Costumes

February 19, 2023.Reading time 56 minutes.

By Carlee Jensen

Featured Art: Paralyzed by Abby Pennington

It was Halloween, and all the ladies from the front office had dressed as Wonder Woman. I spotted them as I crossed the parking lot: in matching red go-go boots and lamé headbands, tight Lycra dresses that framed their tits in gold. There was something dazzling about the sight of them, standing shoulder-to-shoulder at the head of the carpool line, tiny skirts ruffling in the October breeze.

“It’s quite a spectacle,” said Claudia Palmer, surveying the scene while she waited for me to swipe my key card at the front door. Claudia was too dignified for costumes, but like all teachers of a certain generation, she owned a vast collection of appliqué vests and novelty jewelry, which she trotted out for special occasions to the delight of her fourth-graders. As she waddled through the door, burdened by her many tote bags, I admired the twin kernels of candy corn hanging from her ears and the gap-toothed jack-o’-lantern brooch perched at the apex of her ample chest.

“I’m glad they’re confident,” she went on. “Even Mrs. Ward, at her age. But is this really the example we want to set for our young women? Your outfit seems much more appropriate, Valerie.”

I was a cat. I had been a cat every Halloween of my teaching career, with the same fuzzy ears from the grocery store seasonal aisle and the same greasy whiskers drawn in eyeliner on my cheeks. A hole had opened in the armpit of my overextended black T-shirt, revealing stipules of untended hair whenever I raised my arm. I liked Claudia—she was the kind of teacher I could imagine myself becoming in a few decades, an old-school bitch who inspired devotion in the students she tortured with handwriting practice and multiplication quizzes—but it seemed awfully rich to suggest that I was any kind of example.

Still, she wasn’t the kind of person you contradict. “It is a bit on the nose,” I admitted, gesturing through the window at Mrs. Ward. She was hamming it up, striking Lynda Carter poses for the approaching cars. “Like, I’m a teacher! What’s your superpower?”

The Triple Goddess with a Bird’s Head, on My Dad’s Side

February 19, 2023.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Sue D. Burton

“. . . she circled the battlefield as a conspiracy of ravens to carry away the dead”
—Gregory Wright, Mythopedia.com

There were trainloads of us, my daddy said, heading
to “Hillbilly Heaven”—up to Akron in the 30s and the 40s—
lured by Tire & Rubber, but we were open-shop snakes (cheap)
to anybody who already worked the factories up there, though
of course once we got active in the union, we got dissed
for that, oh, it goes on and on—homesick—
the rubber bust—.

It’s what now we call the Great Appalachian Migration—

but by the time all that went down, we pretty much forgot
the Morrígan, that ancient Celtic goddess of battles and doom
who crossed the Atlantic with us and spent the next how-many-years
dirt farming in West Virginia. And the Morrígan, too, got
pretty much tamed down, though sometimes she just shows up,
on your doorstep, like the baby my friend gave up,
who thirty years later tracked her down.
And didn’t have a pretty story.

But why should the Morrígan—a feisty old gal
with the head of a raven—have a pretty story? My dad said
the Scotch-Irish (we Celts) had a fightin’ reputation.
Though now they say if you eat vegan, your microbes or
whatever are in sync and you pass for middle class.

I never went to war.
But I would like a bird’s head.
I’d like to think I had some magical mythical legacy, other than
Wonder Bread and bad-years Goodyear Tire. Though to what end?
I told my nice bourgie dentist once I wanted a gold front tooth.
I don’t think that’s a good idea, Sue, he said.

The Numbers

February 18, 2023.Reading time 2 minutes.

By David Dodd Lee

I counted eight cygnets (and two adult swans) on the river in May but then counted four
cygnets in late June and today the four have turned into three. My next-door neighbors

went from two to no persons then back to two after the deceased
couple who’d lived there’s daughter and husband moved in, then up to five

after the woman’s sister, her sister’s boyfriend, and their child
joined them. A note written on lined notebook paper that I assumed

(on what basis?) was written by the woman’s sister blew into
my yard. It said I want out of this life and I love you Jesus I do

but I don’t care anymore I’m sorry but for now they’re still five.
My house is one and sometimes two, especially on weekends, add

one cat and it goes up to three. I grew up in a house of six and then
there were five and then six again for a while and then five. My

sisters ended up in houses of six, five, and four eventually, I in houses
of two, four for about eight years, two again, now usually one . . .

The eight, four, then three cygnets take all summer to become close to
indistinguishable from their parents and then by spring each relocates

to a different pond river lake where they become two, then four, five, six, seven, etc.,
something you can count until counting no longer seems to matter anymore.

8 Ball at Sportsmen’s Bar & Grill

February 17, 2023.Reading time 2 minutes.

By John Bargowski

Featured Art: Time Lime Rhyme by Mary Popa

Road-trip thirsty, barely out of our teens
and passing through on our way home

from a cross-state friend’s, we took
every game from the pair of locals

we faced at this circus-lit hillbilly joint
in the knobby hills off I-80,

and maybe it was the booze queued up
for us at the bar as payoffs,

or maybe the skinny brunette in a brushed
Lady Stetson and skintight Wranglers

helping us drop coin in the slot of the juke
for triple plays between wins,

but something lit their fuses, so after JC ran the
last six striped balls of a double

or nothing, then sank the 8 in a corner
pocket with a bank shot, the English

on the cue ball spinning it so near the lip
a hip bump could’ve knocked it in,

that’s when the first pool stick shattered
across the table, skittered past the two-steppers

on the parquet then trip-switched the stools
to spin round, ejecting every good-timer

from their seats at the bar onto the floor
as we did the math, cut past the banjo clock

and out the swinging double to the Olds,
wheel-rutted the gravel and tore asphalt

back to the interstate, slapped in Waylon
and blasted some tonk out of the box.

In the Red Vinyl Booth of the Horseshoe Cafe

February 16, 2023.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Carol Tiebout

We traded Harvey Wallbangers, Velvet Hammers, and straight-up tequila,
kicked Nixon and Agnew around and came up with a board game
about Camp David that would use lacquered walnut shells and peas as markers.

When the acid slid in, clipping all the edges in clear light, we fell out
into the late-night street now stuffed with one hundred thousand
points of cool fog that wrapped the curbs and thinned under the lamps

into a series of three-foot worlds. A drunk appeared below us, limbs curled up
waving like a crab that had been tossed onto its back from its rocking bed to hard
granite while still holding the comfort of the sea. He looked up at me

with baby-kissed blue eyes and asked, “Are you an angel?” I thought for a moment
maybe I was, maybe in the realm of infinite possibilities, it could be there on certain
Tuesdays, my name in the index of Alan Watts’ book under A.

Fifty years later the sky opens up, raindrops the size of cats singing
the hood of my car as it curves past the turnoff to town
and in a loud whooosh, deafening as a splashdown, I no longer

understand why I would hold back any longer from
whatever walks into this minute
from the deep seams of the world.

The Happening

February 15, 2023.Reading time 1 minute.

By Josh Luckenbach

Featured Art: Birds of Freedom by Kourosh Nejad

Things went on right up until the moment of it—
the hummingbirds whirred at the trumpet honeysuckle,
and the aphids scaled the ivy on the brick wall
facing out toward the new construction across the road
and the mountains and highways beyond
where the people in cars traveled distances near or far
with their usual haste or leisure to sit in offices
or to attend the weddings and the births
which, it seemed, were more and merrier than ever before;

and afterward, the strangest part was that things
went on then too—the packages arrived on time,
the lights turned on and off at the flipping of the switch,
the goldfinches returned in late morning to flit
among the zinnias near the deer netting, and the clouds
drifted as they had the day before in the same ageless sky
that often feels too vast for us to have a place in it,
and yet, for the time being, we do, as now I occupy
this patch of grass and tell my hand to move and it does.

Aubade

February 14, 2023.Reading time 1 minute.

By Josh Luckenbach

Featured Art: i.dissociation. paranoia. by Ahneka Campbell

Up all night shuffling from chair
to bed to couch to floor

and only the flustered trilling
of the soul at its own failing,

decades funneling to this:
narrow opening, fissure

in my hope’s remaining rot
which I had thought

to step through
would mean to surrender to

the dull world (and it would,
though not in the way that I’d feared)—

tunnel-visioned and mourning
the loss of meaning,

up all night and no god; I lost
years like this, hope long since gale-tossed.

Meanwhile whatever it was that was
going to happen never did. Now, finally this—

hot coffee on the front stairs
at daybreak, windswept hair—

this auroral calling forth from night’s
void as mundane as it gets.

That’s it. It’s a deal.
I’m clearing my schedule.

Their Every Yellow Leaf

February 13, 2023.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Sarah Sarai

Jacinth looks at the pig and
asks what she did in another lifetime
to be so beautiful.
Maybe not everyone would see it
but she’s perfect.
I am not everyone. I agree.
Alice is perfect,
a hippopotamus made compact.
I stroke her dark hide and feed her
fruit cup from breakfast.
Cauliflower and a toasted bagel.
Plum jam.
With the pig, Jacinth and
I break bread.
Jacob, who is new to this poem,
buries his cigarette in a late-fall lawn
to take a call from Quebec.
In bright sunlight Alice considers
eternally recycling life. Is my guess.
Jacinth has no interest in me or Jacob
and praises only the pig, who is complete.
Is her guess. The heart gets lonely
some days. Is Jacob’s guess.
Feeding Alice renders longing and irritation
irrelevant, without obliterating either.
Aspens snap their every yellow leaf.
The trees expected we’d be gone by now.
Their every yellow leaves don’t guess.

Atardecer rosa by Rubi Villa

February 12, 2023.Reading time less than 1 minute.

The End of the Story

February 12, 2023.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Damen O’Brien

Featured Art: Atardecer rosa by Rubi Villa

I climbed down into Wonderland following the paths of my memory.
Old playing cards ruffled like leaves, but his burrow was empty. It was
a shivering day, a pale sun peeking briefly into his cold warren. He was
long gone. Soft crumble of soil, colorless straw. He had vanished,
popping the buttons of his waistcoat on the far paddock’s fence.
All those years ago and we’d lost touch. One rushed note in 20 years,
apologies for not visiting, complaints of lateness, and then nothing.
No phone number, no address. He has joined the ranks of the Missing,
shutting the last yellow doors of Wonderland, boarding the windows,
battening down the root cellars, scrambling across the checkerboards
of desperation. He’s a gray exposure photograph on a billboard
of the lost. He’s a file note numbered amongst the renditioned, the
compromised and betrayed, standing in a hopeless queue somewhere,
waiting for his portion of grass. We give the past away in exchange
for the future. We foreclose the titles on our fairy tales for a handful
of beans, until they’ve all gone, hitching out in the huddled back of
rusty trucks, bussed in to the Big Smoke for a carrot or two, a cardboard
sign seeking work, selling our heirlooms for a passport, lying unmarked
and misremembered in a thorny field. It’s been such a long time. I was
a little girl with mud on the hem of my petticoat, but I always knew
the world would one day come to Wonderland. He has gone on the last
flight from the embassy’s roof, hiding his face from the government’s
algorithms, sleeping in subways. I barely remember what he looked like.
A twitchy nose, a neat tail, a pocket watch. If I were asked to identify him,
I would say, he was a White Rabbit. He was always having to leave.

