Laura’s Brother

October 31, 2015.Reading time 16 minutes.

By Ryan Ruff Smith

Featured Art: The Blue Passion-flower by Robert John Thornton

Laura’s brother has been crashing on my couch. He’s an addict—a recovering one. The hardest part of recovering is to keep doing it. Laura’s brother recovers for a while, and then he stops recovering, and then he runs out of money and picks it back up again. As of today, he’s been recovering for two months straight, which is a big milestone. Laura’s really proud of him. I’m proud, too, but I’d never say it, because I’m afraid that it would sound condescending and weird. I’m afraid that I would say something like: I’m really proud of you, Jim, and I believe in you, and I wouldn’t be surprised at all if you kept this up and, one day, maybe you’ll even find your way off my couch.

Don’t get me wrong. I am proud of him. Because I know that it’s really hard for him not to slip up. I mean, it’s hard for one. For anyone who is struggling with addiction. Which is what he has. Which is hard.

I get that.

The thing is, there’s this smell. I would never say this to him, but my whole apartment smells a bit funky. Not because he’s an addict—a recovering addict— it’s just a person smell, but since he’s on my couch every night, and most of the day, it accumulates, and it’s not the most pleasant. He bathes and everything, maybe not as often as he could, and usually pretty late in the day, but it’s not like he’s trying to smell. He makes an effort, but I do wonder what kind of soap he uses. Here, I have mixed feelings, because I don’t necessarily want him using my soap—not that I’m stingy, if you come for the weekend, go nuts, use all the soap you want, it’s just that he’s been here for two months—but at the same time, I’m afraid that he’s not using any soap at all, in which case, maybe I’d rather have him use my stuff than have this stench in my apartment all the time.

Blood Buzz, AZ

October 30, 2015.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Shane Lake

Featured Art: Fifth Avenue Nocturne by Childe Hassam

A Red Cross bus gets hit by a truck
and lands on its side, the driver unconscious.

Blood spills from the broken glass,
coats the pavement in bubbling rust.

It is 1977 and the theme for summer is .44 caliber.
It is one hundred fifteen degrees.

A crowd forms in the contagious heat,
pulls back as the red pool expands.

I watch from the ailing shade of a palm tree,
the sweet taste of blood in the air, on my tongue.

Someone tries to rescue the driver
but the mix is slippery. He lands on his back.

His impact speckles the closest few,
who scream and cover their mouths with their hands.

Sirens sound, and soon the fire trucks are here,
hosing donations into the street drain.

Secretly, we all enjoy this,
being here at the scene of the crash

where news vans make stars of us all.
We want our trauma to trump everyone else’s.

We want to be able to say:

“You weren’t there. You wouldn’t understand.”

Manhandled

October 29, 2015.Reading time 32 minutes.

By Tamie Parker Song

Featured Art: Flowers of a Hundred Worlds (Momoyogusa): Ivy (Tsuta) by Kamisaka Sekka 神坂雪佳

Our house is a toilet full of shit and fistfuls of toilet paper, long past flushing. It is the bones of kitchen cups smashed with cigarettes. It is the way we don’t turn on the lights anymore. The way we do not light the fire. It is dead flies in the windows; a pantry with food cans several years old. The house used to be Mom, music on the record player; hair cuts in the kitchen, blueberry pancakes for breakfast, light. Now it is cupboards we keep opening, hoping. Then fishing grabs for us, pulls us under, and we stop even opening the cupboards.

We are commercial salmon fishermen on an island in Alaska seventy miles by plane or boat from the nearest town. Only our family lives on this island, and the crew who works for us, and even though everyone is watching me no one is watching out for me. I have been fishing my whole life, the only girl on an all-male crew. I am fifteen.

Dad eats tubs of frosting and bowls of raw cake batter. He wears the same clothes for six weeks at a time and does not bathe. Mom has stopped coming to the island, and Dad can’t or won’t cook, so I start eating with the crew. DeWitt eats with us sometimes, and sometimes with Dad. DeWitt fishes almost exclusively with Dad, while I trade around and fish with different crew. I try not to think about leaving DeWitt at home. He is only thirteen. But something in my body is trying to pull itself away.

My Mouth Versus Your Mouth

October 29, 2015.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Devon J. Moore

Featured Art: Miss Loïe Fuller by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec

Gwyneth Paltrow is on the air again
saying something about the difficulty of being
a mother on set is more difficult than being
a mother in an office, on a train, commuting
to those 9 to 5s. She says you have it easier
when your life is synchronized to the needs of mouths
that are not your mouth, to the needs of bosses
that don’t know your name. You have it easier when
you’re alone in a room with a baby,
when the sun hasn’t risen and your chest is dripping milk
and you wonder if today is the day the paycheck
or the 7 o’clock bus or the sun won’t come.
Gwyneth, I don’t have a baby,
but my dread is bigger than your dread,
my breasts are bigger, heavier, than your breasts.
Do you still feel the need to compare?
How about this? My cat would be cuter than your cat
if it hadn’t been for that sick neighbor and his box cutters.
My lover left and his back got smaller,
more quickly, than your lover’s back.
My dad dying sucked more than your dad dying sucked.
I could do this ridiculousness all day. But, Gwyneth,
the memory of my mother needs me
to say, that novel she always wanted to write
never got written. I was a needy daughter,
maybe even needier than your daughter.
I demanded
she look at me instead
of a book or the movie on the TV,
and maybe, Gwyneth, you were
in it, being thinner than my mother
but not prettier. There were days
my pretty mother didn’t look at me
because she couldn’t see past the dark
space in herself and I hated her.
There was a day my mother cried in the laundromat
when a woman, another mother, asked her what she did
for a living, and when my mother said she was a home
health care aide, the woman said that meant
my mother was nothing
but a maid.
The color of blood is more vivid and harder to clean
in my daydreams than in your daydreams,
and a powerless life is harder to describe to the powerful
than the sound of my mother crying on the rug.
But I’ll try.

Grace

October 28, 2015.Reading time 4 minutes.

By Craig van Rooyen

Featured Art: Pine Tree by Giovanni Segantini

The History Channel’s playing “The Gold Rush” again.
All those bearded men looking at reflections
of themselves on the surfaces of creeks and rivers and lakes.
They’re so beautiful coming out of ramshackle cabins,
thumbs tucked into suspenders, wading into streams
the color of cheap whiskey. That golden light
on their shoulders, in their beards, dripping
from the brims of their hats, high on
“howdy” and “rough and ready,”
around every bend in the river, expecting
life to begin. The flash of light in a silver pan
full and overflowing. All that hope. Out of
the river, there’s always more earth.
There’s always the scooping and sifting and
throwing away. Everything left behind—out of
frame: The women in their calico, waving goodbye.
The steaming cows in their barns. Now just
the sloshing desire of this moment and the next.
Sure, you have to be willing to kill a few Indians.
But as long as you’ve got a pan and a river
to dip it in, you can forget the rest.
At least that’s what I tell myself before the first
commercial break. Before those attractive
late-middle-aged people clutch each other
in honey light and the baritone voice-over tells me
to go to the emergency room if I experience
an erection that lasts more than four hours. I wonder
if anyone ever panned for gold in terrycloth—
my fabric of choice for watching “The Gold Rush”
in bed at 10 a.m. on a Wednesday. I wonder
if any of those bearded men had a bottle of
Prozac back in the cabin next to the straight-blade
razor underneath the cracked mirror—something
to take the edge off all that failure, something
to dull the regret of walking out on their women
and cows. Of course they’d have another name
for Prozac, like maybe “nerve pills,” as in:
“Durn near forgot to take my nerve pills this morning, Jake.
Christing Jesus, sure don’t want to start sawing
at my wrists again, now do I?” I love the way
there’s no word for shame in the language
of gold miners. All that hope is contagious.
In fact, I believe if I really tried, I could get up
and shuffle to the bathroom and brush my teeth
during the next commercial break. I love
the History Channel! It’s so inspirational.
Right now, the sad banjo music is playing—
the plinking of catgut string over doe-skin,
a sound so Californian it makes you weep for
the all-night diner in Auburn where it’s 6 a.m.
and the sun is lighting up the foothills and
the American River is still frothing to get wherever
it’s been trying to go all night long. All the gold’s dug out
of the hills but the waitress is calling you “love” as she
puts down a cup of awful coffee and sits in your booth—
night shift done. It’s as if she knows you. As if she’s
made the same mistakes and she’s telling you it’s okay.
Now she’s taking out a bobby pin.
Now she’s letting down all that golden hair.

Flowers of a Hundred Worlds (Momoyogusa): Wisteria (Fuji) by Kamisaka Sekka 神坂雪佳

October 27, 2015.Reading time less than 1 minute.

Lost

October 27, 2015.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Craig van Rooyen

Featured Art: Flowers of a Hundred Worlds (Momoyogusa): Wisteria (Fuji) by Kamisaka Sekka 神坂雪佳

In a strange city this afternoon, I looked for myself
on a cart of bargain books. I recognized
my mother’s faith and thrift in “Macrame for Dummies,”
and bought the book for 50 cents.
I recognized my father’s dark devotion
in a tattered copy of “My Utmost For His Highest.”
I fanned the pages with a thumb, felt
the dank breath of the Holy Ghost,
and put it down. I was not there. Not in
“Seven Habits Of Ecstatic Gurus.” Not in
“How To Pick Up Pretty Women With An Ugly Dog”
or “Twitterpated: An Instruction Manual
For Self-Discovery In 140 Characters Or Less.”
On the corner, a quartet of starving students played
“Let’s Get Lost,” faking it in the way of the talented young
winking with their instruments at the business casuals
waiting for a bus. Art is about loss,
they seemed to play. Can you dig it, man?
And I can—suddenly 47 and away from familiar signs,
too old to be discovered; too young to be invisible,
sitting in Union Square under
the lifted tail and muscular haunches of
George Washington’s horse—its neck arched under rein,
fighting to cross East 17th to Forever 21.
Valley Forge behind, knowing not
where he’s going next, our country’s father
(in this bronzed moment) is surely unable to predict
his journey’s end: in bed with a cold, bled to death
by four doctors earnestly trying to save him.
I’m happy to sit in his moon-shadow for now,
park lamps blinking on, smell of goat cheese and ganja
finding my nose, trying not to listen to the soft clicking
next to me as two young people introduce
their oral piercings in the dark. Across the way,
the girl with the Mohawk stops playing her bongo drum
to tell a friend about a rainbow brother who saved her
in the Bronx. Took me in and we smoked a bowl—
no questions asked, no strings attached. On the corner,
a street preacher finds his voice, improvising his holy rant
on a theme of goats and sheep, dividing us into lost and saved.
We’re all both, I want to tell him, cycling through a life-long
game of hide and seek. Even me—sitting under Washington’s
horse’s ass, smoking the flare of my guilty Marlboro
to the filter and feeling the city turn on around me—
a lost coin burning to be found.

Conversation with Amy Bloom

October 25, 2015.Reading time 9 minutes.

By James Miranda

JM: One of the things I’ve always admired in your fiction is the way you’re able to use taboo and transgression so deftly and intelligently as a source of narrative tension. From your earliest stories in Come to Me (such as the much anthologized “Silver Water” and the gutsy “Sleepwalking”) right up through your complicated protagonist Lillian in Away, or Iris and Rose in your newest book Lucky Us, you seem to have an intense interest in characters that push the bounds of what is socially acceptable. Yet their acting out never feels contrived or overdone. The prohibited takes on a sacredness that’s always palpable and quite beautiful in your writing. Are you conscious of the place that taboo and transgression have in your fiction? Do you find such socially constructed forces to be great fodder for compelling narrative?

AB: I don’t really ever think of myself as breaking taboos and transgressing. It’s also true that although good manners matter to me a lot social norms do not. Good behavior is not usually a subject that fascinates me.

