Category: Uncategorized

Deadhead the Marigolds

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Bridget Bell

I am forever bending toward you like
the marigold starters packed onto
these plastic trays curve 

toward the windows. I save my SSRI
bottles. Pack them full of the papery
seeds from the deadheaded 

wasted petals, pulled off at their narrow necks and
even these stupid flowers
know they need warmth to survive. You say you are trying 

but when you pass through the
door arch—the one I’m leaning
into (as if to hold me up)— 

you do not brush against me so it feels like you
are lying, like you’ve passed through this tight
space, not only without touching me 

but with an avoidance of touch. I
turn the plastic trays so the
seedlings curve away 

from the sun—and tomorrow when I check
they will lean again toward the window—
all the back and forth 

buttresses their stems into strong green
spines, so I know they will be okay when
they are left outside and exposed for the
first time to all the brutal elements.

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Two Wars

.Reading time 54 minutes.

By Jasmine V. Bailey

No one knew Putin when he became
prime minister. I remember it well—Dan

In case there is any doubt, I am guilty.
—Dzhokhar Tsarnaev

“The thing about Chechnya is, there were two wars,” Dan says, fishing two Chalkidiki olives out of the jar with chopsticks and plopping them into chilled glasses. The ten-year anniversary of the Boston Marathon Bombing is coming up, and I am feeling nostalgic or depressed, and I want to get to the bottom of something in my mind. “We refer to Putin’s war as the ‘second war’ in Chechnya, counting Yeltsin’s war in the 1990s as the first. But really the first was the Russian imperial war to make Chechnya part of the Russian empire, and the second was Stalin’s exile of Chechens to Kazakhstan.”

“Exile qualifies as war?” I ask.

“It’s a euphemism for genocide. Between half- and three-quarters of a million Chechens were rounded up at gunpoint and forced to move to resettlement camps. They had less than half an hour to pack, and Soviet soldiers shot people for any reason. They got them out quick so they could plunder their houses. If there was any organized resistance, they killed everyone. They were stuffed into cattle trains in the middle of winter and transported 2,000 miles to godforsaken places in Central Asia with no food, shelter, or infrastructure. A quarter of them died. Half of them were children.”

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For My Husband Out Too Far

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Chelsea Rathburn

My mother calls about another death,
this one a neighbor I haven’t met who took
his paddleboard out at dawn and never came home,
body and board found drifting a day later.
Given his age, we guess a heart attack,
but when my parents drop off a casserole,
his widow explains he died by suicide
in the place he loved. She says it matter-of-factly,
their teenage daughter standing behind her
as my parents fumble their condolences. 
She thought they were through the worst of it, she says,
and hearing the story of strangers’ pain I think
maybe ours will never end, or maybe this
is how it will end for us, just when I think
we’re safe. The ebb and flood of your depression
determines the rhythms of our days,
for whenever I think we’ll never sink
so deep again, your face becomes a mask
and I become someone who says, Your father
is having one of his spells, as if you’re a wizard,
or cursed. I’ve told you how my grandfather
thought that his epilepsy was a sign of Satan,
and how my grandmother, watching him preach,
her eye trained on the pulpit, would leap to her feet
when she saw a seizure coming, speaking in tongues
as if the Holy Spirit moved her, since that
alone would keep the congregation from seeing
what she saw. Love oh love, can love be enough
to save us, can I be life vest and vessel and breath?

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Unaccompanied Minors

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Chelsea Rathburn

—San Francisco to Miami, 1951 

My father recalls nothing of the flight itself, only
arriving, dazed, to meet the mother 

he hadn’t seen since he was still in diapers.
He doesn’t know how they left the foster home, 

or if his father was there to say goodbye,
or who paid for the tickets, only that they 

flew alone, he and his sister, arguing
over just whose Ami they were headed for. 

On the tarmac twelve hours later, he heard
two strangers yelling: his mother and new father, 

shouting a name they’d coined for him. They seemed
surprised, even angry, he didn’t know 

to answer to it. His memory stops there,
in that moment. Their anger never ended. 

His sister swears now there was an engine fire
that she spotted, then an emergency landing. 

More likely she remembers the stop in Dallas
to refuel, but my father’s given up correcting her.

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Blue-handled Grabber

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Maura Stanton

Before her stroke, my mother used it to grab
a fallen tissue, or the newspaper crossword
when it slipped off her lap. Now it’s mine,
sitting in my study near an artist’s easel
unfolded for years. Squeeze the handles
and the grabber’s bite picks up anything light,
even a paperclip, with its magnetic lip.
Don’t want to stoop? The grabber pulls underwear
out of the dryer, or lifts the catch-and-release
mousetrap so I can see if it’s still empty.
It swipes the ceiling cobwebs, or picks up
an M&M or a grape rolled under the fridge.
On autumn walks I could use the grabber to yank
more yellow leaves off the trees to let me see
the architecture of winter below the froth,
or maybe, sitting by a window some dark night
I might grab a distant star out of the sky,
one of those little pinpricks from a galaxy
far from our own, where life’s more cheerful.
The tiny star would tremble on its way,
gleaming and giving off blue sparks as I pulled
it down with the grabber, and made it mine.

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Lunch with Heron

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Maura Stanton
Featured Art: “Black Barn, Adjacent Land” by Thad DeVassie

After the rain, a heron’s stalking the stream,
lifting its delicate knees, neck outstretched,
and just as I pass by, it dips its sharp beak—
flash of silver—and swallows a small fish.
Shocked, I stand on the bank as the fat bulge
moves down the gray throat and disappears. 

But it’s not the fish, it’s the bit of silver
that’s stung me—and then I see it—
the job committee that took me out to lunch
when I was desperate for any sort of work.
Unwrapping a big, foil-covered burrito,
chatting brightly to the closed faces,
I didn’t notice foil stuck to my first bite
until I tasted metal. Then the sharp edge
cut my throat, and I coughed and coughed,
sputtering beans and salsa as I choked.
Someone slapped my back, but I had to reach
inside my mouth with my fingers to get it out
while my hosts looked aghast at the silver bit.
Another job I wasn’t going to get, I thought,
and ordered a beer, though I wasn’t drinking.

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On Learning to Play the Shakuhachi Before You’re Dead

.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Ash Good

Sometimes, or probably all the time and with the same outcome, 
I try something new, or old for that matter,
like playing the shakuhachi, and can’t get the damn thing 
to make a single solitary sound, not even a noise that would annoy my wife,
and cause her to give me that look. That would at the least, be somethin worth complaining about,
and even in terms of complaining, I fail to create much commotion,
but after years of puckering my lips as if going in for a kiss
and blowing over the simplest of angled cuts
on the most ordinary of all bamboo sticks, the shakuhachi is silent. 
I thought it would make me wise, and it is silent. 
I thought it would calm my inner demons, and yet—silent anger.
I thought it could help me find inner peace, but inner turmoil rises
with breath after breath until I’m out of breath and must catch it
and maybe this was the point, maybe the final answer is to be more silent.
But then, I know that shakuhachis do, in practice, make sounds,
and making sounds with the shakuhachi is what I wanted to do,
regardless of some Buddhist lesson in futility. 
I imagined myself playing the shakuhachi at parties and office retreats,
under waterfalls in Hawaii, at a Japanese appreciation festival,
while sitting as peaceful and grounded as a boulder,
rooted by a healthy and robust butt chakra, 
or outside a Buddhist temple with a basket on my head—
I even have a proper basket— 
on spiritual trips to Bhutan, or at local yoga classes,
at least local yoga, but still and always, along with all Gods
and the vast Universe, there is effort and intention
only to be followed by more silence. 
Sometimes I hum through it and pretend. 
Sometimes I think, definitely, without a doubt, this is a faulty shakuhachi. 
There is something deeply wrong with this shakuhachi, 
something dark and disturbing and beyond my grasp. 
But then—I do hear something. 
There is a voice calling to me from inside the shakuhachi.
It is wise and it is smug, and it represents all things
as they pertain to the essence of the embodiment of me,
and it says, “Well, there’s one thing we know for sure,
the problem isn’t the shakuhachi.”

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Boxes

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Rodd Whelpley
Featured Art: “Random Toothpicks #4” by Thom Hawkins

On the top shelf are coffee cups
from which I never drank
and, next to all the ghosts
of passwords, sits a stout list
of dog names I will never use.
Life is a short place, littered
with vital, misremembered notions,
riddled with porcelain shards—
spoiled gifts from a son at summer camp
or souvenirs from crispy-aired mountains
where slow steam curled past the lips
of eco-friendly paper cups. Careful boys,
careful how you finally pack my house. 
Don’t miss that stuff that isn’t there.

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Wedding Present

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Rodney Jones

Moving the box carefully because it might break
Or is so heavy anyone might get hurt carrying it 

Awkwardly because one is always slighter 
And struggling to get small hands placed under it, 

And what are the chances they are in the vicinity
Of a hornet’s nest, solicitor, or snarling dog? 

Not to speak of impediments, bumps in the sidewalk,
Narrow steps, the blind ascent of a little hill— 

O it is especially difficult when the weight shifts
And the one in front who is walking backward 

Breaks step but laughs when they finally set it down,
Open it and spread the parts out on the rug 

Though some of the parts they need are missing 
And the instructions translated from another language.

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Something You Should Know

.Reading time 43 minutes.

By Swathi Desai

The email from Kalpana’s niece showed up at the top of her personal inbox. There were no other addressees and only one Cc appeared displaying her niece’s email address. The subject line read: Something You Should Know. Kalpana thought the subject odd, but she closed the email without reading it; she didn’t have time this morning. Her day was filled with meetings; the email would have to wait until tonight when she returned home.

The last time she received an email from Jyoti was after her high school graduation, about ten years ago. Unlike this email, that one was sent en masse, to relatives and family friends thanking them for their generous graduation gifts. All of the addresses, some fifty or sixty of them, were clearly displayed in the recipient line. Kalpana recalled that Jyoti excelled in both academics and the arts, graduating from high school at sixteen and wanting to use her talents to “make the world a more beautiful place,” as she’d written in her thank you email. She added that she would be thinking of them all as she went off to study architecture at Cornell. 

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Wilt

.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Kathleen Rooney
Featured Art: “Spring Returns and So Do I” by Leo Arkus

Usages tilt and words can wither, but they don’t get torn down like buildings do. 

O archaic present tense second-person singular of will, of what wilt thy obsolescence consist? 

To lose turgor from lack of water. To become limp or to languish. O language, if thou wilt not do as I insist, I shall shrivel and droop out of dry brown anguish. 

Words whose referents no longer exist—place them in a room painted pale museum green, cool and clean, a calming space, filled with monstera, dieffenbachia, and schefflera, their leaves a-flap like floppy disks. 

Modern humans suffer from what botanists call plant blindness, moving through life insensate to vegetation, failing to recognize plants at all other than something we might eat. 

“Salad bar” originates in 1940 in American English, “fern bar” in the late 1960s. Do lettuce leaves look more appealing behind sneezeguards? Do ferns thrive in light cast by ersatz Tiffany lamps? 

The flowers upturn their ferocious faces. Would that I could catch what I need from the sky. 

Wilt Chamberlain’s full first name was “Wilton,” but his high school classmates called him “Wilt the Stilt.” Seven-foot-one is tall, but that’s nothing to a tree. He claimed to have had sex with over 20,000 women (despite being “shy”). You’d never catch a tree trying to brag about that. 

At my elementary school, we put on A Midsummer Night’s Dream, abridged considerably. I laughed backstage at my friend Bryn, playing Bottom, declaiming at Titania: “Out of this wood do not desire to go. / Thou shalt remain here whether thou wilt or no.” 

WILT as acronym—What I’m Listening To: Mort Garson’s 1976 album Mother Earth’s Plantasia: “warm earth music for plants . . . and the people who love them.” Soothing, tuneful Moog instrumentals. 

Unlike certain humans I could name, no plant has ever said anything to spoil my mood. 

What’s happening down there beneath the soil? Calibrate your sense of time to plant growth. 

The dreams of plants unfurl with the slow force of a thousand forests. 

In The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky writes, “The centripetal force on our planet is still fearfully strong, Alyosha. I have a longing for life, and I go on living in spite of logic. Though I may not believe in the order of the universe, yet I love the sticky little leaves as they open in spring.”

The federal government banned lead paint in 1978

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Caroline White
Featured Art: “Untitled” by Josiane Kouagheu

but, like an outlaw, that does not just make it
disappear: the act of searching, of hunting
down becomes something like adoration—
riding on horseback through the night only to
catch a glimpse of him, to describe again the
color of his hair. And so with two hands on
the roller we sealed in the lead paint with the
boombox in the center of the room, the disc
gliding around and around like Saturn’s ring.
My father painted wide and calculated
stripes. The room felt special when it was
empty, like a museum—our voices touched,
echoing into each other. This is how it feels
to be the first figurines in the snow globe
before they drown you. Before the snow falls
and won’t stop falling. It was a soft green. I
was painting flowers and leaves and then
they were sinking into the rest of the paint,
hidden; the lead, layers away from us and
dormant. Sealed off like unspeakable
memory, somewhere deep in there, the tiny
flecks staining a ripped sweatshirt. I have
lost so much inside myself. I have forgotten
what music was playing.

