I came to this understanding in my bones, not really all that funny as an option—or reality was we hock our gold.

We hocked it.

Okay, Molly did. Her gold. Every last effing piece of it Molly’s. Earrings. Necklaces, long and dangly and three-tiered, one of them leaf-like, all the chains intertwined and hard to separate. You know how they get twisted up in their boxes like they have a secret life. None of the jewelry rolled or washed gold. Molly did her online research at the library. Brooches, one an open hand, palm out, standing for generosity and giving, one a butterfly whose catch was missing. It had been her mother’s. There was a heart Molly liked to wear on her sleeve. Only one ring. Her grandfather’s on her father’s side. It had a pair of serpents circling an in-set ruby. Brewster was his name, and he had been an M.D. The kind of G.P. parents named their newborns after. The man part of a long line of doctors stretching back to the Civil War. Molly had photos back home in Ohio. The old-timers a bunch of bearded hacksaws, grim butchers.

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New Regs

.Reading time 7 minutes.

By James Lineberger

Featured Art: Card Rack with a Jack of Hearts by Jack F. Peto

I’d never seen her before that day when
she came knocking on the door and I thought at first
I must owe postage on the package in her hand
but no, she said, this was an official visit to advise me
that unless I stopped parking the Malibu in our circular drive,
I would have to mount a new mailbox out on the street
rather than the one by the door that we’ve been using since
the house was built back in the Fifties.
“Say what?” I said,
“excuse me lady but that is my drive not yours.”
But she was not to be dissuaded,
advising me that new regs from the Postmaster General
would not permit her to put her Jeep in reverse
and turn around in the drive,
and she only shook her head no when I said,
“Look, okay, if we mounted it out there on this dead-end street
you would still have to back up
when you get to my neighbor’s house next door
because hers is on the front porch too same as this one
and you have to pull in her driveway to get there, and tell me
how you’re going to get out, and besides,
the reason we park the car out front here is because
my wife broke her hip and had to have screws put in it
and she’s still not too certain on her feet, not to mention
she’s got Alzheimer’s, unless you’ve got regs about that too
but the regular carrier never told us anything like this
and he doesn’t seem to mind backing up at all.”
“Well, sir,” she said, “that is him, this is me,
besides which where is your handicap placard?”
and walked away even as I was saying
“Just you wait lady, we’ll see about this.”

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The Villanos

.Reading time 31 minutes.

By Z.Z. Boone

Featured Art: Vase of Flowers by Odilon Redon

Nobody was really surprised when Rosemary Villano turned up pregnant. It was like my dad said at dinner the night Bernadette Fischer, a receptionist at Staten Island Physician Practice, walked across the street and dropped the news.

“The girl had it coming,” he said.

This was in August 1995, when Rosemary was eighteen. She was my buddy Chegg’s sister, and had quit high school in January in order to work full-time at Frosty’s Italian Ice Creamery in the mall. Some genius had stuck her in this short, skin-tight beige uniform, and it seemed the area’s male populace—my dad included—had all of a sudden developed this insatiable craving for spumoni.

Rosemary had been dating this oversized pinhead named Eddie Dowd ever since her freshman year, another dropout who thought nothing of punching a kid like me in the stomach, or shoplifting liquid Tylenol from CVS, or talking about Rosemary with his fellow goons and saying stuff like, “This girl could suck the bark off a maple tree.” He drove around in a white van that had an amateurish painting of Daffy Duck saluting the American flag painted on the side, under which the words, “Where the Women At?” were printed.

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Tag Sale

.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Scott Brennan

Featured Art: The Rose Cloud by Henri-Edmond Cross

A Barbie with gum in her hair, a Lite-Brite that may or may not turn on,
and Monopoly played once or twice then stowed, the Chance cards

missing, the Scottie dog lost, the dice gone. Here, the Boggle bubble,
cracked. In a milk crate beside the games, we have the tools: a hacksaw,

a cordless Black and Decker drill, a Stanley hammer, a rat-tail file,
a Phillips screwdriver. Here’s a Schwinn bicycle with dry-rot tires, and,

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Sometimes It Snows In Florida

.Reading time 49 minutes.

