Category: Uncategorized

Sitting in a Simulated Living Space at the Seattle Ikea

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Abby E. Murray

Finalist, New Ohio Review Poetry Contest

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

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The Game

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Steven Cramer

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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A Theory of Violence

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Jennifer Perrine

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Embarrassment: from baraço (halter)

.Reading time 4 minutes.

By Jennifer Perrine

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

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

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Envy

.Reading time 13 minutes.

By Patricia Horvath

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

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

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

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Seafood

.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Amanda Williamsen

           Baltimore, Maryland

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

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Crisis on Infinite Earths, Issues 1-12

.Reading time 5 minutes.

By Bethany Schultz Hurst

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

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

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

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

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Coins for the Ferryman

.Reading time 53 minutes.

By David Denny

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

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

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Whatever I Might Say

.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Sydney Lea

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The Pain Suit

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Claire Bateman

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Tropospheric

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Claire Bateman

For all the times
we’ve checked the weather,

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

Is it oblivious, incurious,
self-absorbed?

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

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

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

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

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Purchase

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Claire Bateman

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

Books float alphabuoyantly unshelved
upon Suspension™.

Bartenders slide their brews
frictionless
along Suspension™.

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

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

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

now we’re free to set them dangling
everywhere,

just as we arrange our limbs
to sleep upon transparency

anywhere.

Nevertheless,
we can’t agree:

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

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Tutti Frutti for Me

.Reading time 33 minutes.

By Andrea Simon

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

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

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Feature: Should Poems Tell the Truth?

.Reading time 40 minutes.

By Lawrence Raab

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

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

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

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

.Reading time 19 minutes.

By Adrienne Su

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

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

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

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

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Feature: A Brief Response

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Louise Glück

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

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Feature: Telling the Truth in Poetry

.Reading time 19 minutes.

By Carl Dennis

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

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Feature: “Father”

.Reading time 7 minutes.

By Michael Ryan

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

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

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

.Reading time less than 1 minute.

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

Issue 15 compiled by Jade Braden.

Fear of the Bird Migration

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Darren Morris

Featured Art: Bird by Peter Takal

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

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Cups

.Reading time 9 minutes.

By Cecilia Pinto

Featured Art: Resting by Antonio Mancini

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

I have remembered this.

            

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

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

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

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My Keats Year

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By James Davis May

Featured Art: Tea Party with Open Pottery by Seymour Rosofsky

Shouldn’t it be I’m disappointed by (or because of) and not in you?

We were watching Stellar’s jays—I didn’t know their names then,
I addressed the first one as “Monsieur Mohawk”—watch us,
or watch our meal rather. I don’t know if birds feel disappointment,
but as they flitted around the perimeter of the patio
with an odd combination of aggression and timidity,
their feet on the sun-bleached railing
making sounds like a hand searching a filled drawer
for something that’s not in the drawer,
the diminishment of cereal must have been processed
as the bird-equivalent of disappointment.

When I picked up Chelsea’s bowl and took it inside to the sink,
I thought of California (it was my first time in the state),
and then of Robinson Jeffers,
and then of the time Jeffers realized
he was older than Keats when Keats died, and then I realized
I was older than Jeffers when he realized this.

He was taking firewood back to his house and had to walk over a very narrow
bridge, one that his dog seemed reluctant to cross again. So he left the bundle,
carried the dog over, and then went back for the wood when he was hit by his
age, and then the “insignificance” of what he had written.

And yet we say, “I’m disappointed with myself,”
which sounds redundant.

The woman eating dinner with us the night before told us there was no age she
wanted to go back to. Someone pointed out that she was still young.

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Mystery Object

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Sarah Galvin

Featured Art: The Art of Living by Saul Steinberg

You come out of the room where everyone is doing karaoke
and ask why I’m ignoring you.
I want to say something that suggests I’ve endured
some exotic, indescribable torture

but a completely mundane thing has happened,
which is you have stopped loving me.
So, even though your body is here, you are gone
and bodies are becoming less like a procession of individuals
than a texture like wet cement, but also like words that say,
“Why would you subscribe to such a mystery object”

and I think, it’s funny the cement forms words, especially these words
but something isn’t right about the word “subscribe” in this context
and I can’t tell if the sentence is a question or a statement—
Why is there no punctuation?
I want to run, but I’m already travelling in every direction at once.

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The Darkest Part of the Cloud

.Reading time 46 minutes.

By Jessica Langan-Pack

Featured Art: Wheatfield by Georges Braque

My daughter is nine, and she has recently grown taller and lost most of her softness. Now she’s a thin and delicate thing with very straight, very smooth hair that she wears in bangs across her forehead. She is afraid of bees. She is afraid of forest fires, and of strangers, and of a book she read called The Face on the Milk Carton, which is about a little girl who sees her own face on a missing children poster. She is articulate and serious and very imaginative. When she finds out, at the beginning of her summer vacation, that her father is losing his memory, not slowly, or gracefully, but at a possibly alarming rate, what she decides to do is remember everything.

“So that you can tell him?” I ask her. For a few weeks I have been thinking of my head as an empty room of some kind, and sometimes my voice reverberates off its walls. We are sitting in the kitchen eating cereal.

She shrugs. “Just so I don’t forget.” She is at a stage where she has trouble differentiating between other people, real or fictitious, and herself. I wonder if she is afraid of losing her own memory.

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The Professional

.Reading time 4 minutes.