Conversation with Marie Howe

October 25, 2015.Reading time 7 minutes.

By Brad Aaron Modlin

Brad Aaron Modlin: In the past, you have written in the persona of both Eve and Mary the Mother of Jesus. While Eve speaks anachronistically—of driving a car on ice, for example—Mother Mary does not clearly do so. In the new poetry, Mary Magdalene does. When you (re)write a pre-existing character, how do you know when to stick to what we’ve already heard and when to change it? What do you hope to add to these characters?

Marie Howe: Midrash is a form of rabbinic literature, a storytelling that fills in the gaps in stories from the Torah. I always wished that Christian literature encouraged that kind of imagining. Growing up with the characters of Eve, Mary, and Mary Magdalene, I was moved by the deep silences within their stories. These are women in extremity, and also women who go on living, through those extreme states, into days and months and years—as we all do. What is their experience? And what is it the day after? And the day after that?

Many others have written through these voices—Rilke in his “Life of Mary,” W.H. Auden in his Christmas Oratorio called “For The Time Being,” Eliot, and recently so many women have brought their consciousness to these stories: Lucille Clifton, Jorie Graham, Brenda Hillman, many women writers. Each writer receives the poems according to her sensibility.

New Ohio Review: Issue 17 (Originally Published Spring 2015)

May 31, 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 17 compiled by Benjamin Ervin.

Chandler Brossard

May 30, 2015.Reading time 5 minutes.

By Kevin Prufer

Feature Image: First Snow at Veneux-Nadon by Alfred Sisley, 1878
Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington

When I was twenty years old
and desperate and broke,
I worked part-time in a used bookstore
in Middletown, CT.
I hated my job, hated the cramped store,
hated the paperbacks
that came there as if to die

and more than anything,
I wanted to write something lasting,

a novel I scrawled in notebooks
called “Black Wing”
about a dark-haired girl,
prized during the day for her beauty and intellect,
who by night
killed off poseurs, the ill-read, the clumsy-of-mind,
the bombastic, thick-fingered, and mean.

Ground Swell by Edward Hopper, 1939 Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington

May 29, 2015.Reading time less than 1 minute.

Big Media

May 29, 2015.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Kevin Prufer

Just a glass of water for me, thank you.
One ice cube. Thanks. Just one.
But you should order what you want. Don’t be shy.
And don’t worry about me. Water is all I eat.
That ribeye looks promising, doesn’t it?
The charcuterie platter? The bay shrimp in a nest of deconstructed kale,
     drizzled with truffle oil?
Get what you want and I’ll watch you eat, sipping from my glass of water
like a brilliant bird whose plumage once adorned ladies’ hats, but is now
     available only on the black market,
please don’t mind me.
Did you read about how they beheaded another captured soldier?
Cut his head right off, clean as you like. I know, it’s
terrible. Awful, really. It ought to be a crime,
but the water flushes me out, gives me an inner clean. A kind of peace.
All this war must have been hard on you, the bodies and IEDs and the
     threatening
music. It certainly was hard on our nation, and we weren’t even
there. Broccolini, yes. That’s for him. And the foie gras on toast with foraged
     mushroom and lemon foam,
he’ll take that. I love the look of those cauliflower florets, like petite puffs of
     smoke!
The raviolini afloat in broth like misfired paratroopers!
You’re sweet, but much too thin. You should eat.
They’ll send you back and you’ll be nothing but bones
beneath skin. Did you see how they sliced his head right off?
What do you think of my hat?

Diana and Actaeon (Diana Surprised in her Bath) by Camille Corot, 1836

May 28, 2015.Reading time less than 1 minute.

Love You Excavation Work

May 28, 2015.Reading time 11 minutes.

By Donald Platt

Featured Image: Diana and Actaeon (Diana Surprised in her Bath) by Camille Corot, 1836

I am texting you
some trivial message like “Am at grocery. Where are you?”
using Siri,

the intelligent personal assistant and knowledge navigator,
oracle inside
my iPhone. But when I sign off, saying “Love you

                               exclamation point,”
Siri translates it as “Love you excavation work.” I send the message
                               anyway.

Siri’s right. Loving you for the last twenty-seven years has been
                               excavation
work. It has been like discovering El Mirador, the “Lookout,”

                               lost city
of the Maya, three thousand years old, overgrown with jungle, once home
                               to 200,000 people,

now the residence of poisonous fer-de-lance snakes, ocellated
                               turkeys with iridescent
green wings, blue necks and heads barnacled with orange and red

                               wart-like nodules,
spider monkeys, white-nosed coatis with barred tails, spectacled owls, toucans,
                               red-eyed tree frogs,

jaguars, great curassow birds, and howler monkeys whose aspirated roars,
                               says Chip Brown,
adventurer, author, and journalist extraordinaire, “cross the basso

                               profundo of an African
lion with the sound of metal grinding on a lathe.”
                               In El Mirador

they raised pyramids to you—the Tigre Pyramid, the Jaguar Paw Temple,
                               and La Danta
Pyramid, rising over 230 feet from the jungle floor.

In Flight

May 27, 2015.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Lloyd Schwartz

Featured Image: Haystack [colon] Autumn by Jean-François Millet 1874

                                                                                                           “Did you hear what I was playing, Lane?”
                                                                                                           “I didn’t think it polite to listen, sir.”
                                                                                                                    —The Importance of Being Earnest

A big, hefty guy next to me, an even bigger guy
already squeezed into the window seat. Big, pleasant
fellows. Strangers before this three-hour non-stop

domestic flight. But they’ve been talking away non-stop
since before take-off. Talking business. Talking sports.
China. India (my next-seat neighbor might have been

from India). Talking Cubs and Red Sox (they both love
them both). Google. The Euro. Leverage. Banks. Bailouts.
Masters of Money (“It will change the way you think”).

Tuesday Night

May 25, 2015.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Corrie Lynn White

Featured Image: Madison Square, Snow by Allen Tucker, 1904
Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington

I lay the sweet potatoes on
the roasting pan on their backs
or bellies—I can’t tell. The oven
is heating and the cat box

needs cleaning so I dip the plastic
shovel into the litter and grieve
that Frankie doesn’t go outside—
sit high in a tree or roll in

a lush patch of clover. I stare
out the window at the neighbor’s
raised beds and convince myself
he’d eat all their basil, puncture

the flesh of their first red tomato,
then run far away. What keeps us
where we are? I throw the plastic
bag of clumped urine into the bin

by the road and look down a few
blocks for a sunset. The sky is pink
past the stoplights. Nothing in nature
is as sudden as turning off the lamp

at night. Inside, I push the pan
into the oven and remember the guy
in my class today who said:
People don’t feel strongly anymore.

There’ll Be an Enormous Party

May 24, 2015.Reading time 1 minute.

By Patrick Ryan Frank

Featured Image: Merrymakers at Shrovetide by Frans Hals, 1616-7

Tumbling down that wide Niagara of laughter,
the blonde girls and the gray-haired men beside them
swirl away through picture after picture.
If there’s champagne, there’ll be a waiter’s smirk.
If there’s an ice sculpture, it will be a swan
weeping for its flaws. If there’s a pool,
a horrible beautiful woman will end up pushed
and the garden will quiet just to hear her thrash
within the weird slick of her ruined silk—
and then the jokes and it all begins again.
Oh vanity, why won’t you leave me home?
Why must you pull me by the elbow down
that crowded hallway then leave me by the wall,
awkward as an interrupted joke,
adrift in the back of half the photographs:
a face turned too far left, mouth spread too wide
to grin, gaping as if to gulp back breath?

Hooked

May 23, 2015.Reading time 2 minutes.

By David Yezzi

Featured Image: The Battle of Love by Paul Cézanne, 1880
Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington

She’s a friend I take some nights for pain.
Dosage is an issue. We maintain

an equilibrium, but it is hard:
the IV drip of texts, the memory card

of photos we filled one fall by the sea.
What’s good for her is mostly good for me,

but pressure-points that ease her nerves today
may frazzle them tomorrow. Tough to say;

tough, too, to get just right, or right at all.
Every step’s the first part of a fall.

What is this bloodless tie sustaining us,
thumb-pal, app-gal, cyber-glamorous,

cobble of connections wormed through space,
which might dissolve if we came face to face,

in the flesh, as they say. Now more than ever
this boudoir of electrons echoes: never.

Should I take thought and lap my gruel of chat?
Or find another drug, if it comes to that?

The Central Casting of the pharmacy
is full of characters who’ll happily

help to wipe the vestiges of her.
Missing her is strictly de rigueur,

a touchless ache while it still keeps its feel
that might have ended worse had it been real.

Let

May 22, 2015.Reading time 1 minute.

By David Yezzi

Featured Image: Pink Roses by Fidelia Bridges, 1875
Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington

Across the net,
she wilts and falls
behind, so I let
a few balls

slide by
in the midgy air
and drawn sky
of late summer.

Is this
letting her win
a Judas kiss,
the warm sin

of fooling too
far a daughter
who,
slow to laughter,

stakes all in all
on a game?
She’s tall.
I call her name,

to snap her
back from the place
she goes, blur-
ring the odds: ace,

game, set.
Her stride returns,
as I abet
her. She learns

no lesson, nor
do I hint
at helping. After,
we sprint

on the road
home, our run
hung with gold
silk spun

by spiders in
patchy pines.
The threads glint
in sidewise lines,

cinches borne
by the air,
so loosely worn
they’re hardly there.

The Abandoned

May 21, 2015.Reading time 64 minutes.

By Chaitali Sen

Featured Image: [Landscape with Cottage] by Marie-Charles-Isidore Choiselat, 1844

The husband is still explaining it on the day of the parent-teacher conference, and the wife still carries on as if she doesn’t understand. The twins will be home early, their school day shortened so their teacher can meet with parents all afternoon.

“Is the school too difficult?” she asks.

“How do I know? That’s why we talk to the teacher.”

Their appointment is at three o’clock, and it will take almost an hour to get there. He will be away from the shop too long. When is she supposed to start dinner? She can carry on for as long as she wants, he says, but on this he has to be insistent. This reversal of roles must reverse back. She is the mother, the one who should know the details of her children’s schooling.

By a Car Door

May 20, 2015.Reading time 1 minute.

By Mark Belair

Featured Image: Interior of the Colosseum by Ippolito Caffi
Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington

A little boy
in superhero underpants
is made to change clothes
by the open door
of a battered family car
parked on a busy street, his gaunt
mom managing the maneuver
though not quite bothering
to block him from view,

the rest of the family
milling about, each glancing over
impatiently, the scruffy siblings
finally pulling each other’s hair
out of boredom, prompting
a scolding from their pot-bellied dad,
the escalating family tussles
drawing dark scowls
from the overstretched mother,
the little boy’s sense of privacy
seeming oddly

complete
despite the utter lack of it
for they all do
wait and no one, tellingly,
has a taunting word
for the exposed, vulnerable boy,
making his family, while fractious,
seem set on spinning him
in a cocoon

of protective, enduring
force meant to stay—
as he launches into the world—
secret and powerful
as superhero underpants.

The Dogana and Santa Maria della Salute, Venice by Joseph Mallord William Turner, 1843; Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington

May 18, 2015.Reading time less than 1 minute.

Three Sacraments

May 18, 2015.Reading time 14 minutes.