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The Growth of the Bureau of Infinite Growth

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Lucas Jorgenson
Featured Art: “Doorways Guarding the Mind” by John Zywar

It started on The President’s cheek. Small and pink, like he was always chewing bubblegum, obvious only if he smiled. He loved it immediately, saw in it our whole future, history, changed laws for it, made it the national mascot, respected its autonomy and rights. 

It got bigger: a meatball, a mango, a baby’s spare-haired head. It started teething. The teeth erupted bicuspid, perfect, glistening, and always white. The President feared its deflation more than anything, went on an all-milk diet, kept a fresh toothbrush in his shirt pocket to polish its every point. It was a full-time job. At night, he tucked it into a crib beside him, whispering questions about tomorrow’s weather, macroeconomic policy. 

It got bigger: a coconut, a disco ball, the head of a bull. The highest honor The President could offer was to extract a tooth and implant it in the recipient’s chest. But he got jealous. He hoarded it. It wanted to be hoarded. It waterballooned over his eyes. 

His fingers withered, plums into prunes. He said he weighed more than ever, felt healthy, robust. It rode him like a jockey. His words were garbled with it. Undulating like a pom-pom, it punctuated his every point. It got bigger: a boulder, a meteor. Underneath it, The President shrunk. He loved it. It chewed him up. He was all smiles all the time.

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Malpractice Insurance for Poets

.Reading time 4 minutes.

By David Gullette
Featured Art: “Doomed From the Start” by Thad DeVassie

I mean, 
suppose you opened up your reader’s heart but carelessly
left in the cavity a jagged mixed metaphor? 

Or swore in writing to tell only the truth but used invisible
ink and the stiffed readers cried “Fraud!” and came after you
with something resembling pitchforks? 

Or your rap sheet said you repeatedly named emotions
instead of re-enacting that spot of time that would shake
your readers to the core without telling them what to call
it? 

Or in your fine poem the fine print is
flea-bitten with clichés like “to the
core” 
or “I had never been so unhappy in my life” or
“My father always told me” etc.? 

Or at the Open Mic you groaned out your poem with the
endless Gregorian monotone the Poets’ Theatre calls “The
American Drone Strike”? 
(audience shuffles, checks watches, stares at ceiling). 

Mistakes have consequences, people!
That’s why you need to sell your
house cash in your Roth 
pawn your first edition of Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror
signed “For (your name here) very cordially John Ashbery”
so you can buy our top-of-the-line policy that covers all the
mishaps mentioned above a list that (believe me) only
“scratches the surface.” 

We offer multiple paths of escape from your . . . Let’s
call them slip-ups 
including a new identity as some nondescript who
evinces no interest in writing anything followed by
transplantation to some mindless spot 
(American Virgin Islands?) where no one will
recognize you as the guy whose sonnet used the
same rhyme twice: 
especially after your state-of-the-art
face and hair and voice transplants
[Part 3, paragraphs 4–6] that will
make you unrecognizable 
even to your dead mother who keeps popping up in your poems like a
(hey, time for a moratorium on similes). 

You didn’t think of all this when you were in Poetry School.
Or during your Residency. 
Or were made Partner. 
Or got mentioned in Dispatches as 
“once up-and-coming and now a known quantity
in the world of American poetry.” But this is the
real world, kid. 
Real and unforgiving. 
One false move and down you go. 
Which is why Insurance was invented. 

After the first substantial deposit 
along with the sworn affidavit in which you promise
to lay off poetry once and for all it’s a series of
manageable monthly payments wired to our
headquarters in the Cayman Islands, where no one
remembers anything. It’s not that we forgive you (not
our job). 
It’s that we cover your tracks and
make you disappear long before
your pen has gleaned your
excessively teeming brain. 

And what a relief that will be!

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Meat Bird

.Reading time 21 minutes.

By Marika Guthrie

Everyone in Shirttail called her Familiar. Not because that was her name, no one knew her name. And not because eventually the men of Shirttail would become as familiar with Familiar as the inside of their own palms. No, they called her Familiar because she felt familiar to them despite not being born in Shirttail or spending a day of her short life there before arriving unannounced to squat in the late Larson Boucher’s chicken coop.  

That trashy little blank-faced girl over at Larson’s place sure seems familiar, got shortened to, that familiar-sorta-girl living in Boucher’s old meat bird coop, got shortened to, that familiar girl, and within five days they had talked her over so hard she was whittled down to Familiar.  

The meat bird coop was twenty-three paces east of Larson Boucher’s twobedroom house, which was set behind Boucher’s Gas & Garage. The station had died years before the man. Wild Turkey brought premature death to them both in equal measure. Boucher’s Gas & Garage was on the south end of town, spitting distance from the “Welcome to Shirttail” sign, erected by the Rotary Club. Proximity to that marker made Familiar an outskirts problem, not an intown scandal. Still, “town” wasn’t but three blocks away, and the residents of Shirttail watched from the sides of their eyes and talked out the sides of their mouths.  

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Questions for the Lord in the Court of Divine Indifference

.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Kerry James Evans

Lord, hasn’t it been long enough? I’ve prayed
three days straight, read Matthew, Mark, most of Luke,
and John. I’ve called my grandmothers,
listened for you in every note of the bluebird’s song,
and yesterday I even spoke to your messenger,
walking the dog—a chipmunk escaping
the screams of a circling hawk into a split log. 

Lord, if this is the end, can I have a bowl of ice cream?
Can I toke up one last time? Can we agree
to skip the next World War? No? I’ll settle
for a housing crisis, another divorce—whatever’s left
on your Armageddon Bingo card.
Lord, forgive my lowly sentiment. I’m tired
of missing my ex. Since she left, all I do 

is litigate with the walls. I never win. 
The opposition? Stoic, crown-molded from corner
to baseboard. Its argument linear, square.
I should know. I painted each wall
an assortment of pastels, hoping to please her.
I didn’t account for how light shapes a house
throughout the day—how dark a room 

becomes when all that’s left is you. Your Honor,
the defense recognizes it won’t change anything,
but I need to repaint the walls. Do it now,
I hear you say from on high, but, for the life of me, 
I can’t grasp how you made a world
in seven days. After years of trial, 
I still struggle to fry an egg. Who doesn’t? 
Phil Tucker, the postal worker, stops
every morning at Flagg Chapel Pavilion
and slides open the door of his box truck
to burn a cigarette. Once he’s snuffed
the butt under his boot, he’s off to finish the route.
I don’t smoke anymore, but find myself wanting
to be more like him. What’s that about? 

Why is it, despite your best efforts,
I’m filled with this stubborn, juvenile belief
that you’ll return in a whirlwind, halo and all?
Lord, if you can render honey from a speck
of flower dust, what’s your plan for me?
I know a bowl of ice cream is asking a lot,
but I promise to wash the dishes when I’m done.

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First Joy

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Jana-Lee Germaine

Hard to pick the moment—first smudge
of my smile when my nephew, learning the
Earth’s age, told his teacher Grandpa’s old
as dirt! so serious, so proud to connect
eons with epochs with his own long span. 

No antidote for grief, Just walk
straight through, mom always
said, don’t stop to smell the
self-pity. My heart pushing its
wheelbarrow dirt and rocks
across the overgrown lawn, 

Sisyphus New England–style, until
one morning I flip through the
comic-a-day calendar and laugh,
though months and months too late. 

Hard to pick where—to untangle one katydid note
from the rest in September, synchronous scrumming
legs like insect Rockettes. Easier to say it was that
first leaf in autumn to orange: unexpected flash
among reams of still- 

green, precocious student of temperature
shifts you can’t unsee, can’t unfocus on once
your eye lights it, signal flare that means not
help anymore, but a spot to mark, here. The
end of something approaches, 

I learn first to drop, allot each piece to
patchwork air, branches lift, shuck down to 
simplest selves so you can see them stretch,
lengthen, then second: to stand, 

in an attitude suggesting peace, not understood by
the ever-grinding mind, but held in the core,
learning still, learning know that I am, in a far
country, meditate on the merits of snow.

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The Unhealed

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Brad Aaron Modlin

The ones who weren’t healed didn’t make it into
the Bible, but remained still as ponds the wind has
forgotten, seated as always 

on their straw mats, while across Jerusalem, a lucky one
stood for the first time and walked, her heels learning the
hot dirt. And that lucky 

woman, all she could do—feeling the ground as
it pushes back against our steps—was say,
“What, what, what.” And the man whose sight 

returned shouted, “Yellow!” like an old friend’s name. 
“Carry me home,” the unhealed instructed
their companions, 

and there, where everyone lingered in the dark as if
the curtains had no drawstrings, someone started to
say, “I’m so sorry,” but couldn’t get past I. 

And everyone drank hot water because there
was no tea and no one wanted to leave to buy
any, and no one wanted the water 

to end either, until it had to, because it had to, and the Bible left
out the friend who mentioned, too soon, returning the new
sandals the unhealed had bought 

prematurely. Then, while the room sat silent,
pretending never to have heard of shoes before, the
unhealed chewed a fingernail and thought for the
first time of many, “Maybe tomorrow. 

Maybe he will pass by and see me.” Finally,
remembering our hunger 

never stops, someone felt their way to the stove. And the
room ate flatbread unfamously, and halibut with lemon, and
what rose from the ground— 

a feast of more food than they’d expected to find there—
their wooden spoons scraping the bowls, the rising moon
scratching at the curtains.

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.Reading time 6 minutes.

Hand Over Hand Over the Edge of the World

By Claire Bateman

Let’s begin with genre. While Patrick Swaney’s Hand Over Hand Over the Edge of the World (YesYes Books, 2025) is described in its promotional materials as prose poems, the title piece won Nanofiction’s 2012 Nano Prize, and Swaney himself refers to it as a story. This slippage is generative: on the flash-fiction/prose-poem continuum, there’s space for experimentation in the messy middle, and that piece exemplifies this fluidity:

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The Deletions by Sarah Green

.Reading time 9 minutes.

By Bethany Schultz Hurst

Sarah Green’s second poetry collection, The Deletions (University of Akron Press, 2025), considers how to reckon with loss on a spectrum from personal to global—from divorce to violence, mortality, and ecological crisis. “How can I stay in this body?” asks the speaker in “The Afterlife.” The question reverberates throughout the collection: How can we contain our many griefs, or expect our fragile bodies to contain us as we grieve?

In many ways, the book itself seems organized into a neat container. Divided into three sections of similar length, most of its poems are one-pagers, often using conventionally-punctuated stanzas of equal length. Resisting that containment, though, are several outliers, sectioned poems that span multiple pages, sometimes—as in the case of “My Liver”—eschewing formal punctuation. While numbered sections in poems like “The Afterlife” suggest a sense of order, sentences spill mid-phrase over the section breaks. Green aptly uses these less cohesive forms when the integrity or safety of the physical body feels most precarious, as when the speaker is diagnosed with ovarian failure, undergoes a biopsy, meditates on violence against the female body, or confronts a death so recent that the departed still feels physically present.

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Drawbridge Sewn to Jawbone A Review of Derek JG Williams’ Reading Water

.Reading time 9 minutes.

By Johnny Cate

Reading Water is absolute fire. But let’s do ourselves a favor and stay away from the term tour de force. This is an award-winning book, deservedly. It doesn’t need another nobody to validate it, but I guess it can’t hurt, right?

With 100-something pages, Derek JG Williams puts together a cohesive and cool poetic vision in this book, which was published by Lightscatter Press in 2025.

The voice is distinct and the poet’s devotion to a liquescent style of lyricism gives it a slick and appropriately fluid vibe. There’s far too much to say about it—this review will be painfully incomplete, but let’s just revel for a second.

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.Reading time 13 minutes.

Disability and the “Messy Olympics.” A Review of Brian Trapp’s Range of Motion

By Clayton Bradshaw-Mittal

Early in Brian Trapp’s novel Range of Motion (Acre, 2025) two brothers attend the coercively named Camp Cheerful for disabled children. Michael acts as a caretaker for his twin brother, Sal, as they navigate the fun and games of camp life in an effort to raise the spirits of Sal, at one point participating in “Messy Olympics,” a loosely defined competition that includes wrapping campers in toilet paper and dizzy baserunning. Early in this section, as each sentence flows with meticulous construction and the clauses billow, Trapp makes it clear that Sal wants no part of the fun, and as Michael spends fifteen minutes swimming in the water, taking a brief moment to enjoy his teenaged self, Sal disappears, escaping Michael’s custody. As we learn later in the novel, Sal has, for the first time, affirmed his own agency in perilous fashion, as teenagers are wont to do.

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The Saddest Girl on the Beach by Heather Frese

.Reading time 7 minutes.

By Ashley Cowger

Many stories arise from the conflict between science and a belief in something unknowable. At no point does this conflict feel as urgent as it does when we are mourning a loved one. For Charlotte, the narrator of Heather Frese’s The Saddest Girl on the Beach (Blair, 2024), no question is more important than how to process and move on from the death of her father without the aid of belief in an afterlife. “My dad believed in science,” Charlotte says. “But science doesn’t believe there’s anything after death.” Frese personifies the distinction between belief in an afterlife and belief in science through Charlotte’s two romantic interests: Michael, a young scientist to whom Charlotte feels an electric pull, and Nate, the religious brother of Charlotte’s best friend who is perfect for her “on paper.” The choice between these two men is much more than a generic rom-com setup, though. Michael and Nate represent two strong opposing forces in Charlotte’s life, two very different ways of dealing with grief.

