In Our Nature

July 18, 2024.Reading time 36 minutes.

By Sunni Brown Wilkinson

Petrified wood is a lesson in belief, not so much a belief in what you see but in what you feel. Touching it, rubbing your fingers over its impossibly stony skin, you have to remind yourself that what it once was has changed entirely. A sequoia transformed into a rock wall. The language of trees turned to silence. Given the right conditions, the elements moving perfectly into place, it’s only a matter of time.

The Wild

I met Pete the summers I spent working in West Yellowstone, Montana, the tiny town situated just outside the west entrance to Yellowstone National Park. I was a freshman in college and had never lived away from home. A senior in high school, he hadn’t either. I’d also never had a boyfriend. Pete tied and sold flies over at Jacklin’s Fly Shop and dreamed of being a fly fishing guide one day. More experienced outdoors than I was, he naturally held a youthful energy for the place while developing a kind of wisdom I always envied. Each time we drove through Yellowstone Park, he recited to me the scientific names of the wolves, elk, and buffalo, those gorgeous Latin words decorating our conversations: Canis lupus, Cervus canadensis, and the comically redundant Bison bison, which always made me laugh. He even knew the scientific name of the lichen growing on the rocks (Pleopsidium), and older fishermen remarked to me how adept he was on the river, especially for an eighteen-year-old. I was proud, of course, of finding someone so unique. Instead of flowers, he brought me the best flies he’d tied for the week, and I stuck them in my ball cap and wore them all summer, woolly buggers and caddisflies flapping against my head in the breeze.

In Praise of the Hand Tool

July 18, 2024.Reading time 1 minute.

By Megan Blankenship

Resorted to, mostly, if remembered at all,
retiring into sheds and cellars, pillaring
cobweb palaces, inscrutable of purpose
to modern eye, called by sea
and smoke language as rare whiskeys are—
to be savored the utterances bradawl, froe,
chamfer plane, though as worthy
the guileless post hole digger,
the leprechaun spokeshave.
Let these fine things be loved again
for the simple works accomplished, each
according to ability, not asked too much of,
but trusted—more, at least, than motor.
Bless the place where handle narrows
to fit the grip, smoothed and oiled
against palms, generations of palms—yes,
the very word of satisfaction made flesh.
When a tool like that is taken up
in singleness of aim, it is a gospel.
As if you yourself were the relic barn
kneeling now, almost a heap,
lit wax-yellow in patchy beams
where shakes have rotted through,
having long outlived builder and all hope
of livestock, into which one afternoon
an unaccountable hand reaches
and from needles, nests,
and many other implements rusted
nearly past discernment, grasps
the necessary one, squares up,
and drives it once more into dirt.

Sanctuary

July 17, 2024.Reading time 1 minute.

By Alan Shapiro

Early mornings as I turned onto the gravel road to the bird sanctuary,
you’d start panting, pacing in the back seat, whining,
impatient to be let out and hit the ground at a dead run,
head cocked slightly to the side as if to query the sight or scent
of what I couldn’t see or smell of what you never stopped believing you would catch,
and never did. Always ahead of me or behind but never stride for stride,

you plunged, rustling, into and out of brush, you barked or didn’t,
you sniffed the freshest rumors of what had happened there while we were gone.
When you’d disappear, I’d call. And you only reappeared when I’d stop calling—
you must have thought my Here boy, come here boy was how I told you
not to worry, take all the time you need. Which is to say,

we each had our own experience of the experience we shared.
Our separate truths grew up inside those finite mornings.
They leaned on each other. But the mornings themselves?
Nothing outside them proves our ever having once been in them,
traceless as the sound of my calling after you
who rustled only as far into the understory as my voice would reach.

Sleep Singing

July 17, 2024.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Sara Fetherolf

You bring up
a detuned garble like a dear bone
unearthed from the garden
of your 2am sleep, upright
in bed, keyed
to your dream,
looking straight beyond
me as you sing.

All spring
with your wah wah and distortion
pedal, I’ve heard you playing
the Stormy Monday
Blues in other rooms.
I have eavesdropped
on the breaks, counted up
the bills to your lord-have-mercies.

If one of us
gets snake-bit, then,
it better be me. You’ll descend
with a five-bar
earworm to spring me from
the subterranean territories, blaze
trails through the lightless
pomegranate groves. No

god of death could fail to find
your full-throated tenor
convincing.
Your skin
in the dark is a lyre
string I touch to stop
resonating, and you

look back, confused
in the new silence, then drop
to sleep. And I come
tumbling after, down that long
chute, the future, where
we wait in the aftermath
of your song (tears
on the cheeks of Spring) and know

it was perfect, and fear
what’s gone is gone.

The Museum of Death

July 17, 2024.Reading time 4 minutes.

By Sara Fetherolf

A week after our wedding,
in New Orleans, on our long way

to California, when the afternoon

turned thunderstorm (salt & river
& old stone smell &

the dripping awnings we ran under),

we came upon the door
to the museum. I wanted to see

the Victorian death masks, hair lockets, embalmer’s tools,

obituary clippings. I imagined
a museum of ordinary,

sentimental tchotchkes for marking loss.

I imagined shadowboxes full
of letters with laced black borders, penning in

the old grief. I wasn’t expecting

the serial killer memorabilia (a Gacy
clown painting, the sagging prison panties

Aileen Wuornos wore), crime scene photographs,

car-crash snuff films, blood green-white
in the dusty filmstrip light.

I walked through the displays, viewing

a type of death I had somehow not seen
coming, hearing your footfall

in the next exhibit room. I like the idea

there are many versions of us,
spread through many universes, and dying

in one sends our consciousness rocketing back

to a universe where the death never
happened, our still-living

variations drawing our dead

selves in like iron filings
to a magnet—meaning every near accident

or pollutant worrying the lungs, every bad fall, childhood

illness, &c.—it all
simply concentrates us, makes us more

ourselves than ever, the one who has survived

everything, flickering
against the dust. But I began to see

(walking the rows where I could lift

a black velvet curtain to look
at executions, botched surgeries, the Black Dahlia)

how one day I would rocket back

to somewhere you are not—more myself
than ever, and you more

yourself elsewhere, a partition in between.

Last week we had fed
each other cake, which ahead of time

we had not quite agreed to do. I’d joked, then,

how one of us will have to feed the other
someday, maybe, anyway, so might as well

practice in a gleaming still-young summer,

and I was angry, almost, that I had to worry now
about your universe slipping off

from mine. Honestly, I was still angry about it,

that honeymoon afternoon
in the museum of death,

where the murder photos glowed, rainlit

and old already, each of them holding someone
who, if I’m right, was still alive

in the universe where they are the one

who goes on forever. Maybe they were
even then in New Orleans, in that

rainstorm, having their fortune

read or browsing these walls that wee missing
their image. Before that day, I had

mostly felt, if not invincible, ready at least

to see what would happen next. And now
here I wasn’t. And outside the rain

had stopped like a watch. And never again

would the streets shine in that precise way.

The Ground Beneath the Bars

July 17, 2024.Reading time 11 minutes.

By Jessica Lee Richardson

Maybe it’s because I was born with my feet turned in and the doctor had to break them and stick me in casts as a little kid, but I’m always afraid I’ll lose a body part. Lately it’s my fingers. I wear double mittens and chicken-squawk them in my pits when it’s cold. My mom says I have to take them out when we’re shoveling shit from the rottweiler cages or else I drop the shovels too much. I like the rottweilers. I feel bad for them stuck in cages with their shit until we come, and they pant like crazy to see us. We complain about the dirty quarters, but it’s not like it’s clean anywhere else.

The dogs belong to my mom’s friend who plays the piano. I’ve never met him, but we go to his house and clean the shit, and I play his piano to warm up my filthy hands. It’s always dark in the house and I don’t know why we don’t turn the lights on. The only other person I know with a piano is my mom’s friend who goes to Puerto Rico in the summers and collects sea glass and jars of cherry Jolly Ranchers. She thinks she was taken aboard an alien spaceship, which my mom thinks too. I’m crazy for the cherry candies.

When I tell my friends about the spaceship, they say that’s impossible, but don’t look so sure. “Wow,” they say. “Do you think they did experiments?” I don’t think so, but I go with it, because these friends have pretty voices. I like listening to them sing in the school bathroom with the square tiles like hard pieces of gum. All I bring to the table are secondhand aliens and a talent for doing U.K. accents.

The Winners

July 17, 2024.Reading time 43 minutes.

By Alan Sincic

And get this. Winners may be invited to an awards ceremony. A gathering of persons. Chocolate. And punch. And puppies a possibility. Should they appear—red ribbon round the collar and powdered with talc and spritzed with Aqua Velva and the zest of the lime—greet them with a hearty aloha. Take a knee. Unlimber the limbs. Up over the bone of the ankle they paddle to lick the back of the hand.

Rumor has it the winners get a plaque, mahogany slab with a topper of bronze no thicker than a slice of deli ham. Winner it says, and Cock Of The Walk, and I Told You So. Onto the face of the plaque they Dremel the name of the winner. That’s right. The winner gets a name. And a rub-down. A vigorous scrubbing with the pumice and the salt to obliterate the name tattooed at birth upon the butt. Away with the stain of the semen, the squall of the suckling, the bloody sheet of the afterbirth. With a branding iron they burn, onto the brow of the winner, a better name. Tab or Rock. Meg or Bo or Liz or God.

A single syllable, see, so when you speak it, it pops. The bells in the tower ring, the buffalo stir, the river swells and the bank overflows and the salmon leap, up into the arms of the fisher folk leap, and onto the griddle and onward, onto the plate and into the belly of the Mayor with the key to the city in the palm of that salmon-scented hand of his. The key to the city! And flowers. And bushels of corn.

I Look for You

July 17, 2024.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Jen McClanaghan

Featured Art: “In the Garden” by Tina Moore, Tiffany Grubb, Alexis Rhinehart, Casey Collins, and Wendy Minor Viny (Passion Works Studio)

I look for you in travel plazas.
In claw machines. In corn husks, crank
shafts, coils and pumps, in funnels.
I look for you at breakfast
and again at dusk. I look in
weather, in dust, in bird song, in barking.
In the magnetic field of the wildflower.
In sockets, in closets, in strangers.
In Spanish, in rain’s silver fringe.
In the hawks that land to look at me.
In the splinter that entered my thumb
from a drawer that belonged to you,
could it be? I hold the cheap pens
in your purse. I spend money on shoes
to make myself feel like you.
I dreamt you were on my deck
with your eyes closed.
In your dresses I fold
for someone else, I see how tiny you were.
I watched the intern take your pulse
and wondered if he was shy or right
when he said you were gone.
On the form for your flight from ICU
to morgue to mortician to oven, to me,
I guessed you were a hundred pounds,
so light you could be made of helium.
You could be made of air
and be everywhere.
Of a world made of so many unlikely things,
of the mongoose’s ability to kill
the cobra, of consciousness,
of time before the beginning,
before the two of us, of death, I see you
enter the light above my shoulder
and read what I’ve written.
All this for you. This alphabet
you shed in June, this word
and the next and this final sentence
a fence of roses that can only be you.

Ode: Man in a Baseball Cap

July 17, 2024.Reading time 1 minute.

By Steve Coughlin

We commend your anonymity—
how you move among us
on the subway
and up stairwells
of nondescript buildings.
We commend how you expect
nothing more
than to be an extra
in the background
of our lives
as we flee into restaurants
escaping the hustle of sidewalks
to be seated at important
tables reserved hours
in advance. At the summer concert series
you ask to be nothing
but the distant blurry face
in our pictures. And when our lives
devolve into arguments
at the park—when one of us
accuses another one
of us with words
that shatter—you’re the one
on your bike
who takes no notice
but moves through the day
with placid ease.
Oh Man in a Baseball Cap
thank you
for providing
necessary texture
to these moments of our lives!
And even more
thank you
for asking nothing of us
as we experience the treacherous depths
of human experience—
our conflicts and contradictions—
upon this stage
where we can’t stop believing
some audience
in some abstract way
observes us
and feels deeply
for our struggles
as you sit in the background
sipping a drink
hunched over a life without need.

Distant Shore

July 17, 2024.Reading time 1 minute.

By Steve Coughlin

You remember the evening chill
of New Hampshire
in the middle of summer
and your parents
not fighting—your father
not packing a suitcase
to spend three months
among stained carpets
at the Willow Motel—
but sitting with your mother
on the front porch
of the small A-frame cabin
by Echo Lake
where the water was not dangerous
and the gathering clouds
remained rumbling
upon a distant shore
while from inside
a radio played big band music
as your father shuffled cards
and your mother tapped her foot
and you knew
as long as you sat
on the front porch swing—
as long as you continued rocking
with quiet ease—
there’d be no cracks
in the safety
of this feeling that promised
if you moved through life
so lightly—if you stepped
with care
upon the thinnest layers of discontent—
your parents’ shadows
gently cast by the porch light
would remain distinct
and real
and forever before you.

Unifying Theory

July 17, 2024.Reading time less than 1 minute.

By Steve Coughlin

When John Coughlin sings
Joey and Steven are tigers
while driving the backroads
of Hingham, Massachusetts
it is of particular significance
because Joe has been dead
three years
and his name has not been mentioned
in any of John Coughlin’s
invented songs
with borrowed melodies
since his oldest son
was murdered.
But of similar significance
is that as John Coughlin
continues to sing
in the fading twilight
with his still-living son Steven
beside him
there’s a sudden understanding—
a distinct comprehension—
that if they keep driving
with the windows down—
if John Coughlin keeps singing
the names of his sons—
the winding road before them
will never end.

Who I Passed While Running

July 17, 2024.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Kenneth Tanemura

I ran after the siren’s light,
past retirees in bright tank tops
and tank dresses,

reclining on lawn chairs.
The woman in carefully
crafted beach body standing

in a bikini, parts of her spilling
out of it. She was looking
at the sea, past the kids bodyboarding

in the shallow surf. The kids stood
calmly in a calm pool unscathed
by the waves coming to shore,

then going in reverse.
They didn’t move outside
their zone to catch a wave

to the sand. Currents travel out
to the ocean faster than Olympic
swimmers, in Volusia County,

where the front desks at the hotels
lining the beaches don’t warn
the guests about high surf

and rip risks. I ran
in my touristy linen shirt, a white
affair I could wear

to a wedding. My arthritic knee
tightened. I saw my stepson
on his back, the young woman

pressing down on his chest,
searching for his pulse.
“Was he alone?” a shirtless lifeguard said.