Patience as a Crocodile

February 11, 2023.Reading time 1 minute.

By Damen O’Brien

Seven hours under
bubbles to breakfast,
practicing his terminus
while they slap water
with the fowl’s carcass rag
and tempt him to spring-
loaded striking at 1 p.m.,
to the matador’s applause
each hot weekday and
twice on Saturday, but
he must only win once,
tangent to his target,
a holy investiture,
sacred digestion, and
every zookeeper has
one absent moment,
so he’ll wait forever
like the best missionaries,
for the one chance of faith
to find its grim purchase,
when in the coughing dark,
a child’s fever breaks
and prayer can be praised,
so one heedless heel
too close to the water,
then matter of fact,
not with any animus,
not out of revenge,
a final punctuation
for the slow god
of limitless perseverance,
cold-scaled leviathan,
to take and roll and roll
until the silent ripple of
dismay which is
a crocodile’s patience.

Wolf

February 11, 2023.Reading time 37 minutes.

By Julia Strayer
Selected as the winner of the 2022 New Ohio Review Fiction Contest by Madeline ffitch

Featured Art: Monte Constantino, Night by Alex Spragens

I lost her the night of the squalls, when wind raged hard enough to rip trees from the ground—my husband helping neighbors with a collapsed roof, and me with blood that wouldn’t stop and wouldn’t stop. I carried her for four months. I had imagined her face.

I walked the dark house alone, not wanting to sit, hearing crying that wasn’t mine while the moon trailed after me. I searched out the front window for my husband’s headlights because it wouldn’t feel real until I could tell him, but my breath fogged the glass, and I couldn’t see. Finally, I slept because I was too tired to do anything else.

Empty and quiet. My body. The house. Except for the walls, which were run through with mice and scratching.

They say children choose their parents. What does that say of me? What does that say?

In the wild, a wolf mother will carry a dead pup around in her mouth, showing the body to the rest of the pack, before she buries it.

Oncology

February 10, 2023.Reading time 1 minute.

By Corinne Wohlford Mason

It was winter solstice. As day faded,
we drove to the appointment
through our city and over the river,
a circuitous route, the golden light
ennobling the derelict brick, the industry
of the river, the winter hawks perching
on the floodplain. The news was
not that bad, but still, bad enough.
We had options. We drove home
toward one bright star against the pink
spill of sunset. Look at this light,
we kept saying. Here is a neighborhood
we have never seen before. The sky shifted
sapphire to black. We floated
premises; they floated away. We would
choose later, let the longest night
take its time. We would do this right.

Leaving

February 8, 2023.Reading time 4 minutes.

By Kevin Boyle

As retirement began in May, I placed my little reminders
around the house, “Every third thought shall be my grave,”
and for the first week I was dutiful, losing track of

my lists of groceries or my dog’s empty bowl, thinking
of my grave easily a third of the time, keeping a running tab
of each idea on my phone, sometimes unsure of when

a thought might end and another begin, was the Carolina
wren’s call only one thought, and the white-throated sparrow’s another,
if so, then as I dug my garden with my rototiller

that hurt my bones, I would certainly consider my grave
just then, the rectangle clearly a visual reminder and the soil,
only the treated lumber borders threw me off, so I thought of the pecans

so late to arrive in leaf, would they produce this year
those beautiful kernels, and then by early June I bumped it up
to every fifth thought, which allowed me to prepare to collect

on my investments, thinking it through without giving way
to tears, thinking of the garlic bulbs I planted, the scapes—
those green leaves—I ate in a frittata with salmon, line-caught,

very pure, innocent, and by the time the zinnias arrived
in July, the shortest in the front, the largest in the back
like a choral group arranged by range, I said, Damn it,

I shan’t be buried at all, I’ll amend my dying will to request
a cremation “ceremony,” and I went around the house
like in mid-January taking down every Christmas detail

including the manger with the unmoving donkey and lamb
who I might try to outstare, but now I searched for my grave
mnemonics, my construction paper cutouts, my calligraphy

that was poor penmanship, my silly arithmetic reminders
of death, and I could go eight, on a weekend, maybe ten thoughts
without a single visual of my body gone, my mind that knew

a thing or two just emptied like a bin or the compost jar
that I sometimes just toss right into the ground, not caring about
time, until the zinnias called it quits in early November,

the grass stopped growing and gave some color away to charity,
and the birds, the birds felt something coming and shipped out
sometimes in great flocks of chattering that were frightening,

or sometimes, just a single bird that flew south, though
I knew and called out to it, Actually, you’re heading north,
I yelled at it, and still it sailed on, maybe a breeze was showing it

the quickest way to leave, or just the least painful,
until its speck must have entered a cloud.

Rabbit

February 7, 2023.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Kevin Boyle

I missed it on holiday by a mile
or so, collapsing at hilly
Sacré-Coeur—calling out,

My hips, my knees,
my wife answering,
My hibiscus, my hydrangea,

darling, though I wish
I had marched farther on the Parisian butte
like a Communard, braving

it to see the song-and-dance bar beautifully
named Lapin Agile, the agile
or nimble rabbit who would enjoy

the cruel, rugged landscape,
and while there, I’d hoist a tankard
to toast the artist Utrillo

who painted the bar a hundred times,
a thousand, always from the outside,
perhaps because he loved drink too much

and inside were the drams and drafts
and cups and absinthe, and outside
there was weather and next door

a cemetery where he would later lie.
Perhaps it’s best for me to see the bar
framed, hanging on a wall, and not to toast,

from inside, the melancholy Utrillo—
why toast an alcoholic?—
but to focus on his focus, the repetition

that always changes
somewhat, an idée fixe that lets you see
the seasons that are colors and leaves

or no leaves at all. I don’t need to travel
since I can see what there is to see
(life!) here in my sleepy and flat zero-ass town.

Job Interview: Where do you see yourself in five years?

February 6, 2023.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Carrie Shipers

If I said “Dead” you’d want me to describe
the cause and circumstances, promise
my demise is unrelated to my work,
which I don’t know for sure. Most days

I’m awake to my impending doom,
but the details remain dim. “In your seat”
would sound arrogant and also isn’t true.
I much prefer a cubicle to losing

my weekends or leading folks like me.
I may be surrounded by robots, but I bet
they’ll need a human standing by in case
they walk into a corner and get stuck, request

a reboot to erase having learned their tasks
are stupid and endless. Given you’re
a decade my senior—or else really
fatigued—“Retired” might offend

by rubbing in you’re nowhere close.
Too much focus on the future strikes me
as futile. Once the apocalypse begins,
we’ll probably all do things we can’t

imagine now. If I asked you the same,
I wonder if you’d have an answer prepared,
be flattered someone cared, or if you’d
be upset by goals you haven’t met.

Experience suggests I’ll be performing
this same show for a new audience,
either because the company’s at risk
of shutting down, or because I’m so frustrated

I can’t bear to stay. I’m tempted to say
“Standing on the roof,” then allow
an awkward pause before explaining
there’s also a DJ and champagne

to help us celebrate my latest great idea,
which I won’t reveal until after I’m hired.
I wish this question had come sooner
on your list. I don’t want the words

I leave you with to ruin our rapport,
but the longer we sit here the more
my vision narrows to the door,
the relief I’ll feel when I walk out of it.

untitled by JC Talbott

February 5, 2023.Reading time less than 1 minute.

The Hiring Committee Makes Its First and Final Offer

February 5, 2023.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Carrie Shipers

Featured Art: untitled by JC Talbott

We don’t negotiate salary because we’re already certain
what you’re worth. It may be less than you’d hoped,
but it’s enough to live on if you’re practical. We don’t
negotiate benefits because we think you’re lucky

to get any. The single therapist is prone to naps and lousy
metaphors, but you’re so sad that you’ll keep going back.
We don’t negotiate duties because the job ad was crafted
to include everything that we don’t want to do, and then

revised again when we got sued. Belonging to a group
always requires sacrifices: someone has to do the dirty work
for which no credit is received, take on difficult tasks
where failure means you’ll probably get fired, and it’s not

fair for you to skip your turn. We don’t negotiate
vacation time because we’re angry it exists. You’re also
not allowed to work from home unless you’re quarantined—
we tried it once and were so drunk by noon we answered

our email with kitten pictures. We don’t negotiate
office space because you’ll be assigned a cubicle,
bottle of bleach to combat creeping mold. If you choose
to decorate, make sure all items fit into a single banker’s box,

which allows for ease of exit if you suddenly get fired.
And should you have requests we haven’t covered,
the answer’s No to those as well. We know winning
a small concession would increase your confidence,

make you feel truly wanted. But honestly you weren’t
our best or favorite candidate. You were the one
we settled for because you seemed most likely to say yes,
and the fact that you’re still listening suggests

we were correct. Regardless of your reasons for taking
this job—debt, despair, misguided optimism—
we think you’ll fit in fine as long as you remember:
We don’t negotiate because there is no need.

Questions for the Tech Founder

February 4, 2023.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Carrie Shipers

If I said solutionism was the greatest challenge
facing us today, how many whiteboards
might you fill before the irony hit home?
Was your attempt to privatize the Post Office

short-lived because it was too hard to disrupt
real objects, or because Jeff Bezos told you
to back off? Are you more embarrassed by
the bubbling sinkhole stinking up your campus

quad, the fence that fails to block its view,
or the studies stating that the Valley’s so-called
“pipeline problem” is merely a myth you’ve built
around a rigged system? Given the resulting

poor publicity, do you regret deciding to:
use live endangered animals to illustrate ideas,
spend millions on a bonding trip at which
most of your staff contracted STIs and salmonella,

compete pants-less at the all-hands sack race?
Relatedly, what percent of the lawsuits
you’ve had to settle might’ve been avoided
by investing in HR before a second helicopter?