By Brooke Champagne

Featured Image: The Dogana and Santa Maria della Salute, Venice by Joseph Mallord William Turner, 1843; Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington

                                                                                             The Eucharist, although it is the fullness of sac-
                                                                                             ramental life, is not a prize for the perfect but
                                                                                             a powerful medicine and nourishment for the
                                                                                             weak . . . Frequently, we act as arbiters of grace
                                                                                             rather than its facilitators. But the Church is not
                                                                                             a tollhouse; it is the house of the Father, where
                                                                                             there is a place for everyone, with all their prob-
                                                                                             lems.
                                                                                                             —Pope Francis, “The Joy of the Gospel”

                                                                                             The true vision and knowledge of what we seek
                                                                                             consists precisely in not seeing, in an awareness
                                                                                             that our goal transcends all knowledge and is
                                                                                             everywhere cut from us by the darkness of in-
                                                                                             comprehensibility.
                                                                                                                       —Gregory of Nyssa, Life of Moses

Holy Unction

I’m nine years old the day my mother dies and comes back to life and, if I ever believed at all, it’s the day I give up on Christ.

The reverse might be expected—miracles, the power of prayer—but when I make my final judgment, I don’t know yet, won’t know for a long time that she has died and returned. At that point, I’m only told she is pregnant and there are complications. The baby, my would-be half-sister, is gestating at twenty-three weeks and because my mother is sick, must be delivered. Everyone waits and prays. Doctors work and pray. At school, my teacher’s hand on my shoulder a few seconds too long in that comforting way, her eyes say: I’ll pray for you. Before bed I press my hands into a teepee and try earnestly at first, then only pretend to pray.

At the Narrows

May 17, 2015.Reading time 1 minute.

By Meredith Davies Hadaway

Featured Image: The Gulf Stream by Winslow Homer, 1899

Now, when even midday sun holds shadows,
and only the wooden boats are left, bless
scarred hulls and splintered pilings.

Bless the hands that still twist eel into lines
of hard commerce. Bless the motor’s stutter
declaring, yes, we will go out. Bless the foul

mud that peppers the gunnel, the ascent
of the bait, its twitch as it goes over the roller.
Bless the slow crab, too greedy for stink to see

the net coming and the basket, slats leaking
a scrabble of claws. Wanda J, Alice Rose,
Edna—grubby river angels, decks swollen

with rain, smelling of brine and rot, all divot
and slop—bless your deadrise, your hard
chine, your rudder. In the morning, all will

blur into mist. Crabs will begin their exodus
to deeper waters. We tell ourselves they will
be back. May this, too, be true.

We Buy, Sell, Trade

May 16, 2015.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Betsy Sholl

Featured Image: A Farm in the Sunlight by Meindert Hobbema, 1668
Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington

Ideas are one thing and what happens is another.
—John Cage

Weather or axe—who neglected or hacked
to make this bag of piano keys, this

clatter of loose scales in a paper sack,
fifty-two whites, the yellow of stained teeth,

a few of them chipped: some upright or grand,
its music collapsed in a racket of chainsaws

cutting up belly and legs for scrap.
Warped wood, the thunk of stuck notes—

Summer Night

May 15, 2015.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Suzanne Carey

Featured Image: Jetty and Wharf at Trouville by Eugène Boudin, 1863
Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington

Teen boys shoot hoops
a few yards from my open door.
The night’s nearly moonless,
yet they persist,
thunka-thunka of ball on blacktop
driving me to the verge of complaint,
like some old woman caught
in a numbing net of loneliness,
the old woman I suddenly am.

Today, the man I love told me
how he happened to leave Michigan
and mused how different
his life would have been if he’d stayed—
no degrees;
running a string of burger stops
or clocking in as a machinist like his dad;
never meeting his wife—

this last said with a shaky smile,
like someone who, by turning back
to retrieve a forgotten umbrella,
dodged death, and I realize finding her
is something he will never regret.
No matter how much he loves me
or how many cracks in his soul I caulk,
she is the rock he’s built his life on.

Summer fades like worn denim,
yellowing leaves grow frail.
I close my door.
Outside the boys ceaselessly aim
at shadowy baskets
that cannot hold a thing.

One Solid Chassis Among Us

May 13, 2015.Reading time 1 minute.

By Susan Blackwell Ramsey

Featured Image: Giant Magnolias on a Blue Velvet Cloth by Martin Johnson Heade, 1890
Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington

We praised the gray car for being a good little mule
the day before it roared demands. The labs
for my sister’s knee surgery came back showing dual
heart chambers out of whack. And right-left jabs
of exploding joints and breast removal for me
came one year after both my husband’s eyes
lost cataracts, gained corneas. The knee
still needs to be replaced, of course. So why
not buy a new car? Certainly we could
transport our patchwork selves in our patchwork car,
all very apt, and prudently get the good
of what’s left. Or, while granting how things are,
we could fling cash, climb in with gleeful smiles,
and ride shiny the remaining miles.

Summer Morning by David Lucas, 1830

May 12, 2015.Reading time less than 1 minute.

Looney Tunes

May 12, 2015.Reading time 6 minutes.

By Nathan Anderson

Featured Image: Summer Morning by David Lucas, 1830

Nah, it’s not that, I wouldn’t call it that, I mean molested
that’s like TV stuff, and Brenna
she’d be real nice sometimes like flesh and blood should.
Bring me back a chocolate frosty just because.
Anyway, I’d just as soon say we’re done,
or you want I should go through it all like I did in June
with the last one? Twice now—and this just goes to show
the system’s jacked—twice I’ve waited, asked the front desk ladies
and waited, I said people I need a little help and you’re telling me two hours?
In all this hospital you’re telling me there’s no one I can talk to now?
I said what about the dude mopping floors? Is he around?
Can I talk to him? Or do I go ahead and slit my wrists right here?
So they hauled me up to you, another white coat
working the psych ward. A woman. What’s up with that?
No offense or nothing. That’s just how they do me
down on first-floor, where everyone else on earth is. You ever one of those
ER docs I see running around? The way I figure it, a woman like you
doesn’t need to run. You’re all put together—you know, like a car
that’s just come off the line . . . . But okay, this isn’t about you.

Mountain Landscape with Bridge by Thomas Gainsborough, 1783/1784Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington

May 10, 2015.Reading time less than 1 minute.

Inspiration

May 10, 2015.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Mark Kraushaar

Featured Image: Mountain Landscape with Bridge by Thomas Gainsborough, 1783/1784
Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington

                                                                                                     Intellectual: Anyone who can listen to Gio-
                                                                                                     achino Rossini’s William Tell Overture with-
                                                                                                     out thinking of the Lone Ranger.
                                                                                                                                  —Laurie Taylor, sociologist

Sometimes I picture that foppish, fat Gioachino Rossini—
with his brocade shoes, his velvet-collared jacket and his satin vest.
But mostly I think of him stepping over the ocean, smiling
and rubbing his chubby palms and then, inexplicably,
standing on the porch of a modest family farm
and looking out at Bald Rock Dome or Sugar Pine Peak.
Beside him a poorish, but kindly, but cowardly widower
explains that just that morning a band of filthy varmints
burned his barn and shook him down for the last of his cash
and his only cow. Rossini listens but begins to hum

and just as he turns from the farmer to gaze back at the mountains
two handsome men gallop up and dismount.
The first, the one with the matching six-guns,
and black mask and elegant horse,
hands the farmer his recovered money.
The second man, his sidekick, a quiet Indian
dressed in buckskin and moccasins says:
Bad men go jail.
We ride kemo sabe?
Yes, Tonto, says the mysterious rider
and pausing only to wave
the two men speed away in a cloud of dust.
Once again the Italian Mozart looks out at the mountains
and begins to hum. Who was that stranger with the mask?
he asks, I wanted to thank him.

That’s Me Smiling in the Back Row

May 6, 2015.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Elton Glaser

Featured Image: The Parthenon by Frederic Edwin church, 1871

The day warms up fast,
Like leftovers in a microwave, odors of dawn
Still rising from the dead lilies,
From dry grass bleached to blonde and now
Heading toward platinum.
In the slow burn of midsummer,
The nose takes you where the mind won’t go.

There’s bad juju all over the place.
Light clings like cellophane
To the limp leaves. Nothing will budge
That carpet of shadows on the back porch.
I’m watching a spider
Rappel from the blades of a broken fan.
Somebody needs to fix it soon,
Somebody who knows how to work a miracle
With Juicy Fruit and a steak knife.

May B

May 5, 2015.Reading time 9 minutes.

By Lois Taylor

Featured Image: Young Ladies of the Village by Gustave Courbet, 1851-2

The last thing May B ever wanted was to be stuck with Tweety, who is standing there in her halter top and shorts, frowning at the yowling cat.

“Run that by me again, where you got her?” says Tweety.

May B explains how the stray came to the door just before her mom got sick and the aid car had to take her away again, and her mom said the cat was pregnant but way too young to have kittens.

Now the cat begins to twitch. “She’s going to die,” says May B. “She doesn’t even have a name.”

“Who’s talking about dying,” says Tweety. “Help me get that baby ready.”

Venus Out on the Town

May 4, 2015.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Shakira Croce

Featured Image: Charlotte, Lady Watkin Williams-Wynne by Daniel Gardner, 1775
Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington

Yes, you may buy me
A drink

It has been a long week for me too
At work trading, you said?

No, you haven’t had much?
Experience in social enterprise

Isn’t it great we live in a country
Where you and your partners can pull such fine bootstraps

One of the brightest, yes
I’ve been told I have a nice smile among other things

Your lines show in a few more years
Your advances will be harmless, cute even

Thank you for the champagne
What did you say your name was?

The Tenants of Feminism

May 3, 2015.Reading time 1 minute.

By Denise Duhamel

Featured Image: The Valley of the Seine, from the Hills of Giverny by Theodore Robinson, 1892

When the interviewer mishears “tenets”
I know my gals are not in a villa,
never mind the United States Senate.

My heroines crowd in drab tenements,
their image scaring even Attila
the Hun. The interviewer hears “tenants”—

bad asses, public housing. Bob Bennett
wakes sweaty from a nightmare, Guerrilla
Girls rushing the United States Senate;

Gloria Steinem, bell hooks, and Joan Jett
stuffing manifestos in manila
mailers. The interviewer hears “tenants,”

sees kitchens where women cook venomous
dishes. His lady smells of vanilla,
minding their house, not the U.S. Senate.

My principles are not set in cement,
nor are they adrift on a flotilla.
I call upon all feminist “tenants”—
Steer your U-Hauls to the U.S. Senate.

We Are All Beyond Disgusting

May 2, 2015.Reading time 34 minutes.

By Jill Kato

Featured Image: Breezing Up (A Fair Wind) by Winslw Homer, 1876
Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington

I like to get to the ship early. You’ll usually find a couple of old-timers waiting by the bar, itching to sip a Tom Collins or a whiskey sour on the rocks and get their vacation started right. This is the best time to build rapport and I’m their gal. At this point, they’re still excited about their trip and have a thick wad of cash in their billfolds. Their wives are in their cabins getting settled or making appointments at the spa or booking excursions for when we dock. The bar is quiet and they have me all to themselves. They can pour out all their troubles, and I can pour them all the liquor they need, at heavily marked-up prices. I haven’t even finished restocking the tabasco and maraschino cherries when a salty dog of a guy walks in. His name is Jerry and he’s on board to celebrate his wife’s sixty-fifth birthday. I ask him what he does, and he says he used to own a manufacturing company in the fashion district but now he’s retired. Left the business to his son. He says he built his company from scratch. Even though his shirt is ugly and has hula girls on it, I tell him I like it. I tell all men I like their shirts. I garnish his glass with an orange slice and tell him I admire men like him, self-made men who do things like run their own companies. And I do.

The Lake

May 1, 2015.Reading time 1 minute.

By Billy Collins

Featured Image: Lumber Schooners at Evening on Penobscot Bay by Fitz Henry Lane, 1863
Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington

As usual, it was easy to accept the lake
and its surroundings,
to take at face value the colonies of reeds
along the shore, a little platoon of ducks,
a turtle sunning itself on a limb half submerged,
and the big surface of the lake itself,
the water sometimes glassy, other times ruffled.