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.Reading time 9 minutes.

The Poetics of Ecology Kathryn Nuernberger’s Held: Essays in Belonging

By Anna Farro Henderson

Facing environmental crises, Kathryn Nuernberger obsesses over mutually beneficial interspecies relationships in Held: Essays in Belonging (Sarabande Books, 2025). Short lyrical essays named for pairs of species examine our interconnectedness and collective experiences. Yucca moths fertilize and feed on the Yucca plant. Mycorrhiza fungi live on trees and share resources among them to maintain forest health. Bioluminescent algae camouflage bobtail squid in moonbeams, hiding them from predators. “I need sparrows to understand myself,” Nuernberger writes. Non-human species offer mirrors to see ourselves and imagine how else we might show up in relationships. Through essays on
travel, observation, and grief, Nuernberger attempts to find belonging in the poetics of ecology and to share this belonging with all of us.

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.Reading time 11 minutes.

Play This Book Loud by Joe Bonomo

By Kyle Minor

The epigraph to Joe Bonomo’s Play This Book Loud: Noisy Essays (University of Georgia Press, 2025), comes from Lester Bangs’s “Untitled Notes on Lou Reed”:

           The real question is what to live for. And I can’t answer it. Except another
            one of your records. And another chance for me to write.

That epigraph, for all its devotion, underplays what was actually going on in the long, weird relationship between Reed, who made a career of making a myth of himself, and Bangs, who loved the myth, and who did as much as any music critic to burnish and promote it. What precedes the epigraph in “Untitled Notes” (and which Bonomo elides) is the invocation, “You know your hatred is just like anybody else’s,” and what follows (also elided) includes the assertion that Bangs “would suck Lou Reed’s cock.”

It is difficult to imagine a contemporary critic writing out of such a fever, or even daring the transgression of Bangs’s fellatial declaration. The performative aspect of the Bangs act arrived amidst the two-decades’-long context of all sorts of post-rock’n’roll posing—the speed-driven Warhol machine, the punker-than thou CBGB scene, Studio 54, Tom Wolfe and Hunter S. Thompson and the New Journalism, nearly every page of Creem or Crawdaddy or Rolling Stone.

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Fourth Genre: Twenty-Five Essays from Our First Twenty-Five Years

.Reading time 14 minutes.

By Robert Rebein

These days we take for granted that creative nonfiction has earned its place within the pantheon of writing genres. But that hasn’t always been the case. As recently as the early 1990s, the so-called “fourth genre” was so little regarded that there were virtually no anthologies, textbooks, or journals devoted to it. That began to change in the mid-to-late ’90s, when, in the space of five years, an influential textbook, Robert Root and Michael Steinberg’s The Fourth Genre: Contemporary Writers of/on Creative Nonfiction, was published, and the journals Creative Nonfiction, River Teeth, and Fourth Genre each launched in quick succession.

It’s difficult to overestimate the role these journals played in elevating creative nonfiction to its current position vis-a-vis poetry, fiction, and drama. One sign of this ascension appears in the title to Joey Franklin and Patrick Madden’s introduction to Fourth Genre: Twenty-Five Essays from Our First Twenty-Five Years (Michigan State University Press, 2025), which boldly declares, “Fourth Genre? More Like First Genre!” Such boldness would have been difficult for founding editor Michael Steinberg to imagine, let alone express, when he prepared the first issue of Fourth Genre for publication in the winter of 1998, but judging by the contents of this retrospective anthology, it doesn’t feel out of place.

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Announcing the Winter Online Exclusive

.Reading time 1 minute.

The latest winter online exclusive from New Ohio Review is now available! Scroll down to read.

This issue, our 15th online edition, includes featured art by Madelyn Bartolone, Alex Brice, Ryan Davis, Rachel Hall, and Mallory Stowe, whose “Downstream” is our cover image; poems from Amanda Nicole Corbin, Jaye Kranz, Mark Anthony Cayanan, Matthew Williams, Michael Mark, Allisa Cherry, Sarah Suhr, Rodd Whelpley, Christopher Shipman, Derek Jon Dickinson, Theresa Burns, Theo Jasper, Emily Banks, Amy Miller, Wes Civilz, S.J. Stover, Hannah Smith, Kim Farrar, and Maria Dylan Himmelman; fiction from Richie Zaborowske, Jim Marino, Anna Sheffer, Jessica Jo Staricka, Annemarie Neary, Rick Andrews, Michele Lombardo, Victor McConnell, and Kent Nelson; essays from Julia Ferry, Madeline Simms, Matt Miller, Anna Davis Abel, R.M. Harper, Katharine L. Wiegele, Heather Buchanan, and Elle Therese Napolitano; reviews of new work by Christina Cook, Bill Hollands, Cassie Burkhardt, Candace Walsh, Craig Bernardini, George Choundas, and Samantha Edmonds.

We hope you enjoy.

Thanks for reading,

-The Editors

i am out with gloves, foraging for myself 

.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Amanda Nicole Corbin

i’m doing this because i’m wondering if i’m paying enough
attention to my own life. i can’t even get my own molars to stop leaving
toothprints in my tastebuds so i make myself stop and examine
my fingers and find i’ve picked new shapes into their folds. i’ve colored  
myself outside the lines. there were once people i called my entire world  
and now i don’t even know which timezone they’re in—i only ever
studied the architecture of others, not the geography—and all i know
about that version of myself is that she did not know how to pay
attention to most things, which is not very much to know
about someone. i know less about her than i know about what it’s like
to throw up a veggie burger in the sink at rehab. i know less about
what she saw in each of her lovers than i know about yeast infections.
now i’m not saying i’m an expert; i’m saying the fields are always
changing sides like the illinois–penn state game that went into nonuple
overtime. my finger remembers better the feel of a door slamming
on its eight-year-old marrow than it does its first engagement ring. the only
thing i can remember was the obvious flaw he pointed out. you see,
i’ve memorized the dry scratchy floral chokehold scent of a diaper pail
better than i can recall the man i was going to marry and even the version
of me before that remembers my loose flaking fingernail like a pocket
trinket. it’s funny though, even now, when i think of him, i think of his hair,
his glasses, his hands—and then i’m back to myself. 

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Infinity Net

.Reading time 6 minutes.

By Jaye Kranz

It’s a new year and my friends are snowing in.  

It’s a new year and my friends are swimming out.  

It’s a new year and I meant to be still. I meant to slip between
the years and do one complete back-up of my core, there.  

I meant to give away at least half of my wholes. 

I meant to reply to last year. 

It’s a new year and we throw prawn-heads to the dog
while the algorithm plays Love Theme from Spartacus.   

It’s a new year and we’re on the roof counting from ten to one
with strangers we can hear but can’t see
on the other side of the fence.  

Dear Year, I see now, how fireworks require emptiness
but can still enter the muscle
of my dog’s hind legs. 

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Ecstasy Facsimile

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Mark Anthony Cayanan
Featured Art: “Event Horizon” by Mallory Stowe

Guess manageable despair arrives on time today,  
my soul cracking when sunlight sharpens my migraine.  
I listen to Wilco and amplify my unoriginal sadness.   
The U-Bahn stalls at Ullsteinstraße and now I’m sure
I’m going to be alone forever, and it’s oh so important,
this intimate history between my earbuds and my feelings.
It wouldn’t be so bad, being somewhat lonely, mostly
ordinary, if I could soundtrack my life. I’d stare at rows
of bottled wieners while mumbling invented lyrics.
And I’m still mostly male and so adjust myself in the aisle,
my ball cap and sullen face, chili & lime chips, cheap IPAs.
I self-checkout to avoid talking. I bring my own bag.
Pleasure never lasts, you know, but pleasure does. And how
embarrassing, to be unloved. I hum every longing home.  

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Prognosis

.Reading time 51 minutes.

By Richie Zaborowske
Featured Art: “Frills” by Alex Brice

Afraid that her husband Clint would find out, Debra began withdrawing cash out of their savings account and hiding the money in a wool sock in her underwear drawer. She got herself a divorce lawyer, a good one from one of those law firms with three last names. After searching around online, she found a landlord who, after she placed two months’ rent down as a deposit, didn’t ask too many questions. Then, when she finally had everything in place, when the only thing left was for her to find the courage to tell Clint she was leaving, on his way home from happy hour at Smitty’s Tap, Clint blew a stop sign and rammed his Ford F-150 into the side of a milk truck. 

A police officer told her about the accident. Knocking on her door as Debra was dumping a pot of spaghetti noodles into a colander in the kitchen sink. Clint had never been to jail. But he was no stranger to law enforcement. So, she wasn’t exactly surprised when she opened the door and a police officer was standing on her porch.  

“Your husband’s been in a wreck,” the officer said, in one breath, as if he had been running. The officer was young; cropped haircut, big ears. Haltingly, he explained that Clint was in a coma. Showed her a picture of the scene on his phone; the side of Clint’s truck crumpled like tinfoil; a blast of glass strewn across the road. 

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Samsara

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Matthew Williams

My students wear the name Nirvana and don’t know the band.
I didn’t know Kurt Cobain chose the name for its pretty sound
and, when I was younger, revered him as a tortured genius
until my brother found my mother unconscious
and all the medicine bottles empty. They say
he didn’t want the band’s name to sound angry.
One of my students who loves his Nirvana shirt
lost his mother. He stands and shouts at everyone
and no one and pushes out the classroom door. Despite
my mother becoming a self-avowed Buddhist who listens
to Thích Nhất Hạnh audiobooks and smokes marijuana
for chronic nausea and pain, I still know little of Nirvana
beyond what I’ve gleaned from a few movies and books:
transcendent detachment, cosmic oneness, unbeing.
And yet, with what little I knew, after
the bell rang, after the students
moved through the long hallways
that shook then stilled
as they emptied of their laughter,
I looked for him. I did.
I looked for that boy. 

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Dedication for a Plot of Ground

.Reading time 2 minutes.

     after William Carlos Williams 

By Matthew Williams

This plot of ground facing the gaze
of unrelenting California sun
is dedicated to the living presence of
Charlotte Elizabeth Williams
who laid down in South Carolina,
before boycotted busses with a son
still in her stomach, was forced to move
with her husband and children to Hawaii,
lost that husband to Vietnam, flew
back across the Pacific with her sons
to become the second black family
in a Sacramento suburb, surviving
a stalker who stabbed her seventeen times
and scarred the hands she used to drag
the abusive second husband onto the lawn,
pull the knife from his back, defend from him
the family who, on her single salary, she ensured
saw plays, ballets, foreign shores, afforded new clothes
for new schools—knowing enough of the old school
to keep five black boys from trouble, to fight
against the expectations of pale neighbors,
against the recklessness of their youth,
against driving I-80 ninety miles an hour
and the dour white face that sounds the siren. 

She often spoke of God, prayed daily,
became a Senior Olympian as if to hint
at a dignity deities and mountains alone
can achieve, and in her final days
attained a holiness we can only call
human, as her body was still here,
when she began traveling
in that other world, and—

if you can bring nothing
to where she sleeps
but your body, rotten
with its easy living,
keep out. 

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Joy Riders

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Michael Mark
Featured Art: “Lost Moment” by Mallory Stowe

My 98-year-old father steals cars
every day. It’s not uncommon
for him to take another at night, too. 

Sometimes he slips the keys
from an aide’s pastel pink scrubs
while they’re tying his shoes or,  

he tells me, he picks the pockets
of visitors of other residents—he sneers
saying that word. Most times, though,  

he steals his own—he’s been prohibited
from driving by his ophthalmologist,
audiologist, cardiologist, children,  

the State of New York. Often he’ll filch one
he sold last century or one he’s wrecked—
the green woody station wagon. He winks  

telling me he hot-wired his old man’s
‘31 yellow taxi cab. Lunch mostly
is when he makes his getaways. The food’s crap  

at The Home—more sneers, punctuated
with a dry spit—cold, mushy, same grey
thing over and over. He brings the cars back,  

tank filled to the exact spot
on the gauge as when he heists it. So nobody’s
tipped off. Weekday or weekend, 

makes no difference, he always ends up
at the same Burger King. On the way
he swings by the cemetery, picks up mom.  

She loves their nuggets.                                                     

  

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Essay: The lines, the borders

.Reading time 35 minutes.

By Julia Ferry

  1. Beginning 

I shrink the size of the image. Now I feel that it reveals too much, even though that was precisely my intention when I photographed my grandmother. It is her daughter, who died when I was only 5 years old, who I wanted to find through this face. For a while I’ve started searching for my mother and decided to start with hers. I wanted to get as close as possible to this person who, to me, is distant and silent. 

I’ve never known the name of the city where she was born, who her parents were, or how old she was when she emigrated to Brazil. I don’t know what it was like for her to raise six Brazilian children, all born in a Japanese colony where she lived and worked for 40 years. We’ve exchanged a few words, especially about her second daughter. I think about this silence and wonder whether it is the generations, the languages, the apprehension, or the loss that separates us. 