Are you aware the word “founder” also means
to sink or fail utterly? If yes, do you ever dream
you’re drowning and wake up afraid,
and does this perhaps explain your interests

in sea-steading and extreme longevity?
If I suggested several of your famous Principles,
e.g., Be Boldly New, seem cribbed from
other companies, would your benign

but somewhat flat affect pivot toward rage
so fast I’d feel dizzy? Did you agree
to this meeting in the hope that seeming
open, honest, and sincere would counteract

your current image as a greedy genius
hooking users on their own abuse? Or because
a public busy judging your ethics, humor
and haircut is less likely to notice or object

to your real work, which is not the thing
you’ve gotten famous for? Assuming
the latter, are you sorrier I’ve caught on
or flattered by the depths of my alarm?

Hair of the Dog

February 2, 2023.Reading time 43 minutes.

By James Sullivan

Featured Art: Prositabhartruka Nayika by Kripa Radhakrishnan

The kids call him Smash Dad when it happens. “Smash Dad, Smash Dad!” chant six-year-old Kevin and Kylie, voices still almost indistinguishably high-pitched. “Ha ha ha.” Robert forces a smile, squinting to repel the enemy light. I can only imagine the gouging pains and gushing nausea he describes because, while we both like to drink, only he gets these hangovers.

He’s never belligerent or weepy when he drinks. At the worst, he’s increasingly amorous, which is no trouble for me once the kids are in bed. We have a grand time, sampling this and that, lots of reds from Sonoma especially. Sometimes, even knowing what it does to him, he’ll indulge in some Californian IPAs: “Gonna let the gorilla hammer me,” he says, releasing the hop aroma. It’s one of the things that maintains the continuity of our university romance as we’ve entered the house-and-kids phase. I remember him carrying my vodka-smashed body like a bundle of loose logs after a post-exam party, performing Matrix bends to protect my head from cabinets and doorknobs. At parties a couple times a year where I choose to over-indulge, I like to relive that old marriage of tenderness and danger by making myself his unwieldy patient, the only one he takes home from the hospital. Later we sip Pedialyte in bed, and I tease him about his least favorite Beatles song (and my favorite physician, “Doctor Robert”) until our new life demands we get up and fix twin breakfasts.

But even his hangovers are atypical, never the balled-up-in-agony, stay-in- bed-all-day kind. It’s more like someone has gently popped loose his brain case, as if opening up the back of a watch, then swirled a paintbrush around in gray matter, dabbed a little of the juices over here, mixed in some tannins and grape skins, and adjusted the dial on the left, producing a new arrangement of my husband’s faculties. Picture George Martin, alcohol surgeon with a slapstick sense of humor. Parts and labor $20, rebate if you recycle the bottles.

Me, the worst I lose is some REM sleep. But Smash Dad, my remixed Robert, better a Bob in this state, he goes haywire. The man lumbers like a Sixties Toho robot (MechaDad is one of my names for this character), neck stiff and limbs clumsy like a 50-meter city destroyer. He inadvertently thumps and elbows into cupboards and door frames and hunts for the jar of pickles, cheeses and mustards and cartons of eggs spilling to the floor as he fumbles: “I know they’re in here, but they’re not in here!” I sense in these moments anger at the end of a long road of banal frustration. Like a hemorrhaged eyeball on a dopily grinning face.

Omen

February 2, 2023.Reading time 1 minute.

By Sydney Lea

Featured Art: Cuervo de Jupiter by Rubi Villa

Wingbeats at the window
snap me out of the torpor
of my minor springtime sorrow.

A blast of desire, not wholly
carnal, not wholly not,
suddenly overcomes me:

I’m almost 80—and lovestruck.
What can that have to do
with a cardinal’s frenzied attack

on his likeness there in the pane?
Bright bird, I see that you’re jealous
—of what? You’re at it again,

enraged. Small wonder you’re scarlet.
Listen: you’re only alone.
Aloneness. Somehow I feel it.

A small bird’s futile ardor
brings on a premonition.
My love’s in the bedroom, dear reader,

and I picture my world’s perdition.

Halfway to Vermont

February 1, 2023.Reading time 4 minutes.

By Owen McLeod

Featured Art: Clown Hair by Emily Rogers

I tell my wife
my old friend Tom
is in the car
right under my seat in fact
she says not funny
I say I’m not joking
then reach down
and fish around
until I produce
the small blue padded envelope
that contains
the portion of Tom’s ashes
his half-brother
mailed to me from Alabama
five months ago
I explain my plan
to scatter them
on the shore
of Lake Champlain
where we’re going
to spend a week
doing nothing
it’s fair to say my wife
who grew up in China
with beliefs and customs
about death
very different from mine
freaks out at this point
and asks that I get Tom
out of the car
the sooner the better please
I take the next exit and
look for a halfway
decent spot
but it’s just a Sunoco
in the middle
of nowhere
we pull in
and while my wife
goes inside to pee
I walk to the edge
of the parking lot
and pour Tom’s ashes
on a struggling patch of grass
which strikes me as not
altogether inappropriate
given that Tom
spent his entire adult life
drunk
and unable to fulfill
his great promise
as a poet
in the few moments
I have at the edge
of the parking lot
I try to remember
the good poems
he wrote before
he couldn’t write anything
and I feel guilty
about cutting him off
years ago
but I just couldn’t
continue watching him
drink himself to death
and it grieves me
that I never truly thanked him
for introducing me
to poetry in the first place
but it’s time
to say goodbye
so I say goodbye
to the ashes in the grass
and walk back to the car
where my wife
greets me with a hug
and a bottle of cold water
and says yuàn tā ānxí may
he rest in peace
and then to the sky
above the Sunoco sign
xièxiè
xièxiè
xièxiè
thank you
thank you
thank you

The Exaltation

January 31, 2023.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Ronald Okuaki Lieber

In dry season in equatorial Chad, the Sahel is so hot the soil
Chars to red dust, the grass to a blond bristle, heat bearing down like affliction

And because the land blisters and coastal Africa is forested, humid and cool, air
Is sucked easterly, darkening the horizon with fury into which a man, tending

The village flock stares, a wave so sudden and massive the Dogon has little time
To corral the sheep before the air erupts with stinging needles. The storm

Sweeps across the continent until in the Atlantic thunderheads and wind
Marry the doldrums, and a hurricane is born. Its updraft plunges the ocean, and swells

Spiral westward across the open sea to loom large on beaches lining the American
Eastern seaboard as in Montauk Long Island where surfers

Scan the near horizon for the shadowed lines their kind read. It’s what they have prepared for
The summer afternoons and cool September dawns before work, that one stirring

Pitched perfect just where a surfer waits, and he paddles to catch the lip, a chthonic uprise
Heaving him high to which he surrenders, riding the rollinglevel underneath

Into rapture that I as a ten-year-old in the thick of the Ozarks heard in the treetops
Swaying back and forth, a thousand miles away. The shepherd stokes the charcoal

Embers with dry twigs, the surfer packs his board, and the hurricane makes landfall
In Kill Devil Hills, splintering wooden homes. I am joined.

Sometimes I believe,

January 30, 2023.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Dion O’Reilly

Old Mother, you might, in your final days, bloom—
your century of violence, crumble,

to false memories of full tables, fire glint of quiet
evenings. You, Old Mother, might

become the benevolent queen
of my own, small country—

the open-assed cotton you live in might
become a ball gown of light, lit

web of warmth, and your fingers
witched by the urge to whip, become benediction

on the warm foreheads of babies. Look, Old Mother, you knew
how to love. Remember your chicks? You took eggs to the broody

hens, watched them sit, breathed in
the straw smell of fluff, watched the chicks slip

from slick serum and cracked shell.

So here I am again, in your final room, bringing
egg flower soup, hot tea, rice pudding,

thinking when I lift you from the commode,
you’ll whisper Thank you. That when I show

you the photo of my father, your
husband, both of you so young, soaring

in your early heat, you won’t say,
Throw him away. No, you won’t say that.

There’s too much love, lost within
me, to imagine such a thing.

Shelf Life

January 29, 2023.Reading time 1 minute.

By George Kalogeris

That slender, dusty volume. When I was a student
Roaming the poetry aisles in search of a voice,
And never again so moved to open a text—
If only because its hundred-year-old pages
Had never been cut. That minor British poet.
So minor I can’t remember his name, though I took
His book home, and parted his late Victorian poems,
One by one, with the edge of a razor blade.

Nameless shade, I can’t unseal your lips—
But decade by decade, and ever more fervently,
You speak to me from the gloom. Not even the epic
Poets, returning from the underworld,
Know what it means to be mute. Then back you go
In your slender jacket that couldn’t keep off the dust.

Fearfully & wonderfully

January 25, 2023.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Stacey Forbes

Featured Art: The Blues by Abby Pennington

My preacher brother
free-climbs and fishes
the ocean in small boats.
Once, in a kayak, he caught
a young blacktip shark.
The two of them thrashed
like an angel wrestling
with flesh and my brother’s
thigh was wounded. A hook
in the mouth hurts, too.
He knew the angel
in the story wasn’t him.
He felt the weight
of original prayer in his hands
and released it. My brother
doesn’t run from pain.
Holiness hurts sometimes,
he says. Just enough to wake
you. To make you remember
you swallowed a spark
on the day you were born.
We are light, chasing light.
Follow the hawk
that follows the sparrow.
We are called to walk
with all that hums and howls
and crows on the earth.
Joy is not made
gently. Imagine the fury
and beauty of flight.
Imagine swimming
in warm, dark bodies
of water with stingrays
and cottonmouth snakes.
My brother has done this
and more with his sons.
He touches the holy and
the holy touches him.
Nothing that lives can dig
the divine from its heart.
I have a picture
of my brother on a climb
where he came very close
to falling. He hung
there, fear and wonder
alive in his eyes,
laughing over the black-
foot daisies and butterfly weed
four hundred feet down.
Dangling from the face of God.

A Blueprint for Escape

January 24, 2023.Reading time 38 minutes.

By Anna Farro Henderson

Featured Art: Pomodori by Nina Battaglia

The Italian smells of mint and chocolate, but when I blink my eyes open there is only the Midwest sun. While it’s dawn here, it’s siesta for him. Champagne bubbles up my spine—I’m sure a message awaits me.

In my sleep I had kicked off the sheets and thrown my T-shirt off. Rob doesn’t believe in air conditioning. It lets you go on as if there aren’t seasons. The humidity in our bedroom has the weight and press of a crowd without the fun and excitement of a concert. I blink at the thought of smashing into and exchanging air with strangers. While the initial lockdown lifted in June, the world has largely stayed on pause.

I roll over to watch for the slight rise and fall of Rob’s chest. Nothing. I pull a feather from the duvet he sleeps with and hold it under his nose. No quickening. Julie tells me, in our daily calls, that I’m crazy. But I swear he has no heartbeat either. I design cardiac medical devices for a living, and Rob’s vital signs baffle me.