By Michael Bazzett

She arrived in a dark suit and a mask-like smile, explaining
her services in a manner so polished it almost put us off.
This is my specialty, she soothed. Both mind and house
will be empty as a mountain wind once I’m done. I sensed
she’d said those words before. We sat at the kitchen table,
you and I, looking at one another, hoping the other felt more
certain, more assured. Once we signed, it would take years
before we acknowledged our mistake. She’d left the whole day
open, and could begin immediately. Was there perhaps a guest
room where she could change? Her assistant arrived with
a black duffel, fresh white towels, and a stainless-steel basin.

I didn’t know the basin would be so big, I murmured. We looked
at one another uncomfortably. It is not always a clean process,
she reassured. You do understand, once I’m sequestered, it is
very important that I not be disturbed. We nodded. She closed
the door with an audible click. For the first few hours, it seemed
okay. Her assistant sat out in the van, with the windows down,
reading. We sat in the living room and tried to do the same,
ignoring the sounds coming from the guest room, sighs that
sharpened into cries. When a few faces started disappearing
in the photographs above the piano, you leapt to your feet.
This isn’t right, you said. These things shouldn’t be removed.

But what about the pain? I asked. Don’t you want it gone?
No, you said, pointing to the image of a child, suddenly frantic.
The eyes had faded to nothing. From forehead to cheekbone
was just smooth skin. I ran to the window. The van was gone,
as was the tire-swing that had been there an hour earlier. I looked
and saw the elm losing its limbs, one by one. Maybe we can still
get some of our money back, I said. And then you said: I want her
gone. The assistant had sealed the door shut with tape. It came
off with a spattering sound, and the shrieks from inside paused.
Then the voice came, a strangled croak as I opened the door
and saw her, smaller than I remembered, perched on the dresser,
her suit pooled on the floor beneath her. Her face had become
a sort of beak, hinged open and hissing. But it was the children
that were upsetting, sitting in a circle at her feet, quietly singing.

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Fastball Shy

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Mike Schneider

Featured Art: Gray Spots by Vasily Kandinsky

Hot roller to the shortstop,
me—lean machine
of summer, scuffling
in ballfield yellow dirt.
Off like a hound I go
with my three-finger
Warren Spahn, neatsfoot-
oiled cowhide glove
to gobble that scorched
grounder & fire it
across the diamond
to Tub McMullin’s
fat-handed mitt at First.
Little League? Shit.
This is ultimate Big Time.
        Who knew that stitched
leather ball could baffle
hand & eye? Wild
chance, wicked hop,
they said, nasty chop
direct to the cartilaged
bulge of my Adam’s Apple
dropped me flat, washed
me in starlight. Nerve
& muscle inscribed
with solid-state physics,
I learned to flinch & never
could unlearn that secret.
One rainy afternoon
on Heckman’s front porch
we unraveled it, yards
& yards of yarn down
to the inscrutable rubber
pill, unforgiving hard
center of the world.

Read More

Still Listening

.Reading time 7 minutes.

By Robert Cording

Featured Art: Confusion of Christmas by Julia Thecla

I. Hospice Jumble

The Jumble in the paper too hard for him to read,
my mother suggested we make up our own: Dear,

she said to her husband, your first word is life.
Reduced to words we jumbled, he joked file

it. My brother offered another, mean,
thinking perhaps of his diabetes, a name

like cancer to our family. Then, lamp,
lit at his bedside, and the one palm

visible outside his one windowed room.
My father got them quickly, the last, moor,

said with all the sadness of being far from shore . . .
A grandchild solved that one—horse,

she blurted, noticing that he had left
us for a while. By his bed, my mother felt

his hands and face and eyes. Bob, please,
she said, but he was already asleep,

snoring, not dead. My mother sighed, O God.
My brother, in the spirit still, said dog. Read More

My Dead Father Remembers My Birthday

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Lesley Wheeler

Featured Art: Birthday Party by Margaret Burroughs

Dream-phone rang and I thought: that’s exactly
his voice. I haven’t forgotten. Then: but I could
forget, because he’s dead. Hi, sorry it’s been so long,
but I was sick and the doctors messed everything up.
He made that shrug-noise, dismissive but pained,
meaning he’s lying or leaving something out.
It’s snowing here, and then a click, click, over the line,
and a neutral woman’s voice, slightly officious:
This recording was intercepted. If you wish to replay
this message, dial this number now, and she recited
a blizzard of digits while I flailed
for a pen then found myself tangled in blankets.
The window a bruise beginning to fade.

Here mist wreathes the trunks. In a few months
snow will crisp the grass, insulate and numb the oaks
with feathery layers that would soak and freeze
a human being. When and where is he? Snug,
maybe, watching weather through double panes.
Or wanting to be. I heard a bead of doubt
suspended in his voice, a cool guess he’d missed
something, before my operator intervened,
reason declaring: This is memory. The line is cut.

Read More

A Toast in Cancun

.Reading time 61 minutes.

By Charles Haverty

Featured Art: Oak Street Beach, Chicago by Terry Evans

Everyone in his new life warned Ferris not to go to Cancun. They said Cancun was to drinking what Las Vegas was to gambling. “They even drink in the swimming pools,” his sponsor Leonard told him. “No shit. They belly up to the bar right there in the water.” He’d been sober for four months, a week, and three days, but Caitlin was his only sister and he her only brother and this was her wedding. So there he stood, sweating on the beach in the wrong suit, the darkest figure in the sand-colored crowd. With the ceremony behind him, only the reception, the night, and a taxi ride to the airport separated Ferris from the plane that would carry him back to Indiana and his quiet, normal life.