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Grief in the Potting Shed

.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Allisa Cherry
Featured Art: “Lily, Out of Breath” by Mallory Stowe

I startle a deer mouse 
squirreling straw into a pile of burlap.  
It freezes then returns to its instinctive labor 
caring for its litter of pups–still deaf and blind. 
Each as small and pink as a baby’s toe.  
How miniscule my reflection must be,  
turned upside-down in the gloss of its dark eye. 
At the beginning of the war in Ukraine 
a woman approached a Russian soldier, 
gave him a handful of seeds,  
and told him to carry them in his pocket  
so when he died on Ukrainian soil  
at least sunflowers would grow where he fell.  
At least. No matter how great the devastation,  
it requires a small act of resistance for scale.  
Consider those moments Roland Hayes  
stood in a resolute silence while members  
of the Nazi party booed and cursed 
his blackness. Alone under a spotlight on stage  
in a concert hall buzzing with hatred.  
And still his throat softened  
and a song—Du Bist die Ruh—rose  
from his throat until every fascist heart  
had been stroked by the finger of its beauty.  
But I have never been brave.  
I’ve only ever waited out the clock  
in those moments when I was afraid.  
So, when my older sister asked me 
—the apostate daughter—to help her  
dress my mother’s dead body  
in her temple robes, tie the fig leaf apron,  
fasten her bonnet and veil, I couldn’t  
take in the tenderness of her heresy  
all at once. Instead, I narrowed my focus  
to the industry of my fingers, 
half expecting them to snap into flames  
as I pushed each pearl button  
through its braided hoop.  

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THE KNOT

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Sarah Suhr
Featured Art: “Aria” by Mallory Stowe

   for Patty 

you broke your mother’s ribcage trying  
to revive her bones like a goldfinch 
do not cry daughter oh wisp of breath  
she speaks from beyond her tomb  
keep chrysanthemums & coneflowers  
in each corner of our house & console  
your father with a nightcap westerns &  
puzzles  
        still he cries each year  
that passes & you oh daughter carry  
bouquets & his weight across  
threshold after threshold till he can  
no longer hold a spoon to his mouth 
so you petal chowder to his tongue  
& every swallow is a strangulation 
that stones your heart to silence   
               you 
no longer know where your fingertips 
end & his begin if the sun has risen 
or descended oh daughter are you 
in darkness or light he says this is it 
i am done after dialysis & within days  
his head wilts cold into your palms 
you clear his books from your shelf &  
reshelve poetry found in a storage unit  
your hands hold a collection called  
reclamation but you can’t recall  
how it came to you 

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The News from North Korea 

.Reading time 33 minutes.

By Jim Marino

We’re three bites into not-quite-Christmas pie when my mother breaks into the epic tale of Dad leaving her for another woman. Sometimes it’s a blonde, sometimes a spurious redhead, depending on how inspiration moves the teller. Like all great oral epics, it’s founded on a myth. My father’s been dead almost four years. The other woman he left my mother for was an inoperable brain tumor. But who wants to hear that? 

“All those sexy young dental hygienists, and in the end? He leaves me for a patient.” Mom wags her fork like a finger, emphasizing, demanding attention, making just one point more. “This little Puerto Rican with big fake tits and fake blonde hair and two impacted molars. Consuela. And would you believe the worst part?” 

My husband wears the Jesuit-school poker face I envy so, eyebrows raised as if he’s just been told some modestly interesting fact. Eddie, approximately 2.4 years old, is busy experimenting with whipped cream between his fingers, and my sister Judy, who drove Mom the two days from Miami, still looks a little dazed. But Larry from work hangs on Mom’s every word.  

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Essay: Far From a Mother 

.Reading time 30 minutes.

By Madeline Simms
Featured Art: “Eye of Horus” by Ryan Davis

It is a Wednesday when I ask for help in the kitchen, a Tuesday night for my mother.  Winter flirts with spring as she sends a photo of the Monkey Bread recipe across the Atlantic. It reaches me and my dry bones in the wet grey of Ireland. I am looking for anything sweet—  

She sends a good night text when I send Good morning, alongside a picture of Rian and Jonah climbing over my groggy body. We laugh countries apart. Day or night, it is winter-dark wherever we are. I send her a video of the boys licking my face as if they are dogs, and we laugh counties apart. Our well-wishing is a promise of rising, be it the sun, the bread. I think of the day ahead of me filled with Hot Wheels, dropping off the boys at school, picking them up, snacks, spills, a likely tear or two—author unknown.  

During the past few months as an au pair, I’ve grown closer to my mother. She sends me suggestions for sneaking veggies onto the boys’ picky tongues, fun games to fill our long days together. I can’t help but wonder if she feels this too, comradery despite the distance. 

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The Uncertainty Principle

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Rodd Whelpley

You can only know a particle’s speed 
or its location—never both at once. 

But Saturday Night Fever isn’t science, 
and mom and dad were “Stayin’ Alive” 
late in marriage learning to cha-cha-cha 
quickstep, waltz, and foxtrot.
                     Except no one    
at dancehalls played that then—only disco. 
So, in the living room, they would argue, 
practicing their Walk and Latin Hustle. 
By all rights these kids back in ’49 
didn’t stand a chance. A baby in her 
senior year. He, un-scouted by the pros.   
Their young lives falling into steady beats— 
car loan, home loan, work, kids, and getting old. 
Did they love each other?
                                                 There are questions—  
painful—for which no one seeks an answer,  
only theories: How he stepped butter smooth. 
How she horse-stomped backward, skipped the record. 
How all those years they remained in motion. 
Physics never factored in the Bee Gees, 
or counted on my parents . . . five—six—seven— 
eight. She drops blind. And there. He catches her.   

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A Toast to My Son’s Last Drink 

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Rodd Whelpley

His mom and I are slow to form attachments. 
(We have met your kind before—juniper  
on pulse points, malt-conditioned hair.) But if  
you are his last last drink, then welcome  
to the family.
                         We’ll receive your gifts
beneath the tree, set white meat on your plate.
There will be no politics at dinner, and
I’ll fight to forget you as the Danube—
a frothy current pushing those swan-boat
kill-me pills across his lips, which landed,
by grace, hapless,
                                  like a drift of cygnets
tickling his gut. If you swear you are
his last last drink, then I will pay a cantor
and a priest. Father you, as I have failed
to father him. Take you at the elbow.
wedding march you as my dire daughter,
and let him lift the veil. 

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Animal Control

.Reading time 39 minutes.

By Anna Sheffer
Featured Art: “The Bride” by Alex Brice

The buffalo’s tail swished. Clumps of sod mashed around in its mouth. Dana watched through the sliding glass door, safely hidden behind the curtains. If she wasn’t so afraid, it would have been funny, spying on this creature demolishing their yard as if it were an inconsiderate neighbor. But the welcome pamphlet had said these animals were unpredictable—not to be approached under any circumstance—so she was on hold with the nature preserve, listening to jazz flute riffs while wrapped in the curtains she had bought less than a month ago.  

Libby materialized, round four-year-old stomach protruding in front of her. A plastic horse figurine dangled by its mane from her closed fist. “Mommy, what are you doing?” She had been playing quietly in front of the TV just minutes ago; why couldn’t she go back to whatever she’d been up to?  

Before Dana could reply, Libby peeked around the curtain and let out a delighted squeal. “Look, mommy, a buffafwo! Did you see it?” 

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Basketball

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Christopher Shipman

Mark was two years younger.
He was 10 to my 12. But Mark had a hoop
with a chain net, the post
planted right in his backyard, its slick metal
gleaming among his mother’s azaleas
and lilyturfs. It didn’t matter
that on our block two years meant
two lifetimes. We were fast friends anyway.
Had to be. The park wasn’t
too far but it was farther than I wanted.
Besides, his mother made the best
sweet tea and gave us all we could swallow.
That summer I honed my skills.
I’d finally have the chops
to take Jimmy Blake to the hole
the next season. That was my only thought
at the top of the key. Then the next
season started and I was 42
and living in another state, married
for going on 13 years, father to a daughter
who just celebrated her 10th birthday,
her smile gleaming among
three bouquets of assorted flowers adorning
the dining room for the occasion.
I can’t even remember what Jimmy Blake
looked like. The new season
will start up soon with or without him.
With no Mark nearby, I’ll air up an old ball
in the shed, head for the park.  

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Trick of the Light

.Reading time 52 minutes.

By Jessica Jo Staricka
Featured Art: “Nope” by Alex Brice

One night twenty years later, among cardboard boxes fuzzy with dust in the basement of my mom’s final house, I find a tennis racket. I’m puzzled. We never played tennis. Maybe the racket was trash left behind by a previous renter that we accidentally packed and brought with us on one of our many moves. Maybe Gladys and I begged a dollar off our mom to buy it at a garage sale and made up our own game pitching pinecones to each other in one of the back yards. 

But when I pick it up, its exact heft and balance rush me out of this basement and twenty years back, to the perfume of white pines and the prick of their needles through the holes in my sneakers, to the gravel yards and dandelion lawns and empty horse corrals and collapsing barns of the half-dozen ramshackle farmhouses we rented growing up, to their living rooms on summer nights, where Twins games played on TV, where I tinkered with salvaged arts and crafts, where my sister Gladys played an out-of-tune piano if the house happened to come with one, and where a bat appeared in the corner of the ceiling. 

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Essay: Angling

.Reading time 36 minutes.

“Fie on the witch!” cried a merry girl,
    As they rounded the point where Goody Cole
Sat by her door with her wheel atwirl,
    A bent and blear-eyed poor old soul.
—from “Wreck of Rivermouth” by John Greenleaf Whittier

By Matt Miller
Featured Art: “Close Up – Spatial Neighborhoods” by Alex Brice

The world will work to twirl girls into witches, or they will twirl themselves into witches, or they will twirl and turn away from the witch they could be, would be if not for the world saying no, the world saying that their lives are their own fault. Goody Cole, the witch of Hampton, walks the marshes, haunts the dune grasses, watches the ships from the granite perch above the Atlantic shoreline of Little Boars’ Head. She is looking for her name.  

“I can’t back,” my father said and so I thought this was a story about my father. In the old stories, every father is an ogre, an ogre of absence or an ogre of presence. Today he was present and being pulled out into the Atlantic, borne upon his own currents.   

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Irish Nocturne

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Derek Jon Dickinson
Featured Art: “Grass Pathway” by Madelyn Bartolone

I lift myself, pinch my hat, splash some coins against my debt. Crusts of dried swallows in the emptied pint-glass. Outside, the moon is a wooden button through its slit of Gaelic wool. The pub is a cask of fermenting voices, windows oily with yellow light; night melting inside me, like a given kiss, or warm wobble of whiskey. South—my soles scuffed with work, clicking the dew-glistening cobble, the brook-straddling bridge; water, fragile as flute-glass, tinkling the stone sluice. Moonlight stitching the fraying salmon; lidless eyes, cold as premonition; tails pulsing like sunken sails. The coming car-light snips me like scissors from the black pitch night, its red taillights trailing-off as errant sparks. Home—wafts of sweet peat-smoke, a tune rolling around like a marble in my mouth. With sun-chipped hands, I work the turf-stove’s iron latch; strip-off my clothes, naked as a wet salmon, strumming the sheets upstream; thumb denting the clay slab of my wife’s hip. 

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A Space Unfilled

.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Theresa Burns

There is no great beauty without some strangeness in the proportion.
   —Edgar Allen Poe 

I heard this the first time from my high school boyfriend, 
who became my college boyfriend when he hitchhiked 

from Long Island to Boston a week after I’d left, 
found me in Mary Ann’s on Comm Ave with friends I was 

 starting to make. And I was both happy and annoyed 
Paul had come, and the next morning he said it— 

I’d cut my classes to lie with him on the quad, 
infatuated with his blue-jean eyes, his Martin guitar, 

and he told me the gap in my front teeth, though strange, 
had an element of beauty. And I believed him then.      

It was the Eighties—Lauren Hutten was hot, and Les Blank 
made a movie about the mystique of gap-toothed women, 

and every guy I dated since would mention that movie, 
remark on that gap, which made me more self-conscious, 

but if I threatened to have it fixed, they’d say don’t. 
We adored Patti Smith then, with her heroin-thin arms, 

and the old man voice of Neil Young, more alley cat 
than honey, and I began to see what Paul understood, 

that in every kind of beauty, there is a strangeness,  
a mistake. Years later, a friend told me, 

Paul became a junkie, and died of a blood clot 
that mostly junkies got.     I thought of him last week— 

the man behind wanted me to make a right on red, 
except there was traffic coming, and he got out of his car                    

to yell at me directly, swearing and spitting, my kids 
in the back seat. And then he said it— 

Why don’t you get your ugly teeth fixed, lady? 

Read More

Essay: Original Sin

.Reading time 36 minutes.

By Anna Davis Abel
Featured Art: “Self-Portrait” by Rachel Hall

“You’ve got to be feeling better!” 

Kim, the nurse practitioner I see every month, beams at me from across her desk, framed by a fortress of file folders and half-drained pens. A congealed yellow mass perches in the corner of the tabletop, leering at me like an inside joke I no longer find funny. This is what ten pounds of fat looks like! she’d said once, jiggling it between her hands. You’ve lost four of these! 

“I do feel better,” I lie, curling my lips into the smile I know she loves. 

I am her only eating disorder patient—a peculiar case in a weight loss clinic that masquerades as a wellness program. They market health here, but the waiting room tells a different story: anxious bodies perch on plastic chairs, flipping through pamphlets promising transformation. The air smells faintly of antiseptic and desperation. 

“You’re a real success story, Anna,” Kim says, slipping the reading glasses from atop her head. Her fingers dance over the laptop keys, scrolling, scrolling—pausing. A satisfied hum. “Looks like we’re only twelve pounds away from your BMI goal! And how long has it been since a binge?” 