Why, Henry David Thoreau or anyone
even vaguely familiar with the role
of the picturesque in American
landscape painting of the 19th century
would feel perfectly at home in its presence.

And that is why I felt so relieved
to discover in the midst of all this
a note of skepticism,
a touch of whimsy,
or call it a bit of Dadaist playfulness;
and if not a remark worthy of Oscar Wilde
then surely a sign of the human was apparent

in the casual fuck-you attitude
so perfectly expressed by the anhinga
that was drying its extended wings
in the morning breeze
while perched on a decoy of a Canada goose.

Regarding Isabelle Huppert

April 29, 2015.Reading time 17 minutes.

By Tom Whalen

Featured Image: The Unicorn Rests in a Garden (from the Unicorn Tapestries), 1495-1505

Yesterday as I reread Hubert Hoskin’s translation of C. A. van Peursen’s Leibniz (1966/69), I couldn’t help but think of Isabelle Huppert. As with Leibniz, experience alone cannot account for her performances, but I don’t think, regarding Isabelle Huppert, I need concern myself with eternal truths residing in the mind of God. Judge advocate, nun, prostitute, mother, dressmaker, postal clerk, piano teacher, scientist, abortionist, war bride, writer, hostage, thief—whatever the role or source (Euripides, Diderot, Goethe, Dostoyevsky, Flaubert, Maupassant, Conrad, James, Zamyatin, Crnjanski, Genet, Bataille, Duras, Highsmith, Bachmann, Rendell, Jim Thompson), energies feed the performances of Isabelle Huppert from without and within.

Have you seen many of her over one hundred films? Retour à la bien-aimée, for example, or Eaux profondes, Pas de scandale, Sans queue ni tête, La séparation? Are you older or younger than Isabelle Huppert?

At the door to the house of Isabelle Huppert one stands as if before a tabernacle of dreams. Have you, too, stood before the tabernacle of Isabelle Huppert, or perhaps even entered its elegant chambers, which others before and after you have also entered? I confess I have not, though I am convinced I can say without equivocation that the house of Isabelle Huppert is capacious, albeit modestly so.

On His Way in Finding the World

April 28, 2015.Reading time 1 minute.

By Dennis Sampson

Featured Image: The Lackawanna Valley by George Iness, 1856, Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington

He was a person. He put
one foot in front of the other and often
thought of himself before thinking of others,
tried at times to ask a woman whom he loved
what he had done wrong and sobbed
during a counseling session in a back room of
a Catholic church when his wife made it clear she
did not want him to touch her. He smoked,
wrote in enclosures that were cold, that were sweltering,
and celebrated his modest accomplishments
by drinking alone in a bar in Cleveland,
infuriating those who did not like his kind
of frankness. When his mother
died slowly after a stroke he felt nothing. The singularly
vivid iridescent streak of sunlight in late afternoon in October
inspired him to write. He never forgot
the aroma of Mennen after-shave permeating the hallway
when his father left the bathroom, or the sweet fragrance
of lilacs growing in all corners of their yard. A person.
And he once held a leopard frog in his palms and was
startled by how desperately it wanted to get out.

Rumors About Dread Mills

April 27, 2015.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Rodney Jones

Featured Images: Rouen Cathedral, West Façade by Claude Monet, 1894, Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington

1974

At last they have him in church, a short service and the family silent, but the moments after the funeral are like a test.

True: The new base-tube press at Lockland Copper weighed sixty-seven tons. When they had completed the building and brought it in the door, six engineers agreed they would have to lift the roof to get the crane in and lower it into the pit. He heard from Tip Smith, a drinking buddy, a welder on the job, and wrote the board, saying he would do it for 10,000. Went to the ice plant, ordered eigh- teen blocks, filled the pit, rolled the press onto the ice; then, as the ice melted, pumped out the water.

True: Drunk every day for sixteen years. False: Mostly homebrew or moon- shine.

True: Every morning Maurice Orr’s rooster pissed him off. False: He caught the rooster in a sack, dug a hole behind the house, buried it with just the neck and head sticking out, cranked the mower, and mowed the lawn.

False: The story that besotted on the back lawn he ordered Jawaharal to dance and choreographed the steps with a Colt revolver. (Gunsmoke.)

True: Jawaharal inherited his logic gene and argued when he called him “Jerry.”

False: He never hit a lick at a snake. Once he pruned the grapevine. Twice, after midnight, he picked roasting ears from Leldon Spence’s garden.

True: When the money from the press job ran out, he wrote bad checks until his name was published on the glass doors of every business from Cold Springs to Decatur. It hit him then one day: go from store to store, copy all the names, print the list of deadbeats twice a year and sell subscriptions to each store for fifty dollars.

True: His Deadbeat Protection Flier taking off before the Credit Protection Act: drinking Jim Beam in the air over Georgia and Louisiana, he was a sloppy man who made a million dollars.

True: The gay son home from Palo Alto. The wife, a holy roller in a sari. His brilliant, inebriated redneck math, marks in the chicken yard. The liver. The heart—details of the unannotated life: grease-prints on Erdös in Combinator- ics, unused tickets to see Conway Twitty—Cliffs Notes for Abyss Studies—

His mind at the end like a hand reaching for a pocket when he wasn’t wearing a shirt.

“I would kill myself if there were anyone better.”

Soir d’hiver à Montmartre (Winter Evening in Montmartre) by Jean-Alexis-Joseph Morin-Jean, 1910; Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington

April 26, 2015.Reading time less than 1 minute.

The Ends of Stories

April 26, 2015.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Karen Loeb

Featured Image: Soir d’hiver à Montmartre (Winter Evening in Montmartre) by Jean-Alexis-Joseph Morin-Jean, 1910; Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington

At the finish of the meal, your father left. And that was that.

I led a reckless life, but when the accident happened, I reformed.

So I discovered that the bananas had to be really ripe.

The bouquet was a wet bathing suit moldering in a gym bag
tossed in the corner last month.

The lost earring with the green stone turned up years later
when they moved the dresser. She’d thrown out the matching one
a decade earlier.

The smell was a casserole forgotten on the counter. Something with tuna
and onions. It greeted them when they returned from vacation.

I plan to beat the odds and live forever, he declared.

The cat was hiding in the top drawer of the bureau, flattened
as thin as a comic book, eyes peering up, blinking, when we
finally found him.

Turned out it was a moth as big as a bat making those shadows
on the cabin wall.

She went shopping for a jacket covered in feathers, just as it had
appeared in her dream.

BBC

April 25, 2015.Reading time 1 minute.

By Mike Wright

Featured Image: View of Toledo by El Greco, 1599-1600

I leave the World Service
on at night, snoozing through
the British iteration of gang rape
and kidnapping. I’ll stir sometimes
to hear a few moments of economic
collapse, but it’s really white noise,
blanching the laughter of drunks outside.
Sleeping to tragedy helps tamp down
my father’s last days, his morphine speech,
how my mother sent me to Kentucky
Fried Chicken with a coupon
for his last meal, and how shame
drove me to throw the coupon out.
If his death were broadcast in the night,
his of thousands of dying fathers,
and you slept well, how could
I begrudge you a night of rest?

Where My Father Went

April 24, 2015.Reading time 9 minutes.

By Sandy Gingras
Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington

When the funeral director hands my father’s ashes to my mother, she puts the little cardboard box into her pocketbook—the one with all the zippers and buckles. My mother says she’ll hold off on scattering the ashes until maybe the next time my brother comes down from his farm and we’re all together. Maybe we’ll scatter them in the ocean.

“But, for now,” I ask, “Where are you going to put him?”

“In my bedroom closet,” she says.

My parents never shared a bedroom. My father’s room was the converted attic, my mother’s, the converted garage. As far away as they could get from each other within the same house. Putting him in her bedroom closet seems, at once, too remote and too intimate, but I don’t say anything.

Two years pass.

My brother only visits on Christmas and Thanksgiving, which is not the right time to scatter the ashes. It’s never the right time to scatter the ashes.

Someone Else

April 23, 2015.Reading time 6 minutes.

By Sandy Gingras

Featured Image: Roses by Vincent Van Gogh, 1890
Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington

When my mother was dying, we started calling her “Grammy” as if she’d become someone else. She was eighty-five pounds. She looked like a shrinkydink of herself. She wore a diaper and a hospital gown. The diaper looked enormous on her. It was one of those pull-up ones. If you yanked up her diaper when she was trying to stand, you could lift her right off her feet. “Whoa,” she’d say to you. “Whoa there.” Grammy was a good sport. She was nothing like my mother.

She was on morphine, so a lot of the time, she made no sense. “You know,” she’d tell me earnestly, “I gotta get me a Louie-Louie.”

“Okay,” I’d tell her, but I didn’t have a clue what she meant. “I’ll buy you one.”

“Don’t get it too small,” she’d say. “Oooh,” she’d kind of shiver with excitement, “That will be lovely.” Lovely. As if my mother would ever say a word like that.

My Mother Comes to Dinner

April 22, 2015.Reading time 1 minute.

By Sally Bliumis-Dunn

Featured Image: Green Plums by Joseph Decker, 1885
Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington

We leave the dining room and she remains
alone at the table; the plates need washing,
we prepare dessert. I still wait for her

questions, half-buried in dish-clatter,
her broken tones in the hot kitchen air,
though these days she sits mostly silent.

And larger than the room and yellow walls, her silence—
as though it were strung to the sky,
to the air that too has been washed and washed

like a bed sheet in the relentless sun,
colors and patterns mostly faded

like all the meals enjoyed then washed
from these brown earthenware plates.

Jester’s Cap

April 19, 2015.Reading time 4 minutes.

By Brandon Amico

Featured Image: Corridor in the Asylum by Vincent Van Gogh, 1889

Three rabbits walk into a bar. The third rabbit carries a shotgun.

Three rabbits walk into a bar. The third rabbit carries a shotgun and the first
rabbit a vase of imported flowers.

One of the rabbits is already drunk.

Three rabbits walk into an orgy but only for the pre-orgy hors d’oeuvres.

Three rabbits walk into a bar with masks on but their ears give them away.

Knock-knock. (Who’s there?) No one, it’s just the second rabbit, the one with a
free hand, rapping his knuckle on the bartop.

Banality

April 17, 2015.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Gregory Djanikian

Featured Image: Tullichewan Castle, Vale of Leven, Scotland by Sir James Campbell of Strathro, 1855
Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington

There’s something to be said for banality,
the way it keeps everything on a level plane,
one cliché blithely following another
like cows heading toward the pasture.

How lovely sometimes not to think
about Russian Futurism, or the second law
of thermodynamics, or how thinking itself
requires some thoughtfulness.

I’d like to ask if Machiavelli
ever owned a dog named “Prince.”
I’d like to imagine Rosalind Franklin
lounging pleasantly by a wood stove.

Let the mind take a holiday,
the body put its slippers on.
It’s a beautiful day, says the banal,
and today, I’m happy to agree
with its genial locutions.

Nowadays

April 15, 2015.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Judy Rowe Michaels

Featured Image: A Basket of Clams by Winslow Homer, 1873

And is that everything
since you? Since meaning
posthumous.
Here melancholy’s
interrupted by brief flirt
with dictionary: originally
postumas, no hint
of burial in living earth.

Dicking around again with
missing you, post this and that—
coital, colonial, menopausal,
Mesozoic, coitus interruptus . . .
Nowadays sex is catch-all for
almost anything, god, war,
cupcakes, abs and apps, the boat
is listing.
Poet Gilbert, Jack, said
“the erotic matters not as pleasure
but a way to get to something
darker.” He’s restless
when people laugh a lot,
he prefers Greek fishermen,
who “do not play on the beach.”
Is it so wrong to heft
an inflatable ball, twirl it
on a finger, think circus seals?