In graduate school, Rob and I raced our bikes around city lakes. We’d fall into the grass and make out. I pressed my head to his chest, delighting in the booming announcement of him over and over. Now we ration flour and toilet paper. The least important of supply chain problems, but the most immediate in our house.

The hallway is dark, and I feel my way through the house. I expect the air on the deck to be fresh, but it is like stepping into an open mouth. The heat will build until we reach the right level of violence when, finally, the sky darkens, tornado sirens shriek, and, as if punctured by a bullet, the humidity shatters into a crackling light show. Most of summer is build up—the dramatic storms are rare moments of punctuation.

Lucidity

January 21, 2023.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Ken Holland
Selected as winner of the New Ohio Review Poetry Contest by Kim Addonizio

Featured Art: Unresolved by Lucy Osborne

It’s not that the sane are sane
and we need talk no more about it . . .
it’s more the question of how insanity hasn’t run rampant.

Please, if I may be an example:

If I were given the choice to suffer in poverty,
or suffer fleeing that poverty,
I would simply say, No thank you.

Or this: if, as the animists believe, even stones have souls,
you’d be mad to think about chain gangs
and what they do with sledgehammers.

More so, if there’s just one god then someone
please explain the saints to me.

Here’s a longer thought: I cannot forget the bands
of feral dogs roaming the streets of Cairo—their
physical kinship, the tawny slope of their haunches,
the wasted musculature. And it seems to me
God was himself conceived in hunger.
But not his own.

Madness is the muzzle of a dog that’s been muzzled
and left with no way to eat.

But it’s not as if the animal can’t breathe.
Even I can smell what’s coming from the kitchen.
The mutterings of sanity are like gospel,
while the mutterings of insanity
bear the stigma of an invasive species;

though some believe the inverse to be true—

as if it were impurities that make water lucid,
that still sadness into the near-notes of a
nearly sung song.

This is perhaps the way dissonance
sometimes resolves into a minor chord.

This is perhaps the way insanity feels
when it is most composed.

Betwixt and Between

January 20, 2023.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Ken Holland

My friend and I stopped in a bar
we maybe shouldn’t have stopped in,
but we were on the way from here
to there and decided to pull off the road
somewhere in-between.

Somewhere in-between has its own charm
being a space where letters don’t get written,
and bills don’t get paid, and old lovers
just get older for all the time you get to ignore them.

A beer and a little space in-between you and
your friend who’s in the same in-between space
as you are, ignoring all the same things
you’re ignoring.

And the jukebox is lit and a record is spinning
beneath the needle but really what you’re listening to
is all the solitude inside your head,
one beer gone, another in its place
and you barely noticed the bartender’s hands.

The thoughts you’re having are of the breed
that pull up to the edge of a precipice
and make you wonder if anyone’s yet laid claim
to the dark acreage that lies below

what the asking price might be

just how much does the abyss go for these days

and your friend doesn’t even look
when you reach over to pick up the loose change
lying next to his beer. You already know
which tune he next wants to hear.
It’s the one in-between the one that just played
and the one you’ve yet to decide upon,

as if there’s no moment more merciful
than the one you’re edging toward.
The quarters in-between your fingers clicking
like tiny castanets on the brink of rhythm.

The House, the Russian, and the Dying

January 19, 2023.Reading time 33 minutes.

By Raphael H. Kosek

Featured Art by Felicity Gunn

The House

The house, my mother’s house next door lay fallow over two years—the inner air still and musty, grass carpeting the gravel drive. What happens to a house where no people move about inside, breathe its air, circulate its dust? It exists as a museum of quarters suddenly vacated—blankets on the bed, water in the kettle, dishes left to be put away, mail to be opened. Two years ago my mother had a spinal implant for pain that went wrong. Her pain multiplied. She couldn’t walk at all, so she went from hospital to nursing home to assisted living. And the house languished. The carcasses of ladybugs littered the upstairs. Reluctantly I discontinued the phone, cancelled the cable TV. Her house, next door to mine, haunted me like a ghost.

The Russian

The sun shines hot on this last day of June, but a terrible, shattering thunderstorm tore through just a few hours earlier. Waiting outside the mall for my husband to drive around with the car, with a heavy boxed microwave at my feet, I watch a huge thundercloud gather over the Hudson River. Lightning flickers down like tongues of fire while the blue, air-filled balloon figure advertising Sears tools blows about wildly waving its arms until a worker comes out and turns it off. He packs the sagging figure neatly into the silenced machine while the storm roars. I make it into the car just in time. We sit in the car while several inches of water deluge the lot in a rain that blows sideways. The tortured dancing balloon figure still writhes in my head when we pick up Tatiana on the train from Brighton Beach.

Mother Standing in the Atlantic

January 19, 2023.Reading time 1 minute.

By Eben E. B. Bein

Featured Art: First and Never-ending Painting by Connaught Cullen

Once the ferry to Provincetown
cleared the neck, the headlands
decorated with lighthouses,
and it whipped along at some
impressive number of knots—
I do not know how much
speed is in a knot but
let’s just say she carried me
at a spate of knots—
toward some dark shape
in the middle of the ocean
no island to be seen,
it finally resolved:
a lighthouse
spitless,
standing alone in the roil
searching the ocean
on her one long and rusted leg.

I had assumed all lighthouses
were mothers
come to call their children in,
leaning on their rocky fences,
waiting,
getting cold, muttering
It’s an island—how far
could they possibly get?

Far. And who would
keep looking. I do not know
what kind of hope
I’m allowed.

Looking Through My Mother’s Dresser as a Child

January 18, 2023.Reading time 1 minute.

By Joyce Schmid

Featured Art: Yeats’ Hill by Connaught Cullen

I found a small six-sided box
inlaid with moonlight, glints of rainbow—a
small anomaly of radiance.

Mother-of-pearl, my mother said,
the word itself a wonder—

mother made of pearl/mother of a pearl—
pearl-mother and pearl-daughter—one.

Her father’s gift to her—
her father, dead.

Can I have it when you die?

She gave it to me there and then—at eight—
a year before she finally forgave me

for being born in wartime, colicky and premature,
my father stationed in St. Paul.
When she joined him there,

I’d become a stepchild in her heart.

I didn’t want the treasure yet.
I needed it to still be hers—

a stash of startling beauty
I could rummage for and find

those suburb-summer afternoons
with grief-dust falling
over beige-gray furniture and floors,

time lolling hot and humid over everything,
and beauty the only place to go.

Dandelion Is The New Guru

January 17, 2023.Reading time 1 minute.

By Lisa Bellamy

Featured Art: i.fragility. by Ahneka Campbell

I am exhausted by my confusion,
wary of sudden fires,
but dandelions, it seems, have dug in
for the long haul, and to them
I offer 10,000 bows—
I witness the indignities they endure,
the insults (weed, useless stem,
filthy stalk). I admire
their stand against savagery, poisons,
brutal mowing; stalwart
resistance of the taproots.
I lie among them, listen
to their whispers: we will not be moved.

Ode to My Minivan

January 16, 2023.Reading time 4 minutes.

By Cassie Burkhardt

Featured Art: Drive Time by Abby Pennington

You are slightly shorter than a Boston Whaler but just as difficult to park. When we’ve piled three kids in you and Frozen II’s going on the DVD, we might as well head Into the Unknown, which is what every day of parenting feels like anyway.

You are so roomy my children could Irish stepdance comfortably inside you, and so filthy cheddar Goldfish could spawn from your cupholders or several strains of bacteria from their stinky feet, socks thrown at me while I’m driving. You are useless in cities, rain and snow. In fact, you cannot drive over a single snowflake without completely breaking down into a ditch two feet from the sledding hill.

When your automatic doors slide open, people line up for bao buns from what looks like a popup restaurant, but instead, out fall woodchips and half-eaten lunches, an entire soccer team, faces smeared with chocolate ice cream ready to decapitate the other team with their ponytails.

O minivan, your behemoth shape is literally the definition of uncool and people burst out laughing when they see you in relation to me—someone who used to be cool—someone who went to NYU, once stayed up past ten, wore tight jumpsuits to underground clubs in Paris circa I can’t remember and yet, you fit seven humans comfortably. We wedge scooters, coolers, suitcases, relatives, boogie boards, hopes and dreams, pets, stick collections, and an entire folded-up trampoline in you on a pretty regular basis.

You are a superior flu-season-nose-blowing-bunker.

One seat of you is removable to allow for side-of-the-road dining, a triage room, parking lot naps, breastfeeding marathons, poop diaper explosions and mental breakdowns.

Your front headlight? Smashed into an innocent column just minding its own business in the parking garage where I park every day because I was drinking coffee and throwing apple slices into the backseat while driving.

You have been keyed.

Just kidding, that was me again. I swiped you against a metal post upon exiting the environmental center while queuing a Cookie Monster song on Spotify.

(Did I mention this van is a boat?)

Did I mention we have survived three fender-benders, the soul-sucking school dropoff procedure, that you have popcorn and sand in every crevice, that being a mom is so underrated and hard and thankless and infinite, but also kind of hilarious, even noble if you just embrace it?

That maybe minivans are magic carpets and the horizon is getting closer.

You are a so-called Sport version of nobody cares. You are a complete and total embarrassment. And when I say I hate you, you know what I mean.

I can’t imagine life without you. I can’t wait for life without you. My next car will be a vintage Porsche Carrera, or a slim Italian bicycle, or a speck of dust.

Our Trouble

January 16, 2023.Reading time 9 minutes.

By David Hansen

With my sister, a lean, hard girl who looks like our mother, I discuss my trouble. When I’ve said it all, we talk about money.

“Just let me help,” I say.

“You are helping,” says my sister.

“Let me help more,” I say.

Now my sister fishes a roach out of a tiny bowl from which I, as a little girl, ate ice cream, and says, “You’ve changed the subject.”

“Have I?” I say.

“Yes,” she says. “We were talking about you. Whenever we talk about you, you try to talk about me instead.”

“I don’t think that’s true,” I say. “But very well. What about me?”

She asks me whether I will do a certain thing about my trouble.

“Oh, I don’t know,” I say.

In truth I will not do this thing, but I will come close. I will come so close that I cannot speak of this thing, even now.

My sister lights the roach and draws a gentle breath from it, leading it back into this life. Then she offers the roach to me.

“But should I?” I say.

“Probably not,” says my sister.

“I must warn you,” I say, accepting the roach, “that this will make me a mite dreamy.”

When we are both afloat my sister tells me of the business with her landlord, a bad situation she has only made worse by taking him to bed. I ask her how much she pays now. She tells me.

“For this?!” I say, but in truth, I adore this little place, with its seasoned hardwood and its hideous angels sculpted into the cornices.

Our Grandmother

January 16, 2023.Reading time 1 minute.