“He was alone,” I said.
I shouldn’t have left the boy alone,
I thought. I was tired of watching

my tired, elderly parents
awkwardly stand on the beach like
they didn’t belong there.

It was hot and there was nowhere
to sit. It was boring to wait
and watch the baby

in the summer heat. A sheriff
noted my name
on a notepad, scribbled

‘stepfather’ on the thin line.
Go home and get your wife,
then head to the Halifax Hospital.

On the drive home a man
jogging passed me.
Someone walked her dog

on the trail by the Halifax River.
In the parking lot, Dezree
was showing an apartment

to a young couple
with Illinois license plates.
She waved to me

from the golf cart. My wife came out
when she saw our white
Sentra pull up.

In the lobby, a bored
security guard scanned
our IDs, a woman

behind us complained
she had to get another
pass to get upstairs?

Good lord. If it’s not
one thing, then it’s another.
A smiling nurse in blue

scrubs smiled. “We were waiting
for you, please follow me.”
The boy’s eyes jolted open.

The ventilator pumped
oxygen into his lungs.
There was nothing behind

his eyes. His pupils
didn’t move. My wife cried
beside the hospital bed. I put

my arm around her shoulder.
She did not lean into me.
The sheriff stood in the hall.

Behind him, someone walked
by, a cell phone pressed
to his left ear.

Grief Mentor

July 17, 2024.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Kenneth Tanemura

She dresses up anyway, the long blue
cardigan drapes her form. Finished
a bit of work, she snaps her fingers.
The boy she once bathed and changed, lost
to what? The surf? Is rip risk a thing?
Locally, everything changes. She lets
herself crave—noodles, a drive
around the neighborhood, Ella crooning,
Billie grieving. Is that it? Anguish,
or just some annoyance? Not that word,
not anguish. Describing anything is a stretch.
Palm trees and ghosts, full moon, skeletons.
Grand, the way she stood by the crematorium,
her body shaking. Deep sobs in the shower
like any creature. Primate mothers carry
their dead infants for days, weeks,
knowing what? The soul passed
into another realm?

That’s not it—less drama, less fanfare.
See what you can get away with
if you undercut yourself? She gives
a clownish smile to the surviving
toddler, holds her hands high,
palms open. The boy eats it up.
She shares the crazy inner thoughts
most keep to themselves: rebirth,
the soul hungry for burgers, waiting
in an intermediary space between here
and there. So many ways to split hairs
about there. Is that a secular stance?

She would make a grief therapist’s
eyes roll with her talk of the pure land.
Those eyes so used to performing
sadness to mirror grief. She doesn’t want
to blame anyone. Better to explain
as fate, design—master plan.
She plans with colored pens, makes
sense of the random—why do I want to say
‘Fall days,’ as if the season matters?
Monotony calms grief: write down every
word that starts with k, the counselor said.
Is anger better? Pin it on someone,
this boy’s drowning. She wants to.

The coffee drinks change with the weather.
She doesn’t say words a character
in a TV series would say. She kneels
before the altar, chants, thanks
her partner for putting his hands
together in prayer. No, she wouldn’t thank her
mother, who’s supposed to sit
cross-legged on hardwood. The man,
the husband, somewhere between stranger
and who?—blood relation?
She wears childish sweatshirts, makes
her feel closer to the boy she lost.
Or it’s another look—the grieving,
or past that. She stays with the one
who was supposed to watch
the boy in the surf. Supposed to
save him? Her ring catches
light. His ring a band
the saleswoman said a chainsaw
couldn’t cut through. She liked that,
something unbreakable.

My Body is a Cemetery

July 17, 2024.Reading time 53 minutes.

By Eliza Sullivan

In the shower, she moves my head under the water. Rinses the shampoo out and untangles the knots. An ant crawls out of the pink linoleum.

She’s cold, her wet chest pushes against my back. Her knees against the backs of mine. She’s always trying to talk about it.

Have you ever tried talking to anyone? she asked at dinner.

Is there anything I can do for you? she whispered in the theater.

I love you, she says, every day. I love you, do you know that?

And then she’s kissing me but he’s at the other end of the tub. Hairy legs spread. You’re supposed to hold your breath when you drive by cemeteries or lock your doors or something so you don’t invite ghosts and I don’t have a great relationship with my mother who gave me that advice but I can’t breathe.

She sees him too. Gently, she moves me away and back under the water. She sighs.

My Soul Refuses to Write Itself

July 17, 2024.Reading time 1 minute.

By Veronica Kornberg

Cuddles under the fake fur blanket. No ideas only things, things.

Runs beside the car, a moon-faced dog refusing to be left behind.

Twig or light? What scratches at the window?

Woman-shaped room inside a violin, full of resin dust and a voice from a well.

That one note held and held, then quivered silence. Both true.

Hard bench under the big-leaf maple. The yellow carpet.

Stands my hair on end, electrical.

Slogs up the asphalt hill, sweat beads in the small of the back.

Props up its feet in the chapel ruins.

Says Oh love, bring prosciutto and melon, sauvignon blanc.

My Sister

July 17, 2024.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Veronica Kornberg

The four of us—Kathie, Ruth,
our mom, and I—drove down
to Maryland to visit Annie
in the coma hospital where
she’d been sent after she
opened her eyes and moved
one finger. The place
was great—therapy
six hours a day and nurses
like strong, funny angels
swooping around her railed bed.
One terrifying thing—
every week, the team tested Annie
to see if she’d made
enough progress to stay
another week, and if she hadn’t
she’d be moved elsewhere,
somewhere not so great
but nobody knew where,
there was no where—we should call
our congressman and tell him
to do something.

That day was bright
and cold. We wheeled Annie
outside and sat on a bench by
the parking lot, squinting into
the winter-low sun amid
pocked mounds of plowed snow
that had hardened to ice.
We chatted in Annie’s direction—
about a cardinal in the naked dogwood,
about mom’s poodle barking hysterically at
a snow woman in the yard,
about the balls of yarn slowly morphing
into a crocheted afghan on the recliner.
I heard us packing the silent spaces,
cramming them full of news and pictures.
Annie didn’t have many words
but she could still make her famous
bird face to show a little sarcasm
so that made the conversation feel
familiar and less desperate. Annie began
to fixate on our mother. “She is scary,”
she stammered. A kind of miracle—
Annie speaking a complete sentence.
Our mother blanched,
then made a goofy-ugly face.
“Scary,” she chimed, waving her
gloved fingers. It was the most
adult thing I’ve ever seen,
the way she swallowed that pain
and turned it into a sweet
lick of icing, a joke, a little nothing.
God it was awful.

Halfway home we stopped for the night
at a freeway motel, the four of us
in one room. In the lobby, we scarfed down
a buffet—honeyed ham
and gloppy macaroni salad,
dinner rolls spongy and soft as
an old man’s belly. There were two double
beds in the room and when I plopped
on the corner of one, the whole mattress
flew up toward the ceiling in a way
that I cannot explain the physics of
to this day. But I kept doing it,
the mattress jack-knifing in the dim room
until we were all laughing
and laughing—we laughed until
we cried we were laughing so hard.

My Dental Hygienist Confides in Me

July 17, 2024.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Rose Zinnia

& I in her—at least, as much as I can with my mouth
a cave like this chanting yuh yuh yuh every now

and again, some humdrum monk—affirming her confessions—
our eyes two pairs of headlights pouring into each other, a starless

oblivion, below and ahead forever—for I too have a face
patina’d thick with loss’s microbiome, too have known addicts

of every degree & desperation, & so can understand her
family—become chosen. She lifts her teal mask

while scraping my enamel of its gunk to make sure
I am hearing her clear. Her eyes crack open like eggs.

I did everything. I could. Her father first, then her little brother,
folded into hushed echoes of their lives, two rot teeth

she couldn’t repair or replace. I still don’t know why
it happened. The stats say two in one family is near

unprecedented. & I swear: her whispering is in the same
timbre my activist friends & I used when we planned

our direct actions against the state, huddled like owls
in a dinky co-op kitchen, feasting on dumpstered melons

with the dog & the pig & the rats & the cats & the squirrel
who we enlisted in the coming (surely, soon) class war.

& maybe this is why we are here together, now, whispering
about taking your own life under the guise of a tooth preening—

there is nary a day I don’t think about my loves & if they will be
here tomorrow. & I too: know shame’s wending & distending

of the body, its chiseled scepter piercing into our thrashing
animal. & I too: have sung surreptitiously into the purple twilit

sweet gums secrets no longer houseable in the little tally
my body makes from the days, built ordinarily of elements,

lest I bloat into shapes I was never meant to stretch into or brave.
In Cleveland, we pulled our bandanas down around our necks—

like she does her mask, now, here—our not-yet-smartphones
wrapped in a blanket outside the room, so the state couldn’t listen

so they couldn’t tell us the world we longed for was not possible:
that our trying would never be enough to fill all this ever-metastasizing

loss. Flossing me she says she keeps a recording of her brother
singing on four different hard drives locked up in two separate safes

so she won’t ever lose his voice again.

Go, Went, Gone

July 17, 2024.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Sara T. Baker

Communication, never our forte:
in the ER, I tell you you will be admitted
upstairs for observation. You let out
an anguished cry worthy of the London stage—
This is it, Sara, I’m going upstairs!
Your forefinger points up as you give me that knowing eye.
It takes me a minute. Not that upstairs!
But you swear, this is it, your curtain call,
your swan song, the end of your road,
your bucket kicked. Still, once on that heavenly
floor, you cow the nurses, charm the doctor,
vacuum up every last crumb
of hamburger and fries.

Years later, on your actual deathbed,
you turn red-rimmed eyes to me, barely
managing to mouth, I have to go!
You can go, Mom, we rush to assure you.
Leaning over, I whisper, We’ll be okay.
Your face gathers into the shadow of a glare
as you try to swing your legs out of bed.
The toilet, you gasp, not having the strength
to say you idiot. But we can’t let you out of bed;
we’ve become de facto jailers, your most private
functions now public property, input and output
duly recorded, your dignity the last casualty
of this war. You give no easy victory
to thieving death; not used to losing,
you snatch back the breath we think
has left you. Laboring for days,
your sunken chest rises again and again,
while we, your children, fall around
you, exhausted. Then you are gone,
giving us the slip at the devil’s hour.
As we wash your cooling body,
your hazel eyes pop open like a doll’s,
as if you want to see, as if to insist
you are still a part of things.

My Mother’s Breast Prosthesis Falls Out

July 17, 2024.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Sara T. Baker

as she takes off her bra to put on a hospital gown.
She motions for me to pick it up off the floor,
which still has spots of blood or plasma
on it. I glance at her breasts, small-nippled
like my own, although one is dented
where they did the biopsy. She tells me
about that every time, how they deformed
her. Then she climbs, regal, into the hospital bed.
In the bed, she is pale under the fluorescent
lights, although her diamonds wink on either side
of her face. Her bedazzling smile is at rest,
her cheekbones rise over sunken cheeks,
her brow is furrowed, her hazel eyes flutter
behind purple lids, her roots need touching up.
She’s had work done, but dementia has
elided that fact, which seems to me
the best of all possible worlds.
The gorgeous male doctor comes in
with a homely male nurse to report
The tumor is bigger and you have to do
something. His cobalt eyes lock intently
on mine across my mother’s supine body.
I imagine swimming in that blue, freestyling,
one rhythmic stroke after the other. My weary
voice explains We have been waiting weeks
to see the oncologist, even as my body is flipturning
in his eyes, my nostrils full of chlorine
and Coppertone.

None of which my mother hears, as, mercifully,
she isn’t wearing her hearing aids. But when
the men leave, she slides her eyes over to me
and asks Which one was the doctor?
The tall one, I answer.
She cocks an eyebrow.
Fit? The bluest eyes?
Yes, I say, that one.

Not that I noticed, she adds,
with a shrug and a laugh.

Wisteria

July 17, 2024.Reading time 1 minute.

By Sara T. Baker

Fifty years ago, a tramp came to our door.
I didn’t see him, just heard the rumor
ascend the stairs with my clamoring brothers;
by the time the three of us thundered down
again, there were only wet footprints
leading from door to kitchen and back.
My mother had fed him, a woman alone
with six children in an alien land, wisteria
dripping from the porch roof, a green April rain
drenching everything. It is the grape-like must
of blooming wisteria, its decadence, and the dark
empty house, and those glistening tracks
that I remember, and the woman with her fierce,
generous heart, so that when my doorbell rings
today and a large man looms on my porch
with his empty belly and full story,
I do not hesitate.

Hand-Me-Downs

July 17, 2024.Reading time 34 minutes.

By Shaun Haurin

Opal had an annoying habit of leaving stuff she no longer wanted on our doorstep. What’s more, she refused to call ahead or send a warning text. She wouldn’t even ring the bell. (She once gave us a partial gallon of rainbow water ice on a warm spring day, and it wasn’t until a neighbor kid spotted it staining our stoop like an oil slick that we became aware of the leaky treat, accompanied by a sticky caravan of ants.) “It’s just Opal’s way,” was how my wife explained it to me the first few times I opened the front door and nearly tripped over one of her sister’s “offerings.” “Tell her we have enough junk of our own,” I would say, or some cranky comment along those lines. “She can take it to a flea market.” Wendy would just roll her wide-set eyes and smile her eternally camera-ready smile. “You’re missing the point, Tom. She doesn’t want to sell her stuff to strangers. She wants family to have it.” “But what if family doesn’t want it?” I’d press. At which point Wendy, who was likely late for an audition, would cut the conversation short. She was done defending her sister. Not that Opal wasn’t a bona fide blackbelt when it came to verbally defending herself.

On bad days, I thought of my sister-in-law as a mangy stray for whom depositing her gleefully eviscerated prey was a sign of great respect. On slightly better days, I thought of her as a kind of half-assed Santa Claus. Not in a million years would we ask for the sort of gifts we were routinely given: A trash bag full of bucatini pool noodles (we didn’t have a pool); a cast-iron fondue pot (Wendy was lactose intolerant); an “autographed” portrait of Kevin Costner atop a horse, dressed in full-blown Dances with Wolves regalia (it was a portrait of Kevin Costner atop a horse). Opal once left us a heaping brown bag of bargain-basement lingerie—assuming the basement was located at the bottom of a brothel. It was coarse, iridescent stuff, as if its wearer’s chief concern was not getting lost in the dark. Its intense color seemed to come off on our hands. Never mind that Opal was twice Wendy’s size. It’s hard to imagine any woman being taken seriously in that sort of underwear, let alone lusted after, coveted, craved. But maybe being taken seriously wasn’t the point. Opal was good-looking, but her sense of humor tended toward the shadier side of the street. In fact she looked a lot like Wendy—Wendy with a perpetual sneer and a little extra face between her features. Once, at the beach, we came across a guy armed with a Sharpie who was drawing caricatures of passersby on balloons. After a few seconds of scribbling, his zany, inflated medium squeaking like a set of handlebar brakes, he handed us Wendy’s likeness. She and I looked at each other and shared the same tipsy thought aloud: Opal.