Wasn’t sex mostly three-ring
circus—three or more, given
the presence of memory, fantasy,
irony, flattery, usury, syzygy—
that’s sun, moon, earth aligned,
and then there’s the all-but-impossible
synergy, two becoming a
greater third,
yes, Nowadays
is everything since that.

Harping

April 14, 2015.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Judy Rowe Michaels

Featured Image: Cattleya Orchid and Three Hummingbirds by Martin Johnson Heade, 1871
Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington

While most of us are grieving

something—cold spring lost child dead-end
lyrics that won’t resolve,

the spadefoot toad, who bears
a gold lyre-mark on her back,
is crazy-busy with what science calls

explosive breeding. Rain says Go,
and up from culvert cistern over porch and patio across roads
the fraught migration of spadefeet slowly breaches
our borders to breed in our ponds.

Flood of toadlets in just three weeks, pop pop,
with tiny golden harps, how will this
end? We run them down
coming or going, then pronounce them
rare, so we

love them, make posters, poems—
      (Old moss-grown pond—a
      toad jumps in to breed pop pop
      poppoppoppoppop)

We can’t say they’re unnatural, or blame
the job rate bad schools gang wars (unprotected
sex?), but tiny golden harps

seem suspect artsy irresponsible un-American.
All night trill thrills,

while most of us are grieving.

Feature: Uses & Abuses of Dialogue

April 10, 2015.Reading time less than 1 minute.

The following is a collection of essays and writings on the subject of dialogue within fiction. Including an essay from author Rebecca Makkai (Music for Wartime, The Hundred-Year House) about a college assignment of eavesdropping to craft realistic dialogue. As well, audio of Robert Anthony Siegel reading “I Deserve Two Firing Squads: Dialogue and Conflict in Fiction.”

A Trompe L’Oeil for the Mind’s Ear

April 10, 2015.Reading time 5 minutes.

By J. Robert Lennon

Featured Image: Lady Lilith by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, 1867

The key to writing realistic dialogue in fiction is to abandon all presumption of authenticity and acknowledge the necessity of total fakeness in achieving the illusion of truth.

Human speech is not simple. The words we say in conversation convey, at best, 25% of what we mean,¹ with the remaining 75% taken up by body language, volume and tone, facial expression, and prior understanding between parties. The fiction writer has access to these conversational elements, of course, and may fill in back story, provide stage direction, and apply (judiciously, lord help us) descriptive dialogue tags to convey the intended meaning. But a good writer can evoke the character of a speaker, his or her intended and actual meaning, and even very subtle contextual clues, using only the words within quotation marks.

Among the tools the writer has at her disposal when writing dialogue: Sentence length. Punctuation. Rhythm (along an axis of consistency, from entirely smooth to completely broken). Syntax and diction (specifically, its breadth, expressive sophistication, and degree of formal correctness). The reader should be able to understand who is speaking in the same way that he requires no assistance to identify, by sound alone, the voices of his friends in a crowded room.

Still Life by Henri Fantin-Latour, 1866, Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington

April 8, 2015.Reading time less than 1 minute.

Inside the Cave-Speak of Saunders

April 8, 2015.Reading time 8 minutes.

By Leslie Daniels

Featured Image: Still Life by Henri Fantin-Latour, 1866, Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington

The setting in George Saunders’ story “Pastoralia” is a theme park where two characters—the narrator and Janet—live and work in a simulated cave. Their job is to perform for the occasional tourist the skinning and roasting of a goat. Theme park rules dictate that employees must not speak English at any time so as not to destroy the illusion of being cave people. The narrator abides by the rule, but Janet flouts it, which is a major concern of the narrator’s. On this occasion the freshly dead goat has not been delivered. There are no tourists present.

Janet comes in from her Separate Area and her eyebrows go up.

“No freaking goat?” she says.

                                        I make some guttural sounds and some motions meaning: Big
                               rain come down, and boom, make goats run, goats now away, away
                               in high hills, and as my fear was great, I did not follow.

Janet scratches under her armpit and makes a sound like a mon-
key, then lights a cigarette.

“What a bunch of shit,” she says. “Why do you insist, I’ll never
know. Who’s here? Do you see anyone here but us?”

I gesture to her to put out the cigarette and make the fire. She
gestures to me to kiss her butt.

                                        “Why am I making a fire?” she says. “A fire in advance of a goat.
                               Is this like a wishful fire? Like a hopeful fire? No, sorry, I’ve had it.
                               What would I do in the real world if there was thunder and so on and
                               our goats actually ran away? Maybe I’d mourn, like cut myself with
                               that flint, or maybe I’d kick your ass for being so stupid as to leave the
                               goats out in the rain.”

I Deserve Two Firing Squads: Dialogue and Conflict in Fiction

April 7, 2015.Reading time 13 minutes.

By Robert Anthony Siegel

Featured Image: Landscape with Trees and Water by James Bulwer
Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington

The world I grew up in was full of hyper-verbal people for whom talk was the medium of both ambition and feeling, the tool they used to try to shape the world around their desires. For that reason, when I began writing fiction, I found that characters were never completely real to me until they spoke: when they started talking I finally knew what they wanted. So I started writing the dialogue first. I would get two characters talking to each other and then build the scene out from their conversation. The dialogue was the trunk, and everything else branched out from it: thought, feeling, memory, sense perception, action.

In those days, when a scene worked, I thought it was because the dialogue was good. It took years for me to realize that it was the other way around, that dialogue was just helping me to uncover the underlying conflict that actually drove the story. What I know now is that dialogue doesn’t have to be fancy or quirky or unusual in order to do its job effectively. It just has to arise freely and naturally from the characters’ experience of conflict.

The Great Statue of Amida Buddha at Kamakura, Known as the Daibutsu, from the Priest’s Garden by John La Farge, 1887

April 6, 2015.Reading time less than 1 minute.

A Brief Personal History of Dialogue

April 6, 2015.Reading time 7 minutes.

By Kelly Luce

Featured Image: The Great Statue of Amida Buddha at Kamakura, Known as the Daibutsu, from the Priest’s Garden by John La Farge, 1887

                                                                                             Not everyone says what they mean. But they do
                                                                                             always say something designed to get what they
                                                                                             want.
                                                                                                                                                       —David Mamet

1987: Ms. Voyeur, my first-grade teacher, tells my mom I’m too quiet and should be seen by a psychiatrist. But I prefer listening! Other people are interesting. They tell you more secrets when you’re quiet.

1992: My Language Arts teacher accuses me of plagiarizing a short story I wrote about volleyball tryouts. Why? “The dialogue is too realistic.” When I tell her that’s because I just tried out for volleyball myself and remembered how the girls sounded, she says, “No one learns to write dialogue by listening to real people talk.”

1997: I read Salinger’s “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” for the first time. Remember the conversation between returned soldier Seymour Glass and the young girl, Sybil, on the beach? Sybil is being perfectly herself, still possesses her childlike ability to say just what she means. Seymour is a couple hours away from—. Their chatter is innocent. Or is it terrifying? Take this exchange about a rubber raft:

The Dialogue of Gesture and Silence

April 5, 2015.Reading time 7 minutes.

By Alyce Miller

Featured Image: Rouen Cathedral, West Façade, Sunlight by Claude Monet, 1894
Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington

What people don’t say is often as important as, or even more important than, what they do say. Too much exposition, or what I call “soap opera dialogue” (e.g. “You remember my brother John who tried to murder Tiffany, before she was caught stealing from Marsha’s cousin who changed her name….”), or its opposite, too little, as is often found in the “generic social glue” of the how’sthe-weather variety, can undermine the progression of story and essential character development (unless, of course, weather is key to the story).

We often think we learn about people through what they say and how they say it, but other forms of communication are just as crucial. Dialogue can happen without speech. Words can fail. Gesture can summon meaning beyond language.

In Hemingway’s dialogue-rich story set in an empty train station in Spain, “Hills Like White Elephants,” the two traveling protagonists he calls respectively “the man and the girl” carry on what might sound to the untrained ear like a conversation about nothing when, in fact, they are about to make an important decision as to whether “the girl” should have an abortion. Whichever path they choose, it is clear that the course of their life together will be forever changed. At one point, after a good deal of back and forth, the girl says, “Then I’ll do it because I don’t care about me.” When the man counters with “I don’t want you to do it if you feel that way,” the girl doesn’t respond. Instead she stands up and walks to the end of the station. Her choice to substitute action for speech and distance herself momentarily from the man says more than anything she could at that moment. Her attention drifts instead to the landscape, the river on one side of the track and the mountains on the other, while she stands in that place of in-betweens and uncertainty. No conversation could convey her dilemma more precisely at that moment.

Dialogue: The Footfall of Its Wandering

April 4, 2015.Reading time 23 minutes.

By Darrell Spencer

Featured Image: The Card Players by Paul Cézanne, 1890-2

You might not have it in mind to go a particular
direction and you might end up going that way.
—tapper Jimmy Slyde

Well, that ain’t what art does. It makes things.
—Stanley Elkin

1. Full Disclosure

For my entry into a discussion of dialogue I can’t think of a worthier writer to cite than Amy Hempel. The magician and maestro. Hempel’s narrator of Tumble Home opens the novella as one ought: “I begin this letter to you, then, in the western tradition. If I understand it, the western tradition is: Put your cards on the table” (69). Here are my cards: I like fiction that feels off-shot and shaggy, that seems to have fallen from the sky and is banged up thanks to re-entry. I like my fiction jerry-rigged and clumsy. Stanley Elkin uses the word baggy to describe his novels. Perfect.

Screw Poe: “A skillful literary artist has constructed a tale. If wise, he has not fashioned his thoughts to accommodate his incidents; but having conceived with deliberate care, a certain unique or single effect to be wrought out, he then invents such incidents—he then combines such events as may best aid him establishing this preconceived effect.” Oy. Rube Goldberg schooled me; he’s my guy. I want, as I read, to experience the acrobatics, to hear the pop and the hiss and the whiz-bang of the performance. A Goldberg contraption might get you somewhere but you will most likely be too dizzy to appreciate your arrival. You’ve seen those spaceships wobble across the screen in the crackly black-andwhite Flash Gordon flicks. That’s what I’m talking about. Look closely and you see the wires.

That Dialogue Assignment

April 3, 2015.Reading time 11 minutes.

By Rebecca Makkai

Featured Image: la Orana Maria (Hail Mary) by Paul Gauguin, 1891

I first got The Assignment in a college playwriting class. You might have gotten it in high school, or picked it up from a writing exercise book (somewhere between Keep a Dream Journal and What Color Is Your Character’s Toothbrush?): Eavesdrop on strangers, and write down everything they say. The idea is that this will help you write better dialogue, more realistic dialogue. Because realistic must equal better.

To be honest, I fudged the college assignment somewhat. I listened in on two campus maintenance workers, thinking they’d say hilarious and off-color things. Mostly, they grunted about paneling. I cherry-picked my hour of listening for the best phrases, crunching them together into what sounded like three minutes of witty banter, adding a few lines of my own. I did this partly to make my classmates laugh (I knew we’d be reading this aloud the next day) but also because I sensed that there was something deeply unsatisfying about actual dialogue—uninspired, disorganized, mundane dialogue.

The Light Factory

November 30, 2014.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Sandy Gingras

I work the night shift at the light factory.
The gears of the conveyor belt slip
silently, and emptiness goes by me
one segment at a time. I have to take
the dark in my gloved hands and make
something of it, then connect it to something else.
Someone further along the line bends
it, I think. Nobody really knows much about
the other guy’s job here. We just do our part.