By Kari Gunter-Seymour

twisted silver-streaked strands
into a knot, pinned at the tip of her crown,
draped her bird-bones in crossback aprons
cut from calico, sewn on a pump pedal Singer,
bought brand-new just after the war,

baked flaky scratch biscuits
from White Lily flour, spoonfuls
of lard, a pinch of salt and sass,
danced the flatfoot clog around
an old wringer washer,
employed on Mondays without fail,

wielded a scythe and hoe
good as any man, grew cabbages
big as watermelons,
drew us maps, where we came from,
patchworks of bloodroot, furled fierce
along the face of the Appalachians,

orphaned us, laid out
under a pine branch blanket,
a rough-chiseled stone.
Daffodils regretted their unfurling.
Redbuds wept purple pearls,
the fields so bare they grew voices.

Mysterious Ways

January 15, 2023.Reading time 1 minute.

By Kari Gunter-Seymour

Featured Art by Ross Di Penti

Nine weeks, no monthlies,
my body a nestling’s perch,
a tremoring tree, leaning

into a southeaster, hard luck
and poverty licking red-hot
flames against my bent back.

I scrimped, saved, still forty dollars
short of the cash I’d need to set
me and that little bird free.

No stranger to a bowed head,
I got straight to the appeal, laid out
my endgame and trading points.

The Lord coughed up two twenties
by way of a birthday card, sent postage due
from my granny, who wrote at length

about her late-night vision.
She saw me old, alone in the dark,
crying out for some little bird.

Breaking the Silence: Abortion and Knowledge in Summer and Weeds

January 14, 2023.Reading time 20 minutes.

By Jana Tigchelaar

While bodily autonomy and individual privacy are phrases commonly associated with the current discussion of reproductive rights in the U.S., the key term for understanding the culture of abortion starting in the late nineteenth century is knowledge, according to Kristin Luker in Abortion and the Politics of Motherhood. As legal exceptions to the ban on abortion rested on a physician’s determination of medical necessity, abortion became the privileged ground of the doctor whose medical license gave him the sole ability to decide when abortion was medically justified. In other words, by the late nineteenth century, abortion became a question of who could lay claim to this specialized knowledge, and who could exercise their authority based on it. Luker calls this era from the 1880s until Roe v. Wade in 1973 “The Century of Silence” because while the medical community determined the necessity of abortion care, they also dominated the public narrative about abortion.

Other critics, however, point out that this was not a complete silence. In her book When Abortion Was a Crime: Women, Medicine, and the Law in the United States, 1867-1973, historian Leslie Reagan notes that women did “speak of their abortions among themselves and within smaller, more intimate spaces.” One such “intimate space” (which is paradoxically also very public) is within published literature. Abortion was a recurrent plot element in literature published in the early decades of the twentieth century; as Meg Gillette points out in “Modern American Abortion Narratives and the Century of Silence,” from “1910 to 1945, more than seventy abortions were contemplated or had by characters in modern literature.” This literature reveals a struggle that is firmly embedded in the narrative of knowledge and authority. In two of these texts, Edith Wharton’s 1917 novel Summer and Edith Summers Kelley’s 1923 novel Weeds, the question of knowledge is bound up with issues related to class, privilege, and connection—specifically the way the medical takeover of reproductive health care transformed the prior networks of knowledge shared among women.

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein: Birth Without the Gendered Body

January 13, 2023.Reading time 20 minutes.

By Rebecca Richardson

Featured Art by Steve Mowrey

In his review of Frankenstein, Sir Walter Scott defended the novel’s “philosophical and refined use of the supernatural.” Here was a novel that altered “the laws of nature” not to “[pamper] the imagination” but to illustrate “the probable effect which the supposed miracles would produce on those who witnessed them.” The reviewer for Knight’s Quarterly Magazine agreed. “Frankenstein is, I think, the best instance of natural passions applied to supernatural events that I ever met with. Grant that it is possible for one man to create another, and the rest is perfectly natural and in course.”

This way of stating the novel’s premise—“Grant that it is possible for one man to create another”—can seem, like the novel itself, to elide the fact that Victor Frankenstein is reinventing a wheel. To be sure, there are distinctions: this is an asexual reproduction process that depends on the spare parts from the dissecting room and slaughterhouse, and the new being isn’t an infant but an adult of gigantic stature. But despite his size, the Creature starts off, in mind and spirit, as an infant, a blank slate to be written on by his experiences.

Despite what might seem an obvious analogy for reproduction and birth, it would take until Ellen Moers’s work in the 1970s for Frankenstein to be widely interpreted as a “birth myth.” For evidence, Moers pointed to the material of Mary Shelley’s lived experiences: Shelley knew that her own birth had caused the death of her mother, she became pregnant at sixteen after running away with Percy Bysshe Shelley, and, during her time with him (before and after their official marriage), she was continually dealing with pregnancy, miscarriage, childrearing, and the loss of children. Despite these parallels, it had taken around 150 years and a couple waves of feminist thought for Frankenstein to be read as a Gothic analogy for pregnancy, childbirth, and the aftermath.

Monstrous Body Horror in Transition: Gretchen Felker-Martin’s Manhunt and Jeanette Winterson’s Frankisstein

January 12, 2023.Reading time 9 minutes.

By Emrys Donaldson

When I consider being pregnant myself, I imagine Sigourney Weaver from the original Alien: a wet head emerging, its teeth bared, as I scream and scream. What for others may evoke joy and anticipation for me evokes fear. In Gretchen Felker-Martin’s 2021 horror novel Manhunt, pregnancy itself becomes a kind of body horror as testosterone turns people into sex-crazed zombies bent on cannibalism. A fertility specialist explains the process to a wealthy patient: “When they [the changed men] impregnate a victim, the baby is XY. No variation. It undergoes viral metamorphosis in utero and eats its way out of the mother at three or four months. A few hours later, it can hunt for itself. In a year, it’s sexually mature.” Gossip tells of “a woman in Vermont whose boy twins had eaten their way out of her.” In this science-fiction world, pregnancy is not only dangerous for all the usual reasons, but also because a zombified fetus might eat its way through the abdominal wall (just like in Alien). Abortion access saves lives. To abort, in this world, is to avoid being eaten from the inside out. Yet in the post-apocalyptic world of Manhunt, as in the twenty-first century United States, abortion access varies widely and depends on the pregnant person’s financial and social resources.

Under-resourced people undergo the brunt of pregnancy-related collateral damage in Manhunt, just as they do in real life. In the novel, a wealthy “bunker brat” impregnates a dozen women with her zombified boyfriend’s sperm to see if she will be safe trying to have a baby with him. Eleven women die; one gives birth to a girl infant. Yet, as seems to be the result of abortion bans everywhere, no one keeps close track of what happens to the infant once alive: one of the characters tries to convince herself, with no knowledge to support it, that “someone must have taken her. Kept her safe.” The desperate desire for a perfect infant at any cost leads, during the novel’s climax, to the death of the bunker brat at the hands of her wannabe baby daddy as well as the annihilation of the bunker, which was previously a walled garden for the wealthy. Class-based critique underpins the novel’s attitudes toward reproductive rights, as a safe pregnancy is a privilege only afforded to the richest people remaining.

Getting It Behind Them

January 11, 2023.Reading time 15 minutes.

By Wendy Rawlings

Featured Art by Steve Mowrey

For men, it’s almost always about solving a problem. “We’ll be fine afterward. Just like we were before,” the male character in Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants” tells his girlfriend Jig. In Matt Klam’s 1997 short story, “There Should Be a Name for It,” the male narrator says of his girlfriend’s abortion, “This was her show. Soon it would finally be over.”

Of course (though maybe this isn’t as obvious as it should be), for women, it’s not over once the pregnancy is terminated. There are the lingering effects on the body as it recovers, days lost from work, stress from lies told to family or friends. There’s the money needing to be earned to replace the money the abortion cost. There might be ways the abortion shifted the woman’s relation- ship with her boyfriend or husband, or ways she was affected if the man who constituted the other half of the act that led to pregnancy wasn’t a boyfriend or husband. She might not have known or liked him very much. He might have raped her. And then there’s the cultural taboo against abortion; that, too, is in bed with the woman as she recovers.

Looking back into the two abortion stories written by men in the context of the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade, I noticed in ways I hadn’t before how insistent both the male characters in these stories are about getting the abortion behind them, getting back to normal. Further, neither man has the slightest ability to empathize with or help the female character, emotionally or otherwise. Hemingway’s character is classic Hemingway: a man of few words who imagines himself entirely in control of the situation. Klam’s narrator, a 24-year-old man-child, is wholly incapable of comforting his girlfriend Lynn, and during the actual procedure, implores the reader, “Is there a way to describe how much I wanted to get the fuck out of there?” This pretty much sums up how much of a help he turns out to be.

Unwinding Unwind

January 10, 2023.Reading time 19 minutes.

By Hilary Brewster

Featured Art by Ross Di Penti

Dystopian novels for teens, who are “trying to understand their world and their place in it” are written with gripping plots and first-person narration that “may have the potential to motivate a generation on the cusp of adulthood,” write Balaka Basu, Katherine R. Broad, and Carrie Hintz in their introduction to Contemporary Dystopian Fiction for Young Adults. It’s not a coincidence, I don’t think, that a “plethora” of these texts were published in the post-9/11 era of the mid-2000s, culminating with what John Green called an “explosion” in 2007-2008 that included the first installment of perhaps the most successful of all the franchises, Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games trilogy. With the commercial success of this burgeoning market, YA writers created fictional worlds to warn teens about too much surveillance, like in Little Brother; the dire consequences of obsession with unattainable standards of beauty, in Uglies; and damaging conformity, like in the Divergent series. Although dozens and dozens of realistic YA novels deal with teen pregnancy, abortion, adoption, and other matters related to reproductive healthcare, not as many dystopian novels do. But Unwind, by Neal Schusterman, is an exception.

One question scholars ask of YA dystopian novels—a particularly relevant question when considering abortion—is whether the text espouses radical political change or masks an inner conservatism (Basu, et al.). Schusterman’s Unwind, published in 2007, is set in a futuristic world where the United States has fought a Second Civil War: this time about abortion. After years of deadly conflict, a treaty was signed that satisfied both Pro Life and Pro-Choice armies. The premise of this treaty—as well as other moments of didacticism—seems to reveal the “inner conservatism” of the text. (A note on the language: while I prefer to use the term “anti-choice,” Schusterman uses “pro life”; thus, throughout this essay, I will use the linguistic terminology set forth by the author to avoid any confusion.)

Finding The Boundary Line: A Look at Ayelet Waldman’s “Rocketship”

January 9, 2023.Reading time 15 minutes.