I aim for optimism. “Three months.” 

Read More

Essay: Pride

.Reading time 19 minutes.

By R.M. Harper

I smoothed the dress across my chest as the Pride Parade smiled, danced, and sang its way past San Francisco City Hall. It was the kind of summer day the world paints the Bay: seventy degrees, a kissing breeze, and not a cloud in sight. Parents carried children on their shoulders to watch the floats pass by. Would it be easier for them, knowing what they could be, or are we moving backwards through the decadence of our time? 

Violet cheered the Chicanx parade group passing twirling, smiling, holding hands. Her outfit alternated pink-black, nails and denim skirt, fishnets, scales of silver eyeshadow, six-foot-two, a neon angel in combat boots. We were in the MFA program together at Saint Mary’s College, in East Bay. She was a good friend and a great Dungeon Master. I was glad she had offered to come with me: it was my first Pride. 

Entering the Civic Center I took in the panorama pink and plural. There were booths all along the Civic Center selling stickers, candy, cock rings, clothes. The crowd was making its way toward the main stage where drag queens smiled scarlet to the heartbeat drum of the stereo bass. A masc voice called out to us as we passed by. 

Read More

Duplex (Gray-blue Staircase) 

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Theo Jasper

I feel small at the bottom of the gray-blue staircase, 
the one where she didn’t die, even when I visit it in my memory. 

Even when I visit it in my memory, the duplex where she tried to die, 
I can never reach the top of that staircase. 

The light hits the blood on the floor, (why can’t God see the staircase?) 
and my childhood cat has escaped, like she knew what was coming. 

And in my memory I have escaped because I know what is coming. 
But memory is not reality and the reality is this: there was blood on the windowsill. 

Memory is whichever wine goes down the easiest. Reality is the staircase, the windowsill. 
In a duplex on Orange Street, there’s blood all the way up the stairs. 

In a duplex on Orange Street, I never move from the bottom of the stairs. 
Maybe God sees me. Maybe he doesn’t. But in my memory, I never go up. 

I keep my head bowed. My blood is like wine. I never, ever grow up. 
I stay small at the bottom of the gray-blue staircase.

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Nativity

.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Theo Jasper

This morning in January, the men on the street were  
wheeling one of the Wise Men into a truck, on a dolly,  
just like that. 

And I remember two weeks ago, Christmas Eve,  
a man in front of the Nativity almost backed into my car 
and his immediate anger was infuriating, his middle finger,  
as if it were my fault for being where I had been all along, 
and I wanted to do something but remembered danger,  
saw his son’s eyes watching me  
from the backseat. 
 
His anger flashes in my mind while the men wrap God in bubble wrap, 
banging his head against the roof of the truck, how it probably 
dissipated after a minute or two, then maybe regret for this display  
on Christmas Eve, the severe eyes of Christ, and maybe a drop or two of anger  
left over, or only quiet sacredness.  

A man drops a lamb on the sidewalk. The sky threatens  
to break open. And the child was scared. 
And the child was scared.  

Give me the plaster eyes of an angel,  
the eyes of anyone who might stop the car and see this, 
horns honking now, see this birth of Christ, St. Gabriel delivered the news 
to always look where we are not wanted, to await our annunciation 
as virgins and sheep among the teeth of Shepherds, 
holy men, good men, packing up their religion, 
sweeping dust and myrrh and the shattered bodies of those 
who will continue to go unnamed. 

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Mask 13

.Reading time 45 minutes.

By Annemarie Neary
Featured Art by Rachel Hall

They had barely finished the introductions when he asked about the war. The endgame, the likely victor, things no Ukrainian cared to discuss with strangers.  

‘I wish I knew,’ she said. Usually that was enough. 

‘But what do you think?’ 

She managed to keep her tone level. ‘I try not to think. But I’ll do a good job here regardless.’  

She didn’t like his smile any more than she liked his question. But she did want the job. A friend who was still in Kyiv had spotted the ad online. These things are almost never advertised, so Olena emailed right away with her CV.  

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Riddle

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Emily Banks

It was everything I didn’t have
and all I wanted. 

If I could have it
I knew I would have all
I didn’t have and everything
I wanted. 

It was a key to the city
of dreams, a hacker’s code
in a hackneyed spy film,
a sleek black rectangle
of plastic with no limit I could slip
into my back pocket. 

I wasn’t wrong. I found it.
Doors did open
and chairs were gestured free.
I saw carpets roll out in strangers’ eyes. 

They flock like moths to artificial light.
It tickles me, how they brush their tattered wings
on my glass skin, fiends for the bright,
willing even to die— 

I can make anyone
tell me everything
I want to hear
for a night. 

They hate me when they learn I’m not the sky.  

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The Algorithm Sells Me a New Bra 

.Reading time 5 minutes.

By Emily Banks

Hate bras? This is the bra for you.
I can’t gatekeep. I hadn’t worn a bra in years
but this changed me. Are you a member
of the Itty Bitty Titty Club (IBTC)?
Well it’s here finally, a bra made for small cups. No more gapping.
I threw all my old bras in the trash when I tried this on.
I just ordered four more. Have you been wearing the wrong size
since you were ten and your mother wrapped you up
with her measuring tape, told you to stand still, straight?
We’ll tell you your True Size. Take this quick quiz
and give us your email. We’ll send you emails till you buy
a bra from us or die. What do you mean
you want to unsubscribe? This is our best offer, only one time.
I used to believe wireless bras couldn’t work
for big boobs like mine. That was until I tried—I can’t gatekeep.
This one is for my girls who are blessed in the chest.
This year we’re kicking underwire to the curb.
This year we’re breaking up with cup spillage.
This year we’re saying no to uniboob
and constant pain. Listen, you need to see this for yourself.
My bestie asked if I’d gotten a boob job.
I’ve never had cleavage before this bra.
This bra is magic. Watch how it disappears under my tee.
Watch how it makes my back fat disappear.
Does your size fluctuate throughout your cycle?
Girl, mine too. Girl, this one is for you.
Stop what you’re doing now and listen up.
These straps won’t slip or dig into your skin
branding you with crimson marks that take
forever to fade. So easy to adjust! This is the very bra
Taylor Swift wore rehearsing for the Eras Tour.
It improves your posture and your mental health.
I can’t gatekeep. I quit therapy after wearing this for a day.
My boyfriend asked if I’d started a new anti-depressant.
Ladies, this is not a normal bra.
It feels like I’m wearing a cloud.
It feels like I’m floating on an innertube
with my bestie back when we were still too young
for bras. I fall asleep in it. Work out in it.
I’ve updated my will to request
they bury me in it. Because this is heaven:
no more gapping, no uniboob, no endless, lonely ache
so subtle you stop noticing it till it’s gone.
These pads can be removed for customized cleavage.
This is my new “have to leave the house” bra.
This is my new “have to turn the Zoom camera on” bra.
This is my new “have to drag myself from bed
although what’s the point really” bra.
Its band never rides up. My ride-or-die.
You’ll wear it the store. Wear it to work. The gym.
To make dinner, to load the dishwasher.
To Swiffer the floor and vacuum the rug, scroll through a feed
of wedding anniversaries and new babies,
cocktails on beaches, the friends you meant to keep
up with and men you once turned down looking happy,
check Facebook Memories.
Girl, you can stop scrolling.
I can’t gatekeep: this is the first bra
I don’t take off as soon I get home. This is it for me.
This is the support I’ve been needing.
Oh my God, this changes everything.   

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Vernonox

.Reading time 21 minutes.

By Rick Andrews

<BEGIN AT MARK 1> 

                                  Thank you. I appreciate it. Thank you. You’re too kind.
                 Thanks so much, everyone. <GESTURE TO CROWD>. There’s an
                 excitement in the air tonight. Can you feel it? 
                                  Let’s give it up one more time for our amazing speakers,
                shall we? Let them hear it, folks!  

<LET APPLAUSE DIE DOWN> 

                                  You know, people ask me why I started Vernonox. They
                 come up to me in the lobby, they recognize me at bars, in airports.
                 People all over the world stop me on the street and say “Michael—
                 Michael D. Powers—why did you start Vernonox?” I tell them
                 there are three reasons. 

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Naturism

.Reading time 44 minutes.

By Michele Lombardo

My fourteen-year-old daughter lounges atop the Queen-sized bed wearing pink nylon hiking shorts, woolen socks, and nothing else. Torso, out. Boobs, out. I’d been in the bathroom for three minutes and now, somehow, this. Arms folded behind her head, she smiles, a sly tilt in her expression that signals danger. My husband faces the wall of the cramped hotel room, his back to her, like she ordered him to stand in the corner. Whatever this is, he’s losing. Lately, we’re all losing.  

Jake pivots to me. “Try to convince her that wearing a shirt in front of her father isn’t too much to ask.” As though he’s the only one being victimized here.  

Emma studies her nails like a Cartel boss deciding our fate. “You don’t have a shirt on. You never have a shirt on. Why should I have to wear a shirt when it’s hot out? You have nipples, do you not?” Her father is, indeed, shirtless. 

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The Church of the Dermatologist 

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Amy Miller
Featured Art: “Pony Up” by Alex Brice

I wonder if she says a prayer before
she bustles into the room, all smiles and sweet
accented English, tongue a rolling horse
in a field of Russian consonants. My feet  

or scalp or inner thigh might pronounce
a sentence on my life: she incants
asymmetry, border, color in three rounds,
four, the marketeer’s or pastor’s chant.  

She’s here-and-now, no penance crap to pay,
no questions of the beach, my tans, my youth,
for everybody’s sinned already, way
too late to rein those horses in. Truth: 

I did my praying driving here. Lord,
let her eye be ruthless. Thorough. Bored.  

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Addicted to Plastic

.Reading time 35 minutes.

By Victor McConnell

When I relocated from Los Angeles to Denver, some of my physician competitors thought I was foolish. I opened my new clinic in Cherry Creek, fitting out the office with clouded glass, marble floors, hammered copper light fixtures, and every other top-of-the-line finish I could think of. Coming from Beverly Hills gave me a marketing advantage right off the bat—the rich suburbanites and the Cherry Creek locals all wanted to know how things were done out there, who I’d treated, and so on. I became a regular at the Denver bars with the wealthiest clientele and had a standing lunch reservation on Fridays at Hillstone; I even befriended a bartender there who, for a small kickback, would gently recommend that some of his regulars come see me. The divorced women in their forties and fifties were the best targets. My practice grew quickly enough that, within five years, I was in the process of setting up a satellite clinic in Aspen and was making plans to relocate there full-time before my fifty-fifth birthday. Five years there, I figured, then retire by sixty. 

I was thinking about that, the life I’d envisioned in Aspen, midway through my hearing in front of the Colorado Medical Board. I had a feeling they were going to revoke my license even before one of them asked me if I thought my actions were consistent with the Hippocratic Oath. Given that the guy who asked was one of the nine board members without an MD, I wanted to ask him what he knew about taking the oath.  

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Difficulties

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Wes Civilz
Featured Art by Rachel Hall

Today will be a paradise if I 
Can manage to control the many hells 
I’m made of. If I misidentify 
The buzzers, flashing lights and warning bells 
Haphazardly erupting here and there 
Inside my skull, my soil, my sin, my sex, 
I’ll pay the price—which means that everywhere 
I go I’ll be nowhere, a circumflex                              
Over myself. Not quick, just dead. No good, 
Just bad. No song not noise. All kisses stone 
And any kindnesses misunderstood 
As counterfeit. All indicators show 
     Too much vibration in the system now—
     Reach up and flip the switch and shut it down. 

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Fly on the Wall 

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Wes Civilz

The threadbare jacket that I wear is made of 
Woven catastrophe. The car I drive  
Is powered by a liquid I’m afraid of 
(Fluid Apocalypse). There is a sound I’ve 
Heard now and then, soft buzz, a background hum 
Of slow disaster . . . and disaster is  
The word that means the stars have come undone, 
So I can’t sail among them with Osiris 
At death, as planned, so while I live I’ll try 
To drink each tall cool glass of loss, cooled more 
By colder cubes of void, and force-feed pies 
Of difficulty with misfortune’s fork, 
      And be a boss of shock, a bird of woe, 
      A watching fly upon a wall of bone. 

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THE CANYON OF UNKNOWN WATER

.Reading time 60 minutes.

By Kent Nelson
Featured Art: “Close Up – Spatial Neighborhoods” by Alex Brice

Henry shoved his drift boat from the trailer into the river, unhitched the winch line, and wedged the anchor into a crack in the cement ramp. He drove his Tundra and boat trailer up the ramp to the parking lot. He’d already loaded his gear into the boat—fishing rod, all-time favorite foods, stove, lantern, camping crap. He put his parking permit on the dash, locked the cab, and pocketed the key—no sense letting people steal what his daughter could use. He’d sent Catherine the spare key and a note that said the truck was at the Spring Creek put-in on the South Fork of the Snake River, which, given his habits, wonts, and desires, was the place he loved most in the world.

The note went out in the mail Wednesday morning, August 17th, from Idaho Falls. Catherine wouldn’t get it in L.A. until at least Friday or Saturday, if she checked her mail, but probably Monday. The truck wasn’t going anywhere without a driver.

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A PRAYER

.Reading time 1 minute.

By S.J. Stover

Daily bread’s gone blue
as a tulip.  