There are no windows in this factory.
The air is like milk, and they pump in
music that has a beat, so we don’t fall asleep
on the job, but we still do. My mother says
I should get a real job, make something solid
out of my life. “There’s enough light
as there is,” she lectures me. “There’s the sun
and the stars,” she says, as if I don’t know this already.

“What do you DO in there?” she asks. I don’t want
to tell her how much we joke around, tell stories,
talk about men. “I can’t really describe it,”
I tell her. “I do it mostly by feel.” Sometimes,
I bring one of the seconds home
with me after my shift. They don’t like it
when you do this, but everyone sneaks some.
I go home at dawn, put it on my dresser
next to the open window, watch it fan
out like a wild thing into the pink sky.
I don’t know why it feels so good to let it go.

POOF

November 29, 2014.Reading time 1 minute.

By Sandy Gingras

My mother wants her head to be frozen
after she dies. I’m against it, but
there’s no talking to her. She has a brochure.

On the cover, there’s a picture
of a white building with no windows.
I tell her, I go, “I’m never gonna visit you there.”

She says, “Fine, fine,” the way she does.
She reads me the whole brochure.
She’ll be maintained at something-something degrees

until they come up with the technology to defrost
her. The, she says, “POOF. It’ll be like
being microwaved.” I go, “Think about

what happens to popcorn.” She keeps on reading
about how they’ll just fiddle around with her DNA,
and she’ll grow a whole new body. I don’t get that part.

I go, “What if they can’t grow you a body,
and you’re stuck being an alive head forever.”
She says, “Then you’ll have to carry me around.”

I knew it. I knew it.

The Undersized Negative

November 28, 2014.Reading time 74 minutes.

By Robert Glick

Selected as winner of the 2014 New Ohio Review Fiction Contest by Aimee Bender

Sometimes the day after Mom’s miscarriage, a chemistry teacher with chin-only stubble interrupts class to tell you he is dying. There were so many reasons not to be anywhere. I, Dr. Watermelon, convened everyone at the abandoned house, which I insisted on calling the sketch house, on account of the Etch A Sketch I had found in a toy chest. My buddy Filbert plopped himself down on one of the oyster chairs; the air clouded with dust mites and dried skin. “Finders, keepers,” he said. We demanded answers of the Harris family from phone bills and colanders, from the oregano scent of the bathroom cleaner, from a postal sack half-full of gas caps. The throat to the fireplace was choked; perhaps a bird’s nest. Rob and Ron each kept one eye perched on the doorless front door, wary of the patriarch Dustin Oskar Harris barging in to reclaim what he once owned. They thought the sketch house itself was sketchy, as if its waxy kitchen linoleum had been responsible for mawing open and swallowing its former occupants. Ron suggested that we get sizzled on the freon from the fridge. Rob agreed; they were repurposers. “Highly toxic,” Filbert said, reluctantly we transitioned to flicking matches at the shelves—flyfishing magazines, nautical books – knowing damp, expecting sulfur, anticipating cartwheels of burn through the air. Filbert, nicknamed for the teratomic testicle lodged like a moon above his kidney, had a talent for fire: me, not so much. I was a Pisces; I went as long as I could underwater.

Filbert’s lit match flew through the air and landed on my crotch. I didn’t want to move. I felt crowned, blinkered by a halo of marsh fog. I observed the flicker of little flame, a prickle of warmth on my jeans. “Huh,” I said. That was my best eloquent admiration for the trajectory of heat and light.

The Egg

November 20, 2014.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Eric Nelson

We’re sitting at the table the way people do
When a family member dies and a stream of well-wishers
Arrive with sympathy and food.

Everyone is concerned for the widow, 70, tough, wiry,
Who now seems weak and befuddled, staring at people
She’s known for years without answering,

Rising and walking out the back door, staring at the woods
At the far end of their land.
Returning to the table without a word.

We’re all thinking how often one spouse dies
Soon after the other, dies of nothing
But lack. Because we are surrounded by guns, her husband’s

Sizeable collection—pistols in glass cases, rifles
In racks and corners—talk turns to their value, the merits
Of revolvers versus semi autos, plinking, protection.

Now, for the first time, the widow speaks, remembering
That she went to the coop this morning and found curled
In a nesting box a snake, unhinged mouth filled

With a whole egg, disappearing a swallow at a time.
She walked back to the house, pulled her .410
Off the rack, returned to the coop and blew its head off.

A hog-nose, she says. A good snake. But I had to.
She shrugs her shoulders. I had to. Glancing
At each other, we nod in agreement, relieved.

Gun on the Table

November 18, 2014.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Eric Nelson

My favorite scene in Body Heat has nothing
To do with the intricate plot
That William Hurt and Kathleen Turner
Devise to kill her rich, oppressive husband.
My favorite scene, maybe ten seconds long,
Shows Hurt getting into his car as an antique
Convertible drives by, a fully costumed clown
At the wheel, waving. Hurt stares, slightly
Bewildered, while the clown passes and disappears.
That’s it. Cut to Hurt and Turner in another
Sweaty sex scene and post-coital planning,
The foregone noir conclusion closing in. Meanwhile,
Since we know there are no meaningless details
In art, we keep expecting the clown to reappear
Or at least figure indirectly yet clearly in the action.
Like Chekhov said—if there’s a gun on the table
In act one, it had better be fired by act three.
But no, the clown is random, there and gone, an odd,
Unrelated moment like any of the ones that pass us
Every day and we barely notice
Because life isn’t art, isn’t revised for coherence,
Not until our lives collapse around us
Like a circus tent in flames
And we begin to look for the alarm we missed.

My Life with Pines

November 16, 2014.Reading time 1 minute.

By Tom Wayman

1
In the glow of a fluorescent, I sit leaning
over a table to sort through parts of
a jigsaw puzzle, working hard to recreate
a picture displayed
on the box I purchased
while outside
great pines have moved in the darkness
down the ridge to surround my house, many of the trees
taller than the roof. A fierce wind
causes the pine trunks to sway, their limbs
churning the dark in wild
and pitiless gestures.

2
Pines thrive in arid soil, mostly sand,
little else will grow in. These trees regard cedars
who love the damp, who must be surrounded by relatives,

as gloomy, phlegmatic,
timid. Cedars, according to pines, are simple-minded
about safety, suffusing themselves with water

as protection from fire. Cedars might as well be,
pines jeer, a fern. Whereas pines
only reproduce in the heart of a blaze,
their cones needing the insatiable rage of flames
to climax, open, release.

3
No matter how many nights, months, decades
I pore over my jigsaw
the one piece that remains to be found
is a pine.

Activity Room

November 14, 2014.Reading time 1 minute.

By John Bargowski

My mother wants nothing to do with the puzzle
two other residents,
whose wheelchairs have been rolled up
to a folding card table,
are trying to put together—
a west side shot of the New York skyline
broken up into a thousand pieces,
the stubborn morning smog
she could see from the apartment
she had to give up photo-shopped out,
the OT insisting Mom join in the fun,
taking my mother’s stroke-locked hand
and guiding it to
a corner piece that’s an easy fit,

When Time Slows Down

November 10, 2014.Reading time 1 minute.

By Lawrence Raab

Now I’m lying in a narrow hospital bed,
waiting for the first tests to come back,
raising the cup of apple juice to my lips,
then setting it back on the table
very carefully. I’ve been watching
a large round clock, so much like

the clocks in the schoolrooms
of childhood, where the big hand clicked
loudly as another minute was forced into place.
Was it fourth grade or fifth?

The Road

November 8, 2014.Reading time 1 minute.

By Lee Ann Dalton

I left, not looking back. I was afraid.
I left the things he bought me, just in case.
I had to close my eyes to find the road.

I carried names and numbers, tucked inside
a pocket in my purse, and not much else
to leave and not look back. I was afraid

of corners, entryways, store windows, hid
and dodged whole neighborhoods, memory’s curse.
I had to close my eyes to feel the road.

Nights, phone off, lights on, I stood guard
on the balcony, wrapped in please. Worse
than leaving, is not looking back. I was afraid

he’d come slash my tires, stage his suicide
or mine, since I refused to witness his.
Sometimes I closed my eyes to see the road.

I’m still ashamed to say how much I lied
to make him step away, give me the keys
so I could leave, not look back though I was afraid.
I closed my eyes to walk the open road.

Intercession

November 4, 2014.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Jennifer Leonard*

When, years later, I learn Kevin Miller,
the boy who grew up next door, is in jail
for drugs and a stolen car and a gun,
I think of eighth grade:
Kevin with his buck teeth and buzz cut
always getting into fights, Kevin suspended
once for carving the F-word into a church pew
during Wednesday Mass, then again
for slinging walnuts against the windshield
of Mrs. Sabatino’s car.
And that one time, on the field at the end
of the street, where the boys gathered after school
to pick teams, Mark McGarity said,
We don’t want the retard,
meaning my brother—
and Kevin said, What the fuck, man,
and Mark said, Well then prove he can catch a ball,
and when Kevin shrugged and said Fine,
and told my brother to go out for a pass,
and my brother did, but did not catch the ball—
when it bounced twice off the ground,
and my brother looked down at his sneakers,
and Mark told Kevin, Yeah dude, there’s no way,
and all the other boys stood
in a sort of ring, and waited for someone
to hurt someone else—
but instead, Kevin thumped my brother
on the back and said, Let’s go. And my brother—
who may not ever be able to memorize equations
or read, but knows when a man risks himself
for another—
he followed Kevin home to our back yard,
where Kevin threw my brother the football,
and though the ball passed again and again
through my brother’s hands,
Kevin kept throwing, telling my brother
where to move and when, and I can picture, now,
my brother’s face so serious and filled
with concentration—
and Kevin, throwing until their shadows
fell long over the yard.

Pavlov’s Dog

October 28, 2014.Reading time 1 minute.

By Derek JG Williams

I chase my shadow all morning. The neighbors watch
from between drawn curtains.

I tear up clumps of lawn until my blood churns how it does
when the bell rings. I sit in the sun and pant.

Next time I’ll lunge for his throat. But the bell sounds
and I love him still. When I run away, it’s to nowhere

special. There’s a certain slant of moon
I seek. It changes the angle of my longing.

Hunger is the pain I can’t be free of—when I’m sitting
in the sun I love him.

I’m never free. I’ll lunge for his throat. The neighbors will say
I told you so.

Photograph Albums

October 18, 2014.Reading time 3 minutes.

By George Kalogeris

“We finally got all of our family photos
Onto our home computer,” Quentin was saying,
Just as we entered the Asian fusion place.

And that’s when it hit me: all those leather albums
With their matted pages and bristly hides,
In their mundane way as archly ceremonial

As the Golden Dragon preening against
The restaurant window. All those cumbersome tomes,
In a decade or so defunct as the dinosaur.

But once their images have all been scanned,
Why should it matter? By then the cherished snapshots
Will have all gone into the world of light—

Or at least into cyberspace. Ancestral faces
That once unfurled from trays of salty water
As dark as Lethe, and then were pinned on strings,

Ex-voto like, and left to dry, will seem
A little less spooky-stern without the shades
Of their twentieth century negatives to haunt us.

And pantheons of illumination so vast
They promised we’d see ourselves reflected in
Their image forever—Olympus, Polaroid, Kodak—

Will shrink to the candle-watt stature of household gods:
Preservers of birthday parties and graduations,
Penátes of pointed hats and obnoxious horns.

For My 1st Ex-Lover to Die

October 16, 2014.Reading time 1 minute.

By Francesca Bell

I heard this morning my old lover died, and I cannot say I loved him, though I may have said it at the time, cannot say he was a good person or lover or anything other than a man who called me in the small hours, driving back roads drunk in his Ferrari, when I was 23 and he was 50, who bought me books and a Lalique clock that’s been broken 20 years, who was the dumbest smart person I ever knew, crying in his car at 4 in the morning, wearing a coyote skin coat that reached to his shoes, and I didn’t want his money or his cocaine or to be his 7th wife, and I’ve seldom thought of him except to remember a dark animal crossing his driveway at night, and the 2 staircases in his grand house, going up, going down, and how I held him, deep in my body, and he made a small, sad sound.