The Mouse

July 17, 2024.Reading time 1 minute.

By Michael Pontacoloni

I watch him drop from the pinch-thin slot
above the dishwasher, scale the tube-steel legs
of the baker’s rack, skirt the sink’s slick edge
and grow brazen: sortie over the runner
by noonlight, champion of bagged bread,
banana, pizza crust. At night I trap him
with a paper-towel tube and peanut butter,
whisper apologies and name him Jeff,
then knowing nothing of care release him
into a brush pile at the edge of the park.
I hope against owls and foxes, pray
that he finds the dark brownstone basement
of Saint Joseph’s Church and lives forever
on the unblessed wafers loose in cabinets.
At the rehearsal of my first communion
Father Las Heras declared them worthless,
tossed handfuls at us like tiny frisbees,
slid them across the floorboards where he
crushed them under his old black Reeboks,
and spun one neatly into the chest pocket
of my first white button-up dress shirt.

Annual Business Trip

July 17, 2024.Reading time 1 minute.

By Michael Pontacoloni

We skitter about the hotel lobby,
high-ceilinged and dim and full

of surprising trees lime-bright in the wide fan
of so nice to see you again and yes let’s.

Strings of light over 7th Avenue. Fingertips
on my forearm. My first cigarette in a year.

After dinner a pair of dolphins splash in the bay.
Midnight at the marina we spirit a manatee

from a floating plastic bag, our eyes
break into the cabin of a motor yacht,

and I forget that it’s snowing a foot back home
in Hartford. Surely my girlfriend

has worn my sweatpants all weekend,
double-checked the door locks, boiled a pot of tea.

And surely Sunday morning she’ll take down
the plastic clock above the kitchen sink

to skip an hour ahead, surely find the palm cross
hidden behind it, dry little relic of prevention

kept anywhere I live, folds cracking and the newly
splintered edge sharp enough to split a fingertip,

which it will, minutes after I get home
and feel in the dark to prove it’s still there.

Safety Deposit

July 17, 2024.Reading time 2 minutes.

By John Bargowski

She was going in for new valves
and a bypass later that week,
so my mother asked me to drive her
to the bank where she signed a log
the branch manager initialed
before he swung the vault open
and let us into that metallic space
walled with rows of numbered doors.
His key first in the one with her number,
then hers in the other slot,
and the steel box she’d earned
by her loyalty slid from its shelf.
He led us to a private closet
with a chair and small table,
and when she lifted the box lid
there they were—the deed for a remnant
of the family farm, the cancelled
house mortgage, a copy of the title
for the last car my father owned,
his 30-year plaque from the slaughterhouse,
and a pinky ring with his initials,
a certificate for a stock gone bust,
her mother’s gold wedding band,
the Silver Anniversary bracelet
she wore only to weddings,
a lock of hair from my first haircut,
and under it all, her bridal corsage,
wrapped in yellowed cellophane,
and while I stood near she peered
inside the manila envelopes
that held the legal papers,
touched each piece of jewelry,
the curl of hair, and tattered remains
of the corsage she’d worn
just above her heart, a desiccated
rosebud pierced with a rusted pin.

The Chaplain

July 17, 2024.Reading time 1 minute.

By John Bargowski

Don’t pat me on the back,
my heart wasn’t any softer,
or bigger than those other kids’
walking home from school that day,
but when he called over
to me from the crosswalk
I put my books down to help
after I saw the pastor’s palsied
hands trying to re-knot the laces
of his spit-shined black oxfords.
I’d heard the talk around the table
about the old warrior come home
with a shrapnel limp, the vet
of Korea and, not long ago,
our big brothers’ green hell,
here to soldier our parish
through the end of the Sixties.
And when I bent down
to retie the knot I got a whiff
of the same stale cigar smoke
that seeped past the confessional
screen the days Sister marched
us in to tell our puny sins
to this man who spent years
hearing the last words
of the wounded, then after
knotting the loops of his laces,
still kneeling on one knee
I tried to eyeball the ridges
and swirls on his right thumb
everyone swore were stained
with blood from hundreds of GIs
and the sacramental oil
of our brothers’ last rites.

Relics

July 17, 2024.Reading time 2 minutes.

By John Bargowski

It was only a steak knife their mother screamed at the cops
after Jimmy stabbed his twin who’d crawled into the hallway

from the apartment across from ours. I thought Joey was going
to die there, bleeding from the gut on the top step of the flight.

A few years older, they treated me like a kid brother, but led
a gang who stole freight from the Erie Lackawanna yard,

so the cops wanted to cuff both and take them downtown to book
and lock up. The judge gave the brothers a choice, so they enlisted

and were shipped off to the green hell we watched every night
on the news. Their mother, heart-ruined, moved away,

and we never heard from any of them again. Years later I walked
The Wall in DC, thinking about justice and what it takes to be a man

in America as I read down the names of the lost hoping to find
neither brother cut into the polished face of that sacred black granite,

unable to forget what brother could do to brother, how a boy’s blood
seeped into the grain of a worn marble step and left a stain

neighbors gathered around, like those bloody chips of martyr bone
we bowed and genuflected before on the holiest days.

A Good Review

July 16, 2024.Reading time 1 minute.

By A. J. Bermudez

My uncle
(great uncle, great)
born in ’38

was a baby in the war,
later, a reverend, who,

when he reads the book
in which it is glaringly clear
that I am not straight
nor narrow

praises
with joy too big for afterthought
with only yes,

and it’s the springing open of a fist
the candybar that might have been a knife

the fountain, drained, not empty
but carpeted in pennies.

Pantoum

July 16, 2024.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Maria Martin

There’s no need to be unpleasant on a Sunday afternoon
when we have all had such a nice time.
He isn’t here to defend himself, and besides,
he is a father, and besides, he is a man of the cloth.

We were all having such a nice time,
but what you’re saying is very serious.
He is a father, and besides, he is a man of the cloth.
He has always been nice to me,

but what you’re saying is very serious
which is why I am concerned you are mistaken.
He has always been nice to me.
It’s like you want to destroy his reputation

which is why I am concerned you are mistaken.
You come out of the woodwork
like you want to destroy his reputation
when you never said anything before.

You come crawling out of the woodwork,
and we are all supposed to believe you
when you never said anything before.
Do you know what everyone has been saying about you?

And we are all supposed to believe you?
You never stop, which is why I am telling you now
what everyone has been saying about you
since you were seven years old.

You never stop, which is why I am telling you now
that everyone has been walking on eggshells around you
since you were seven years old
which is why no one has called to apologize.

Everyone has been walking on eggshells around you.
We know you will use our words against us
which is why no one has called to apologize
and besides, we did apologize, and besides,

we know you will use our words against us,
you are never satisfied,
and besides, we did apologize, and besides,
what do you want us to apologize for?

You are never satisfied.
I see you’re becoming emotional.
What do you want me to apologize for?
I have only ever loved you more than anyone has ever loved you.

I see you’re becoming emotional.
I am not surprised. I have done nothing wrong, but I am not surprised.
I have only ever loved you more than anyone has ever loved you.
Some people see the worst in everyone.

I am not surprised. I have done nothing wrong, but I am not surprised.
You have been like this since you were a child.
Some people see the worst in everyone, but
there is no need to be unpleasant on a Sunday afternoon.

Kate Sessions Park

July 16, 2024.Reading time 50 minutes.

By Bruce McKay

Featured Art: “Flower of Love” by John Coey, Cardon Smith, Eric Cranston, and Tanner Ingle (Passion Works Studio)

I went downtown with Fatima sometimes that summer for her big-sistering—San Diego, windows down, the noise from her Mazda just ridiculous. The wind whipping. Fatima in her white sunglasses, laughing, dabbing tears with the back of her hand. Tucking her hair behind her ear. Slapping me on the leg. At Sixth Avenue she’d exit the freeway and park in the yellow zone on Ash Street where electric scooters would be leaning against the meters. My first trip, I thought we were lost—all that concrete, the wide streets. But through a chain-link fence I saw GATEWAY stenciled in fat purple letters on a renovated warehouse. Inside was one of those carpeted gyms with the basketball lines dyed into the fabric. A playdough-and- crafts room. Jump ropes hanging on the wall. Kids screaming and charging around. A tang in the air like old mayonnaise, and the temperature way too hot.

Fatima would sign in at the front desk and chat with the high school kid on duty. He’d squirm in his violet shirt with the Arch logo, self-conscious—not because Fatima was stunning but because she was for you and you felt it, even from the periphery, felt the love. And then Cici would astonish everybody by sneaking into the lobby and throwing her arms around us from behind. We’d be like she’d done magic. “Where’d you come from, girl?!” And she would hug Fatima so hard it was frightening. She was a hundred percent energy, twelve years old, short dark hair, Filipina. Sometimes the mom would be there—slipping away out the side door with an exhausted face. Sometimes not.

Kintsugi as Bob Marley, Yo La Tengo, Thelonious Monk, and Over the Rhine

July 16, 2024.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Becca J. R. Lachman

When you couldn’t hold your head up, we all sat
at the black keys, your 6-pound frame swallowed
by a nightgown. New to all this, how’d we know
exactly which intervals would hum you back into sleep
at 8, midnight, 5:25? Verses we’d shrieked or whispered
as kids surfaced, out of nowhere. For our own sanity,

            we grew our daily rituals: I love coffee, I love
            tea-eeeee, crooned into morning through
            bluetooth speakers until we had it memorized.
            Dance parties to shake off the electricity of
            worry or bliss, drowning out the refrain where
            you might really leave us. I fell again

for your foster Da then, how vast his inner library
was, finding the song to make you stop crying.
Your toothless grin was wide as your face when
the trio of us swayed. Soon, you reached toward
mouths, added rhythm at the Baldwin with
an atonal foot, moan-humming along like

            you knew, already, what breath and sound could do
            inside a body. I can believe in a God who thought up
            music, can sit down at a piano in an empty house
            and be saved by something again. I wonder what
            Japanese artists would say about our old grand,
            jagged cracks in its lid where a contractor had

a very bad day. Or about your story and ours,
no doubt too much in this house and beyond it
to lacquer completely with silver or gold.

My Darling, You Aren’t Mine

July 16, 2024.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Becca J. R. Lachman

but in this moment, from your ginger head dipped
toward the song of the faucet to your pinked
glossy landscape showing off its recent growth rings,
what could I be but yours? “To bring up”—

that’s what fostering can mean. And it’s like this: a poem
I knew by heart once, framed or carried in the wallets of priests and
au pairs and waitresses dared “let the soft animal of your body /
love what it loves.” It was written as a simple exercise, not as any
lifeline—meant to show a friend how a breath can choose

to break open or rest at the end of a line. Just think
            what that means for any of us: our beginning can
be what we need to keep swimming,   or
            our bodies themselves can turn
                                             into dry land.

100% illuminated: Or, Nine lines with nine syllables for Luna

July 16, 2024.Reading time 1 minute.

By Becca J. R. Lachman

Tonight, the Pink Moon marks nine months of
you + us, keeps us all awake with
its bright tunnel of a face. On the
couch, a last-ditch effort, you stretch your
torso over mine, and I feel you
soften, your snore against my neck, hand
fluttering. It’s the closest we’ll get
to any quickening, my feet cold
without a blanket, the furnace on.

Late to the Table

July 16, 2024.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Becca J. R. Lachman

I’m ashamed to say it, but it’s taken me this long
             to pick a carcass clean with just my fingers
for the first time, setting aside the good
morsels for a soup bright with dill.
Which one’s the dead thing, and which one
            the maker? And when is it again
            that a shell’s truly useless?

This one will be submerged, savory
            shipwreck in filtered water, with thick
lemon wedges and rosemary. For the first
            day of a new decade, it will sit atop a burner,
            heat pulling and cajoling from its bareness
the very medicine

I need. I’m no witch doctor, no pagan
goddess wanting to read my

future, maybe even change it. My grief
tastes of nothing, it’s been boiled
for so long . . . But I’m ready now: give me
fresh thyme,
ginger,
salt.

Reading Shackleton During My Husband’s Cancer Treatment

July 16, 2024.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Michele Bombardier

Selected as winner of the 2024 NORward Prize for Poetry by a panel of previous poetry contributors

After tucking in the kids, we tucked in the house—
dishes, laundry, prepping the next day’s meals.
When the hush finally settled, we’d get in bed
read Endurance out loud to each other.

The ship became trapped in ice
the night before his surgery. All that week I tried
to get back from the hospital in time to kiss the boys
but I failed. I sat on their beds, watched them sleep.
The day we got the pathology report,

the men, running low on food, put down their dogs.
Radiation all summer. The boys played soccer.
The oncologist told him to join a gym, get a trainer,
go hard because she was going off-label,
tripling the usual dose.

They threw everything overboard, but the ship sank anyway.
Anemia turned his skin yellow-gray. His body
became smooth as a seal. I watched
as he denied fatigue, struggled to untie his shoes,
get up the stairs.

Shackleton split the crew, sought help: everyone survived.
After we finished the book, we never opened it again.
I wonder where it went. Years it sat on the bedside table
under the clock: last thing we saw at night,
first thing every morning.

Third foster placement: age two

July 16, 2024.Reading time 1 minute.

By August Green

He could sit on a couch for hours, just
watching. Ripping

callused skin from the corners
of a thumb with his teeth. He puts his mouth

to the meat of his hand
and bites. Baby-doll hands

marked by the blood-red spots
of bedbugs, circle burns

from cigarettes, scars
from unattended can lids,

a missing nail.
Hands conditioned to destroy.

Everything he touches
turns to rubble.

A lined piece of paper in bits,
a car with no wheels, the door

of a treasured dollhouse, snapped.
In the tub, he rips the head from an action figure,

kneels over its body,
and pees.

Social workers, foster parents,
teachers. Each adult a reminder

of the ones who let him down.
Yet you learn to keep things away.

Spend days where time passes
in increments of time-out.

He slaps me on the face, leaves a mark.
Pulls fistfuls of hair

from the other children’s heads.
I learn to keep myself away.