It was five o’clock, with two hours to kill before the beachside reception, and as guests blew soap bubbles in lieu of throwing rice, he felt an arm encircle his waist, his father’s arm, steering him back through the bubbles toward the empty rows of white chairs. His father was a well-kept man of fifty-nine, youthful and perpetually tan, and though he’d been all smiles walking Caitlin down the makeshift aisle, he looked ashen now, diminished. “We need to talk,” he said. “Not here. Alone. Mano a mano.” They agreed to meet poolside once his father was through posing for photos with the wedding party. He took hold of Ferris’s sleeve. “Don’t fail me, Son,” he said, and that Son frightened Ferris more than anything. As he followed the concrete path that ran alongside the beach, the urge to drink, to counteract his renewed sense of dread, was near irresistible. He had to call Leonard.

Read More

Patina

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Mark Cox

Featured Art: Untitled by Vija Clemins

In your prime, shape presents itself first,
the angle and curve of one thing,
the size of something else,
or the way her hair flows volcanically

along each subtle slope and swell.
It is crazed, intense, super-heated,
even the soles of your boots feel sticky,

because she’s entered you, you know this,
she charts the very map of your blood,
and that eyelid twitch you have going,
they’ll claim is stress and dehydration,

but it’s her, pal, all her, she floods places
you’ve never named in yourself,
she proffers the pulse, the duende, the élan,
that jackhammer of lust
outside the Fiesta Ware outlet. . . .

But one day, it just happens,
a man’s eyes cloud and change,
you don’t feel with the same ardor
the way she moves, her confident posture,

no, suddenly it is color you notice,
the grays, the yellows, the bruised surfaces
tinged with a silver-green, almost a tarnish,
as if her skin were a metal,

and not such a precious one, either,
more like pewter or the common alloys
of soot-smudged medieval artisans,
something to be re-shaped, hammered thin,
become useful and used.

Read More

Finality

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Mark Cox

Featured Art: Jonny Dunn’s Sandwich Shop, Paducah, Kentucky by Walker Evans

She did not fit her body anymore—
she was lost inside it—
not like some punished child
wincing in the corner of a vast room—
not, either, like a ring fitted snug in its box—
more like the single yellow pill
in her white medicine cup—
that’s how she was, waiting—
carving precise cubes
from a thin lamb chop, chewing
with such listless fatigue,
I feared she might never finish,
and so pretended that by looking away
I was preserving her dignity.

Chewing and swallowing—
that’s how I remember her—
not as a face or even sequence of faces,
but as a complex montage,
a simultaneous superimposition
of every face she’d worn since birth. Read More

A Distant Relative

.Reading time 7 minutes.

By Ryan Meany

Featured Art: Coffee and Cigarettes by Ken Schles

Mom called Friday to say Linda died.
At least two people I don’t like at work
I know better than Aunt Linda. I carried her
casket yesterday, because my grandmother asked,
along with younger cousins, strangers I recognize from childhood,
tough men I see only as the children they were
in bony faces, stubble. The babies they were
they’ve locked up deep: Dusty on military disability
with three kids, and Billy, who used to be Little Billy,
with a court date for driving 137. My grandmother
looked like a Treasure Troll in tired skin, white broken
hair refusing to go down. When I hugged her the life in her was small
as a niece, her lineage drained out all around her. She reminded me
I was her first grandbaby in that smoky Southern Baptist
vibrato. A few days before, on Sunday, when I’d come to her house,
she talked like she’d long ago forgiven me for mostly staying away
for twenty years. I was glad she didn’t know the trouble I’ve caused, especially
because I doubt she’d love me less. My senior picture hung in her living room
as if I were as important as all these grandkids and great grandkids
who wondered who I was. Soon she’ll be dead and I won’t be so important.
So many people took turns holding her
the funeral seemed to be hers. I had no right to want to save her
from thinking, when I was helping to carry her daughter’s body,
that I’d soon be carrying her body, as I’d carried my grandfather’s body
just a couple years before, which was actually six years before.
We were not sad that, to time, we were like grass
under the feet of pallbearers. I was sad because
the time I had in common with this side of the family
we’d mostly forgotten, another thing my grandmother would die knowing.
The last time I saw Aunt Linda was outside the hospital
in the courtyard for smoking. I was there visiting someone
who’d mixed Vicodin and vodka to find out who cared. I can’t remember
why Aunt Linda was there, her heart or her brain. Her brain
would cause the most trouble later, a popped vessel, then
another, the top of her skull removed, screams
from the headaches and so many drugs, according to my grandmother
as we smoked outside Sunday morning. She’s at peace,
I said. Already we were down to our last words.

Read More

At the Grave of Sadie Thorpe

.Reading time 68 minutes.

By Miles Harvey

Featured Art: A Graveyard and Steel Mill in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania by Walker Evans

Time forks, perpetually, into countless futures. . . . In most of these times, we do not exist;
in some, you exist but I do not; in others, I do and you do not; in others still, we both do.
—Jorge Luis Borges, “The Garden of Forking Paths”

“Was she a relative of yours?” the old man asks, leading me toward your grave.