By Michael Cooper

Featured Art: Murol in the Snow by Victor Charreton

The new girl from Vermont said that a woman lived in her shed. The new girl from Vermont brought in a pair of boots to prove it. The boots looked ancient, green suede in a previous incarnation, full suede probably before any of the children in Ms. Gwynn’s class had been born. Now the boots were gray and stiff with duct tape layered up to the edges, leaving only the mossy-looking tips exposed. Terry Wilkins, whom the other children called Terry the Terrible, said it looked as though Sally, the new girl from Vermont, was holding a pair of elf shoes from Middle-earth. The entire class erupted in laughter. Before the show-and-tell session could regress entirely, Ms. Gwynn told the children to quiet down. She told them that they should respect Sally and her story.

The last of the laughter subsided and Sally continued speaking, the shoes nestled in a forearm like pets.

“My father keeps a woman in our shed and these are her shoes.”

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Against Silence

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Andrea Hollander

Featured Art: L’Heure du silence by Henri Georges J. I. Meunier

After I confessed, all I’d hear
was the scratch of my father’s ballpoint
against his prescription pad
as I stood before him at his office desk
on the first floor of our house. Yes,
I’d say, I did it, I left the mower out
all night, forgot
to turn the sprinkler off, lied
about the party,
the pack of cigarettes,
the exact hour I got home.

His hours or sometimes days
of silence entered our house
like an unwelcome guest,
an intruder we agreed
to treat with kindness,
each of us saying Sit here
when we didn’t want him
to sit anywhere.

After I apologized and promised
never to do it again, whatever it was,
after I made his coffee
in the morning, served it
with two Lorna Doones on the saucer
beside the china cup, sometimes
he would thank me.
But even then I didn’t know
if it would take one more
silent dinner or two
before I’d hear forgiveness
in his voice, that other guest
who arrived unpredictably
while I wept myself to sleep,
that guest whose safe return
I prayed for, the one
my mother prayed for, too,
she told me later, that guest
she thought she’d married
in the first place.

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My Mother Who Told Me

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Martha Silano

Featured Art: Mount Sainte-Victoire by Paul Cézanne

the Bible’s a Mount Everest of metaphor—
the seventh day more likely the seven

trillionth, the Holy Spirit about as real
as Casper the Friendly Ghost. My mother

who never once definitively sang
in the tune of Judgment, the lexicon

of flames. My equivocating, not-sure-he’s
the-Savior mother, who calls with an urgent

message: Billy Graham’s 95th birthday special.
Mother of Peace, mother who sanctioned

my Sunday school exodus when my teacher
refused to define adultery, who rolled her eyes

at shiny offering plates, who yadda yadda’d
the Lord’s Prayer, mother too busy browsing

The Female Eunuch to read to us from the book
of Jonah, to reason a man could live three days

in the belly of a whale, mother lacking sufficient
conviction to share the story of the loaves and fishes,

inciting me to fall to my knees as I did one day in 1974,
the man on the screen having told me I must.

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The First Straw

.Reading time less than 1 minute.

By Billy Collins

Featured Art: A Caravan in the Desert by Narcisse Berchère

The camel felt nothing
as it stood outside the encampment,
its nose lifted in the thin desert air.

And no one in the caravan
even noticed the straw,
or if they did, no mention was made of it

that evening as they sat in a circle
inside a colorful tent
talking quietly under the numerous stars.

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The Wall

.Reading time 13 minutes.

By Christopher Kempf

Selected as runner-up for the 2015 New Ohio Review Poetry Contest by Robert Pinsky

Featured Art: Ruins of an Ancient City by John Martin

                At mile twenty, roughly, the muscles
of the legs will collapse. Calves
                 twitching at random. The hamstrings’
                                                    sacked meat seizing. Scarry,
in The Body in Pain, explains
                                             that language too, tasked
                    with conveying affliction, fails. That pain,
   she argues, obliterates
                                                          discourse. I limped

                           past the drunk undergrads
of Boston College, my body’s stock-
                                                           pile of glycogen finally
                                       exhausted. The wall, runners
               call it.  The bonk.  The blowing
                                                                                         up. & after,
             the body in pain will make
                                                       of its own fat fuel. I followed

               the shimmering column of runners right
                                     onto Boylston Street. In three
                                                                                            hours two
           coinciding explosions would themselves
                                                                   leave the city—except
    for its sirens—speechless. The limes, Latin

        for boundary line, signified
                                         to ancient Romans the most remote
                              walls of the sacred Empire. Lie-
       meez Arabicus for instance.
                                                         Limit.
                                                                      The legions
                           Caesar trusted most though & therefore
    dreaded, he kept
               stationed on the Plain of Mars a mile only
                                      west from the city walls. He watched
     from the seventh hill the drilling
                                                                    columns, consulted
                                          each morning in the sky above him
             the wheeling birds.  A body,
                                                                            he knew well, will
                      at sometime or other, hungry
                                                                                for blood, break
               in on itself & eat.