By Jennifer Furner

Motherhood was not what I was expecting. I thought I had prepared myself—I read countless articles online, learned a myriad of soothing techniques, watched videos of women’s birthing experiences. But there had been no way to know what it would be like for me. And my experience was not at all like what I had been told to expect.

I was told any woman could give birth naturally if she breathed deeply enough, if she believed in herself. My daughter’s head was stuck on my pelvis, though, and in the end, it didn’t matter how much breathing or believing I did; I needed an emergency C-section.

I was told it’s a baby’s instinct to seek out the nipple and suck, but my baby only screamed at my bare chest.

I was told every mother had instincts that would guide her in how to care for her baby. But when my daughter cried for hours on end, my instincts told me nothing about what she needed, how to fix her problems.

Before my daughter was one-week old, I already felt like a complete failure as a mother.

Mothers and would-be mothers are told a lot of lies. “Motherhood is the best job in the world” is one. “Mothers put their children first” is another. These are lies, or at least certainly over-simplifications, because they imply that women stop being separate people once they become mothers, that they suddenly lose any ambitions they had for their own lives and think only about what is best for their baby. But mothers are people, and just like any other person, they have wants and needs. And flaws.

Tove Ditlevsen, Abortion, and Dependency as Birthright

January 8, 2023.Reading time 12 minutes.

By Anna Rollins

Featured Art by JC Talbott

Tove Ditlevsen’s The Copenhagen Trilogy (published in Danish from 1969-71 and available in English in 2022) tells the story of the author’s childhood, youth, and dependency. Her ultimate dependency occurs after her second abortion. During the procedure, she describes the injected anesthetic as “a bliss I have never before felt spread[ing] through my entire body.” Following this abortion experience, Ditlevsen struggles with addiction. Eventually she would succumb to it, dying by suicide.

Even before her abortion, though, dependency was Tove Ditlevsen’s birthright. As an ambitious woman, Ditlevsen was exposed to unspeakable sorrow in a world shaped by systemic sexism. It wasn’t abortion that turned Ditlevsen into an addict; it was her lack of agency that left her alone with her own pain.

In the first volume of Ditlevsen’s memoir, she describes a fraught relationship with her mother in childhood. Her mother was lonely and frustrated because she, too, lacked independence and choice, confined at home alone all day with her children while her husband went out into the world. Her “dark anger always ended in her slapping my face or pushing me against the stove,” Ditlevsen writes. In the absence of maternal nurturing, Ditlevsen turns into herself, in introspection and rumination, finding an outlet for expression in the written word.

Still, she feels compelled to conceal her writing, even as an adult: “for me, writing is like it was in my childhood, something secret and prohibited, shameful, something one sneaks into a corner to do when no one else is watching. They ask me what I am writing at the moment, and I say, Nothing.” Ditlevsen learns early that any use of voice or demonstration of need could be used against her—and so she practices concealing and repressing her passions.

Something Has Tried To Kill Me: Race, Poetry, and Reproductive Rights

January 6, 2023.Reading time 12 minutes.

By Sarah Green

I first heard Lucille Clifton’s “the lost baby poem” when I was nineteen years old listening to some Napster download of a warbly and far away Ani DiFranco reciting it onstage: “the time i dropped your almost body down . . .” That year, although emergency contraception had recently hit pharmacies, a long holiday weekend in Ohio found me saved instead by a friend in my dorm who carefully counted out pills from a blister pack until they added up to the amount of ethinyl estradiol and norethindrone that would resemble a morning-after dose. To be clear, this was not an abortion. But I found myself thinking about the potential baby. I counted the months—it would have been a Pisces. I read Diane di Prima: “how am I to forgive you this blood? / Which was [. . .] to grow, and become a son?” Still, as I finished up a spring semester Incomplete and made an appointment to get on birth control, I knew I was lucky to be able to move on so smoothly.

Of two abortions she had as a young woman, Ani DiFranco—who would go on in mid-life to give birth to two children—writes in a 2019 LitHub essay: “I used to periodically count the ages that my first two children would’ve been if they had entered the world as such. [. . .] It was an exercise in the terrifying math of the near miss. Your life as you envisioned it could have effectively ended three, five . . . ten years ago. Just imagine. What kind of shell of your former dreams would you be now?”

Abortion Is Like Art: Red Clocks and the Facts of the Body

January 5, 2023.Reading time 31 minutes.

By Madeline ffitch

“Two years ago the United States Congress ratified the Personhood Amendment, which gives the constitutional right to life, liberty, and property to a fertilized egg at the moment of conception. Abortion is now illegal in all fifty states. Abortion providers can be charged with second-degree murder, abortion seekers with conspiracy to commit murder. In vitro fertilization, too, is federally banned, because the amendment outlaws the transfer of embryos from laboratory to uterus. (The embryos can’t give consent to be moved).”
—Leni Zumas, Red Clocks

When I was in graduate school, a friend and I were invited to write a “docu-drama” about abortion access before 1973, when Roe v. Wade enshrined it in federal law. The project was a collaboration between the Women’s Studies, History, and English departments. History grad students supplied us with nearly a thousand pages of research, and we sifted through testimonials from people who’d sought illegal abortions, interviews with the Jane Collective, sobering statistics about how common it was before Roe for women, especially those who were low-income and not white, to be injured or to die from illegal abortions. Somehow, we gathered all these voices and patched together a draft of the play, after which one of the faculty sponsors invited me into her office. The draft was too cavalier, she told me. She let me know how important it was to emphasize that getting an abortion is never an easy choice. She shared with me that she’d had an abortion, and that although she believed strongly that her right to choose should be legally protected, ending her pregnancy was the most painful decision of her life, as it was for most women. To make it seem otherwise would be playing into the hands of the other side.

Lazarus

November 30, 2022.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Arah Ko

Featured Art: Freedom at Twilight by Jailei Maas

I eat it to feel alive, a man confessed to me,
teeth crunching through a golden reaper so hot,
my eyes watered to be near. When did he feel alive?
Lazarus, I mean, after he died and then came back
again. We talk about him like a firebird, crumbling
to ash and shaking off the coals to rise once more.
But it must have been something, you know? Waking
from four days of death, frankincense cloying
the air, linen bandages unraveling. Did it feel good,
like stretching after a days-long nap or did it sting
like capsaicin, dormant limbs burning from lack
of use? My father once ate a ghost pepper whole.
First came the sweat, then vomiting. I think
I’m dying, he told me, my life is flashing by my eyes.
And that’s another question—what did he see,
between? The glow of seven stars in a pierced
right hand, a double-edged sword emerging
from his mouth—perhaps the world tilted
in resurrection like from a devastating concussion,
swirling around his sisters’ grief-creased faces.
Sometimes I leap from cliffs, cling to bridges,
swim with sharks, but I’m not brave enough to suck
a devil’s tongue, weep into a pile of sliced scotch
bonnets, try to grill another chocolate habanero.
Maybe the question I most wish I could ask
Lazarus is which hurt more—the fever that burned
him to death from the inside, or the rush of God,
like a Trinidad Scorpion, like ten million Scoville
shocking him alive to the face of a friend?

Thank You For the Tulips

November 29, 2022.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Lisa Bellamy

Featured Art: The Gracious Green by Grace Worley

During the pandemic, after I told you—
speaking up never easy—I was lonely
for you, your kids, and your husband,
you sent me tulips. Just like that, you
sent tulips. I wondered, though: did I
deserve them? I am sorry I was a drunk
when you were a kid. Thank you for not
hanging up when I call. The tulips
arrived in a creamy box; your note
tucked in tissue paper. I am sorry I could
not keep your father around or try very
hard to stop him when he said he was
leaving. I am sorry I did not love him
enough. Thank you for choosing such a
nice, funny guy for a husband. I am
sorry I pursued such a crazy boyfriend
after your father left—the shouting, the
slamming phones and slamming doors,
the walking out, the coming back. The
tulips are white and iridescent purple.
Thank you for your brown eyes. I
believe they are still flecked with green,
although sometimes, even now, I am
embarrassed to look you in the eye. I am
sorry I was so sick from drinking,
throwing up, and dizzy. Once, I could
not take you to your dentist appointment
because I felt shaky and kept falling.
You cried, you said nothing works,
nothing happens, everything falls apart.
Thank you for your clarity. Thank you
for your red face, your bursting, when
you were born. Thank you for your
anger when your stepfather and I
screwed up the car seat as we drove the
baby around the city, looking after her
while you were at your conference. Boy,
that woke us up! I am sorry you fell out
of your stroller when you were a toddler
because I was hungover and forgot to
buckle you in. I don’t know if you
remember. Now you know. Thank you
for the tulips. You sent so many I filled
three vases: one big, two small. Thank
you for insisting you wanted hipster
vegan donuts at your wedding instead of
a white cake. That one threw me over
the handlebars—drama, etc. Your
stepfather was kind and calm throughout
and wrote the checks. He loves you. He
says, later you get all the money, no one
else. In the end, I was a good sport,
admit it; the donuts were
delicious. You were a delicious baby.

Speak Up

November 28, 2022.Reading time 19 minutes.

By Jesse Lee Kercheval

Selected as winner of the 2022 Nonfiction Contest by Melissa Febos

1.

I dream I am teaching and it is not going well. I still have these dreams though I retired a year ago. Counting grad school, I taught 38 years so this particular nightmare is hardwired into my nervous system. In my usual dream, I am talking, then shouting, at students who are talking to each other and not paying any attention at all—something that never happened in real life, unless a dream counts as life. In this dream, though, it is the students who are yelling at me. I can see their mouths open, their tongues wagging, every one of their white teeth, remarkably straight after years of expensive orthodontia—but it is a silent movie. I touch my ears, a reflexive movement to check if my hearing aids are there. Yes, but somehow they seem to have swollen, tripled in size, and to be plugging my ears like fat kids’ fingers, making sure all I hear is the sounds of my body, heart, lungs, that we hear without using our ears at all.

Thanksgiving with Kerouac

November 28, 2022.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Bonnie Proudfoot

Featured Art: Uzbek Folklore by Fatima Taylor

“I felt free and therefore I was free” – Dharma Bums, by Jack Kerouac

We pooled money and food stamps,
bought the largest turkey
we could afford, also, cigarettes,
baking potatoes, a baggie of reefer,
a bottle of Jack Daniels and Mateus,
because those bottles made
cool candle holders. Someone
had a blue and white enamel pot,
and since the bird was frozen,
we kept the lid on. Someone else said
turkeys were best roasted slow,
so we set the oven at 300 degrees,
put in potatoes, set the table for four.
Four hours, five hours, the room
started to smell like dinner,
though with each stab we saw
the bird had refused to thaw.
The potatoes were good and hot,
and off we shot into the icy night,
streetlights solemn and glazed,
the whole silent city tucked behind
parked cars and glowing blinds.
On the swings in a playground
beside some railroad tracks,
we passed the bottle of Jack,
gazed up at Orion, Betelgeuse,
the glow of Bethlehem Steel edging
the southern sky orange.
Back home, the turkey was bronze,
the wine was sweet, WBFO
swung red-hot jazz after midnight,
and we played scrabble until
the sun rose over the Trico plant,
letters and words strung across
the board like an epic
yet to be told, a cluster
of constellations.