And yet.
His chubby legs over my shoulders, calves

dangling loosely over my chest. His chin
a gentle pressure on my scalp.

He skims the hairline of my jaw, absentmindedly,
lightly, with his fingertips.

Go Seek

July 16, 2024.Reading time 35 minutes.

By V. F. Cordova

Paula has some thoughts about what happened at the playground. There are spooky things with children, she says. Kids holding conversations with unseen ghosts, kids with memories of dead people’s lives, siblings with totally opposite versions of childhood memories. It’s theoretically possible in a multiverse scenario, Paula says, that a child could be in both one place and an infinite number of places at the same time, time itself moving simultaneously backward and forward.

I suggest that Paula write a paper on this. I picture her snickering, face illuminated by her phone’s glowing rectangle. The Phenomenology of Freaky Shit, she texts back. I smile.

Or was I just wasted? You. Were. Not.

That she wasn’t there, that she’s not a mother, is no impediment to Paula’s theorizing. But if she’s expert in anything, it’s the outer-bounds of my alcohol tolerance. She’s gotten drunk with me more times than anyone. Our college years were one long rumspringa from our repressive all-girls Catholic school days. Later we both got serious and left town for our doctorates—hers philosophy, mine history—but we kept up weekly phone dates to “wine and whine.” For years we worked as adjuncts in obscure towns, bitching to each other about the apathetic students and the bad take-out and how the drive to the closest airport would be as long as the flight back home. We got tenure-track positions around the same time. Paula’s still at hers, across the country in California. It’s hard to find the time to call now, but we have this text-chain going that, printed out, could bridge the distance.

Pop Cooler

July 16, 2024.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Ted Kooser

Perhaps the last two or three of the type I remember—
a tank for the water and ice, and a labyrinthine
steel rack to hold the necks of the bottles, a cold flap
that a nickel would unlock so you could pull out a bottle—
haven’t been placed on prominent display in one of those
sadly under-funded, just-off-the-highway, Butler-tin
county museums, but, on their broken-down casters
have been shoved and scraped over the floor to the back
to be stored with a surplus of other heartfelt donations,
none really rare, and none of much historical interest—
the one-hill-at-a-time hand-operated corn planters,
grease-stained lard presses and treadle sewing machines—
the pop coolers’ heavy lids closed over stale summer air
from the late Forties, their bottle openers still functional,
cap receptacles hanging below, though containing no
pop caps—no Oh-So Grape, Nehi Orange, Cream Soda—
all of those caps pitched up onto the top of the bluff
that casts a cool shadow over the Standard Oil station
owned by my Grandfather Moser, who as a young man
played ball for the township team, who is still throwing
those bottle caps, one after another, from the oil-spotted
cracked pavement in front of the station, showing off,
showing his grandchildren his pitching arm, winding up,
lifting a knee, then sailing a cap high into a lost world,
partially sealed by the dried rubber strips in the cooler.

In Center Field

July 16, 2024.Reading time 1 minute.

By Ted Kooser

Ball glove a big clown’s hand on my hand
and punching my other fist into it
as one was expected to do, ten or twelve then,

I stepped backward and backward, farther
and farther away from the bright, buzzing
diamond, and on into the dewy, tall grass

and ticking crickets, where the Milky Way
began to take over, and, stepping backward,
I entered the universe, the stars brighter

and more numerous the farther I went,
the air cooler, and I no longer cared much
about softball, about catching that high fly,

the ball coming down out of the mothy glow
like a planet, slapping right into my glove,
teammates far in the distance, applauding,

as I backed into that great, spacious dark
sprinkled with stars, feeling light on my feet
as if I were floating, spreading my arms out

like wings as I slowly fell back against it
though not really falling, dissolving into it
backwards, eons beyond center field.

Tree Service

July 16, 2024.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Ted Kooser

Featured Art: “White Deer” by Amy Nichols, Scott Brooks, and Wendy Minor Viny (Passion Works Studio)

But for the big empty section of sky
that he pieces together, branch by branch,
building a forever of light, his work
is all disassembly, in deafening noise,
today from a cup at the end of a boom
that bounces a little, swinging this way
and that as if trying to catch water
dripping out of a ceiling. He’s taking
apart, from the top down, a sick sixty-foot
ash, first cutting away its outer parts,
feather-light as they fall, each reaching
as if to high-five the branches below,
a helper picking them up by their ends
and dragging them to a big gluttonous
chipper that drags them in, screaming
and flailing. Bobbing lower and lower,
the man in the cup, his saw buzzing,
leans out to unstack the heavy spools
of the trunk, reaching to tip them away
to drop with an emphatic thunk
on the litter of twigs and dead leaves
on the lawn, the cup bouncing lower
and lower, spool after spool, the boom
telescoping back into itself and then
finding its place on top of the truck,
as now he climbs out, lifting one leg
then the other, both whole and unsevered,
and backs down the steps, stretches,
pulls off his gloves in the vast silence
that, suddenly, everything’s part of,
those few of us watching feeling as if
we’ve taken too deep a breath of the sky.

Review: Retribution Forthcoming by Katie Berta

July 16, 2024.Reading time 16 minutes.

By Erin Redfern

Across the poems in Katie Berta’s Retribution Forthcoming (Ohio University Press, 2024), a self-aware speaker works to come to grips with her complex apprehensions about beauty, identity, virtue, and violence. In an interview with Rob McLennan, Berta affirms that “poems are a place of internal quiet in which I get to explicate what I think and feel without the invading presence of another mind.” The effect is as if Sartre’s play No Exit featured different aspects of only one character having a high-stakes, if informal, colloquy. As with that play, we keep reading for the quality of the conversation, which in Retribution is unpretentious, perceptive, often sardonically funny, and always intensely searching.

The collection opens with “Compact,” in which the speaker’s dog “locks him- self // in my boyfriend’s office while we’re gone” and “chews the clothes . . . to smithereens, maybe to keep himself from chewing / himself.” As Berta’s book explores, a person locked in her own mind without recourse to faith in something bigger has nothing to chew but the self. Berta continues, “Asking questions of god is, of course, chewing // yourself. Though, in some situations it’s practical. / Like when some part of you is / what’s caught.” This “cleaved” self reappears throughout the book, and the poems in which it appears run the gamut from everyday absurdity (“Becky! Are you trying to text a different Katie?”) to existential angst (“Batter my heart, you no-personed god”) to traumatized dissociation (“so I went off into the ceiling’s coarseness . . . until it was over”). This cleaving shows up grammatically in the recurring slide between first- and second-person pronouns that characterizes the majority of the poems.

Review: My Life in Brutalist Architecture by John Gallaher

July 16, 2024.Reading time 5 minutes.

By Kevin Prufer

For two decades now, John Gallaher has been quietly writing some of the most pleasurable and compelling poetry in the United States, including the books The Little Book of Guesses (Four Way Books, 2007), In a Landscape (BOA, 2014), and Brand New Spacesuit (BOA Editions, 2020). In his newest collection, My Life in Brutalist Architecture (Four Way Books, 2024), he is at his very best.

The book begins with a quote from Ruth Graham: “There is something temptingly tidy about the idea of adoption: a family with extra love and resources meets a child in desperate need of both.” From there, through meditations on his own adoption in 1968, Gallaher goes on to show just how untidy his life and thoughts on the subject are. But there’s nothing dogmatic here, nothing sentimental. Gallaher offers no lessons for readers and comes to no solutions. Rather, in poem after poem, he explores the subject with complexity and inquisitiveness, his mind shuffling through his own experiences, memories, suppositions. A photo of himself as a baby removed from its frame for the first time reveals his birth name written on the back. What might the poet have become had he kept that name? Where would he have gone? Is the name dead, or does it belong to some other version of himself, a version he might consult for guidance? “My fear says / these people don’t love me,” Gallaher writes. “They adopted me by mistake.” In poem after poem, the poet offers readers not just a meditation on the complexities of adoption, but on the variations of the idea of the self, on the slipperiness of identity, personality, and all our passages through years. “What,” he asks at one point, “does the self consist of? // The theme is time. The theme is unspooling.”

Review: English as a Second Language by Jaswinder Bolina

July 16, 2024.Reading time 8 minutes.

By Denise Duhamel

Jaswinder Bolina’s English as a Second Language and Other Poems (Copper Canyon, 2024) is a delightful political treatise for our troubled world. This poet’s gifts are many. In a particularly brilliant move, Bolina sequences the book’s poems in two ways, with a table of contents both at the beginning and the end. You can read from the perspective of the poet’s childhood to adulthood and parenthood, or from present perspective of parenthood looking backward to childhood. The nuances displayed are tremendous. The foreshadowing works in either order. And both the beginning and ending poems (no matter which way you read) involve the speaker eating hotdogs—in London or Chicago.

Review: If I Could Give You a Line by Carrie Oeding

July 16, 2024.Reading time 9 minutes.

By Claire Bateman

In If I Could Give You a Line (University of Akron Press, 2023), Carrie Oeding further develops the voice-driven associational thinking that characterizes her first collection, Our List of Solutions (42 Miles Press, 2011), while recontextualizing and transcending its concerns. The earlier poems are richly populated with neighbors, lovers, friends, and peers as their speaker navigates the fraught social dynamics of early adulthood, repeatedly referencing music/dance as she struggles to map out a workable configuration of intimacies and distances. Primary emotions include status-anxiety and longing—sexual/romantic, and even ontological. In the poem “Joy,” Oeding writes “And if everything is aspiring to be music— / the making and the dancing and the joying, / if they are all dying to be music, why does music just get to be music?” If I Could Give You a Line is continuous with that project in terms of Oeding’s fascination with space and distance; however, in the new collection, she explores relationships (both intimate ones with her partner and her daughter and intellectual/aesthetic ones with the work of a number of artists), questioning the nature of place itself. The book comes across as a series of dance-like thought experiments about motion in poems such as “The Making of Things,” in which Oeding, responding to Richard Long’s conceptual land sculpture, “A Line Made by Walking,” uses a strategy of negation to interrogate a variety of understandings of the line:

Review: The Moonflowers by Abigail Rose-Marie

July 16, 2024.Reading time 12 minutes.

By Apoorva Bradshaw-Mittal

Up from the barren, parched earth, a statue grows. A man,
for a woman is too malleable to be immortalized in stone.
-from The Moonflowers

The moonflower—named so because it blooms only at night—collects its aroma throughout the day, and as it blooms, it spreads an intense jasmine-like fragrance. In Abigail Rose-Marie’s debut novel The Moonflowers (Lake Union Publishing, 2024), the flower is not just a symbol of beauty and enchantment, but also a symbol of freedom, of the “malleable” woman-figure adapting to its conditions and finding ways to bloom even in extreme circumstances.

The Moonflowers is framed as a mystery novel set in a small Appalachian town where secrets have been carried through generations—the secret behind the death of celebrated hero Benjamin Costello; the secret behind the women who have gone missing during the years leading up to Benjamin’s death; and the secret of why the narrator, Tig (Antigone) Costello, left behind a burgeoning career at the Art Institute of Chicago. The book begins with Tig taking up the project to learn more about her grandfather Benjamin and to use her research to create a painting in memoriam. As she reaches the small, dusty town, it’s quite apparent that Darren, Kentucky, is almost in ruins, as if all economic progress stopped after Costello’s death. Tig soon discovers that the town may have never seen any kind of prosperity to begin with, and rotting under the surface is misogyny so deep that, even in the 1997 of the novel, women are treated as second-class citizens by the townspeople.

Review: Daughters of the New Year by E. M. Tran

July 16, 2024.Reading time 7 minutes.

By Gwen E. Kirby

I feel keen anticipation and anxiety when I start a book that has set itself A Challenge. Will the author pull off a magic trick or will The Challenge become a gimmick? Will it add a new dimension to the characters’ stories or will it become an intellectual exercise, A Challenge for the sake of itself?

In Daughters of the New Year (Hanover Square Press, 2022), E. M. Tran tells the story of the Vietnamese-immigrant Trung family through its women, beginning in present-day New Orleans and moving backward in time through Hurricane Katrina to the fall of Saigon, the French occupation of Vietnam, and finally to fragments of an almost mythic past. The novel is a beautiful example of when A Challenge—here, telling a story backward—can give new depths to classic themes. Tran’s exploration of legacy, family, and cultural memory is complicated and shows us how the past refuses to offer up answers even when we have imaginative access to it.

Review: Cactus Country by Zoë Bossiere

July 16, 2024.Reading time 31 minutes.

By Nicole Walker

I first met Zoë Bossiere (they/she) when I visited Ander Monson’s undergraduate nonfiction course. We had an intense conversation about how to balance information and lyricism in our essays. I knew them as the managing editor of Brevity Magazine which publishes essays of writers working in the brief form. Many of these essays lean toward the lyrical side, like Brenda Miller’s “Swerve,” which begins with one very grounded scene but then spins out to include a litany of mini-scenes whose sonic and imagistic connections blow the top of one’s head off. Bossiere also recently edited and published, with Erica Trabold, The Lyric Essay as Resistance: Truth from the Margins (Wayne State University Press, 2023) which draws from a broad group of writers to argue that the lyric is indeed a powerful persuasive force for change.

So, I was surprised when I started to read Cactus Country (Abrams Press, 2024). On a flight to Minneapolis, as I turned page after page like the book was on fire, I thought, This book is the most narrative memoir I have ever read. I am prone to exaggeration. I know of many memoirs that move by story more than association, but Cactus Country holds tightly onto narrative and doesn’t let go. And, neither could I, as I fell in love with the author’s rendering of place and of their allegiance to how the narrator’s body moved through that place.

Announcing the 2024 Summer Online Exclusive

June 10, 2024.Reading time 1 minute.

Featured Art by Karen Renee

The latest Summer Online Exclusive from New Ohio Review is now available!

The issue includes art from the Athens Photo Project; fiction from S Graham, Jennifer Schomburg Kanke, Aimee Parkison, and Owen Thomas; nonfiction from Marissa Yuan; poetry from Pam Baggett, Danny Caine, Lauren Camp, Rob Cording, Savannah DiGregorio, Ockert Greeff, Evan Gurney, Mickie Kennedy, Patrick Kindig, Georgia McKay Lodge, Jennifer Martelli, Olga Maslova, Jory Mickelson, Dion O’Reilly, David B. Prather, Linda Ann Strang, Leigh K. Sugar, Emily Wheeler, Steven Winn, and Dan Wriggins; and reviews of work by J. C. Scharl, George David Clark, Nancy Miller Gomez, Kari Gunter-Seymour, and Kate Fox by Betsy K. Brown, Jonathan Geltner, Michael Lavers, Erin Redfern, Bonnie Proudfoot, and Rose M. Smith.