“Well, not exactly,” I begin to reply. “She—”but then I pause. In the middle of my sentence, in the middle of my life, in the middle of some small-town cemetery in the middle of the Midwest, I pause, unable to explain who you are or why I’m here. What I would tell the man, if it didn’t sound so absurd, is that although I am not your descendant, although I only recently learned of your existence, although you barely left a mark on the world, and although your corpse was buried here more than forty years before I was born, I can’t get you out of my mind. What I would recount, if I could figure out a simple way to do it, is the history of happenstance that connects me to you across the years, a bond that at this moment feels almost as strong as the ties of blood. What I would confess, if I wasn’t worried he’d laugh in my face, is that I woke up this morning, a couple months shy of my fiftieth birthday, certain I had to drive more than one-hundred miles from Chicago to visit a total stranger’s grave in this tiny hamlet of Dana, Illinois.

A dog barks in the heat of this August afternoon. A killdeer swoops in on slender wings, offering its distinctive call: kill-dee, dee-dee-dee, kill-dee, deedee-dee. And still I pause.

Read More

Hook and Eye

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Sarah Barber

Featured Art: Untitled (Woman’s Arm and Bra) by Ralph Gibson

Often I have unfastened it myself
without tragedy. But I wanted you
to stand behind me—in fact
a fourteenth-century town
of needle manufacturers crocheted
loops from wire because they wanted
your hands just so terribly
close and a little bit slow
at the closure too aggressively
latched to unhook at the will
of its wearer, which is what was said
to sell it to nineteenth-century ladies,
not quite promising exactly such
an unhooking of their dresses
and all those garments, and indeed
as early as 1643 a woman in Maryland
traded £10 worth of tobacco for hooks
and eyes only because she wanted
you to stand behind me
as the fastening came undone.

Read More

Rome in Us

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Thomas Grout

Featured Art: The Fountain, Villa Torlonia, Frascati, Italy by John Singer Sargent

It’s funny isn’t it—the way Rome still comes at you
fast like a bat breaking past your head from memory.
At the Roman pace the body takes the city better than the mind.
A cathedral ceiling’s fireworks shoot up
once the sermon’s fireworks stop. And when
the ceiling finally stills, the piazza outside overfills
with new fruits and vegetables and etymologies.
Stimulation’s cheap as wine and your horse
is more than happy to take it in by trough.
But it flies by so fast—

only just now it’s slowed enough to hatch a feeling
similar to how it is to listen through the dark over our bed
for a half-caught sound to sound again.
That given one more chance I could make easy sense of it.

It’s often that I sleepwalk down our subdivision’s version
of the Spanish Steps thinking I left something unnamable
inside the Trevi. Is that it at the end of the tube-slide?
I never know. It all gets hazy after the Flaminian gate
though I’m absolutely certain I wake up at the refrigerator.
Rome is in us like unfinished business—

that’s why half of me is still sauntering the cobbles.
I guess we’ll always live our lives possessed
by the ancient Roman sense that down any old left turn
suddenly one of our dreams might find its title.

Read More

Connect

.Reading time 16 minutes.

By Glen Pourciau

Featured Art: Mall of America, Minnesota by Melanie Einzig

We were in a Mexican restaurant at the mall, and my husband, as is his habit, was looking at everything but me. I still had half an enchilada left, but Boyd’s empty plate had already been removed and he’d ground through all the tortilla chips and salsa on the table, leaving his eyes and mind free to survey the room. His attention was drawn to the occupants of a booth across and at a slight angle from ours. He could see them better than I could, but I peeked back and saw a man and woman, presumably married, and a young intellectually disabled boy, the boy seated on the man’s side, which may have appealed to Boyd. The three of them were a picture of happiness, talking and smiling and enjoying one another. If the boy was their son they’d likely been married at least ten years, and I admit I couldn’t help comparing how they seemed to how we were after fifteen years. Read More

Pythagoras

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Bruce Bond

Featured Art: Broken and Restored Multiplication by Suzanne Duchamp

Somewhere beneath the crematorium
of stars, the mystery and the boredom,
the vacuum that every space abhors,
you might stop to listen to no one there
and hear the words of a dead man, a Greek,
who measured nights in increments of music.
The sky then was a calliope of numbers
whose tune was everywhere and therefore far
away as dead men are. No such thing
as solitude among them. It takes a string
of intervals on heaven’s monochord
to pull the sounds from one another, the choir
of which must be silent, surmised, and yet
each ghost note dies into the next to hear it.

Read More

Bobcat

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Mikko Harvey

Featured Art: Forest by Werner Drewes

Walking through the woods / at midnight / we were on our way / to the pond / where we
would skinny dip / when two yellow eyes / appeared on the path / we froze / they didn’t
blink or move / the body was / hidden by the dark / there was something / sinister in its
stillness / we turned back / you said it was probably / a bobcat / but better not / to take
that chance / we shared a bed / untouching as usual / you fell / asleep first and I wondered
what kept us / apart really / that night / and the others / the distance between us / maybe six
inches / felt like a shadow / I couldn’t step out of / my two open eyes / the only light
in the room / I thought of the animal / blocking our path / and it occurred to me / she was
only a hostess / welcoming us / to the world of risk / smooth and lovely / water hugging
your naked body / the animal said / are you ready / but we walked away / I had an urge
to shake your body / awake and take you back / to the animal and say / confidently yes
table for two / but instead I just lay there / in the perfect / quiet / country / darkness / and
imagined the outline / of your chest rising / and falling / rising / and falling as you slept.

Read More

At the Metropolitan

.Reading time less than 1 minute.

By Ellen Devlin

Featured Art: New York (Couple on Steps of Metropolitan Museum of Art) by Garry Winogrand

I once saw a Persian sword, in a museum,
glass-boxed, lighted. Warriors on winged
horses charged, lifted scimitars, hundreds of them,
carved in the blue white breath inside the hilt.
I leaned my head on the glass, helpless.