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In a Year of Drought, I Drink Wine in a Los Angeles Hot Tub

.Reading time 4 minutes.

By Christopher Kempf

Selected as runner-up in the 2015 New Ohio Review Poetry Contest by Robert Pinsky

Featured Art: Interior of the Pantheon, Rome by Giovanni Paolo Panini

So too on Troy’s final afternoon
the doomed children of the city sang. Such
      was their joy, Virgil tells us, such

was their simple awestruck wonder
at the great beast even
      the Achaeans, cramped, standing

on each other’s shoulders inside
the close wood, wept. What
      he means, of course, is that inside

of the other’s suffering, one
can imagine always aspects
      of a wild beauty refusing

negation. Or no. Not
that it exists, this
      beauty, but that

it can be made so. Rome
Virgil says, springing
      from Ilion’s ashes. Elsewhere

Orpheus. This
is not my home. Here
      for the weekend only, I float

out into the hot tub’s bubbling, bleach-
& salt-scoured water. I watch
      the few stars the city permits

still flicker on, the long
avenues of light below them—Cienaga
      & Sunset, Ventura—burn

& spangle in the mountains’ dark bowl. The bottle
of La Marca prosecco sweats. To secure
      for their desert metropolis water

enough to nourish all this, city
developers—circa
      the arrival, reports suggest, of something

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Before the Storm

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Christopher Kempf

Selected as runner-up for the 2015 New Ohio Review Poetry Contest by Robert Pinsky

Featured Art: Storm Clouds by John Henry Twachtman

Birds fled. The city fell
quiet. Across
the night the neighbors raised
their glasses & together, gathered
on our porches, forms
in a Japanese landscape, we stared
up. Or was it
Turner the sky resembled? How every
late seascape became
for him, given
to opium & with his father’s
death, depression, a tempest
of motion & color. Clouds
roiling. The oils
of his tiny boats bleeding
out. Only,
he knew, the frame’s gilt edge
splits beauty from terror. Airplanes,
that night, climbed
from the city & steeply, fleeing
too the ruinous
wall of rain, banked
south. Schools, a step
ahead of the looming cataclysm,
closed. Newscasters
leaned forward into the wind & we, raising
our own glasses to the neighbors
drank. Dark
& Stormies. Sazeracs. We imagined
the city flooding. Mudslides
on Foothill Parkway. Prospero, fallen
from his dukedom, does it
all for pleasure he says, every
shipwrecked Milanese aristocrat, every
extravagant clipper cast
up in the pitch & tumult his rough
magic fashioned. That,
we know, is mostly
what the groundlings came for. To fancy
a world they would never see struck
low, & so
close, sometimes, as to feel even
on their faces the great
king’s spit. There is,
in catastrophe, a satisfaction
exceeding sex, psychologists
believe. Before
the storm the city
bristled. Bells
tolled. Before
the last helicopters cleared
Saigon, operatives
burned in a rooftop incinerator
the state’s documents. We watched
from our porches the planes
shudder & mount. On Merritt
Lake, the pelicans, frenzied,
fed.

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Sixteen

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Mary Angelino

Featured Art: Japanese Iris (Large Blue Iris) by John Edwards

His dad did coke. His mom died young.
We watched porn so I could learn—
he was my first. I didn’t know enough
to do things right like other girls.

We watched porn so I could learn
to say what I did and didn’t want,
to do things right like other girls.
He filmed me almost naked once.

To say what I did and didn’t want
was a trap, an argument that didn’t stop.
He filmed me almost naked once—
he lost the tape when we broke up.

A trap, an argument that didn’t stop:
he was my first, I didn’t know enough,
he lost the tape when we broke up,
his dad did coke, his mom died young.

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