We hope you enjoy our 2024 Summer Online Exclusive.

Thanks for reading,

-The Editors

Athens Photographic Project

June 9, 2024.Reading time less than 1 minute.

The images for New Ohio Review’s Summer Online Exclusive and the cover art for Issue 34 were provided by Athens Photographic Project.

Athens Photographic Project identifies itself as:

A community of artists dedicated to using photography as a tool for self-expression, personal growth, and social change within the mental health recovery journey. Working in Appalachian Ohio for more than 20 years, we explore the boundaries of photography and mental health while reaching diverse audiences with our images.

For more insight into the work done by Athens Photographic Project photographers, please click here for a video featuring Issue 34 cover artist Beth Klaus.

Arizona Snow Globe

April 11, 2024.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Dan Wriggins

I needed two thousand dollars by Friday.
You deadheaded a daisy. I googled
precipitously. You beat the welcome mat.
I had a related question. You wore a hat in a place
where it was considered not the vibe
to wear hats. I choked
on the billowing dust. You buttered a bone
surgeon. I listened to a song you said was money.
You drew five cards (unlucky)
in a row. I dug my heels into the belly
of the mule. You ladled bathwater.
I couldn’t get the mule to move. You tied a sheet
bend in our yo-yo string. I chased a chicken
under a canoe. You had a serious moment
on the tilt-a-whirl. I rearranged
according to aura. Green, indigo, black. You re-
heated soup. I smoked one
down to the filter. You waltzed
with failure in your mind. I possessed a drunk
driver. You roadkill.
I tried pouring coffee on the music.
Why not at least try? You looked at me
like a stalled motorboat.
I asked how many copies we could move
and how fast. You synthesized
a boring diamond. I signed petition
after pathetic petition. You shook
a snow globe. I proposed posting up under a tree
until the whole thing blew over. “Darling,”
you said, “I don’t have the keys to that
apartment.” I focused on a hubcap.
You bought a falafel truck
because apparently Jesus had
a falafel truck, and we can always inch
closer. Everything I did to make you happy.
Everything you did. You chucked a stick in the river
and it floated around.

It’s Not Always About the Lemmings

April 10, 2024.Reading time 5 minutes.

By Olga Maslova

Sometime last century in Kharkiv, father
and I fled the melting August pavement,
bribed the conductor of a sold-out train.
He jammed us in the luggage racks,
and we took off to the Black Sea.

The moving furnace spat us out somewhere
in Kerch, the easternmost town in the Crimea
two hundred miles from sandy beaches, magnolias,
and pine trees,
streets lined with vendors selling buttered corn
charred shish kebabs and chacha. Predawn Kerch

was drab and empty, last night’s drunks
scattered on the streets like seals in their puddles,
seagulls feasting on rotting fish. At the port
we made a deal with a captain of a cargo bulker
Father paid the fare with his life stories, and kept
the crew awake.

I sat 12 hours next to the cockpit
                                                            staring
    at the horizon changing colors
                                                                    from pink
                                to blue
                                                   to pink again
                        to black

till the evening Yalta embraced us
like an old friend at the party:
a little tipsy, a little horny, determined
to dance all night
under shooting stars

* * *

An arctic snowy owl arrived
in the south of France last Wednesday
3000 miles away from home. Her baffled face
was captured by the paparazzi. British scientists
as their rituals dictate, had offered an explanation:

It’s all about the lemmings:
The owl was following the lemmings
The spike in the lemming population
had lured the hungry bird

There is one person
who really knows what happened—
the captain of the Greenlandic freighter
the stowaway had boarded, heading south

But he won’t tell

nor will the owl

nor the lemmings.

Transitioning Glasses

April 9, 2024.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Lauren Camp

Featured Art by Mitzi Klaiber

When I come in after shoveling
that last round of snow—an exquisite parliament
of low-slung brightness
even in its groaning down toward the ground,
I see my sister
has texted QUICK
THING. So easy to send such airy
unplanned balloons. The ordinary
flakes saunter down, will not let go, the white
weather not yet leaving its filthy
will with car tracks and time. I am her
shelter. The snow falls as spheres.
I like being inside now watching it.
I think of the weight of it, the pile-up
as it further neatens. The white at its best
is a blur. My eyesight is off. It has been two years
and seven months since I peered
through one of those devices that brush
eyelashes. I haven’t heard a doctor
circle those disks and ask this one
or that one, this one or that. What I see
is another day, the wind sucking about.
A coyote walks behind the junipers
And now its shadow has become an action.
The snow comes down, side by side.
I am hardly paying attention;
my eye no longer holds what it touches.
There is so much noise in life.
As children, my sister and I played tag
during sermons. I could go on
about how her notes bother me.
The snowflakes are an arm’s length off.
It could be the only thing I do:
answering her, filling the white void
in my hand. Everything comes from further up.
When I respond I can talk now,
I am saying no one realizes
love without feeling this urgency.

In Which I Compare My Brain Surgery to a Slope Mine

April 8, 2024.Reading time 1 minute.

By Evan Gurney

Featured Art by Greg Rounds

Mine and mill have done their work,
the ridge face once lush with fir
and poplar now cleared of airy timber,
the brow slashed and bored, a strip
of railroad curling like a scar up
the mountain to the excavation’s cavity,
sealed now but still marking its territory,
still leaving its lasting impression.

Hidden from sight, a subterranean labyrinth
of crosscuts line like stitches the shaft
that slopes down and in through folds
and plunges to the precious stope
that engineers surveyed, prospected,
and, finally, removed entire, hoisting out
the bituminous ore, leaving behind a sump
that time and age will fill once more.

Things of the Earth

April 7, 2024.Reading time 3 minutes.

By David B. Prather

Featured Art by Karen Renee

We knew what it meant to grow up
in the suburbs, the product of poor beginnings―
the progeny of farmers who readied the earth
with horse-drawn plows, and women
who kept having children

until it killed them,
people who didn’t know anything else,
surviving the Great Depression
by telling ghost stories and war stories
never meant to be believed.

We never let on.
The girl across the street swore
her mother was a full-blooded Spanish princess,
when we knew she was Mexican.
We were too young to know it didn’t matter.

The Pentecostals three doors down,
women with uncut hair and denim skirts,
men with lives like any other, were the only ones
who were sure in their conviction
they were headed for heaven.

The rest of us resented them
because this meant we were condemned,
like the old tool shed down the dead end
where all the kids used to play,
scaring rabbits in and out of the rotting lumber.

We just had nowhere to go
in the middle of summer. So we dared
the clotted vines of poison ivy, itching
the next day, and grateful for the calamine lotion
pinking our arms and legs

in thick splotches through which our fingernails
dragged until the welts broke
and the fluid spread. How it ever stopped
we couldn’t guess. We ran through
the rain-wet grass, mud-soaked when we found

a one-and-a-half-foot nightcrawler.
Not even the boys would touch it
except with a stick to carry it to the breezeway
where we watched the awful thing suffer
the concrete, already half dead anyway.

As fascinated as we were
by the things of the earth, we should
never have realized the sky was blue.
But there it was, hanging over us
large as any relative who came back

from the front line, shell-shocked
and gun crazy, unable to make a living
at even the smallest thing he tried,
or the girl who hated Christmas
for its one beaded necklace,

who never forgave herself for the gift
of scarlet fever that killed her father,
or any of the rest of us who cursed
in the old backward ways, convinced someday
we could care for ourselves. We could let this go.

We Grow Apples

April 6, 2024.Reading time 45 minutes.

By Owen Thomas

My father told me the story of this big-time gangster from Georgia. The guy ran the streets of Tbilisi but left in the 1990s. He was running from something. He ended up a trash collector on the streets of New York City. I used to imagine this gangster’s thick gloved fingers wrapping around the handles of the plastic bins, lifting them up and flipping them into the back of the truck.

Evie and Adam at the Farmer’s Market

April 5, 2024.Reading time 1 minute.

By Linda Ann Strang

After Jack Gilbert

Scoping out the fattened apples
and snatching QR codes with an iPhone,
Evie, always eager to bootlick, says, in lipstick,
What do you think, Addie, babe? Requiring

no official arraignment to condemn herself
to death, she proffers in turn Paula Red,
Ginger Gold, Jonamac, Jonagold. Her last ditch:
How about tonight I make tarte tatin,

or apple crisp? Then, Would you like me to get you
another cup? Careful, take mine. There’s a drip.
Her voice leaping in pitch, she tries to forget
that time she snuck off with fucksome

Lucifer—Dodge Viper parked in the Johnstone’s
orchard, midnight cigarettes, a demon pretending
his cock’s a rattlesnake to make her laugh.
She stifles a rebel guffaw right now, nearly losing

it in front of the key limes. Bitching husbands
and fruit can mess with your head, plus
you never know when God might appear pink
aproned on the porch, pie upfront, and eager to snitch.

How to Remove a Hot Sauce Stain

April 4, 2024.Reading time 1 minute.

By Dan Wriggins

Featured Art by Beth Klaus

First, remove yourself
from the plane entirely.
I’ve heard about drugs that can help,
societies one can join.
Some people move to Maine and jar things.
There’s a Sun Ra movie
where Sun Ra plays the piano
so hot the club burns down.
A guy from my high school started tracking eagles.
I knew a woman who said
she meditated for an hour a day,
sometimes two. Megan
from Wisconsin. You had so many kinds
of hot sauce. Sambal.
Cholula. Dave’s Five Alarm. Habanero
from Hell. Meggy, my days are so long,
and I think only of you

Remedies

April 3, 2024.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Mickie Kennedy

The surgeon wants me
to remove my prostate.
The upside: my life.
The downside: no more
erections, unless I take
a TriMix penile injection,
used by porn stars
for ten-hour shoots.
I do not feel
like a porn star.
Diapers for a year
if I’m lucky,
for a life if I’m not.
Also for a life:
arid orgasms.
The upside: no more
messes. The downside:
no more messes.

Reddit-strangers want me
basic: every day,
I’m swallowing seven
teaspoons of baking soda
to vault my pH
above eight. Cancer
struggles to survive,
they say, in a basic
environment. I shit
a dozen times a day.
I piss on a plastic strip
and it changes color,
almost like a game.
I live on the toilet
but still, that’s a life.

III

The Happy Prostate
Facebook Group
wants me on everything—
milk thistle, black
seed oil, broccoli sprouts
I grow myself,
sea moss, boron,
tudca twice a day,
a dog dewormer
even though I’m not
a dog, mangosteen,
hibiscus tea, soursop
leaves, and never more
than twenty pits
of bitter apricot,
unless I need
to end things early
(a drop of cyanide
in every pit).

The oncologist wants me
to annihilate my prostate
with targeted blasts
of radiation.
CyberKnife.
Sounds like something
Guy Fieri would hawk
on late-night TV.
This is everything
you need, he says,
trimming his frosted tips
with a glowing scalpel.

Randy wants me cumming every day, a frenzy
before the famine.

With the patience of an attentive nurse,
he helps me arrive,

his finger curling towards the place
my prostate takes me—
a brief obliteration.

Maybe if I touch the cancer,
he says, it’ll leave.

My stupid, silly man.
It doesn’t work like that.
But even when there’s nothing left to touch,

I would let him touch me there.

Jam Sandwich

April 2, 2024.Reading time 1 minute.

By Patrick Kindig

I plunge my hand into my husband’s gut
& squeeze. He giggles, doubles over

like an uncovered pill bug.
He has never had a gut before. We

are both taking pleasure in it,
this soft appendage extending

his silhouette. Of course, he is also
taking some shame. Once,

his stomach was ribbed & rigid
like a Victorian corset. Unlike me,

he never knew his body
to grow unexpectedly, never fingered

an expanding love handle. Now
he has. Now

we take turns touching his tum
& laughing like young mothers, delighted

to discover a new fold in the baby’s
arm. Sometimes

we press our bellies together
& jiggle them. For some reason,

we call this the jam
sandwich. Who knows why.

All I know is it makes me feel
like a child, doing something silly

& a little naughty, joystruck
by all our bodies can be.

Steal a Grape

April 1, 2024.Reading time 1 minute.

By David B. Prather

Featured Art by Paulette Hall

Three years now,
I still resurrect my grandmother,
pull her out of that mausoleum vault
and bring her back to life.
My life, that is.
I know she’s tired and wants to rest,
but grief is greedy
and tireless. When I pull her back,
she wears red,
which, for now, is symbolic of Paradise.
Sometimes, she is a cardinal,
especially in winter
when the world needs to be reminded
of whatever it wants most.
What I want is to take her to Kroger,
so she can steal a grape or two.
I want to take her to a doctor’s appointment
so she can complain about the wait.
I want to take her to see a movie
so dramatic she will pretend not to notice
that it hitches my breath
and stings my eyes. Three years from now
is unpredictable at best.
And resurrection
is only a way to drag the past with us,
lest we forget. Yes,
we forget.

In haraqa al-film

March 31, 2024.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Jory Mickelson

[One translation of the Arabic title is when a camera’s film is literally burned by the sun]

In the photographic crypt in Lebanon,
Studio Scheherazade, where amid the hundreds
of thousands of negatives sometimes

an image will emerge of friends,
lovers, or something in-between, same-gendered
couples playing marriage, behind

the photographer’s screen, unable to be taken
into the afternoon’s harsh light, the small town’s streets,
where, if exposed all is ruined.

So too, in the layering of history,
every Egyptian hieroglyph gives you side-eye.
Each Persian relief:

side-eye, maybe smiling. But an Akkadian
never deigns to look at you at all, a glance beneath
their dignity. Their eyes

on some king in symmetrically crinkled robes
& perfectly tasseled hair, stiff as the ceramic smocks
of the Sumerian votive statuettes—

the Sumerian’s eyes enlarged
because their eyes were watching a god—
until we carted them off

to some white-walled museum where they look
now upon the lookers, praying their dusty prayers,
in climate-controlled absence.

Our prayers, too, will go unseen
or be lost beyond our time, the gods forgotten,
and every couple a speculation.

Chapter IV. The Suffocation of the Mother

March 30, 2024.Reading time 19 minutes.

By Savannah DiGregorio

Excerpts from The Extant Works of Aretaeus The Cappadocian, translated by Francis Adams (1856), A Brief Discovery of a Disease called the Suffocation of the Mother (1603) by Edward Jorden

In the middle flanks of women lies the womb, a female
viscus, closely resembling an animal; for it is moved of
itself hither and thither. In a word, it is altogether erratic.