Read More

The Museum of Might-Have-Been

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Anne-Marie Fyfe

Featured Art: Art Institute of Chicago by Thomas Struth

Opens its doors one Sunday a month
in winter. The queues back up for decades.

If you’re lucky and your number’s called
you can have any tour: Your Charmed Life,
Your Regrets, The Prodigal You, every second
slip-road at the intersections of the possible.

The exhibits are stark and infinite
under strip neon, long hallways
of lost opportunity, slow clocks,
stopped clocks, rooms where even now
a thought might wither: the attic storeroom
is out-of-bounds to all but the curators,
though artifacts are still donated by the hour.

Standing in line is no guarantee
of admission: some days
word spreads that when you
reach the queue’s head, pass through
the double doors, it’ll be stripped out,
even lightbulbs, with only packing materials
and discarded drapes left. Yet critics insist
The Multiple-Choice Foyer, The Roads-Not-Taken
Gallery, The Back Burner Café are stunning.

Every room’s a tasteful shade of apple-white
apparently. Waxworks and living statues
rehearse at intervals for The Balcony Scene,
The Shining City, The Reconciliation, over
and over, night by night. As in the finest operas.

Read More

A Gift From Wales

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Carl Dennis

Featured Art: Shore Line by Howard Giles

Having lingered, on my first trip to Europe, longer
In Paris than I expected, I had to forgo
Walking in Wales. But that didn’t keep me
From becoming deeply indebted to Wales
When I phoned the hotel in Cardiff
To cancel my reservation and save my deposit.
“There’s a letter for you,” the desk clerk said,
In a rich contralto. “Would you like us to send it on?”
“Better read it to me, if you have time,
Since I keep moving.” And that’s how it happened
I heard, as I sat in a booth at the Gard du Nord,
Awaiting the train to Brussels, my mother’s sentences,
Penned in Missouri, delivered with Welsh intonations.
That’s how her usual mix of family news,
Tips about healthy eating, and encouragement
To visit any noteworthy local garden,
Took on an undercurrent of mystery.
That’s why they seemed imbued with the suggestion
My travels were more than a summer’s entertainment,
Were in fact a quest for something just as meaningful
As whatever a knight went searching for
When he rode out from a castle in Wales.
Some truth more practical than a grail
And more surprising would soon be mine
Once I learned to listen to people whose words
I regarded before as predictable and forgettable.
And I had questions about the desk clerk,
Who’d read the letter as if she’d composed it herself,
Inspired by a sincere concern for my well being.
What did it mean, her convincing performance?
If it wasn’t part of her job at the hotel,
Was it part of some other calling
Defined in a legend I didn’t know yet
But would want to learn if the chance were offered?

Read More

Three Houses and a Wish

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Linda Bamber

Featured Art: House by a River by Edward Hopper

1. Chevy Chase

Choked up to see the in-ground cellar door
behind the house
I was born in long ago

then had doubts, cell handy,
called older sister far away.

She said, wrong house!
Original had front yard oaks,
big porch . . .

found right house, had no
response at all. Used up tears on
house that didn’t know me from Adam! Read More

My Grandmother the Mohel

.Reading time 4 minutes.

By Barbara Hamby

Featured Art: Study of a Baby by Fredrick Goodall

When I tell my mother that a man I know pickets the local hospital
              about what his wife calls “his topic” that is, circumcision
and its evils, she tells me this was my grandmother’s specialty
              as a nurse, and I say, “You’re kidding.” “No. The doctor
she worked for couldn’t stand it, so she did all his circumcisions.
              She loved it!” Loved it? I think—cutting the tips off
boys’ penises? Loved what? The precision? The power? The cries?
              I remember sitting with my mother and grandmother
when I was seven or eight, pretending to play, so I could listen
              to them talk in front of my grandparents’ house
in Washington, 328 Maryland Avenue, and down the tree-lined street
              you could see the Capitol dome looming. A couple
were walking on the sidewalk, and they waved at my grandmother,
              who smiled and waved back. “Are they married?”
my mother asked when they passed. “No,” my grandmother
              answered, “they’re just shacked up.” The cups of my ears
gathered around those words like ravenous Venus Fly Traps,
              because this was just what I had been waiting for,
though I had no idea what it meant, and I knew I couldn’t ask
              or my doll dressing and tuneless singing would be exposed
for the subterfuge they were, and I’d be exiled into the house,
              and this was before my grandfather died, who didn’t think
a woman should drive, but my grandmother taught herself,
              her two little girls in the back seat screaming
as the car jerked over the dirt road behind their house in Kentucky,
              and then after he died, she went to school and became a nurse,
but fifty years later I’m chatting with a man on a plane, who’s returning
              home after spending the day in New York because
he is a mohel and has made this long trip to snip the tip off
              some little boy’s penis, and I think of Mantegna’s painting
of the circumcision of Christ at the Uffizi and kosher laws which
              forbid eating crustaceans, which would mean a sacrifice
of gumbo, boullabaisse, cioppino and fish soups the world over,
              and it was the fried Apalachicola shrimps that broke
the back of my vegetarianism, what in Louisiana they call
              “sramps,” and I’ve heard them called “pinks,” “prawns,”
and sometimes when I’m standing over the stove making a roux
              my life seems to be a kind of gumbo, and if you don’t burn
the water-and-flour paste, then it doesn’t much matter what else
              you throw in, but okra is a must and a couple dozen
oysters, andouille sausage, all your dark mistakes mixed in
              with the brilliant medals and diamond tiaras,
and my grandmother told me she went to her wedding
              in a horse and buggy, a seventeen-year-old girl,
probably a virgin, and little did she know where that road
              would lead her, from canning tomatoes and corn
to snipping the tips off thousands of penises to the nursing home
              where she died, shacked up with all her selves,
that particular gumbo stewing in a body withered by 93 years,
              not knowing anything but that she’d rather be eating
ice cream, driving to Memphis, frying chicken, mashing
              potatoes, baking a cake with blackberries
her daughters picked that morning before walking to school.