Hot Enough

November 27, 2022.Reading time 1 minute.

By Bonnie Proudfoot

not a spark
but a blaze,
not a welding torch
but a glass furnace
molten and glowing,
heat like an express train
across the tongue
down the throat, not
Chet Baker or Stan Getz,
but Arnett Cobb, Pharoah Saunders
not Ringo but Gene Krupa,
Buddy Rich, a box set
of surprises,
better to surrender.
Hot enough for you?
my neighbor asks.
No, of course not.
Give me ghost peppers,
Carolina reapers,
keep that Frank’s off the table,
kiss with your teeth.

Fruits and Vegetables: drawing by Bright Kontor Osei

November 26, 2022.Reading time less than 1 minute.

heaven whatever it may look like is filled with conversation so loud a person can barely hear themselves

November 26, 2022.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Aidan Dolbashian

Featured Art: Fruits and Vegetables by Bright Kontor Osei

you sit down to dinner with your mother        an ape appears in the kitchen and begins poking
around                i’m looking for the other ape                he says                the ape pulls out a frying pan
and places it on your head        he asks you if there is another ape under the frying pan
               you and your mother tell him no and little black hairs wriggle out of your arms and your
face wrinkles like a dried apricot and your knuckles rap upon the floor                       no that’s
wrong the ape says      the other ape isn’t like that

the ape finds an empty seat at the table with an empty plate and an empty cup        i love pork
chops and applesauce he says and coincidentally this is what you are eating             but i’m not
hungry at the moment          you see               i am much too missing the other ape                  you
understand him         the hairs on your arm grow thicker and blacker         you ask the ape if he
would like to say grace                       the ape bows his head and says           god tells bad jokes

you all open your eyes to an angel immaculate and chrome           stuffing its face with pork
             the angel licks a glob of fat from its metallic lips and says      god does not-              but the
ape holds up a hand and says              no that’s wrong            the other ape isn’t like that
             and crushes the angel like a sardine tin in his leathery fist                the ape turns to your
mother she nods and little black hairs wriggle out of her arms       you all three settle in to eat
               but no one is hungry              don’t worry      says the ape   it’s normal                     it’s all
too normal         everything in the room settles             at this             you hear the softness of
footsteps upstairs         wanting only to tell you            all about         who they spoke to today

The Art of Attention

November 25, 2022.Reading time 1 minute.

By Erin Redfern

Featured Art: Untitled by Olivia Juenger

My husband rips off his sleeping bag, strips.
With blind hands I trace his thigh and find

the big tick bedded deep. To get it out
I take tender from touch, love from love.

Forget him, and work at working it free,
tugging gently at the hard tag, careful

as my mother when I was seven
and came home lice-infested. Lamplight warm

on my head, and her fingers, for once, patient,
parting the fine strands with a metal comb

while I held still, not wanting it to end.
In the cold tent we do full-body checks

by flashlight. Engrossed, removed. Slowly
the bright circle excludes us, brings us in view.

Amaranthine II: painting by Mary Kate McElroy

November 24, 2022.Reading time less than 1 minute.

If You’re Single and Touch-Hungry and Hear a Knock at the Door

November 24, 2022.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Erin Redfern

Featured Art: Amaranthine II by Mary Kate McElroy

Incredible to me now, how long I went without it.
Palm, nape, arch. Shoulder blade, collarbone, top of knee.
Weeks. Months. Not one for manicures, too old for club scenes.

Noting the daily ways we stop just shy of it:
coins dropped into a waiting palm, elbows cased in thick wool
in crowds, on trains the shared heat of covered thighs.

I moved my wrist along the cheap satin slide
of drug store scarves, rubbed the budding tips of weeds,
grabbed brass doorknobs still warm from the hand before.

To the skin-starved, the world’s a frisson of substitutes.
If you know this, and you hear a knock, answer.
I won’t stay long; you can leave the tv on. I’ll use

a fine-tooth comb or soft-bristle brush, my fingers
through your hair. Let me do this. Let me
make amends to my old loneliness. Your scalp’s sudden aria

flooding the studio apartment, the high-rise, the whole city sky
sighed with airliners, then farther out, the dark plains
with their small, hidden lives that pause to listen

and your roaming selves, returning now to the paddock
of your skin. You will dream tonight, and wake up human.

Tour

November 23, 2022.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Jana-Lee Germaine

Featured Art: Fields of Lavender by Evelyn Jenkins

He enters a dream where I am planting chard
or changing sheets. Calls, Sorry, I’m sorry.
Takes my hand. Come back.

He’s seven years too late,
and I am happy now.
The day we went to court

he scaled the stairs behind me, cried
Don’t do this. We’ll move
to California, start again.

It’s July, I’m watching the Tour de France,
180 men ascending Mont Ventoux.
The steady rhythm of their legs,

bodies barely rocking mile after mile –
their world tilted to 9%.
They push their bikes up the grade

because they’ve trained for years
and it’s the day to climb.
Every extra ounce tossed aside.

One year Hoogerland dangled
in barbed wire. But he climbed
back on his bike,

won King of the Mountains that stage.
In ’95 Casartelli
missed a curve in the Pyrenees,

hit a concrete block, and died,
because sometimes man
is just a man, a bike a bike.

I ride much smaller mountains,
but on every summit, I catch my breath.
I have to haul my own soul for decades yet.

Crapshoot

November 22, 2022.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Therese Gleason
for my grandfather

When Daddy was a boss
at the telephone company
we lived at the big house backed up to the railroad.
There was a sliding board, a sandbox, a goat
we could harness to a little cart,
and a live-in nanny, Henrietta
with her twisted arm.
We had indoor plumbing
and a great big car.
When Maymie wasn’t sick
we went to Daddy and Uncle Gus’s club:
the plushest roadhouse in southern Indiana
perched at the top of Floyd’s Knobs
with only one road out and one road in
where pretty dancers gave me and Kotzie
fizzy drinks with paper umbrellas
and a Maraschino cherry.
The rooms were full of smoke and music,
ladies with black stockings and red lips
men in double-breasted suits
hair slicked back
clinking glasses tinkling with ice cubes,
revelers who had crossed the Ohio
after sundown to play cards and craps.
Upstairs Daddy’s man
sat at the window on top of the toilet
with a rifle between his legs
overlooking the 80-foot drop,
scanning the highway’s seven hairpin curves
for feds and cops, roulette wheels
spinning, fortunes turning all night long.
Once, when no one was looking
I pocketed a chip: cream-colored,
printed with a dark green pine.
Good thing Maymie had stashed
a suitcase of cash under the four-poster
before the Crash, the handcuffs, the raid,
before Daddy got the dropsy
and we moved in over grandpa’s store,
before me and Kotzie woke up one morning
to find Henrietta cold and dead
lying in bed between us.

The Man with the Yellow Hat

November 21, 2022.Reading time 34 minutes.

By Dustin M. Hoffman

The man with the yellow hat dragged his monkey out onto the balcony and locked it inside the wire-walled kennel. He’d reached desperation. The monkey he’d named George had finally followed his curiosity to disaster. The monkey had nearly killed a man. From behind the sliding glass door, he studied the monkey’s stillness, wondered what terrifying curiosity he could be conjuring now: a swing from the powerlines, steak knives chucked from their sixth-floor apartment.

Cool fingers trailed up the back of his neck, bumping down his hat brim. “Don’t you think he’s learned his lesson?” the scientist, his girlfriend, whispered into his ear. She joined him at the glass door.

The man clenched the syringe in his pocket. After two years of fostering, the man had become certain that the monkey he’d named George couldn’t be trained. The scientist imagined the man kinder, so much more patient. But there was a frailty he hid just as carefully as his balding scalp under the hat. His patience, his compassion for defenseless animals, was rubbed threadbare. So, he carried a fatal needle for the monkey, the quick solution, finally. She was wrong about him. Everyone was wrong.

It Was All Yellow: image by Olivia Juenger

November 21, 2022.Reading time less than 1 minute.

Ode to the Yellow Pages

November 21, 2022.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Benjamin Voigt

and the White Pages, to the Switchboard,
Rotary Dials and Dial Tone. To the
Answering Machine, to Not Being Home
to Pick Up the Phone, to Being Afraid
of Being Found Out You Were Home
Alone. To “Voigts’ Residence,” and
“Can I Take a Message?” To Forgetting
to Tell Mom Someone Called. To Busy
Signals and Collect Calls and Call
Waiting. To Long Distance, and Listening In
On the Bedroom Cordless. To the Phone
Tree, Caller ID, and the Red Cross
Asking for Dad’s Blood Again. To the
Do-Not-Call List. To Hotlines,
Nine-Hundred Numbers, Star-Six-Nine,
the Pound Sign, the Operator. To Having
to Ask Your Girlfriend’s Parents If
She Could Talk. To My First Cell Phone,
and How It Didn’t Work the First Time
I Turned It On. To its Tiny Screen, and
the Animated Panda We Watched There
That Meant We Were Roaming
Even When We Were at Home.
To Dropped Calls, Low Bars, and Family Plans.
To the Call Mom Got On Our Way
to the Beach Telling Her That Her Mother
Was Gone. To the Quiet Afterwards
in Our Rental Car, Just Her Crying,
and How the Seaweed Lay in the Sand
Like Tangled Cords. To Numbers
No Longer in Service. To the Number
That Was My Grandparents’ for Decades,
The Last Four Digits Their Anniversary.
To Whoever Would Answer If I Dialed It Now.
To My Father, Who Will Go to His Grave
Never Owning a Cell. To My Mother’s
Voicemails About Christmas and My Sister
and Computer Problems, The Messages I Save
for When She Won’t Be There
to Answer, When They’ll Be All I Have Left
of Her Voice, The First I Ever Heard.

The Tenure of Moorings

November 20, 2022.Reading time 1 minute.

By Eilín de Paor

Featured Art: Ormond by Anna Kinney

We’ll give some day,
when the time is right.

Until then we incline, prop like bookends
no one ever bought but found, inherited,

stable as a diving bell on the sea bed,
a lunar drill mining nameless minerals,

strapped with brackets of obsolete gauge,
rusted together—all the sturdier.