                                                                            You made an aquarium of my insides. Sculpted
                                                                            salty marshlands out of meaty pulp. Fashioned
                                                                           algae nests from fleshy sinew, white & crooked
                                                                                                     as the half-moons of fingernails.

You napped in the hollows of my ribcage. Nestled
your mighty body into hammocks of irish moss. Smacked
on sugar kelp like pink chewing gum, sapped & sweet
as the raw nerves under cracked teeth.

                                                                     In fragrant smells it also delights and advances
                     toward them. To fetid smells, it has an aversion, and
                     flees from them. On the whole, the womb is like an
                                    animal within an animal.

From deep inside me you now roar. Crying
and howling until my whole belly
sometimes lifts.

                                                                   When, therefore, it is suddenly carried upwards,
                     and remains above for a considerable time, violently
                        compressing the intestines, the woman experiences
                                             choking.

My organs; an oblation to you.

For the liver, diaphragm, and lungs are quickly
squeezed within a narrow space; and therefore loss
of breathing and speech seems to be present.

With teeth clamped shut,
our hearts convulse in chorus.

This suffocation from the womb accompanies females
alone.

                                                                                    Men stuff partridge feathers and hot coals
                                                                                                                    inside my nostrils. Prod
                                                                                                       blisters on my breasts—blindly,
                                                                                                      as newborn kits search for milk.

Those from the uterus are remedied by fetid smells,
and the application of fragrant things. A pessary
induces abortion and a powerful congelation of the
womb.

                                                                                                              From me you surface burnt
                                                                                                 and hemorrhaging on sorrow. Like
                                                                                                                that of slaughtered swine.

                                                      Grief comes with sponge and pail.
                                                      Scours my soul—barren,
                                                      we laugh ourselves to sleep.

To Be Stevie Nicks Cool

March 29, 2024.Reading time 1 minute.

By Jennifer Martelli

So many men love my friend:
her boyfriend and both ex-husbands build her a three-season porch,
all cedarwood and teak. Pine needles from her backyard

cover the almost-floor. I tell her she is sexual,
like Stevie Nicks. People can smell it like golden beer. They smell my indifference—
it smells like a New England Timber Rattlesnake, all scales,

black-tinged-gold, like a hole. I learned today in a crossword
that Venus has no moons. That was the down clue,
What Venus lacks that Earth has: _ _ _ _ _:

five letters—O and O—filled in already. She sends me
a video of the three men and their equipment: saws, nails, drills,
hammers, planes, pulleys, rope,

planks of wood, aromatic as a closet, some tool
with claws on both ends they toss back and forth, way too hot.

Almost Heavenly Babies

March 28, 2024.Reading time 11 minutes.

By Aimee Parkison

Featured Art by Chris Leonard

1.) You Sound Drunk, You Probably Shouldn’t Leave the House Today

We never speak of the reasons for her drinking, though her husband was in the navy overseas, a high-ranking officer, leaving her alone at home. When I was a child, whenever her husband was away, my neighbor would visit my mother, stumbling into our house, reeking of whiskey and crying about her husband, not wanting to be alone at night. She was the type of woman other women called a doll. Pretty, slender, elfin-faced with no children, she was youthful and kind with an aura of fragile, feminine innocence nurtured like a pet in a well-swept house with caramel aluminum siding and wooden shutters painted sunny-sky blue. A divorced woman also abandoned by a man, my mother felt sorry for our neighbor and asked me to stay over with her to keep her company, since my mother had to watch my baby sisters and had work in the early morning as a secretary at the meat-packing plant. I packed my tattered overnight bag and skipped over to the neighbor’s neatly decorated house, where I slept in crisply laundered paisley bedsheets in her husband’s place as she attempted to fall into a drunken sleep, shivering, curled against my back, spooning me. Sensing her dreaming, I woke in the dark with her hands on me. I was thirteen when it started, fifteen when it ended with her fingers creeping inside me. I pretended to sleep. At sunrise, she cooked me a breakfast of burnt buttered toast dusted in cinnamon sugar while warning me about men. She watched me eat as she sucked her fingers while sipping bourbon-spiked tea.

Miraculous

March 27, 2024.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Pam Baggett

Featured Art by Eliza Scott

Switch on the car radio, music falls out of the air
into my ears: James Brown, Joni Mitchell,
Jim Croce. Old gold. Plus, when I got in my car,
it cranked like it does every time, so many miracles
in that I can’t even count them. Traffic lights
that help us get along with one another,
scent of roast chicken rising from my grocery bag,
which also contains the most delicious bread,
whole wheat with flax, sesame and a hint
of cherries. That someone thought to turn wheat
into bread, miraculous. Yeah, I know, I just
had to start on a heart pill, but it’s nothing,
a little electrical nuisance, no effect
on longevity. And yeah, my best friend
has a hurt so deep and wide whole oceans
pour through it, and her story’s not mine to tell
but jeez, what a soul-shatterer. Yet even she
watches bumblebees. She swears they’re her favorite
miracle. So aerodynamically complicated
in the way they get off the ground you’d think
they never would—flapping their wings
back and forth, not up and down—yet up they go.
She says if they can beat gravity she can too,
and I gotta tell you that to see her dressed
and laughing, hear her singing with that voice
that sounds like water tumbling over rocks
in some ancient river, water that’s passed through
some murky cavernous places but has emerged
into the stunning light of day, to hear her sing again
is one big fat black-and-yellow buzzing miracle.

The Grandmother Tree

March 26, 2024.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Pam Baggett

My sister named this venerable maple
growing at the edge of the mountain’s gravel road,
main trunk long broken, pocked with holes,
a once-mighty tree now slowly failing.
She’s lost her apical dominance, I say, meaning
that when the top broke off, side branches
shot up past the injured trunk like raised arms.
On the left, one wide kind eye, an open mouth
framed by credible lips. Step right, a second eye
squinted shut, mouth twisted up, as if she’s yelling
at us the way our father’s mother did: imagined slights,
our insufferable rudeness, which she thought
should be spanked out of us. Mom never laid a hand,
which says a lot about her mother, gone too soon
for my sister and me to have known. Grandma Baggett
and her snarling chihuahuas gone, too, when our parents divorced.
No wonder my sister imagines a tree could be a grandmother;
she’s been hiding in stories since we were small.
I anchored to the safety of science, to cold fact: Trees break.
A grandmother can call you Sugar one minute,
rage at you the next. Can die without you ever once
hearing her voice.

A Small Room Off To The Side

March 25, 2024.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Ockert Greeff

Featured Art by Karen Renee

He will come to live with you
Make him feel welcome
My mother says
Her eyes turning away from mine
Before I can search for the meaning

I imagine I might have a small, empty room off to the side
With a reddish glim
That might bother him at night
When he takes off his thick, black-rimmed glasses
And his eyelids become soft and white
Butterflies in his leathery face

I would have to get a night-side table for his glasses
And his teeth
And his cowboy book
So that he feels welcome when he comes to live with me

I think that old single bed will be fine
Now that he is alone
He wouldn’t want more anyway
But I will get new sheets
For his old, pale body and his tanned forearms
And maybe a soft, new pillow for his sunken cheeks

I will ask my sister for that old painting
With the open plains and hazy blue mountains
So far, far in the distance 
The one she took when he died

So that he has something to look at
And so that he feels welcome 

When he comes to live with me, in me
In a small room off to the side of my heart
So very far from the plains where he grew up.

Coworker

March 24, 2024.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Kate Hubbard

You were spinning a top on the bar the night we met at happy hour. We had known each other for years. You gave me a poinsettia for Christmas once and I gave it away, left it in my mother’s picture window so she could end every phone call asking about the boy who gave me that nice flower.

I fell down your stairs. I lost myself in the gaze of your oak trees. I fell in and out of your bed when I wasn’t falling in and out of the Italian tenor’s bed. I met you over and over in the street crossing to the deli. I saw you in the parking lot. I forgot you when the gulls squawked, when my feet were sandy, when I took my lunch in bed.

I forgot you when it rained and the gutters overflowed. You sang to the fax machine. You counted your cigarette breaks. You tipped your hat and loitered by my window. I wore blue when you’d remember it. I drank apple ginger tea with my feet in a desk drawer.

I’d stamp your letters. I’d throw out the tenor’s bills. I was mistress of the postage meter. We’d muse about the smell of death in the walls, the drop ins in the drop ceiling. Some nights I’d roller skate around the file cabinets, overtime under the exit lights. You never let the coffee get cold.

You caught a deer mouse in a file folder. I caught a field mouse in an envelope box and sat by the train tracks watching the hawks pick off the chipmunks. I wore a green dress so the forest swallowed everything but my eyes. I told my mother I’d never love you.

No One Wants To See Mourning Doves Fucking

March 23, 2024.Reading time 1 minute.

By Patrick Kindig

yet here we are, watching
one gray dove fleece & fluster
another. We watch the pecan tree

shiver, shaken alive by
fluttering wings, those grim birds
bumping uglies. For ugly they are

& ugly the thing they are
doing: no slow caresses, all
rough tumbling & the touching

of fronts. In between:
the sad, low call that tells us
it is mourning doves doing it,

even when they vanish
among the clumps of green pollen
& pecan leaves. There is something

awful about it, something
profane, the way, the day we received
the ashes of our dog, two weeks

dead, we cried on the couch
& I laid my head in my husband’s lap
& suddenly there was something

moving there, pressed against
my ear, & when I opened his fly
the dog was still there, still sitting

in his urn in the middle
of the coffee table, waiting
for a permanent place, watching all.

Leave rocks here

March 22, 2024.Reading time 1 minute.

By Georgina McKay Lodge

Featured Art by Glenna Parry

Annoyed at rocks
in shoes
in laundry
in little piles at dinner,
she has placed a box
in the hall.

-> Leave rocks here

Hold my rock,
her son says
when they are out,
and squats down
to select another.

Be my rock

The smooth
pebbles,
dove-colored,
worn to wisdom,
she will gladly
carry home, but

his favorite find is
the jagged
saw-toothed
ugly rock,

scraped knee
stung by a bee
broken-armed
heart-choked rock.

Of course
she will carry that one too;
to the end of the world
she would carry it.

A Peacock on Niner Hill

March 21, 2024.Reading time 54 minutes.

By Jennifer Schomburg Kanke

Featured Art by Debbie Norton

The union was strong, but not strong enough to make Detroit Steel keep a dying man on the payroll. John shouldn’t have known this, but he often overheard his parents talking in the room beneath him until late in the evening. He was a respectful boy and was never trying to eavesdrop, but in a house that’s small with heating vents that weren’t so much vents as just holes in the floor (or ceiling, depending on your perception), there wasn’t much of a way to avoid it. He knew the other men at the mill were keeping an eye on his father, Bernard. They were propping him up at his station and bringing him water and coffee throughout the day, whatever he needed to keep him going. “I don’t know why they do it, I don’t need no special treatment,” his father complained to his mother at least once a week. But he still hopped in the car of whoever showed up for him in the morning, usually Jay Mingus’s dad Jimmy who had a 1947 Studebaker with a long front hood and wild wrap-around back window. The fathers of most of John’s friends had older cars like that, bought when they first returned from the war and were fresh hires at the mill. Some bought new ones every few years, like Joseph’s dad who bought a 1957 Buick a few months back even though his old one, which Joseph’s mom had now, was only three years old. The Bondurant’s didn’t even have one car, let alone two. His father always told John it was because he liked to walk to work and couldn’t imagine missing out on the fresh New Boston air, which John assumed was a joke like when he told him his Purple Heart was from getting stabbed with a fork in the chow line. No one, not even John, who loved his town with a ferocity rivaled only by his love for Roy Rogers, would describe the air of their town as fresh.

HEN

March 20, 2024.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Steven Winn

Featured Art by Gary Cartwright

Somehow inside this wire-walled farrago,
Its strutty discombobulation half
Parade of plume and barrel-bottomed flank
And half a mad stampede for any door,

She stands apart, her neck up-stretched and target
Eyes aimed off somewhere, and stands her ground,
Each step a claim on just that spot, the way
Her spindled claw alights to clutch at sand

While high above, a royal in a bulbous
Ornamental coach, she barely takes
It in, crown swiveled to and from the broody
Babble of the mob, their rancid screams.

Something percolates, something like thought
That makes her beak beat down magnetic to
A speck of grain then up again to bring
The morsel down her rippling throat, a throat

That then becomes a spectacle, engorged
To twice its size, complete with guttering
Sound effects, one wing flexed out to show
She can and on another whim retracted,

Head turtled in and out and torqued so fast
She nearly does a full-on Linda Blair,
As if to advertise the fact that she’s
Detachable, a thing of separate parts.

A haze of downy silt hangs in the flock.
Tail raised and primly twitched, she ambles off,
A countess in her gown with time to spare
Before she hears the ax head split the air.

Pitching and Staving

March 19, 2024.Reading time 1 minute.

By Evan Gurney

from Folk Medical Lexicon of South Central Appalachia

The phrase that mountain folk
coined for this condition

provides its own lesson
in the semantics of vertigo,

its participial movement
staggering to and fro,

unmoored by prepositions,
the grammar gone dizzy too

as those twinned verbs spin
into gerundive nouns,

all meaning aptly erratic,
out of tune, each stave’s

horizontal bars failing to fix
in place its pitch, which drifts

off the scale like a ship
that has lost its horizon

among the many staves
in this timbered ocean

of hollow, ridge, and cove
that roll and reel and veer

until I look up, I sing out,
I pitch over, I’m staved in.

Grimace

March 18, 2024.Reading time 1 minute.

By Mickie Kennedy

I liked him because nobody knew what he was. We were alike, bulging in all the wrong places. We tottered around, as if our bodies weren’t meant for movement. As if our bodies weren’t quite ours.

When I was twelve, my mother dropped me at the mall for a meet-and-greet. Grimace was planted in front of a plastic date palm. I was the oldest kid there. Permed mothers kept sending me dubious looks. A group of boys pointed, then giggled.

When I finally reached the front, he was bigger than I’d imagined—a swollen spade, a hill-sized bruise. He pulled me close for a photo, and I kept myself against him. The mothers whispered, but I didn’t let go. I couldn’t. You gotta move on, kid, said the head inside the head. A soft voice. Too soft. Human.

College Days

March 17, 2024.Reading time 1 minute.