Read More

All Ages

.Reading time 49 minutes.

By Conor Broughan

Featured Art: Canal Street, Chicago by Harold Allen

The Statistics played three shows in four days and Chris McCann—all of sixteen and the founding member, lead singer, guitarist and de facto manager of the band—wasn’t ready for the tour to end. All summer, Chris had only wanted to get out of his Springfield, Virginia house and on the road. Unsolicited, Chris’s father had told him that his mother’s erratic behavior over the past six months hadn’t been his fault. Until his father brought it up the night before the tour, Chris had never considered the possibility. Stray raindrops cried across the windshield when he drove over the Turnpike and into Asbury Park, New Jersey for the final show of the tour. The Bowery Club on Ocean Avenue.

Kyle—rhythm guitar—was the first to step out of Chris’s father’s 1989 Dodge Caravan. At the beginning of the tour, he announced that he’d grow out his beard. Deemed a failure on all fronts, Kyle still considered it a work in progress.

Read More

If You See Something

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Billy Collins

Featured Art: Dove in Flight by Pablo Picasso

On my morning walk along a cinder path
that follows the shore of a lake,
I saw a good-size, solitary rabbit,

seven mourning doves who rose to the top of a fence
at my approach,

two anhingas, one drying his extended wings
like a pope on a balcony,
the other not doing anything at all,

also, a loud bird who refused to identify himself,

then ten young ducks in a huddle
by the vegetation near the water,
some sleeping, others preening their feathers,
all not quite old enough to be on their own,

oh, and a squirrel who headed up a tree
when he heard me coming down the path.

Read More

Kickboxing with God

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Jeffrey H. MacLachlan

Featured Art: Vendémiaire, plate 34 from Alcools by Louis Marcoussis

On my way home from an empty happy hour, God shoved me so I punched his
chin with a half-formed fist. He laughed and asked me if I knew who snapped
dinosaur tails like breadsticks. God was all effort like old dudes at pick-up
games. Leg-kicks striking thighs and elbows to the windpipe. My uppercut let
out a Hallelujah choir from the sky. He punched my liver and said I should get
some rest for once. You can’t keep this lifestyle forever. He pointed to his chin
and dodged a knockout swing. Why not go visit your kids? God headlocked me
like Mom’s boyfriends did after parole. I’m behind schedule so just fix your life.
He was right but that didn’t stop the stomping he had coming for not showing
up till that night.

Read More

The Ideal Budweiser Customer Watches a Budweiser Commercial

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Danny Caine

Featured Art: Drugs by Richard Estes

Oh shit I love “Landslide.”
I was going to get up to piss but then I heard me some Fleetwood Mac.
Hey that’s a pretty farm, too. Farms are dope.
Wait, oh goddamn it it’s a baby horse lying in some fucking sawdust.

That baby horse is so cute I can’t even handle it right now.
I am literally unsure how to proceed.
And now the horse is being fed from a bottle?
The hell am I supposed to do with that?

Dammit now the horse and the dude are playing and stuff.
Fuck me if I don’t love a playful goddamn horse.
Look! A Budweiser truck. Budweiser!

I should like this brand on Facebook.
I should follow this brand on Twitter.
I really should make an effort to engage
with this brand on social media.

Wait, that’s a horse trailer. And our dude
is shaking hands with the driver? Is he—

DUDE YOU CAN’T SELL THAT FUCKING HORSE!

YOU’RE GOING TO MISS HIM SO MUCH!

Somebody get me a Budweiser.

Read More

Unemployable

.Reading time 8 minutes.

By Dustin Nightingale

Featured Art: New York Lunch Counter by Walker Evans

Needs and Hopes

I want $50,000 a year with insurance, incentives such as stock
options, 401K, paid paternity leave, sick days, two months off
in the summer, and a company car with a gas card. I expect a
healthy work environment, void of inspirational quotes like
Inspiration overtop of an eagle in the snow. My colleagues
will not try and josh me, nor will they throw potlucks or invite
me to 4th of July cookouts and then think I’m an uppity jerk
when I don’t attend. They will not show me pictures of
something they recently pushed or pulled out of their uterus.
Nor will they tell me about the book they want to write based
on their own life. What they will do is mumble lines of Emily
Dickinson to themselves while staring out a window. They
will bring in a bag of cayenne peppers they grew this summer,
leave it on the break-room table with a sign that says Free
—take what you want. And I will take three. I will let them
dry, grind them up, and place them in the plastic of a cigarette
wrapper, which I will pinch into stir-fries during a very
long and cold winter. And I will try to do the same for them.

Previous Experience

Oh I’ve done that. I’m not proud of it, but I’ve done that.
Have you? Well you should try it sometime, just to see what
you’re capable of and for how long. I mean, why not see what
it takes to make you wake up crying. And then of course, what
it takes for you to stop. So when can I start? Or have I already?