Kitchen’s a bust—
wizened potatoes 

stacked like luck
rocks, 

beans, knobbly
as prayer beads,  

an onion’s thin
green talon.  

One cannot not live
by bread alone you say.  

Okay, so
I will live by  

sentences, tenuous,
precious, line by line, 

one rhyme
at a time.   

I will live by God’s
thin smile, hung 

crooked from
a dogwood tree. 

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SELF-PORTRAIT AT THIRTY-THREE 

.Reading time 1 minute.

By S.J. Stover
Featured Art by Rachel Hall

Jesus never looked so jittery— 
jacked up on caffeine and testosterone,  
sporting a backyard haircut and home-sewn mask.  
I walked the same two-and-a-half-mile circuit 
every day: up Sunrise to McCombs, McCombs 
to Radnor, Radnor to Wingate, Wingate to Antioch, Antioch 
to the Bi-Rite grocery and Our Lady of Guadalupe 
and back down Sunrise again.   
The blue blooms of the hydrangeas and the pink blooms  
of the dogwoods came and went.  
I played “Losing My Religion” on repeat. I voted.  
I went to bed each night with yesterday’s cold  
coffee ringing the coffee table. 
I crucified time. 

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Elegy

.Reading time 1 minute.

By S.J. Stover

In my dream they want to wash you, 
lather you up and rinse away  
all grit, all gravel gathered  
in the quick of your claws, 
brush the dust, the dirt  
from your fur, snip off 
the prickles, pluck the brambles  
tangled in the black of your belly,  
sweep the violets violently from your ears.  

But you— 
wolf-minded ever— 
slip their grip, dive tooth first 
into the woods’ waking whoop, 
your brain’s blue furnace  
alive, alight 
with the genius of your idea:  

to weld yourself to the world’s wild welter— 
to burrow, frog-mad, 
in morning’s muddy unending,  
cling deathless, tough as kudzu,  
to hours, minutes, days—  
a tick on the skin of time.  

Dew-footed you fly 
through thick and thistle,  
to chase the needle-eyed dawn— 
you the burr, life the fur. 

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Landscape as Restoration

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Hannah Smith
Featured Art: “1000 Miles From Nowhere” by Mallory Stowe

You can say a prairie fits into a plain,
but not the other way around.
Like a square and a rectangle, I’ve been
looking for boundaries, sharp corners

I might tuck myself into. The plain
is both a noun and an adjective, a landscape
and a modifier to mean common. I’ve been called
a common woman: a forgetful blonde girl

in a bluebonnet pasture who must’ve been
asking for it. An ask can also be a prayer,
with the added expectation of an answer.
If I can fit myself into small spaces,

on a molecular level, I might see my compounds
in soil chemistry. Wildflower is synonymous
with weed, and that’s an issue with differing
opinions of beauty. Weeds restore

over-exposed soils, fertilize degraded spreads.
You can’t construct a new ecosystem,
but you can repair one that’s breaking.
I’m building another bionetwork that’s anything

but ordinary. Some day soon, I’ll find
myself in a prairie patch along the floodplains.
A sewing needle in hand, and a bucket
of rain-ripe compost.

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Essay: Acres of Gold

.Reading time 51 minutes.

By Katharine L. Wiegele

Dear Friend, it began. 

Around the last week of April in 1944, farmers around the country received a letter from the DeKalb Ag seed company. 

Twelve common kernels of corn would mean nothing to you, but the kernels in this envelope are far from being common. In fact, they are special seed kernels of a new DeKalb hybrid variety. […] Put them in safe keeping until you plant corn. This seed will produce a hybrid which neither you nor your neighbors have ever seen. 

Stapled to the letter was a small envelope containing twelve seeds. 

* * * 

A seed is an embryo. Every farmer and gardener since the Mesopotamians chose seeds to save and replant the following year. This allowed people to stop roaming around looking for food in the wild. We passed seeds from hand to hand every year in a chain of nearly 450 generations. Parents and grandparents died, but the seeds continued. If the seed was lost, we were lost.  

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Trying

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Kim Farrar
Featured Art: “Window Stamp” by Alex Brice

At four-thirty a.m., I contemplate 
how to catch the bright white moon. 

Do I need both bright and white?  
I conjure my doubts. Start again. 

Then, thankfully, a window flies open 
and out leans my cranky neighbor, 

hair in curlers, timeless housedress, 
but no rolling pin, only fists. 

Her fury echoes off the buildings, 
shaming her no-goodnik son below. 

She jangles the keys from six stories up, 
warns him not to be an idyot, 

and lets go. They accelerate  
at thirty-two feet per second squared. 

When he catches them, I’m surprised  
by how happy that makes me 

and I’ve forgotten all about the stupid moon,  
a little lower now, just above the chimney. 

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Lesson Plan

.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Kim Farrar
Featured Art: “Greenhouse” by Mallory Stowe

What is your name’s botanical source? 
I see mangroves and root forests whenever I pronounce it.   
Tell me about your superpowers.  Tell me about being small and frightened. 
What do you stare at to disappear?  
Describe the sound of a push broom on stairs.  
Describe your hair.   

Do you draw those hatch marks on your notebook as a nervous habit 
or is it a trapdoor to your mind’s netherworld? 
I like to pretend my brain is a landscape 
with silt, snow drifts, and an aurora borealis. 
I like cartoons where a lion sees a man’s head turn into a giant ham steak. 
I love it when the aroma becomes a beckoning finger.
 
What three adjectives would your friends use to describe you? 
Use a thesaurus.  Use it like a Ouija board, 
run your divining fingers down the page. Feel the grain. 
Instead of answering—let’s call out fun words to say, 
like schlep or kerfuffle. 

What is your favorite book? Why? 
I’ll confess my least favorite book: 
Wuthering Heights.  There. I said it.  
I didn’t read it once in high school and twice in college. 
Heathcliff was a candy bar. 

What is your dream job? 
Mine is describing the universe in mathematical formulas. 
What about staring? So undervalued in today’s marketplace.

What qualities are most important to be a successful student? 
This is a trick question because our hope is the same: 
to get some credit in the face of our limited choices. 
None of the above is never, rarely, sometimes, often, 
always the best answer. 

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Essay: Little Giants, The Story of a Fire Hydrant and Other Heroes 

.Reading time 58 minutes.

By Heather Buchanan

The patent for the fire hydrant was lost in a fire.  

There is a convincing theory that Frederick Graff, Sr. invented this life-saving device in 1801. He was the Chief Engineer of the Philadelphia Water Works. He came up with the idea of replacing wood pipes with an iron pipe system. He developed 37 other waterworks throughout the United States. He served the city of Philadelphia for 42 years and a stone gazebo with a bust of him was erected at Fairmount Water Works. It seems only natural that he would be the person who invented the fire hydrant. But the proof went up in flames along with 9,957 other patents and 7,000 patent models in 1836 when the U.S. Patent Office burned to the ground. At first, the Post Office was suspected of arson. It shared the building with the Patent Office and was already under investigation for awarding dishonest mail contracts. Rumors spread that they started the fire to destroy evidence. But, since the Post Office managed to save all their documents, investigators decided it was more likely an accident caused by someone improperly storing hot ashes in a box in the basement.  

There was an attempt to recover these patents by getting duplicates from the original inventors, but this process was slow-moving and expensive. The endeavor was abandoned in 1849. Only 2,845 of the lost 9,957 patent records were restored.  

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Essay: The Journey and Return of Elizabeth Fisher 

.Reading time 49 minutes.

By Elle Therese Napolitano

In Elizabeth Fisher’s 1970 story, “A Wall Around Her,” published in Aphra (Volume 4, Number 4), the main character pounds on the locked door of a house where she’s rented a room. As she waits for someone to respond, she is overcome by crushing loneliness and futility. “I never was in, never was and never will be, always outside, always trying to get in, beating with my fists, pleading, ‘Let me in. Let me in.’ Why don’t I just give up the struggle, stop trying to reach people, to be a human being.” 

Elizabeth Fisher was a writer, editor, translator, publisher, teacher and feminist, but these days, she is best known—and unknown, it turns out—for sparking Ursula K. Le Guin’s 1986 essay, “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction,” republished after Le Guin’s death as a tiny book (Ignota, 2019). It’s safe to say that now, thousands of people have seen her name in print—Le Guin names her right there in her resurging essay, along with a partial title of Fisher’s book, Woman’s Creation (though the publication date is wrong)—in which she puts forth “The Carrier Bag Theory of Evolution.” Since Le Guin’s essay was reprinted, new writings about her essay have proliferated. Nearly all mention Fisher. But people don’t seem to know anything about her. There’s all this stuff out there about carrier bags and Ursula Le Guin, but what about Elizabeth Fisher? What about her life?  

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The Foremothers

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Maria Dylan Himmelman

sharpen knives with their teeth, adjust their shawls
to hide their tails and make tiny feather quilts
to keep the birds warm. They char quail eggs
with their breath, serve them on bone China
with sucking candies, then ask if you’re certain
you turned the stove off before you left the house
Their closets are filled with carpets and spice, bolts
of silk and roast chicken. Their medicine chests
are stuffed with opium, hemlock and baby aspirin
In response to most questions they say—
Turn it, turn it, for all is in it, and for this it is said
their price is far above pearls 

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The Word Committee

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Maria Dylan Himmelman
Featured Image: “Through the al-Nil” by Ryan Davis

In January 1896, The Word Committee
conducts its annual séance in order to pull
from Beyond the year’s new words
The Committee head channels Ape-man
and Guttersnipe; the vice, Unicycle and Firebug
There is some discussion of Béarnaise Sauce
and Beef-Steak Tomato before all agree 
on Actuary. There are not yet words for what
happens next, a small boy in the gloom
chasing rats through the alley, a torch burping
smoke like shots on the battlefield, the music
of breaking glass. There’s no sense really
in calculating the odds. It’s already
dark outside 

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.Reading time 12 minutes.

Roaming the Labyrinth—Review

By Claire Eder

When encountering a new poetic voice, especially one that reaches me in translation, I often find myself flipping frequently between the main text and the notes section in the back of the book, grasping for purchase. Once the poems have drawn me in, I want more. I’m nosy and I desire at least some of the crucial details about this person: what was their childhood like? Why does the image of an orange slice keep reappearing? What is this geopolitical conflict, not obvious to a twenty-first century American reader, that they’re referencing in certain poems? While endnotes in academic texts can be dry, I find the notes in volumes of poetry can often be juicy, giving little peeks behind the curtain. 

For this reason, I am enthusiastic about the format that Christina Cook has created in Roaming the Labyrinth with Marie-Claire Bancquart (Aim Higher, 2025), and I’d be happy to see other works in translation adopt such a structure. Roaming the Labyrinth essentially takes the notes section, expands it, and plops it into the main text. The poems are nested in between prose sections offering analysis, context, and personal reflection. (The book also has actual endnotes with helpful material.) Through this unique structure, we get a rare glimpse into the translator-poet relationship, in this case a friendship that lasted many years, until Bancquart’s death in 2019. We come to understand certain choices that Cook made in her translations, and we get a true portrait of the remarkable, generous writer at the center of the text (labyrinth). What’s more, we are privy to a conversation between the translations and Cook’s own poetry, as she includes a handful of her poems that were shaped by her relationship with Bancquart. 

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.Reading time 8 minutes.

Review: Bill Hollands’ Mangrove

By Evan Green

Bill Hollands’s debut collection, Mangrove (published by ELJ Editions, 2025), takes readers through poems of nostalgia, grief, and family, primarily set against the lush backdrop of Florida. Raised in Miami, Hollands paints vivid images not only of the Floridian environment, but also the losses that he has faced. Hollands’s poetry also teems with references to the famous faces of his youth, all while he explores those personal memories. Combining this grief, and references to bygone 70s TV, Mangrove is a moving reflection on a queer life lived to the fullest. In tender and reflective poems, it guides readers through personal transformation and transformations in our televised culture.

From the beginning of his collection, it’s clear how large an impact both television and the natural environment had on Hollands as a child. Recurring images of verdant plant life alongside references to stars from the 60s through the 80s paint the picture of a childhood perched at a sliding glass door between the light of the outdoors and the glow of the television screen. The collection evokes feelings of nostalgia for that late-twentieth century moment—in all its velvet.

In the first section, Hollands dwells on a queer childhood, artfully reminiscing on a time full of new experiences and personal hardships. The second section focuses on Hollands’s family as he ponders the loss of several loved ones with bittersweet remembrance. Finally, the third section reflects on Hollands’s life as a whole, touching on emotion-filled moments from both his childhood and present-day life as a partner, parent, and teacher.

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.Reading time 10 minutes.

Review: Dear Boobs by Cassie Burkhardt

By Tyler List

Cassie Burkhardt’s collection, Dear Boobs (Bottlecap Press, 2025), is a linked collection of well-crafted poems that deal with motherhood and a longing for love. Despite its comical title, Burkhardt’s poems take the reader into the life of a mother trying to get through the day while simultaneously raising her children and maintaining her own sense of self. The tone of many of these swings from chaotic, poetic maximalism to peaceful wisdom, mimicking the rhythms of the speaker’s domestic life. We learn from the poems that Burkhardt is the mother of three kids with her husband, a brain surgeon, and that she’s worried about becoming invisible.