By Rob Cording

Featured Art by Stephen Rounthwaite

Outside, a few gray snowflakes fell,
a truck rumbled onto 290, and the cold
seeped through our windows.
Our landlord had rigged our thermostat
so we couldn’t turn up the heat.
But that day, the four of us nailed a bag of ice
to the wall over the sensor, and when
the heat kicked on, we let it pump
until we’d shed our sweatshirts and flannels.
Leaning back on our futon, we shared a joint,
invincible in our underwear and T-shirts, laughing
and laughing. Twenty years ago now,
before we knew loss and grief, when we sang along
to our DVD of The Last Waltz and didn’t notice
the steady drip of the ice melting.

Lore

March 16, 2024.Reading time 39 minutes.

By S Graham

Featured Art by Beth Klaus

Every night I tag a surface with the word LORE.

Last night: the wall of a mansion abandoned mid-construction.

The night before: the back garage of a boarded-up health spa.

Tonight: a section of the fence that marks the end of our skinny seaside town.

No one really comes down to this fence, no one except for surfers on their way to the beach and cyclists heading south. Beyond the fence are kilometers of forest before the next town. In front of it is where Lauren’s body washed up on the sand.

The fence was her training ground. Her minimalist tags run along it, as well as our father’s nickname for her in other styles: bubble throw ups, pichação pieces, the occasional wildstyle.

After adding my mimicry to the painted patchwork, I look at the precision of her lines and the sloppiness of mine. The contrast makes me petulant in the way I often was when we were kids and she was better at something, better at everything. But then my heart swells with pride and I have to get away from her symbols and signs.

In poetry school

March 15, 2024.Reading time 9 minutes.

By Leigh K. Sugar

my co-fellow leading the free veterans writing workshop—
a fiction writer—
had been to prison
for killing a guy.

It was accidental.
                    College,
                                        a party,
                                                            alcohol,
                                                                                a gun.

The dead guy’s parents
didn’t even want him in court
(him being my co-fellow).
It was all a terrible mistake.

He’s white, the fiction writer,
and was writing a book about a man who kills his brother
and goes to prison.

What I took away from the book,
which he showed me in draft form,
is not shocking. There’s guilt, then dread,
then guilt again, then, somehow, life

but never the same.
                    The veterans in the workshop never talked
about if, or who, or what
                    they’d killed
except a rogue navy guy who wouldn’t (couldn’t?) stop
                    reliving the glory days of the Gulf. Otherwise,
they didn’t tell
                    and we didn’t ask.

My co-fellow had been a college student.
It was an accident; young dudes, a party,
alcohol, a gun. He’s white. It was Maine.
The dead boy’s parents didn’t even want prison.

He got a year and taught guys inside how to write.
                    He told me it was frustrating, the guys
who were illiterate. They were all white
                    and couldn’t get high. After, he did manual labor—
construction?—for a few years
                    then came to New York.

He was very handsome, and later
we didn’t-but-almost kissed
after I’d come home from 2 months
in the psych ward.

He knew where I’d been
and told me I looked great,
which I knew,
but he had a girlfriend,
which I didn’t.

                    Psych patients,
wards, and prisons alike love puzzles—soft
                    harmless pieces dumped
on the floor, the table, guaranteed
                    to fit together, already
perfect, the answer already known
                    to exist—

What It Looks Like

March 14, 2024.Reading time 1 minute.

By Emily Wheeler

Featured Art by Glenna Parry

Returning from emptying
compost out back,
I’m stopped
by a praying mantis.
Don’t you look fabulous,

I hear my mother’s voice,
Dressed to kill and
to blend in, with just
a flash of emerald
on your lower wing.

I hear her say,
Your feelers, are they new,
or are you parting
them differently?
Also, great figure!

I see her swooning
over its eyes that pop
without any makeup,
and the way its face
comes to a point

at its delicate chin:
really quite special.
To me, the mantis
just stares, nods,
possibly politely.

My mother appreciates
many kinds of beauty
and the bug’s elegant
plus alluring look
but I know

its brown egg sac
is hard as cement to protect
the eggs from heat, cold,
even the occasional maternal
appetite for its young.

The Man in the Mirror

March 13, 2024.Reading time 44 minutes.

By Marissa Yuan

-After Chelsea Bieker

I see him when I look in the mirror, my father, the coach of my 5 a.m. 800-meter runs, who sacrificed to finance my education and once presented a twenty-five-slide PowerPoint on how to live my college life in the U.S. He carried a black-and-white photo of our family in his wallet. People say we look the same.

He was the first in his village to go to college after China’s Culture Revolution. He brought honor to and redeemed his once politically shamed family. By his mid-thirties, he already made tenure and was named vice president, the youngest in his university’s history. I remember him waking up in the middle of the night, drenched in sweat, punching the air and yelling, “You can’t get me!” My mother once gave me a peek into his childhood: being hung up-side-down to the ceiling with a rope tied to his ankles while my grandfather beat him until he had broken all three broom sticks. Wrinkles cover my father’s face now, his temples all gray, sharp shoulder bones gathering under his shirt. At my wedding, he hugged me long and tight, with tears of joy and pride, though I had walked down the aisle by myself and never asked him for the honor. I freeze-frame this minute. It was the moment I want to see him in and remember.

Impossible

March 12, 2024.Reading time 1 minute.

By Dion O’Reilly

Featured Art by Kelly Basillio

Maury Island Marine Park, Vashon Island, fall 2023

Five hundred feet
beneath us, waves
appear as ripples,

their drone, inexact,
yet cadent,

methodical

as the shush of a heart,
a great liquid pump,
that bulges and rakes

the blue-black beach.

Listen, we whisper, Listen.

The pulse reaches us,
and we can’t tell
if we’re flutes

or porous stones.

But I know, we both know,
I’ll leave,
and then, these present hours

will become impossible
to hold, like coal
in darkness,

a billion years, compressed,
but brilliant
when back to light.

The Lyric Moment Lasts

March 11, 2024.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Dion O’Reilly

Featured Art by Levi McLain

Canadian smoke vape-skunk
on public paths

a smokeless Rivian
driven by a man who didn’t want me

all the men and women who didn’t want me
and the one who does our favorite bed our over-washed sheets

I let them in

I let in the living I let in the dead

the expanding ranks
of the mad with tin cups and tuneless guitars

the falsely proud
with their flags and concealed carry

my assassin mother plumbers pilots project managers
ex-presidents thieves

I let in the fleshy I let in the wasted

yes I let in the one who loves me and the velvet night
lifts my bed takes me

like a clipper ship
takes fine-cut tea

the oaks and eucalyptus bow to me like a queen

they regain their kingdoms and the sins
of the eucalyptus are forgotten

monarchs guild their branches like magnificent cloth

the beetle-eaten oaks burst into green
the white clay broken in bogs and spray cans in landfills

lift like Jehovah’s Witnesses

even my assassin mother deathless god dies
and gives me reign

the necrophiliacs abandon their passions
the flag bearers and gunslingers are stunned

by the lies of Revelation

A.I. ceases its hallucinations
project managers leave their applications
totalitarians learn to follow

their breath

in a warm sea fish tremble leaderless
they move toward another world

Love Poem in The Unfortunate

March 10, 2024.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Danny Caine

There’s too much news
and not enough me.
I’m not sure if there’s
enough of you either.
It takes a million news
to buy a loaf of bread.
Wheelbarrows of news.
People line up for blocks
to withdraw their news
before it’s too late.
The run on news
has caused the industry
to consolidate further
and us too—there’s
really only two of us now.
As the plane lands
you slowly loosen
your grip on my
whitened fingers.
The attendant says
“I’d like to be the first
to welcome you to
Unprecedented Times.”
Somewhere a man
is buying a gun.
Somewhere a couple
is trying not to
think about it.
Somewhere a sign
says “Due to The
Unfortunate we are
deeply out of onions!”
I’d like to stop living
through history.
I’d love to know more
about how to love.
I have questions
for you. Four
questions. More.
You tell me to
pardon your dust.
Every day is demo day.
I’m sure there are
a million times you
could’ve given up
on me. But here you are.
Now help me with this
wheelbarrow, would ya?

Review: Sonnez Les Matines by J. C. Scharl

March 9, 2024.Reading time 8 minutes.

By Betsy K. Brown

The greatest murder mysteries are often hilarious. Perhaps this is because, as investigator Porfiry Petrovich says in Crime and Punishment, “Human nature is a mirror, sir, the clearest mirror!” Raskolnikov, and other famous murderers in many stories, are not that different from ourselves. How should we respond to this devastating fact? Laughter may be the answer.

Sonnez Les Matines by Jane Clark Scharl is many things—a verse play, a murder mystery, a philosophical dialogue—but it is also simply and deeply funny. A trio of famous former Parisians: François Rabelais, Jean Calvin, and Ignatius of Loyola, stumble upon a dead body during Mardi Gras, and spend the story arguing about who is guilty. In the play this is both an immediate question and a cosmic question, as the interlocutors explore everything from the weapon and evidence to the incarnation of Jesus and what happens when we die. Meanwhile, there is also ample banter, finger-pointing, and poop jokes.

Vitality in Poetry, a Review of Ponds by J. C. Scharl

March 8, 2024.Reading time 15 minutes.

By Jonathan Geltner

I came that they may have life and have it abundantly.

So says Jesus in the Gospel of John. It is a line that occurs to me often when I consider the influence of religious ideas—in this case, Christian—on a writer’s ability to engage with the fullness of life. That is a vague phrase, I realize: fullness of life. Perhaps it would be helpful to say what gets in the way of fullness of life.

There are two major obstacles, in my view. One is material: the virtual world we have constructed and inhabit through screens is by its nature a thing set apart from real life. The more time a writer spends immersed in that world, the less she is able to observe, reflect upon, and move bodily through the real world, the given world of nature and human society as it is experienced face-to-face. The second obstacle is mental: the temptation to delude ourselves, to live in a fantasy of who we are, pretending to believe and feel what we think we ought to believe and feel or want to believe and feel in order to secure membership in a particular tribe.

Review: Newly Not Eternal by George David Clark

March 7, 2024.Reading time 10 minutes.

By Michael Lavers

Newly Not Eternal, the second collection by George David Clark, is a book in which time has burned the dross away. The poems look small, but like Blake’s grain of sand each holds a world. The prologue poem, “Mosquito,” is a manifesto which, with its childlike music and theological contrariness, I think the author of “The Fly” would recognize:

                              God was only acting godly
                              when he strapped a dirty needle
                              to the fly
                              and taught it how to curtsy
                              on our knees and elbows

                              on our necks and earlobes
                              so politely that it hardly
                              stirs an eye.
                              God was hard but speaking softly
                              when He told us we should die.

It’s like Paradise Lost covered by Ariel, Shakespeare’s most musical character. Most of the poems have that spirit’s melodic drive, sitting somewhere between nursery-rhymes and spells.

Review: A Beautiful Persistence: Nancy Miller Gomez’s Inconsolable Objects

March 6, 2024.Reading time 20 minutes.

By Erin Redfern

In her essay “Voices from the air,” Adrienne Rich notes that a captivating poem is “an instrument for embodied experience.” Inconsolable Objects, Nancy Miller Gomez’s first full-length book, is chock-full of such instruments. The word “body” itself enters in the third line of the collection, and from that point serves as a primary interface between the poems’ various speakers and the vast territory of experience they are navigating.

Full-Throated Singing: A Review of Kari Gunter-Seymour’s Dirt Songs

March 5, 2024.Reading time 5 minutes.

By Bonnie Proudfoot

From the first line of the first poem of Kari Gunter-Seymour’s new poetry collection, Dirt Songs (Eastover Press 2024), we are presented with a poetic voice that sings with authority, perspective, and experience, also one that is grounded in place. “Where I’m from, girls learn / to conjure young . . .” and with that, readers are enticed to discover more about both the poet and the place she came of age in. In Dirt Songs, dedicated to “All the invisible girls,” Gunter-Seymour writes against invisibility, conjuring identity through personal history, story, naming, heightened use of detail, and through humor, grief, and pride. “Our grandmother. . . wielded a scythe and hoe / good as any man. . . drew us maps, where we came from.” These songs call attention to phrasing and language, to the rhythms of speech of Appalachian Southeastern Ohio, rich with imagery and music, a place where, “. . . [windshield] wipers slip-slap the beat / like two metal spoons against the thigh.” Speech patterns overflow into the making of poems. “I was a new mother,” Gunter-Seymour writes, “alone more than was fit.”

Insight and Echo: A Review of Kate Fox’s The Company Misery Loves

March 4, 2024.Reading time 5 minutes.

By Rose M. Smith

Within the first few lines of Kate Fox’s latest collection The Company Misery Loves (Sheila-Na-Gig 2024), we embark on a journey to consider the role of inevitability in shaping how we face or embrace life’s absolutes. In language that shimmers on the page, she becomes stage director, tour guide, host as we follow her lead over a marvelous succession of former landscapes. We are invited in turn to believe and to suspend our former belief, to hear the author’s voice and the voices this author has shared so insightfully that one wonders when each poem’s speaker visited her bedside, pulled back the veil, guided her hand over the page.

Poems from the poet’s thoughts of home invite us with visceral, concrete images into each moment. Such is the craft at work in this collection that bids us to see “that oil mixed with rain / in a hubcap is beautiful, which it is / because you own it,” and long years later to walk the land under great emotional weight and behold “as the entry shawls itself / in brilliant leaves, and the mountain beside me / pulls the sun’s deep brim down over its eyes” as though even the land feels the loss of things past.

Just when you think you know what sort of work will be encountered throughout, Fox introduces us to beautifully dimensional voices such as Mary Shelley, Josephine Peary (wife of the admiral), and Kathleen Scott (widow of the Antarctic explorer), whose voice becomes a masterful device to illuminate us regarding Scott’s expedition and those of George Mallory. This present Kathleen Scott handles with alacrity having been mistaken for the wife of Ernest Shackleton as well as how she might have sculpted Mallory had she not found “Everest / holding fast its own.” This author threads much sound insight and fact into these historical poems without ever drifting out of poetic voice—there again, as with us at the beginning, empowering Scott with agency to recount or rewrite history as she pleases. And it pleases.