Read More

At the Precise Moment of Your Awakening

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Matt Morton

Featured Art: Time Transfixed by René Magritte

It will be raining. You will be watching
TV when your son walks
into the room. He will be crying

and holding the stuffed gazelle you bought.
What’s that noise? he will ask,
sounding scared. On the screen,

an armadillo singing show tunes. To humor him,
you’ll pretend to listen:
Outside, down the street, coming closer,

a sound like a train. It’s just a train
you’ll shrug. Here, look at this armadillo.
A flashing red banner scrolling from right

to left across the screen. Such tiny print.
You will squint. Undoubtedly,
you’ll have left your glasses in the other room

with your credit cards and shoes. Turning
your attention back to the show,
you will gather up your son. Front door

rattling against the jamb. All of the windows
black. But you said there aren’t any trains.
He won’t stop sobbing. You said they—

Hush you will say, annoyed
at missing your show. Where is your wife?
By now, the sound has become a roar. The gazelle

lying on the carpet, your son’s mouth
stuck open like a doll’s. When the portraits drop
to the floor and break, you will shake

your head: He is so small for his age, the world
will be hard on him. T-R-A-I-N
you’ll mouth, as if he’s deaf, when the windows

start to blow out. You’ll be shouting
It’ll pass, it’s just a train
as the roof is ripped from the house.

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Telling the Truth

.Reading time 1 minute.

By J. Anna Luz

Featured Art: The Builders by Jacob Lawrence

Observing my boyfriend’s
niece and nephew
kick each other
under the table
at Thanksgiving dinner,
blasting each other
in the shins
and knees,
bone against bone
drawing bruises
and welts,
done in such fury
and with such power
yet no sound,
faces not affected,
not a hint
of a wince
of pain, so little
movement at all,
I thought
that’s how my sister
and her husband
love each other,
and how my father
regards his job
and how my mom feels
about all of us,
and how
I see my body.
These children
with pink Keds
and black and
green striped Nikes
underneath a crisp
ironed tablecloth
of fall colors,
didn’t
lie once.

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À la Carte

.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Denise Duhamel

Featured Art: Frozen Foods with String Beans, New York by Irving Penn

We stopped at a restaurant that advertised steak dinners for $3.99. My father
was excited—he loved red meat. We were on vacation. My sister, my mother, my
father and I were all going to splurge. My father double-checked his billfold and
said, “Let’s go!” The waitress asked if we wanted the special. Yes indeed. Would
we like potatoes? Sure, why not? And creamed spinach? And bread? You bet.
When the bill came, my father blanched. He whispered to my mother he didn’t
have enough in his wallet. He called the waitress to our table and reminded her
of the sign outside. She explained that each steak was indeed $3.99, but that all
the sides we ordered were another dollar each. My father said she should have
been more forthcoming. She brought us a menu. My father asked to see the
manager, who pointed to the phrase à la carte. My mother dug in her purse, but
my father told her to stop. He stood up and put sixteen dollars (a ten, a five, and
a one) on the table—not even covering the tax and certainly no tip. “I’m not being
swindled for a baked potato,” he said to the managerand walked out. “I’m
sorry,” my mother sulked, pulling my sister and me out of the booth. I looked to
the floor, the swirly carpet. “Sir, you can’t do that,” said the waitress. “Ma’am,
I’m serious. You can’t do that,” echoed the manager. “Hey, come back, we’ll
take a personal check.” All the way to the Cape, I thought the police would
pull us over, the unpaid-for potatoes and spinach making me full and groggy.
My mother and father fought—“I’ve never been so embarrassed . . . ” and “Too
bad. I’m no chump.”—before all went silent. My sister and I dug out the steak
from between our teeth with our tongues. After a day or so, the shame turned
to laughter. My mother said, “I guess you showed them.” And my father said,
“I sure did.” By the end of the week we were proud, our story about standing
up to touristy rip-offs, about snobs only pretending to be French, about how we
were living le rêve américain.

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Aftermath in Brine

.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Elton Glaser

Featured Art: Parking Lot, from The Plain of Smokes by Kenneth Price

I can’t stand here all day, glands in a wrangle,
Like some brimstone preacher
Beating the bejesus out of his ratty Bible.

Parvenu and undermensch, slave to enabling vices,
I’m lost in a lanky rhetoric,
Simplicities on the fritz.

But you can’t make laws for monkeys, or poems
From some eruption in the nuts,
Every complication its own Vesuvius.

Poems: or as the Chinese warn,
Disasters that come from the mouth.
Sometimes there’s no wild honey at the end of the beeline,

Only these terse tercets
With no mercy on the rubes
Or the lithe appreciators of gilded tea sets.

There’s always some bother in the Balkans,
And tantrums among the voluble Italians. There’s always
A dent in the fender where the force fields meet.

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On the Opening of Lauren Groff’s “L. DeBard and Aliette”

.Reading time 9 minutes.

By Caitlin Horrocks

Featured Art: Steps in Swimming Pool at Main River, Badeanstalt, Frankfurt by Ilse Bing

I originally read this story in the 2006 Summer Fiction Issue of The Atlantic, a magazine whose student writing contest I had won the previous winter. I was wandering the aisles of a grocery store in a strange city, where my boyfriend had just abandoned me to run an errand to an ex-girlfriend’s house. I perused the magazine rack, scanned the table of contents of The Atlantic. My winning story had been considered for publication, but had not made the cut. The famous authors listed I could forgive for bumping me, on grounds of their fame. But who was this “Lauren Groff”? I’d never heard of her. A newbie, like me. Surely, she was the one who had taken my spot.