Each poem deals with its own individual, episodic-like story, jumping between images of the speaker herself, her husband, or her kids—Burkhardt’s good at showcasing a feeling of daily life passing by, as she also wrestles with self-doubt, the joy of motherhood, and the excitement of circus school—a hobby she has picked up to reclaim some sense of herself as an individual. Burkhardt’s skill is in knitting together the various styles that arise from describing these activities. She comes across as a disheveled, excitable, bold person—a full human being!—as she addresses what it means to be a mother (and more).

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.Reading time 3 minutes.

Review of Iridescent Pigeons by Candace Walsh

By Nicholas Skaldetvind

Candace Walsh’s Iridescent Pigeons (Yellow Arrow Publishing, 2024) pulses along the spectral tide of memory, braiding the intimate with the mundane, creating a textured meditation on love, familial bonds, and personal reclamation.  Her language weaves everyday objects from lemons, dogs, seaweed into a resonant web of at-once connections and separations, echoing Gerard Manley Hopkins’ sensuous attention to form and rhythm: “Glory be to goddesses of heft— / The plush, broad, soft, round, thick.”  Walsh’s adroit application of stylistic devices, with an ear keyed for language, illuminates the “sensuous beauty of everyday life” through a lexicon that recalls the lyrical introspection of Woolf’s The Waves and Bishop’s careful rendering of the physical: “I split the lemons crosswise twice, packed salt into the creases, / and stuffed them in the jar until their blood became their brine.” 

In the book, Walsh ranges from the cento and Sapphic stanzas to free verse, showing a marriage of form and emotional breadth. This reconciliation of form and freedom allows the collection’s overarching themes to come out more clearly; each poem inhabits spaces of queer eros, domesticity, and the unresolved. In poems like “Bowed Beauty,” the lyrical voice works with the corporeal as Walsh channels Hopkins’ “Pied Beauty,” creating an ode to the fullness and shape of bodies. And in “Dogs and Their Lesbians,” she captures a feverish excitement that resists society’s prescribed containment: “When we could finally pounce, / how hot it surged, / or hardly stirred—so deeply stilled. / We know how much it costs / to cut it off. I’d rather clean up blood.”   

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Review: 12 Oxen Under the Sea, by Craig Bernardini

.Reading time 9 minutes.

By Jenna Brown

In a blend of magical realism and surrealist technique, Craig Bernardini’s intrepid short-story collection, 12 OXEN UNDER THE SEA (New American Press, 2025), masterfully meshes domestic concerns with the absurd. In twelve idiosyncratic narratives, Bernardini contemplates death, isolation, parenting, sea creatures, guys named Carl, marital tensions, trauma, and the supernatural. Each story successfully asks us to suspend our disbelief as we encounter: a grieving father turning aquatic in his son’s pond and finding his previously dead wife in its depths; an extravagant hotel continually catching fire for increasingly arcane reasons; a revival house’s playing of Rachmaninoff causing phantasmagoric hallucinations. Or, in 16th century England, the occupant of an inn has his furnishings move due to an inexplicable poltergeist-like disturbance.

What makes Bernardini’s writing so effective is his ability to deftly make the uncanny a part of our world. His literary realms are absurdist, but only to a point. While the stories can be nonsensical, normal rules still apply—there are still bowling balls, bikes, and breakfasts. A child in a Manhattan Italian restaurant can burst into an eternal flame, but the characters themselves still order chicory salad from a menu. But even so, his worlds are not simple and tangible with only one odd thing jarring us. His stories never hinge on that single anomaly, and they hardly ever have a pat conclusion. Almost every time, we are still left in a joyously ambivalent place, thinking, “What just happened??”

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.Reading time 10 minutes.

Review: George Choundas’s I Think I’ll Stay Here Forever

By Grace Cooper

George Choundas’s short story collection I Think I’ll Stay Here Forever, winner of the 2025 Press 53 Award for Short Fiction, explores the uncanny ways we navigate loss, hardship, and change. Across twelve stories packed with molasses ships, fighting roosters, and persnickety aunts, Choundas explores the way we don’t necessarily have a complete fix on our identities. He’s a mesmerizing storyteller of our growing and shifting experiences.

Halfway through the collection we have the joy of reading “The Sisters Jeppard,” a story previously published by New Ohio Review. In that story, the narrator talks about their cousin’s first and second wives and develops that idea of unfixed identity. The first wife was loved very deeply by her mother and two aunts, otherwise described as “the three sisters.” The narrator seems almost judgmental of the care and attention the three sisters gave the first wife, describing her “upbringing” as “so different from how the hard world handles a person.” The first wife tragically passes away and, following her death, the narrator discusses the death of other loved ones that they’re seemingly much closer to, such as their cousin and the cousin’s second wife, who becomes her best friend. The family relationships are complicated, almost ornate, and Choundas wants us to get enmeshed in the strange way connection builds and grief lingers. After losing all these people, the narrator thinks back and reflects on the three sisters’ love with a new perspective:

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Review: A Preponderance of Starry Beings by Samantha Edmonds

.Reading time 10 minutes.

By Emilie DeOreo

Samantha Edmonds’s newest short-story collection A Preponderance of Starry Beings tackles the tensions between childhood egocentrism and the vastness of the worlds—both literal and metaphorical—beyond us. As children, the egocentrism stage is pivotal for our development, shaping how we understand our place in the world through our own limited perceptions. Yet the suggestion that something might exist beyond our physical planet allows some children to grasp, however faintly, that the world extends far past their immediate experiences and the boundaries of their own bodies. In space, they are merely singular specks of dust among the ever-expanding cosmos. A Preponderance of Starry Beings gives its readers a chance to realize how deeply connected we all are to the boundless unknown of the universe, and Edmonds’s characters, whether on Earth or elsewhere, act as a bridge between the ordinary and the extraordinary, showing how even mundane experiences can carry an otherworldly resonance that links us to the larger cosmos. 

Some of Edmonds’s stories are explicit in their relationship between normal everyday domesticity and galactic happenings, such as “The Adventures of Starboy and Earthgirl,” which follows two girls in the late 90s, their passion for all things Spock and Captain Kirk, and their love for each other. Other stories are more subtle about the cosmos connection, such as the impressively linked pieces that feature Ruth Emerson, a late-adolescent character Edmonds returns to multiple times, whose eyes are pointed toward heaven, but whose faith in a larger purpose is tested. Edmonds’s collection as a whole transforms the infinite landscape of space into a mirror for human emotion, demonstrating that no matter how small or isolated we may feel, our identities and experiences are inextricably linked. Whether her stories are about queer coming-of-age or spiritual unraveling, Edmonds shows us that connection (like starlight) travels faster than we could ever imagine, seeming to reach even those who believe they are completely alone. 

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Announcing the Summer Online Exclusive

.Reading time 1 minute.

The latest summer online exclusive from New Ohio Review is now available! Scroll down to read.

The issue includes featured art by Stephen Reichert, including our cover image, Untitled, 2012; poems from Natalie Taylor, Emma De Lisle, Kathleen McCoy, Jeff Worley, Mark Williams, J.D. McGee, Laura Vitcova, and Susan Cohen; fiction from Paloma Martínez-Cruz, JB Andre, Diego Arias, Joe Plicka, Meghan Chou, Logan McMillen, Ivy Goodman, Dena Pruett, Alison Theresa Gibson, Kenyon Geiger, Colton Huelle, and Sayandev Chatterjee; essays from Farah Barqawi and Maya Friedman; reviews of new work by Maria Zoccola, Dustin M. Hoffman, Michael Chang, Claire Bateman, Susan Browne, Dion O’Reilly, Vivian Blaxell, Sunni Brown Wilkinson, Therese Gleason, Jennifer Schomburg Kanke, and Stanley Plumly.

We hope you enjoy.

Thanks for reading,

-The Editors

Drink it up, buttercup

.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Natalie Taylor

                                                             Blue Fruit Moon: August 30, 2023

There’s a lot of hullabaloo in the woo woo
circles about this Super Blue Fruit moon, so rare
we won’t see the next one until 2037. My astrologer
friend counts on her fingers seven celestial bodies
in retrograde: Mercury, Venus, Saturn, Uranus,
Neptune, Pluto, and Chiron. A celestial goo
of retrospect and rehashing, a muck of revisiting old
stories, exes, holidays and birthdays fuzzy on the why
but clear on what wasn’t there, who didn’t show up,
what we missed. Wheels spinning under
a tree. What was plucked too small, hard
and green. Reconnecting with your inner child,
still wanting to play, to be held. Still dreaming
of some freedom attainable with gobs of money or super
hero powers or sheer will. The planets rotate in reverse,
earth shifts in its nook in the universe. We look back.

                                       Riding my scooter after teaching a late class, I stop
                                   at the light. I am not young anymore. I shiver in sweaty
                                      yoga tights, chilling in night air. Once I make it home,
                                             I will have fulfilled responsibilities of all three jobs,
                                        another 12 hours devoted to maintaining shelter and food.
                                          A young man pulls up next to me on his Kawasaki, dirty
                                          carburetor popping with every wrist crank. He waves
                                         smiling under midnight metallic helmet. In the other lane,
                                                                    a Harley’s deep throat rumbles as its bandanaed rider
                                                                     revs the V-twin crankpin engines. We wait for green,
                                                                  a small symphony of crankpins and cylinders and buzz
                                                       and backfires under a freeway overpass. I point to the moon,
                                                                 full and free as a peach, Saturn in conjunction hovering
                                                                                               just above, still spinning. The riders flip
                                                                                            their thumbs up. Just some kids on bikes
                                                                                             lapping up all the juicy bits they can get.

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Miracle-Proof

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Emma De Lisle

A few of the stories were good: Lazarus, Cana, the adulteress. Who doesn’t love a stoning? Or picturing him balancing on that dark sea, feet peeping over the waves that some hand ground down out of those purples and black-blues, phthalo blue, and Egyptian, something iridescent crushed in to sign what you can’t see below. Nacre, maybe. Like a salamander in a flash-photo. Oil on the water like skin. Or like that pearly interference stretched over a raw muscle, its meat-cells cut against the grain. Light-struck. Divided. And the angel. I can hear it. Not a swishing sound, like you’d expect, or a rushing, or anything with such a shhhh. Hush. We’ll be interrupted. I’ll be hyperextended and impossible—this strange star of limbs and hinges like something that could stand up on its own, yanking double-handed on all my cords and tendons, yellow-white if you bite into them, popping, those rickety rubber stalks full of the code that makes me go. Code that opens my mouth. Speaks me. Is it miracle-proof? God sent a messenger to say, Believe her. And would do it again, would do it in a heartbeat. All we do is stay in the foreground, we bend low, we write it down.

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Wall of Clocks

.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Kathleen McCoy

“We rarely hear ‘truth and reconciliation’—just ‘truth and justice.'”
 —David Park, author of The Truth Commissioner

On this wall tick your childhood and mine, your loves
    and mine, your regrets, cacophonies of memory

and harmonies in your ear, coagulations of unuttered grief,
    relentless news from a grittier Belfast, our cousins

going at each other in the streets, Molotov cocktails and hurled
    rocks. Rifles. Truth without whisper of reconciliation.

But this is not the Belfast we have read about. Now the streets
    are clean, the bricks new. Twenty-seven percent check

the “no religion” box. Yet boxes there still be. With Barry’s tea
    I toast a thing that is not a thing, a thought that is not

singular beneath rolling gray clouds that siphon the self,
    that challenge perception, angle and taste, domesticity,

violence, numinousness. Dozens of clocks stand at attention,
    unseeing eyes fixed on the observer, no two declaring

the same time. None advance; all compel stares: one moon-
    faced grandfather clock painted blue, grannies’ broken

clocks, wooden clocks with cats or hens or roosters or sheep or
    horses or farmers and their wives with mice that once spun

in small circles to children’s delight, oak clocks, clocks of ivory
    irony, aluminum alarm, plastic grace, yellowed whites

like tired eyes, grays like boards left out too long in rain—all stand
    in pleasing array—but this signpost points in thirty directions.

No wonder I never know what time it is!
    This liminal Belfast in earliest glimmer of spring

wriggles into the raincoat and, despite its bloody past,
    could be nearly anywhere within the body or the earth.

Sitting before this monument to time, its silent mellifluence of green,
    its threat or promise of birdsong or the sound of striking, I note

how milky tea grows cool, limbs warm. In my absence, here. I am.

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How to Test White Guys

.Reading time 34 minutes.

By Paloma Martínez-Cruz

The first is named Steve Stahl. You have no claim on him; the concept is beyond imagination. Enjoy quiet contentment as you color your tree trunk brown using a box of crayons that sits between you. Steve surprises you the day he announces, “I brush my teeth” and pecks you on the cheek making a smacking sound with his lips.

This means something.

For the end-of-year dance recital, the teacher’s aide pairs you with Juan, a dark brown boy who speaks only Spanish. The teachers choreograph a preschool version of the Mexican hat dance, and you see that a blond girl has suddenly materialized to be paired with Steve Stahl. Had she been in your class the whole time? How is everything about her so yellow? Steve Stahl gets right down to the business of dancing with her, which is just as baffling as her sudden appearance. How is he unwilling to boycott the dance or at least throw a crayon at the teacher’s aide in an act of defiance?

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.Reading time 25 minutes.

5 things getting attacked by a dog taught me about mid-level B2B sales management

By JB Andre

Featured Art: Stephen Reichert, A List of the Reasons of Why I am Getting Into Computers, 2025. Oil pastel, pen and marker on paper, 14″ x 11″. 