With misery in the title, yes, there is loss in this book—loss not shared for loss’ sake but because its inclusion is essential. The losses are here, but the art and beauty of this work is not diminished by what is inevitable for us all. These poems stare into the face of that inevitable and seem to say “this, too can be beautiful.” To repeat Jane Ann Fuller’s words, “This poetry is flawless.” Here is where I must confess exceptional bias. Having begun reading The Company Misery Loves, I was pleased to find this collection includes some of my favorite works by Kate Fox. Finally, I get to share my excitement at how deftly she also wraps biblical icons in humor and contemporary sensibility. Poems from Fox’s book The Lazarus Method retell age-old stories with brilliance. In our varied experiences, there are poems remembered because they were assigned or were the subject of debate. There are poems we witness in live readings that echo the poet’s voice inside us for days. Then there are poems that are remembered because they refuse to be forgotten. The Company Misery Loves draws us into the unforgettable like “human branches reaching armless / toward their maker.”

Winter Online Exclusive

December 31, 2023.Reading time less than 1 minute.

The latest Winter Online Exclusive of New Ohio Review is now available. The cover art is “Diamond” by Reagan Settle.

This issue includes work from Cara Lynn Albert, Steph Del Rosso, Robert Long Foreman, Rosamund Healey, Caroline Koopford, Cyn Nooney, Daryl Ogden, J. Dominic Patacsil, Valli Jo Porter, Maya Afilalo, Mary Birnbaum, KT Ryan, Craig van Rooyen, Linda Bamber, Emily Blair, Joseph Capista, Wes Civilz, Joyce Schmid, Pichchenda Bao, and Michael Lavers.

We hope you enjoy our 2023 Winter Exclusive, which you can read below. This is an issue we hope will add some warmth to your winter reading.

-The Editors

Improvisation for Beginners

November 30, 2023.Reading time 1 minute.

By Joseph J. Capista

Featured Art by Reagan Settle

Peanuts work for earplugs.
Motor oil’s dandy warpaint.
Hammer yonder socket screw.
Let, for birdsong, boulevard
suffice, its springtime
putsch of blathered whoosh.
Try disorganized religion.
Whereas one yellow, freshly
sharpened pencil expedites
the trach, deep blue in place
of black seldom works.
Socks in place of sanitary
tissue is a trick I learned
in proximity to a mosh pit.
For accolade try: While
the jury commends your
recent submission to our
sculpture exposition,
concerns persist regarding
the capacity of guano,
liverwurst, and gypsum
to withstand the realities
of summertime Chicago.
My mother pierced her ears
with a sharp object and ice,
that trick from way back in
the Pleistocene Epoch when
our ancestors substituted bona
fide desire for Neanderthals
which must have been a hoot.
For Perikles, try sprinkles.
For mope, try poem.
For readjust, just read.
For that hornet nest you’ve
tried all summer to locate
and found now in, yikes,
your front maple whose
leaves turned a very specific
color and then with little
fanfare fell immediately
to the gutter try your heart.
For love, try anything.

The Elko Butter Chase

November 29, 2023.Reading time 37 minutes.

By J. Dominic Patacsil

Lakey Sturgis took a palmful of margarine from the brown plastic tub between her feet and ran it over the cheekbones of her grandson’s face. She smeared the pale-yellow spread across the boy’s sloped forehead, deep into the wrinkles of his ears, working her way down the turkey skin of his throat to his bare chest, then beyond.

Just a little more, she said to Peep, who batted long, effeminate eyelashes back at her. Nuggets of the margarine stuck to them, and for a second, Lakey was reminded of nights long past when she lived in Greenpoint and Hans was still living. She looked into her grandson’s globby lashes and saw her twenty-year-old self going to bed without caring to wipe away the makeup she spent so long painting on for nights of swing dancing and manhattans at Truffani’s. That was before Hans’ job brought them to the desert, before their daughter was born. Now Lakey was sixty-six and dying, far from any place she called home.

Slow Fruit

November 28, 2023.Reading time 45 minutes.

By Robert Long Foreman

Featured Art by Reagan Settle

I sat across the desk from the hospital administrator.

On the desk, reflected in her glasses, I could see a photo of her husband and kids.

Having the photo there must have kept her from feeling lonely at work. Or it fortified her in trying moments. Or both of those things.

Pens were on the desk, and a phone with many extensions.

The hospital administrator must have been in her fifties. She wore her hair short, but we’re not talking Terry Gross short. More like Meg Ryan in the nineties—only the administrator didn’t look like Meg Ryan. She didn’t look like anyone. She was wholly her own person, and I respected that.

Note on Human Who Has Been Insulted

November 27, 2023.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Wes Civilz

Human under observation is suffering from an “insult”—
a verbal exchange with another human
that has inserted a nugget of dark information
firmly into one of the sub-surface personality cores.

Interestingly, the insult has, on the quantum level, a shape
related fractally to the central pieces used in the game
called “darts.” Pointy and missile-shaped. Capable
of lodging deeply, if aimed with skill.

Upon pointy end of insult it should be noted
there are “barbs,” similar to those on hooks
used for fishing (these enable ease
of entry and difficulty of removal).

After several observations, I note that
the most effective insults are those that are true.
False claims are much more easily processed
by the ego’s immune system, and dumped from memory.

Specifically, this human was told
he is “dumb.”
Note that this insult referred to
his lack of intelligence

rather than its older meaning-layer
of non-speaking (although it could be interesting
to at some point analyze the connection,
if any, between stupidity and muteness).

This human suffers internally
because he was assigned the word dumb
and the word matched lock-and-key
with the fact that he is indeed dumb.

Upon observing him again
some days later, he has failed to discover
the hidden intelligence boost
contained within the quantum dart of the insult.

I will spend no more time
observing this specimen;
he is sad,
entropic.

Flying Objects

November 25, 2023.Reading time 28 minutes.

By Daryl Ogden

My mother and I were driving home at dusk on a two-lane country highway following one of our visits to the fire station where her newish boyfriend was posted. It was Memorial Day, a couple of months ahead of my eleventh birthday. A pair of vehicles were bearing down on us, their headlights filling up the rear and side view mirrors of our Toyota. The trailing drivers had already twice veered over the center line and gunned their engines, with ambitions of sling-shotting past. My mother responded by pressing hard on the accelerator, threatening a head on collision from traffic traveling in the opposite lane. Even though an 18-wheeler was now headed our direction a few hundred yards in the distance, both trailing vehicles tried again to pass. My mother floored it, forcing the drivers back into our lane or risk being entombed within thousand-pound accordions.

“They’ll have to wait until I’m ready for them to drive on by, Billy.”

On the road, my mother didn’t take any crap.

Stick Season

November 24, 2023.Reading time 17 minutes.

By Rosamund Healey

Featured Art by Reagan Settle

Ruth Ann doesn’t drive that way anymore. She doesn’t have a car but if she did, she wouldn’t. She has no reason to go to that side of the hill anyway. All that’s left of the Alstead farm is a small sliver of land on the dark side of the hill, just big enough for Ruth Ann’s double-wide trailer. Her daddy’s old place—the parts bought by the flatlanders—sits on the sun side of the hill, empty aside from ski season or leaf-peeping. Ruth Ann heard they razed the old farmhouse and put up a new lodge, all logs, meant to look old, yet nothing like what folks used to build. She heard someone else taps their sap lines and runs their sugar house too, but they still put their name on the syrup. She would not drive to that side of the hill for a thousand dollars. Well. Hundred.

“Time, lovey.” Haley doesn’t want to go to school. She pouts, sticky fingers on the cheap screen, knowing she can test Ruth Ann. Ruth Ann reaches out and tries to paw it off the girl, her arms jiggling as she stretches, yellowed nails like sloth claws. Haley jumps up quick and they play their game, the two of them moving in the trailer like slow-motion ninjas, knowing every corner by heart, how to avoid every precarious pile of stuff or mound of dirty laundry. Ruth Ann soon stops to catch her breath. She steadies herself, hand on her knee, palm on her heart, neither body part built for such a heavy body or small space. Haley relents quick, eyebrows knitting as she tosses the screen and roots around for a bottle of stale water. Ruth Ann smiles when she takes a sip even though it hurts. “Come now. Bus will be here.”

Should You Choose To Accept It

November 23, 2023.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Emily Blair

I couldn’t wait to leave town when I was young.
After that, I’m not sure I have much of a story.
It’s true I met someone. We had a child together.
In between I walked across a frozen lake.
I drove over a frozen mountain.
I ran up a hill to find a pay phone.
I closed down the city for extended action scenes
to the tune of 290 million dollars. No—
I’m thinking of the latest Mission Impossible movie
with Tom Cruise. I get confused.
I should be writing domestic poetry,
but I don’t want to. What more do you need to know?
Our family of three live in a third floor apartment.
Sometimes we also meet up outside. I guess leaving town
is still the most exciting thing I’ve done. The other day
I asked another mother on the playground how to clean
bathroom grout. I said Stephanie, what’s your secret?
Then we ripped off our latex masks,
revealing our true identities. No—
that mask thing happened in the first Mission Impossible movie,
the one I saw with my friend Michelle. I leaned over
to say something snarky, but she was fast asleep.
It must have been the whirring of the helicopter blades.
There’s nothing duller than an overblown action sequence.
The secret to having an exciting life is the people you meet.
The secret to battling a helicopter in a tunnel
is explosive chewing gum. The secret to cleaning grout
is a magic eraser from Mr. Clean.

Down in the Valley

November 22, 2023.Reading time 37 minutes.

By Mary Birnbaum

The Featured Art is “Sea Library” by Greta Delapp

I was supposed to go on vacation to a National Park, but I don’t vacation. I mean, I did go, but I came very close to not seeing anything at all, because here is how I am accustomed to seeing: There are windows in my home office, but my desk does not face them, so light enters from the side. I am obliquely aware of the day. Sometimes I twist my body to see if the sun has risen, whether fog covers or wind stirs the big green shrub outside. In this small room in my house, I face three computer monitors and their glowing non-sun. I do a real-time job. Creation and consumption of the product are simultaneous; I make live captions for people to read on the Internet, like a stenographer does in court. I do it for seminars and webinars and legal proceedings, in Zoom or Teams or Chime or the platform du jour. My job is to listen and talk at once. What I do is called Voicewriting. It is a job of ears and mouth, an occupation more physical than cerebral, though I’m very stuck at a desk. I receive an audio feed from a remote source and say aloud what I hear as I hear it. Voice recognition software instantly converts my speech to text, which appears in a unique URL, or onscreen in a meeting platform. Someone I don’t know, someone far away or near, reads it as it unfurls. The job is sweaty and live. I’ve parroted defense contractors, nuclear regulators, pastors and poets. It’s echo, not interpretation.

There is no time to fall behind. A dropped word can be fatal to sentence meaning, a dropped sentence is dereliction. Tethered to my laptop by a web of cords, in my black microphone-headset, I resemble an air traffic controller. When a meeting has weak audio, I jack the volume up, and with my palms I press the headphones to my skull, so I am filled with sound and its vibration, then quickly I move my lips and tongue. If I get a very speedy talker, I close my eyes to eliminate all extraneous stimuli. The trick of the job is to tune out your own noise, to be a channel of syllables divorced from sense.

Sweater Weather

November 21, 2023.Reading time 9 minutes.

By Cara Lynn Albert

The Featured Art is “The Illusion of Memory” by Greta Delapp

You drive to Cassadaga not because you really believe in psychics and spiritualists, but because you’re thirty-eight and feel like you’re running out of options. Because it’s January fourth and you just spent another holiday season alone while your family asks about the absent husband.

The was-never-present in-the-first-place husband. The would-rather-fuck-the-eighteen-year-old-dog-walker husband.

He’s been gone for two years, and good riddance. You pull a cashmere cardigan over your shoulders, a Christmas present from your aunt bought half-off at JCPenney, because it’s one of the few days out of the year where Central Florida dips below sixty degrees. Angels and bloated polar bears dance over crabgrass-infested lawns. Plastic icicles hang from gutters, though it hasn’t fallen under freezing here in three decades.

Masking

November 20, 2023.Reading time 42 minutes.

By KT Ryan

The Featured Art is “Dead or Dreaming?” by Greta Delapp

Month 1: June

“Promise me you’re not gonna die,” my eight-year-old Ellie said.

It was a simple request during her bedtime tuck-in. All she needed was a one sentence guarantee that the operation to remove my brain tumor would go well. I couldn’t do it. What if something went wrong—a spinal fluid leak, paralysis, even death? Ellie’s arms formed a vice-grip around my body. I kneaded Ellie’s pillow, worried that she’d never be able to trust an adult again if I promised success and then something bad happened.

With twelve hours to go before I went under the knife, I resorted to chanting the same thing I’d been saying since my diagnosis one month earlier: that my surgeon, Dr. T. was “the best of the best.” It had worked well up until now.

Horses in a Field

November 19, 2023.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Emily Blair

I am reading my book manuscript to my mother
in her backyard. She tells me that was probably a catbird
I saw earlier. She tells me bleach is the real way
to get stains out of grout. The narrative urge is a strong one,
she says. She had an invisible horse, but never said
she wanted to be one. On that last point, we disagree.
Perhaps it was only a feeling I had
when we were watching horses in a field. That blurring of beings.
Like the colors in a Vuillard painting. A dress turning into
a table or an orchard. My college painting teacher said edges
are important, but never explained how best to create them.
I wanted us to be old ladies together, I say to my mother,
meaning me and her. Now we know it isn’t going to happen.
But she says she was dreading it—she didn’t want to be here
to see me grow old. We decide death comes too soon,
in the second section of my manuscript—
And speaking of death, how can the deck chair cushions
still have a cat hair side, I ask her,
now that the cats have been dead for years.
Because we’re disgusting old people, she replies
with a laugh, meaning herself and my stepfather.
Though the truth is I’m the sloppy one. This redbud tree
is a new redbud tree and I didn’t even notice.
I didn’t notice the new flowers she potted either, lined up
with their brilliant blossoms, waiting
to be put on the front porch. It’s all one to me:
the backyard, the flowers, my mother, me.
How can any of it exist without the rest?
We agree that I’ve written too many poems,
and they don’t go together.

Acting Out

November 18, 2023.Reading time 33 minutes.

By Caroline Koopford

A Friday afternoon, late March of 1990, suburban New Jersey. A second-floor apartment in a series of two-story brick buildings. In the living room there is a slumped brown couch, a scarred coffee table, and a television with dial controls and bunny-ear antenna that stick out garishly from a lop-sided wicker shelving unit strewn with artificial flowers. Beside the shelves is an unshaded window. Outside, the branches of a close maple tree bud neon green. It is almost evening. The light is warm, crepuscular.

Two girls laze on either end of the couch, sleek as seals on a dock, stretched out as far as they can be without touching one another. The television blazes. Cassie is ten. Franny is eight and has been suspended from school. Not for the first time.