Of course, editing doesn’t work like this. I knew that even then. But my jealous, shriveled heart still commanded me to buy the magazine, take it to the seating area of the grocery’s little coffee shop, and sniff out the supposed inferiority of this Groff-person’s fiction. I am not proud of my attitude. Writers hope that readers will approach our work with excitement, with patience, with a willingness to be moved. My state of mind, when I began Groff’s story, was instead darkly, nakedly adversarial.

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On the Opening of Edward P. Jones’s “The First Day”

.Reading time 9 minutes.

By Marjorie Celona

Featured Art: Street by Romare Bearden

It is, at first, a linguistic seduction:

                                   On an otherwise unremarkable September morning, long before I learned
                                   to be ashamed of my mother,

If you’ve ever lived near the ocean, perhaps you, like me, equate one or more dependent clauses at the beginning of a periodic sentence to a wave gaining amplitude before it crashes on the shore. It’s a rudimentary metaphor: the wave builds, and by the time we get to the period at the end of the sentence it has crashed. There is a rhythm to the periodic sentence, and it’s near impossible not to be pulled into it. With its sly promise to deliver something remarkable, that first dependent clause—On an otherwise unremarkable September morning—   is a somewhat seductive lead in its own right. But it is the second dependent clause—long before I learned to be ashamed of my mother—that gives us our first glimpse into the story’s retrospective, mournful heart. If you’re anything like me (lousy metaphors aside), even at this early point the story has you in its grasp. The rest of the sentence, in conjunction with the story’s title, fulfills the tension by providing a simple explanation for what the story will be about:

                                   . . . she takes my hand and we set off down New Jersey Avenue to begin
                                   my very first day of school.

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On the Opening of William Maxwell’s So Long, See You Tomorrow

.Reading time 4 minutes.

By Maura Stanton

Featured Art: Summer Breezes by Gustave Baumann

William Maxwell’s great short novel, set in the farm country of central Illinois, where I, too, grew up, pulls us into the story of a murder with such force that we can’t stop reading.

The first chapter is called “A Pistol Shot.” Maxwell begins with the setting: “The gravel pit was about a mile east of town, and so deep that boys under sixteen were forbidden by their parents to swim there.” This sentence tells us that we’re out in isolated country. But it also suggests that this is a novel about “boys under sixteen.”

The next sentence introduces the narrator. “I knew it only by hearsay” he says of the gravel pit. And then we get to know something about his imagination as he tells us why boys like him are forbidden to swim there—“It had no bottom, people said, and because I was very much interested in the idea that if you dug a hole straight down anywhere and kept on digging it would come out in China, I took this to be a literal statement of fact.” Read More

On the Opening of Graham Greene’s “Under the Garden”

.Reading time 5 minutes.

By David Lehman

Featured Art: Ventana de Radiografías by Manuel Alvarez Bravo

The first paragraph of “Under the Garden,” Graham Greene’s finest story, consists of just two sentences:

                                  It was only when the doctor said to him, “Of course the fact that you
                          don’t smoke is in your favour,” Wilditch realized what it was he had been
                          trying to convey with such tact. Dr. Cave had lined up along one wall a
                          series of X-ray photographs, the whorls of which reminded the patient of
                          those pictures of the Earth’s surface taken from a great height that he had
                          pored over at one period during the war, trying to detect the tiny grey seed
                          of a launching camp.

With the indirection that passes for a physician’s professional “tact,” the masterly opening sentence reveals that the protagonist, a man named Wilditch, has just been handed a death sentence. Greene’s opening dwells on the doctor’s discomfort with speaking the bald truth (“what it was he had been trying to convey”), his determination to skirt the subject, with the result that the bitter prognostication of the man’s demise dawns on the reader in the same way that it dawns on Wilditch: belatedly, like the answer to a riddle or trick question. Or so it feels: Greene gets us right into the mind of his protagonist at the moment of revelation. Read More

On the Opening of Barbara Comyns’ The Vet’s Daughter

.Reading time 14 minutes.

By Maud Casey

Featured Art: Falling by Aaron Siskind

A man with small eyes and a ginger moustache came and
spoke to me when I was thinking of something else.

I have thought about the first line of Barbara Comyns’ novel The Vet’s Daughter since 1993. I was in graduate school and my wonderful professor, the writer Mary Elsie Robertson, suggested I read Comyns. I did and I have been forever grateful for the recommendation. Comyns is that variety of obscure writer who is a secret literary password. To love her is to enter into a speakeasy filled with levitating teenagers, floods, plague, and the occasional monkey. She authored eleven novels between 1947 and 1989 before her death in 1992, with notably captivating titles, such as Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead and Our Spoons Came From Woolworths. When, in the late Fifties, her original publisher—Heinemann—sent her odd fairy tale of a novel, The Vet’s  Daughter, to Graham Greene for a blurb, he responded, “Please, send me no more lady novelists.” I’m not sure precisely which part of The Vet’s Daughter Graham objected to, which part he found too lady-ish—its concern with things domestic? Its girl protagonist? In any case, I’m happy to report, he came around because there’s his effusive blurb on the most recent effort to save it from obscurity, the beautiful edition put out by The New York  Review of Books with a foreword by Kathryn Davis and a painting by Louise Bourgeois on the cover that, at first, you might mistake for lovely red stockings hanging on a clothesline but, look closer, those aren’t lovely red stockings, that’s bloody sinew and bone. (The painting’s title is Untitled (Legs and Bones).) Read More