Dialing The Dead

October 14, 2014.Reading time 1 minute.

By Mark Kraushaar

I’d never call.
First of all, I’d be intruding, and besides
I can see my dead friend with all his dead friends
even now, translucent, weightless, winging
through a cloud or sitting in a circle
on some creaky, folding chairs—
Hello, my name is Peter and I’ve
been dead ten years, car wreck.
Hello my name is Edith and I’ve
been dead a week, pneumonia.
Hello, my name is Frank and I’ve been . . . .

Oh, I know they’d all be friendly but even
dialing later when I guess he’d be alone
I’d have too many questions:
If you’re nowhere now and nothing
is this the same as everywhere and everything?
And, Peter, do you sleep in heaven?
Do you eat up there?
What’s the weather anyway?
And that tenderness of heart we try so hard
to keep a secret: in heaven we’re
wide open, aren’t we?
Stay in touch.
No, don’t.

Last Call

October 12, 2014.Reading time 41 minutes.

By Penny Zang

Each night, after work, we changed our names. We were trying on new identities, seeing which ones fit. Serena and I would throw off our aprons and get undressed in the car, wiggling into tight black pants and shirts thin as napkins. Sometimes we wore red lipstick, sometimes eye glitter. Then we’d find a new bar with the same tattered barstools we were used to balancing on, the same veil of smoke and low light that felt like home. To the men who approached us, we turned into different girls, ones who knew how to charm even without the promise of making a tip.

Our new names were decided on the spot, never the same name twice. They were names we’d once used for our baby dolls, names we’d wished our moms had given us: Isabel, Deanna, Lily. Everything else came later—our stories, our new personalities—fueled by beer and tequila, a practiced game of improvisation. Sometimes men invited us home or out to their car. Sometimes the night just fizzled and we’d stumble out to the street in the wrong direction, too lost to even know it. We’d stop to eat greasy pizza and compare notes, our throbbing feet the only part of us that wanted to give up.

Sitting in a Simulated Living Space at the Seattle Ikea

October 10, 2014.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Abby E. Murray

Finalist, New Ohio Review Poetry Contest

To sit in a simulated living space at Ikea
is to know what sand knows
as it rests inside the oyster.
This is how you might arrange your life
if you were to start from scratch:
a newer, better version of yourself applied
coat by coat, beginning with lamplight
from the simulated living room.
The man who lives here has never killed.
There is no American camouflage drying
over the backs of his kitchen chairs,
no battle studies on the coffee table.
He travels without a weapon,
hangs photographs of the Taj Mahal,
the Eiffel Tower above the sofa.
The woman who lives here has no need
for prescriptions or self-help:
her mirror cabinet holds a pump
for lotion and a rose-colored water glass,
her nightstand is stacked with hardcovers
on Swedish architecture. The cat who lives here
has been declawed, the dog rehomed.
There are no parking tickets in the breadbox,
no parakeets shrilling over newspaper
in the decorative cage by the desk.
When you finish your dollar coffee
and exit through the simulated front door,
join other shoppers with chapsticks
in their purses and Kleenex and receipts,
with T-shirts that say Florida Keys 2003
and unopened Nicorette blisters in their pockets,
you will wish you could say this place
is not enough for you, that you are better off
in the harsh light of the parking garage,
a light that shows your skin beneath your skin,
the color of your past self,
pale in places, flushed in others.

The Game

October 10, 2014.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Steven Cramer

Let me clarify some things about the game.
First rule: think about the game, you’ve lost.
No tiles, cards, currency, whirling dials: all pieces

are included, space has been cleared at the table.
Join in. Your turn. Kids learn the game in school
corridors, score it in red along their forearms,

new staves on old. It doesn’t end when the day ends:
race for the stairs, dodging the geeks and slow kids,
thunder of fists on lockers, last push to the streets.

The old hands they become play all night, by daylight
a winner still in doubt. Friction Ridge, Lake of Enclosure,
Dot and Spur: its variants can wear a pencil to its nub.

Wedded to the game, couples bop to the Heart-Flip,
the Mind-Winder, later to lie on sheets deliberately
left blank. Who invented the game? Who made up

the jokes passed from laugh to laugh? Black suit
for weddings, same for the funeral. In between, quick
as a nail sparks an Ohio Blue Tip, it fixes in its sights

the boy who puffs, walks; leaves in a down of frost
crushed beneath his feet. At the ridge he’ll climb,
sun warms the girl expecting him, curve of her hand

moist to take him. When he comes, the game beats
in his heartbeat thumped by the wallop of her heart
beating against his; and like a spider tumor, spins

webs in his brain, in love now with how it’s played.

A Theory of Violence

October 6, 2014.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Jennifer Perrine

Selected as runner-up of the 2014 New Ohio Review Poetry Contest by Alan Shapiro

In the museum of sex, the video loops
its cycle of common bonobo behavior:
penis fencing, genital rubbing, whole groups

engaged in frenzied pairs, their grinds and shrieks
playing for the edification of each patron
passing through the room. We all summon

our best poker faces. One woman speaks
softly, reads from the sign that describes
all the various partner combinations,

the multitude of positions, how relations
lower aggression, increase bonding within tribes.
We linger over this way of making peace,

wonder to each other if we would cease
our litany of guns, bombs, missile strikes
if we spent more time in wild embrace.

The exhibit doesn’t mention our other cousins,
chimpanzees, who form border patrols, chase
strangers in their midst, leave mangled bodies as lessons.
That’s the story we already know

and want to forget through the release
of these erotic halls, where we seek the thrill, the bliss

of these animals who hold us captive
while we lament what traits we’ve found adaptive.

Embarrassment: from baraço (halter)

October 4, 2014.Reading time 4 minutes.

By Jennifer Perrine

Selected as runner-up for the 2014 New Ohio Review Poetry Contest by Alan Shapiro

All he found when he came looking for us was the home my mother wanted to leave behind: newspapers stacked knee-deep in the hallways, every corner redolent of cat piss, linoleum caked with dried mud and dust, tangles of hair matted to the tub, dried scabs of meals coating plates and bowls piled high in the sink, on counters. Everywhere: the stink, the rot and mold, the great heaps of unwashed clothes, all the filth my mother never let anyone see. No friends allowed inside. Even her dates didn’t get in the door. She spent her nights at their dubious dens, leaving me alone to toss hamburger wrappers and soda cups on the living room floor, our one trashcan so full I couldn’t empty it. My father, finding all this mess, assumed the worst, took photos, jotted notes, thinking the house had been ransacked, that we’d been robbed, killed or kidnapped, though police assured him there were no signs of struggle. How she’d let the house go, he couldn’t imagine. Before the divorce, I heard her shout: I’m no one’s maid. Years later, when my father asks how we lived in such squalor, I tell him I never noticed at the time, though once I did: My best friend, Heather, and I were playing outside when a sudden shower drove us to huddle under the eaves. Soaked, I took pity, opened the door, disobeying my mother’s one rule. Inside, Heather didn’t ask questions about the mildew, the crumpled paper bags she had to brush aside to sit. She refused the towel I handed her to undo the work of the rain. I saw it then: tatty, gray, stained. Heather left, and later, when my mother found the couch still wet, I told the truth. Her face flushed; I tried to bolt. She reined me in with one hand, unfastened her belt. If they see this, they’ll take you from me, she screamed through the volley of blows. My back grew a rope of welts. They’ll call me unfit. Is that what you want? I tell my father none of this, judge it best not to show him the last bits of how his ex fell apart once they were unhitched. I don’t say how I, too, was the mess, tether she yearned to slip, so she could careen unimpeded through life, how I held tight as she zoomed away, raced toward a place where she’d be no one’s mother, no one’s wife.

Envy

September 30, 2014.Reading time 13 minutes.

By Patricia Horvath

The sign on the door says: Children Under 18 Not Admitted to the Chemotherapy Suite Under Any Circumstances.

They call it a suite, this room at St. Luke’s Roosevelt Hospital where chemotherapy is administered, as though its occupants were members of some elite group, which in a sense I suppose they are. For reasons that elude me, the chemotherapy suite is located on the same floor as maternity services, and the elevator is often crowded with an odd mix of cancer patients and pregnant women. The cancer patients are generally hairless, elderly, their skin ashy, their bones prominent. The pregnant women are all flesh and smiles.

On Jeff’s first day of chemo, three months earlier, a couple made out during the entire ride to the eleventh floor. Teenagers practically, they wore tight jeans, cropped vinyl jackets. Her back hard against the elevator rail, her distended belly pressed into her partner. They made little moaning noises as they kissed. I tried to give Jeff my “What the fuck is this?” look, but he was too preoccupied—or maybe too polite—to notice. The other passengers looked away. I watched them not watching and then I stared at the floor.

Seafood

September 28, 2014.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Amanda Williamsen

Baltimore, Maryland

My uncle calls from the wharf; his freighter is in;
he’s walked to the nearest food and I find him
in a crab shack at a table by the window.
Waitresses carry crabs on trays, whole piles of them—
stiff, blue, dead—and the restaurant patter crackles
with the brittle speech of small mallets on their shells.
Elena, his wife—she’s from Colombia, my age—
wants a divorce. She’s living in Miami
with some Cuban, he says; she’s got his TV and his car.
When his crabs come, I order grilled cheese,
tell him about karma, how I’ve removed myself
from the chain of suffering and he says, shit,
picks up a crab and whacks it squarely on the back.
He tells me about winters on Superior, ice boats
cracking a path through December until the solid freeze
of January, how he shoveled iron ore from the hold
until the red dust rose in clouds from his clothing,
rinsed from his body in the shower like a gallon of blood;
and before that, how he went to Vietnam while my father
went to college, how he bombed the jungle beneath him
without ever looking down while my father dropped
out of college without ever looking ahead;
and before that, before the war, how the two of them
hit a tree one night while driving on River Road.
You’d have thought we wanted to be that tree, he says.
It broke the car, broke seven of his ribs, nearly broke
my father’s heart but in the end it just broke his spleen
and ripped him open from shoulder to hip.
My great aunt—the whole family tells the story now—
came from Kansas and prayed him back from the dead.

Crisis on Infinite Earths, Issues 1-12

September 24, 2014.Reading time 5 minutes.

By Bethany Schultz Hurst

I. I’m at a poetry convention and wish I were at Comic Con. Everyone is wearing boring T-shirts.

When I give the lady my name, she prints it wrong onto the name tag. I spell it and she gets it wrong again. Let’s be honest: it’s still my fault.

II.
Japanese tsunami debris
is starting to wash up
on the Pacific shore. At first,
they trace back the soccer balls,

motorcycles, return them
to their owners. That won’t last.

September 22, 2014.Reading time less than 1 minute.

Coins for the Ferryman

September 22, 2014.Reading time 53 minutes.

By David Denny

Marlene and Ralph walked up Kaanapali Beach about half a mile from their hotel. They sat in a corner of an outdoor restaurant with a floor of sand. Each of the small, round tables was shaded by an umbrella made of palm leaves. A row of tropical greenery, punctuated with orange and red hibiscus, separated the restaurant from the boardwalk. They could hear the waves hitting the sand about forty feet away.

Marlene slipped off her sandals and wiggled her toes in the cool sand as she looked over the menu. Mahi was her new favorite; however, she’d eaten it two days in a row and thought she should try something else. Up next to the bar, a local singer was nearing the end of his lunchtime set. He took a slug of water, traded his guitar for a ukulele, and began crooning the popular island version of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.” Marlene wasn’t all that hungry. A shrimp cocktail and a Diet Coke might do the trick. Her husband had his cell phone out on the table in front of him, checking their reservation for the dinner cruise out of Lahaina harbor. He had decided before he left the hotel that he would order a burger; he was tired of fish already.