First I want to start off by saying that I am OK. An ambulance ride, eight stitches, and a lot of painkillers later, I am safely at home with my beautiful, loving family. Shoutout my amazing wife @CamillaSpringer for taking such good care of me after my hospital stay. I also want to take this time to share my gratitude with friends and family who have reached out to wish me a safe recovery—and to those who haven’t: it’s not too late! I have decided to post about this following the success of my more personal article: “What I learned about leadership when my Grandmother died.” To all of my readers, again I thank you for your well-wishes. Please don’t forget to like, share, re-post, and comment. Follow me if you don’t already for more great business content!

Yesterday morning, I was walking my labradoodle puppy (say hi Max!), or, I suppose, we were coming back from a trip to the park, and crossing the parking lot to our apartment (for those of you shocked that we still live in an apartment, check out my article “The risks of homeownership for early-career entrepreneurs”). About halfway across the parking lot, I saw a nasty-looking dog. About 70, 80 pounds, brown, a mutt with a broad, square face like something between a pit and a shepherd, but low to the ground and stocky. I recognized this dog and knew it was trouble (check out my post “Max got attacked by a dog but he’s OK: Resources on pet care and picking an affordable veterinarian”). It was walking up to us slowly, but I have to admit—I ran! Which brings me to my first of five tips.

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Fritura Sunday

.Reading time 22 minutes.

By Diego Arias

I sat at a Taco Bell reading a book about cultural marxists, contraception, and immigration. Someone gave me this book and told me it would define the election, but all I could gather was the author yap on and on about country clubs and labor unions and working-class business practices and shoestring budgets. I very much wanted to dump the book in a garbage can and never read anything about it again, but I was waiting for someone and had nothing else to do. I looked up from my carne asada steak taco and watched a man in the corner enjoy a soccer game on his phone and take savage bites out of a large, engorged chalupa. As he bit into the fried casing’s manila envelope colored flesh, a bright red sauce squirted out and spread across the table. Holy Cucamonga, this was a wild, satanic place. Men with the legs of flamingos and heads like snakes from Central American jungles rummaged through middle American taco concoctions like a teenager in a 1950’s drive-in theater parking lot. They fondled these damn tacos and burritos in uncomfortable, godless ways. What sort of place was this? What kind of man visits a Taco Bell in the middle of the afternoon and orders twelve of these grease torpedoes only to consume them in one twenty-minute sitting? What sort of liver processes that kind of modern nutritional content?  

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.Reading time less than 1 minute.

Featured Art: Stephen Reichert, Untitled, 2015. Oil on canvas, 10″ x 14″. “Ernst Cassirer, An Essay on Man” series.

Paste

.Reading time 17 minutes.

By Joe Plicka

“Unknown / Man / Died Eating / Library Paste / July 14 1908”

                        — epitaph on a headstone at Pioneer
                         Cemetery in Goldfield, Nevada

We were called to Braddock, arriving after midnight to find a woman, recently widowed, laboring with her fourth child. She stood in the kitchen near a burning stove, unclothed and sodden, gripping a thick cord dangling from the rafters. As her pains grew, she called for her oldest daughter to bring a syrup she’d somehow procured from a druggist in Cleveland, an anodyne she was willing and able to try in the absence of her late husband, whom she fairly cursed for his commonplace insistence—when he was alive, of course—that a daughter of Eve not “thrust aside the decrees of Providence.” The druggist, however, had mixed the compound with blackstrap molasses rather than rose honey and the poor woman found the flavor unpalatable. She cried for flour paste, which her daughter fetched from a printer’s devil down the road. This paste she mingled with her bitter cure in an empty sardine tin and continued to taste it with a wooden spoon, even as she birthed a healthful boy with the most immoderate hair one ever saw on an infant.

                           — Mabel Gaskin, midwife, 1850

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.Reading time 2 minutes.

MY WIFE, IN HER ELEMENT

By Jeff Worley

Featured Art: Stephen Reichert, Untitled, 2012. Oil on canvas, 12″ x 12″. “Cirlce” series.

(for Linda’s birthday, 9/5/2023)

You were a human otter,
who loved to roll and roll
in every body of water you found
waiting. Friend’s backyard pool,
Cave Run Lake (an easy walk
from our cabin), tumultuous waves
off Ambergris, all there for you.
               In Kokkari, 1981,
the Greek boys watched
every step you took from the frothy
Med because you hadn’t bothered
with a swimsuit, flinging beads
of turquoise water from the tips
of your raven hair. You laughed,
sputtering water, nearly breathless,
smiling at me taking this shot with the Nikon
from our Daisy Duck beach towel.
               Does life
get any better than this? Not for me,
I thought then. Not for me, I think now.

 (for Linda Kraus Worley, 1950–2021)

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Watching Football with My Dad

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Mark Williams

Saturday night, fourth quarter underway
of a close Packers game. Bart Starr era.
My dad and I were sitting on the couch
in my Grandma Mabel’s apartment.
My legs barely reached the footstool
that my great-grandmother and I
played Chinese Checkers on. But that night,
I was watching football with my dad.

He played left end in high school.
Leather helmet. No face-guard.
When I was seven or eight,
he bought a white football
so we could play catch in the dark.
He taught me how to throw a spiral.
Fingers here. Thumb there. But that night,
I was watching football with my dad.

It must have been near seven o’clock,
Vince Lombardi on the sideline, when
we heard footsteps coming down the hall.
It’s time for the Welk show! Grandma shouts
before she, my great-grandmother Torsie,
and my great-aunt Pauline entered
the room like an offensive line. That night,
my dad and I stopped watching football

so they could watch Lawrence (an’ a one,
an’ a two . . . ), his Champagne Music Makers,
The Lennon Sisters, and Myron Floren
as, no doubt, Jim Taylor went for ten
and Max McGee went deep. I never played football,
though sometimes when I think about the past
I feel like I’ve been hit. But on nights like this,
I am watching football with my dad.

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Butter

.Reading time 41 minutes.

By Meghan Chou

Featured Art: Stephen Reichert, Untitled, 2014. Oil on canvas, 12″ x 12″. “Cirlce” series.

I first saw her aboard the JADE PRINCESS, a cruise ship several miles off the coast of New Hampshire. She wore ribbons in her hair and a leather choker around her neck that read GIVE ME A REASON. The two of us made up the entire wedding party. I played the roles of daughter and maid of honor and she, her father’s best man. The other guests were staff on their dinner break and a couple gamblers, vying for a seat at the blackjack table.

The captain kept the ceremony short (on autopilot like his ship). Ma had already been married twice, yet for Husband #3, she still felt giddy and hopeful. Where I saw folding chairs and a wrinkled backdrop, she saw romance. Where I saw a cardboard cutout of her last boyfriend, she saw the love of her life. When the time came to exchange vows, I handed Ma the wedding band for her five-second fiancé, a mood ring from LOST & FOUND that glowed black in my sweaty hands. The best man gave her father a light-up jelly ring and our parents sealed it all with a kiss.

“Faye,” she introduced herself at the reception, my stepsister before I learned her name.

“Lenny.”

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Providence

.Reading time 39 minutes.

By Logan McMillen

i. Kansas City, Missouri— 1983

Every morning before the store opened, Rubén tempted George into smoking a cigarette by the loading docks—which had a clear view of the highway and the sunrise. Today was no different.

“You’re the devil,” George said—with his lighter already pulled out.

George owned the home improvement store where Rubén worked.

The missionaries were quick to find a job for Rubén. And even though it wasn’t in his field of study, or anywhere near his relatives in New Jersey—Rubén liked it. It gave him a casual sense of purpose.

“We don’t really follow that one,” Rubén said. “Do we?”

Rubén often pretended that he didn’t know anything about Mormonism, even though he’d been “practicing” for over two years. He thought of the religion mainly as a way to stay social in an unfamiliar place. That and he felt like he owed the missionaries something. If they wanted his soul, so be it.

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Ichetucknee

.Reading time 5 minutes.

By J.D. McGee

Featured Art: Stephen Reichert, Untitled, 2013-2014. Oil on canvas, 12″ x 12″. “Cirlce” series.

Archaeological exploration has discovered the site of a 17th century Spanish mission, San Martin de Timucua, next to a short tributary connecting Fig Springs to the Ichetucknee River.
Florida Dept. of State

i.
In needy dawn’s tabula rasa, shred
through breaches in the birch like candleflame
refracted, flung through flashed glass and calms,
as Ichetucknee disrobes habits of mist,
I splash the slim canoe, a floating pew.

The mind creates liturgical vestments;
they vex, featherless chicks pecking for feed.
A broken heart paddles strangely: it bleeds
blood, needs blood. It begs, a feckless and cracked
flask that prays for shape of spring water

ii.
Although the spring is just a thing. It flows
from aquifer, hyaline through bedrock pits.
The parable of trees on the banks preach the chase
of sun and soil; the verse of dragonflies
incants the atom need to procreate and feed.

If it was only just the heron’s sweep,
the otter’s slip, indignant turtle glare,
quiescent flow, supplicant fawn and doe.
This hush, is it within or without me?
Is it scrub jay songs or songs of myself?

iii.
We sat in plastic circles, yellow rooms,
desperate to deserve salvation, told
to find a Higher Power. Fine. But, God,
what grace for nicotine thumbs, DT feet?
Alone, breakfast:
       I once was lost but now

Am found.
    They sang in church when I was young.
Was the hymn an echo, my voice right now,
or welled from other springs? A coffee trick,
perhaps, compelled halation through the blinds,
wrought mosaics inlaid with my cracked glass.

iv.
It may be how, like mouths open to pray,
the stream invokes river, or a wood stork
sainting; it may have been the want of me,
the open wound or suckling, skies precise
and rare as sapphire, oak monk robes of moss.

It may have been wonder, childlike awe,
primordial immanence in my tear ducts;
or, maybe just the child who needs to know,
who breathes dreaming into the world he floats.

What befell may have already been there:
in my bowels, in clear imagined depths
where mullet twine like a child’s friendship braid.
The child’s ease for tears: it may be these springs
are my tears, maybe the tears of angels;

maybe, there is no other god for me.

v.
If I could speak, articulate, shape words;
or, I’m just cursed, repeating all I’ve heard,
a mouthpiece forever, slowed to stone and root.
What self beyond reflection? Stare and yearn,
burnt and burning, to waste away and drown?

I fall into the mirror, the boreal shock,
and deep in the headspring’s gaped mouth I see
a blackness stretched back, but a rush of life,
flawless as the first breath, sharp as a spring sunrise,
bored into bedrock, black, back, the spring of myself.

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Not Now

.Reading time 30 minutes.

By Ivy Goodman

Featured Art: Stephen Reichert, Untitled, 2011. Oil on canvas, 18″ x 12″. “Cirlce” series.

It was a late season game on a warm Saturday approaching summer but not yet humid, overcast, so that clouds gave shade, and if the rain started, good, then the seemingly interminable might end sooner.

Boys, aged nine and ten, were playing baseball.

The game was real, with real uniforms, equipment, jargon, and rules, but it also seemed as momentous as make-believe. I understood make-believe far better than team sports. Oh, I understood sports, but I didn’t. I couldn’t. Like the color blind or the tone deaf, I was somehow incapable. While other parents followed the game, I stared at the players’ families more than I should have.

In our family, there were three of us, my husband, myself, and our son, and we had moved to the area just months before. Newcomers, we were late to register, and our son was assigned to a team with room for stragglers. We still didn’t know quite where we were, what was this place, who were these people? For me the quandary wasn’t just who in general or in particular, but also that deeper puzzlement I often felt, not who but what. What were people? I’d been staring at them my entire life.

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The Surgeon’s Wife

.Reading time 11 minutes.

By Dena Pruett

He tells us he is like that boss, you know, the one from the movie.

“That’s all.” He’ll trill as he flutters past in a mockery of the boss, the movie, us.

 We can tell how a surgery went by the particular way he wears his white coat. On good days the coat is on, collar crisp, the sides flapping up and out as he strides forward, fast and sure. On bad ones, the coat is in his hand, tight and bunched, ready to throw at a chair as soon as he steps into his office.

The rhetoric is as fluid as his fashion. God works through his hands. It’s all divined, preordained. He is but a vessel, an instrument of something higher, more profound than him. Or, it’s everyone else’s fault. The residents are lazy. The nurses and P.A.s slow. The tools not sharp and swift, just out of reach. The patient—too weak. We forgive him these days. He just cares for his patients, the practice. We imagine that deep down he holds himself accountable, feels too much, and this is all mostly bluster.

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Self Portrait as Horse Mouth

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Laura Vitcova

Featured Art: Stephen Reichert, Untitled, 2012. Oil on canvas, 12″ x 12″. “Cirlce” series.

My lips spread open like the doors of a carnival
ride flashing to reveal a narrow-gauged rail
of teeth that jut from my mouth, pink gums
wedged between white enamel planks,
a freak show, a long tongued chasm
in a distorted body, a chamber of horrors,
a tiger’s bladed mouth about to rip out
your last thought with a laugh.
But you said mine looked like a horse’s mouth
that deserved a bit, maybe a bridle, definitely
a saddle. I was broken before I knew my flesh
would stretch to accommodate a lifetime
of acorns in my cheeks, that I would learn
to survive the wild winter.

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