Whatever I Might Say

September 14, 2014.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Sydney Lea

Though to touch its flame would surely be as painful as when it burned brighter, the candle’s low now. On the table, just prior to guttering after dinner, it vaguely illuminates friends.

The glow takes me to Creston MacArthur, one son’s and one grandson’s namesake, and to our many evenings as a campfire ebbed. Just now I’m remembering a particular night, the two of us seated next to a favorite river, swapping stories. His were better.

A bleakness sinks into me despite the patent pleasures of this later interlude with other people I care for and admire. I’ve long savored their camaraderie, their conversation, their gifts for wit. The lateness of the hour has turned our talk to rote murmuring, something like the water of that river, which always flows right below my consciousness.

I should do more now than merely prattle with these good companions, just as I should have said more to Creston, gone almost forty years, and perhaps he to me. Or maybe not: deep in the woods, barred owls started to chatter that night. “Like a good pack of hounds,” Creston said, and that woodsy locution seemed perfect, seemed pinpoint accurate.

Still I’m unsettled. It’s as though I were looking on these people here, on my children, on my children’s children, on my past—I’m looking from above. Having failed to put the right words together, I’ve risen over our group like smoke. The chill in my spirit has something to do with feeling removed, and feeling removed because I’m tongue-tied, tongue-tied for fear that any speech of mine will sound formulaic.

It’s late. The guests will leave. The candle’s wick whispers. I must hope I’ve found a way of being with loved ones that’s better than any talk I could grope for, than any I craved as those old fires grayed, a way that bespoke me better than whatever I may have said, whatever I might say now.

September 10, 2014.Reading time less than 1 minute.

The Pain Suit

September 10, 2014.Reading time 1 minute.

By Claire Bateman

If you happen to live in a broad and open place,
you can watch as it comes flying in your direction—

not really a suit, of course, just the mask and gloves,
though considering its effect, the term is apt.

You can’t hope it’s hunting some stranger, since everyone knows
that it’s visible only to its destined bearer;

you can’t clutch at bystanders, seeking a human shield,
since it passes through every obstruction without even slowing.

It’s probably best to become a city-dweller,
surrounded by walls, oblivious to its approach,

unless you’re one of the those fools who step forward to meet it,
flexing their fingers to feel for the cleanest fit.

Tropospheric

September 8, 2014.Reading time 1 minute.

By Claire Bateman

For all the times
we’ve checked the weather,

why won’t it reciprocate,
inquiring into our condition,
our immediate and long-term forecasts?

Is it oblivious, incurious,
self-absorbed?

Maybe it can’t distinguish us
from other natural features—
the wind gap, the echo hall.

Maybe it can’t perceive us,
not even as spaces
between the spaces,

though its least breath is epic,
having passed through
each of us

as we labor to articulate
all that we’re determined
to withhold.

Purchase

September 6, 2014.Reading time 1 minute.

By Claire Bateman

At last the heirloom china rides
cupboardless, exposed and free
upon Suspension™.

Books float alphabuoyantly unshelved
upon Suspension™.

Bartenders slide their brews
frictionless
along Suspension™.

At the Louvre,
tourists circumnavigate
the Mona Lisa
enthroned in sheerness now
upon Suspension ™.

Even the lowly toothbrush
rests its bristles, moist,
upon Suspension™.

And though we still shape
our shirts on hangers
as in days of yore,

now we’re free to set them dangling
everywhere,

just as we arrange our limbs
to sleep upon transparency

anywhere.

Nevertheless,
we can’t agree:

is there less
or more clutter
since we unanimously opted
for Suspension™?

Tutti Frutti for Me

September 4, 2014.Reading time 33 minutes.

By Andrea Simon

I’m watching The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet on the giant Admiral 21-inch console television, and I can’t wait for the commercial to raid the freezer and see if there’s any ice cream. My father, mother, and sister are in the living room; and it’s no use asking them because my father would not answer me, my sister would order me to bring her a bowl of whatever I find, and my mother would say that I should look myself if I want anything that badly. Besides, what I’m longing for does not exist in this small Brooklyn apartment. I need to find tutti frutti ice cream, and the only flavors my mother buys are butter pecan for my father and chocolate for my sister. Every time I tell my mother that I don’t have the same taste as my sister, she seems surprised and says, “Why, I thought chocolate was your favorite.” I always answer her with the truth, “I love vanilla.” But it may as well be tutti frutti because she never listens to me.

The reason I’m crazy with the tutti frutti is because in the show, the Nelsons see a story in the newspaper about a police sergeant who was keeping a lost boy happy with a large tutti frutti cone, entertaining him until his parents showed up. This is the one night the Nelsons decided to forgo dessert in order to cut down on calories. Ricky, the troublemaker, wants tutti frutti badly. Darning socks, wearing a high-necked sweater with a double strand of pearls, Harriet Nelson says, “I haven’t tasted tutti frutti in years.”

Feature: Should Poems Tell the Truth?

September 2, 2014.Reading time 40 minutes.

By Lawrence Raab

Mid-way through my freshman year at college, my roommate, Roger, asked if I would read a poem he’d written and tell him what I thought. I was pleased to be considered a literary person whose opinion might be valued. And my roommate, who would major in geology, had previously shown no interest in poetry. “Of course,” I said.

The subject of the poem was the death of Roger’s father, and I felt a small shock in reading it, since no one I knew had yet lost a parent. Unfortunately, Roger’s poem was a very bad poem. I don’t now remember the various ways in which it failed, but there seemed no doubt in my mind. Given the subject, however, what kind of criticism would be appropriate or bearable?

I began by expressing my condolences, and Roger interrupted quickly to say, No, his father hadn’t really died. That was just the subject of the poem. “But you can’t do that!” I exclaimed. Perhaps I didn’t actually exclaim, or even say it directly. But it was what I felt. This was wrong, a violation of some rule or code. You couldn’t do it, or you shouldn’t.

August 30, 2014.Reading time less than 1 minute.

Feature: Where Are You Really From? Reading and Writing Place and Experience

August 30, 2014.Reading time 19 minutes.

By Adrienne Su

Maxine Kumin’s poem “Encounter in August” describes a standoff between gardener and black bear over a crop of beans:

                                Inside the tepee that admits
                                sunlight to the underpart
                                he stands eating my Kentucky Wonders.
                                Downs pod after pod, spilling the beans,
                                the ones I’d saved for shelling out
                                this winter, thinking soup
                                when he’d gone deep, denned up.

The speaker stands ten feet from the bear and watches him devour her beans. The bear doesn’t notice her while he polishes off the season’s yield. The danger to the gardener goes unstated; mainly, we feel her indignation and loss. The encounter ends with the bear’s oblivious departure and the speaker’s effort to make peace with what has happened:

                                At last he goes the way the skunk
                                does, supreme egoist, ambling
                                into the woodlot on all fours
                                leaving my trellis flat and beanless
                                and yet I find the trade-off fair:
                                beans and more beans for this hour of bear.

Feature: A Brief Response

August 28, 2014.Reading time 1 minute.

By Louise Glück

Frankly, I have no idea why this should be any sort of problem. I love discovering that a reality, or what I experienced as a reality, is invented, that a world has been contrived to provide context for a set of perceptions, or for a voice that is almost by definition other than the poet’s in some way. Pretty much nothing I write is literally true, and very little is borrowed from someone else’s stories, which seems to me immoral. A voice presents itself and around that voice events form. I love this in fiction and assume it In poetry. Otherwise we’d all be hopelessly limited.

Feature: Telling the Truth in Poetry

August 26, 2014.Reading time 19 minutes.

By Carl Dennis

All good poems must be truthful, but the truthfulness they embody is not that of accuracy to historical fact but fidelity to what might be called the facts of the human condition. In the service of discovering and expressing fundamental attitudes toward life, poetry is allowed, with some qualifications, a license similar to that accorded to fiction and drama: the freedom to substitute imagined materials for those it finds ready-made in the world. Poetic license means that William Wordsworth would have been free to write a poem about meeting a leech-gatherer even if he had never met one in the flesh, that Matthew Arnold would have been free to write a poem about standing on the beach at Dover with his sweetheart without ever having been to Dover, that Robert Frost would have been free to write a poem about picking apples even if he had never picked apples, if, say, a bone spur in his left foot had made it too painful for him to use a ladder. The demands of the poem itself are allowed to take precedence over any demand for strict autobiographical accuracy.

Feature: “Father”

August 22, 2014.Reading time 7 minutes.

By Michael Ryan

Like almost every other MFA graduate then and since, I couldn’t get a teaching job in 1972 after I earned my degree. My teachers—Marvin Bell and Donald Justice—kindly offered to let me stay and work on The Iowa Review if I enrolled in the PhD program and thereby qualified for graduate student support. So I did. The magazine was staffed mostly by workshop students like me and to entertain ourselves we tacked on the office bulletin board particularly psychotic submission cover letters. My favorite was a five-page letter handwritten in red ink whose salutation was “Fuck you, Iowa Review Pig” and went on from there with further compliments about the quality of our magazine and our excellent judgment concerning previous submissions that we had declined to publish. I’d go into the office a couple afternoons a week and screen poems. There were a mountain of them (the magazine was already getting thousands of submissions a year). After a few weeks of this, I developed the skill to reject poems based on cover letters ranging from the aforementioned “Fuck you, Iowa Review Pig” to “I enclose some Christmas verses my pastor enjoyed so much.”

I still remember opening an envelope that contained no cover letter at all and this poem:

New Ohio Review Issue 15 (Originally published in Spring 2014)

June 1, 2014.Reading time less than 1 minute.

Issue 15 compiled by Jade Braden.

Fear of the Bird Migration

May 30, 2014.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Darren Morris

Featured Art: Bird by Peter Takal

I was attempting
the old familiar,
the regular slog,
when I slipped into
missing her again,
the child my wife and I
would never have.
Sometimes she was
a girl and sometimes
a boy. But like heaven,
I held her there
in my mind, a place
of light where nothing
is done, but all is felt.
She was a multitude.
The great uncapturable
plasm of love. Often
she was only
a finch’s thin line across
a rice-paper sky, tearing
through all stations of life.
The way she might
have worn her hair,
or adorned the surprising aspect
of surface-self for appeal.
Or how the supremacy
of personality might emerge,
wriggling out as it does.
Or the first run-in with
terrible, terrible sexuality.

Cups

May 28, 2014.Reading time 9 minutes.

By Cecilia Pinto

Featured Art: Resting by Antonio Mancini

Many years ago I watched a documentary about people with mental illness. One of the patients presented was a young woman who had been institutionalized. Despite being an adult physically, she acted like a little girl and lived in a room filled with dolls. She wanted more than anything to be spanked because she equated this with love. No one would comply with her request which made her desperate and upset.

I have remembered this.

In another documentary I learned of a girl who had been kept in severe isolation and abused for most of her young life. Her deprivation left her sensitive to light and without language. Partial rehabilitation was achieved but it was noted that the girl felt it absolutely necessary to keep multiple glasses of liquids in her room.

When I think about the first young woman, I see her story line in a candy-colored palette, baby pinks, blues and soft yellows. The curtains billow, the bedclothes pool, there are fat, dancing animals with little eyes.

The second girl’s images are black, white and gray. The girl moves through her story like an animated charcoal drawing; sketchy, vibrating lines, electric black hair, skittering movements. I think of black crows flapping into the sky, the glint in their eyes, the glint in the water in all the glasses. She carries glasses of water in front of her as if she is a priestess.