We’ll give, after a long stand,
buffeted by shell, rolled in tumble wave,

buckle—grateful for the water’s lean,
slide into sand, become home to shoaling dabfish,

happy to have stood,
in our cockeyed way.

Fragmented Locale: painting by Brooke Ripley

November 19, 2022.Reading time less than 1 minute.

Newspaper Clipping

November 19, 2022.Reading time 1 minute.

By Eilín de Paor

Featured Art: Fragmented Locale by Brooke Ripley

The last remaining sycamore on our suburban road
was a playtime shelter; its roots, fairy council seats,
its hollows, a dormouse school.
For developers with an interest in the spare acre,
it was an inconvenience.

The men with chainsaws came, met
a ring of steel-eyed children, spanning the centuries-thick trunk.
I wore my favourite coat for the occasion, a hand-me-down ski jacket—
across my chest, a burnished sunrise patched above a flat-earth horizon.
Hope was a four-foot thing in nylon.

We shook placards, posed for photos, made the front page
of the local paper, before being called in for our supper.
They came again in school hours, left nothing but a stump,
hillocks of saw dust, dormice scrabbling for their copy books
through the still-warm crumble.

When They Say All is Lost

November 18, 2022.Reading time 1 minute.

By Abby E. Murray

Featured Art: Holiday Blues by Olivia Juenger

Remind them, a word
is the hardest thing to lose
and practical as a kettle:
there is nothing you cannot
make with a word,
nothing it will not hold.
Start with despair. Add
boiling water: tea for your throat,
soup for your bones.
Now add a crust of bread,
some fat, mercy, this is
the science of naming,
a descendant of breathing,
carried deep behind the eyes
or within the eardrum
or beneath the skin,
and it cannot be stolen
or surrendered at the threshold
of any cell, refuses to be
turned away, demands to be
used even when you have
no will for warmth or food.
You cannot help it.
So long as you have thought
to think you’ve lost it all,
you must call language
what it is: more to live for.

The Silence of It All

November 17, 2022.Reading time 60 minutes.

By Andrea Bianchi

The first time I told a man of my desire for sterilization, my intent to cut off the monthly ovum’s quiet passage through my uterine tubes, he silenced me.

                                                                                         )

The no spoken for almost all his gender, though I did not know so then.

                                                                                         )

“Let’s not discuss that,” he interrupted. His voice sliced the pathway of my unformed words as they traveled from the lungs to the larynx, before they could be birthed by my tongue. “You might change your mind,” he said.

                                                                                         )

Implied in the silence: You might want it all.

When My Husband Asks What He Can Do to Convince Me He Loves Me, I Say

November 17, 2022.Reading time 8 minutes.

By Abby E. Murray

Featured Art: Sorry, I forgot by Evelyn Jenkins

I want you to become
utterly inconvenienced
by my past, present,
and plans, and I want
to have no awareness
of your suffering.
By all means, continue
telling me you love me—
every day, many times—
but I want you
to commit yourself
to a mobius strip list
of tedious chores
that need doing
several times a day,
in perpetuity—namely
laundry, cooking,
and cleaning while
cultivating kind
and grateful children.
You will need
to prioritize.
I want you to find
everything our family
wears no matter
where we disrobe
and I need you
to wash our clothes
in soaps that don’t
irritate my skin,
then you must
line dry certain items
while tumble-drying others;
keep in mind that I alternate
line/tumble drying
depending on the item
and how many times
I’ve worn it
and where I wore it
and how much I like it.
I will be very upset
if you forget. Naturally,
you’ll need to sort,
fold, deliver, and hang
clean clothes,
but I’d like you
also to tell me
where they are
in a way I can
remember, when I feel
up to listening.
I will still ask you
to help me find them
again, when I need them,
but I like to feel
included, you know?
Please remember
to change the sheets
on Fridays. Should you
ask me for help
and I am available
to oblige, I promise
never to learn how
you’ve done any of this,
staining and shrinking
expensive items
which I then fold
into tiny cubes,
the way my mother did.
If you want to convince me
you love me,
I want you to create
a weekly menu
each Sunday
to be posted on our fridge,
and based on that menu,
I want you to draft
a list of supplies
needed from various
pharmacies and grocery stores,
then you must drive
to those places,
find the supplies,
buy them, bag them,
drive them home,
sort them, put them away.
I will come with you
to keep you company
but I prefer not being
sent to stores alone.
While we’re out
I will want to talk
about traffic
and the price of toilet paper
in a loud voice.
Let’s do this every
weekend, forever.
I’ll thank you later.
I’ll likely get home
from work just before
dinner is served
so you’ll have to make it.
There will be nothing
I can do about that—
I’ll remind you.
Please get excited
when you hear the key
in the lock. Maybe
you can work remotely
during the day?
Maybe I can buy you
a gym membership?
I think you’d get better
results at a gym.
When you cook, I will
describe my feelings
about each dish,
using terms like endlessly
frustrating and pointlessly
complicated and weird.
In exchange, I will learn
to make miso soup
so well it becomes
the only thing I can
possibly contribute
to any meal, ever.
I want you to develop
an interest in baking,
desserts especially,
so that when you follow
a New York Times
two-day recipe
for miniature fig
and cherry pies,
I can remind you
how much I was
hoping for plain
chocolate chip cookies—
nothing fancy.
I want you to become
a vegetarian
for reasons informed
by your own
childhood trauma,
the kind you still feel
down to the molecules
of sweat that sprawl
on your palms today,
and I want you to raise
our daughter
as a vegetarian too
so that when she asks
for a real Mcnugget
I can tell her no
because you don’t
want her to have
delicious snacks
while you sit there
remembering that video
of soldiers laughing
at a headless chicken
as it ran in circles,
a sprinting font of blood
until it died
and became dinner.
If you want to convince me
you love me,
you must keep
the floors clear,
make all our appointments,
coordinate transportation
and care for our pets—
you will need to admit
that you’re the one
who wanted them, after all.
You’ll need to sweep,
mop, scrub, disinfect,
diagnose, find, collect, stack,
reorder, pay, mail, return,
schedule, follow up,
call and leave a message.
I want you to be on time
for doctor’s appointments
that enter you.
Don’t worry, I’ll be here
to say I told you so.
You will need to manage
the household’s medications,
illnesses, and symptoms.
You’ll need to coerce us
to heal. Aren’t we darling?
Just look at our daughter.
I think she has dandruff.
If you want to convince me
you love me, please
teach her how to wash
her hair properly
and also she is struggling
with her multiplication tables
so if you get a minute
you should address that
because you get through
to her better than I do,
I don’t know why.
And you know what,
go ahead and get a PhD.
I want you to study
what you love most.
I will complain about
how little I see you
for four years,
I will become
a well of mother’s guilt,
does that help?
I want you to publish,
I want you to only
accept jobs that pay
enough for me
to respect them
(if you don’t,
I’m not sure how
I can discuss anything else
when we have company)
and while this might be
difficult considering
how often we relocate
for my job
I trust you to figure it out.
If you want to convince me
you love me,
you will figure it all out.
I know you don’t
cry much but once
every five times
you break down
sobbing in the bathroom
I promise to look at you
while you say things to me.
I will buy you a coat,
I will buy you a watch,
I will tell you
you’re just a better person
than I am, maybe
it’s genetics.
I promise you, as always,
to be easily convinced
by your love;
in fact, all I need
is about twenty years
of these requests
fulfilled, and remember,
you have a beautiful smile,
you’re so smart,
I liked your hair better
when it was longer.

A Walk

November 16, 2022.Reading time 1 minute.

By Nick Reading

Every day I try again. To see if
I can make it without saying a word.
A penance for a voice that said too much.

A fight. An honest thought. Something stupid.
All plain words that plainly hurt. Walking
in these woods today with the snow as light

as an eyelash is dreadfully cliché.
But no less a boot print. No less my hand
holding my son’s. He, too, is silent. Past

nap and late for snack. We point at a loon
surfacing and stare for a little bit.
To explain its genius would ruin it.

And when it is late in the afternoon
we will collapse into a snowbank
with grunts as we hold our silence in pocket.

As surrender to wrong-headed fathers.
As if fears didn’t need to be named.
We grow colder and my son’s grip tightens

with a strength I hope is never linked to anger.

Amerykański

November 15, 2022.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Annabella Mayer

i.

It is a brisk sun-swept morning,
two days before Mardi-Gras,
and I am eating paçzki,
pronounced pounch-key,
from a stubby Parma bakery
that sells it in red, white, and blue flavors
like Piña Colada or S’mores.
As I pour my coffee, caramel-creamed,
I watch boys who look like my brother
die on television.

ii.

War is grey playgrounds and Cyrillic
on faded billboards, letters I used to
trace out in notebooks —
Now I can read my name, nothing else.
Slava Ukraini, heroiam slava.
It’s not my language anyways,
not my patch of once-Russian earth
that’s thrashing like a sick dog
before the shotgun.
Still, I should cry for it. My mother does.
She’s cut from Youngstown cloth,
bread-lines for bedtime stories,
so curses follow —
Blood grudges bubbling, burning over
after years in suburban veins.
The tanks roll in after sunset.

iii.

I should learn Polish in solidarity,
or attempt Lithuanian.
I should clip in the too-blonde extensions
and glittered plastic eyelashes,
Sell the girl that American men
like to order online.
I should ask Nana about her family
and write down the answers,
tie a square scarf on my head,
learn to bake kolache.
I should stop making death half the world away
about myself, for God’s sake —
Take up smoking, or Lenin,
or going to Mass.

iv.

My friends spend lunch giggling.
They would dodge the draft, of course,
in case you were wondering.
World War Three before winter formal?
It’s just too much!
It’s funny. I laugh myself to tears.

Homestretch: painting by Mary Kate McElroy

November 14, 2022.Reading time less than 1 minute.

Cahokia

November 14, 2022.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Kathy Nelson

Featured Art: Homestretch by Mary Kate McElroy

I don’t know how to be a vessel. When my mother’s father
drank himself to death, she was a day’s bus ride away
at school, got the news by telegram. Today,
in the yard, the trees are disappearing into fog so blank
you could forget they had ever been there. In the 60s,
along the Mississippi, bulldozing for I-64,
workers dug up beads, shells, remains of Cahokia,
a city as large in the 13^th century as London was—
plazas, mounds, courtyards, towers. Imagine
getting to work with your backhoes, blueprints,
your federal funding only to find that someone
got there first. My father’s grandparents, eighteen,
already three years married, left green Tennessee,
headed west. I don’t know why they forsook Eden
for the wind-raw Texas plain. Great grandmother
vowed never to cross the Mississippi again.
And she never did. That’s how the old ones said it—
and she never did. I can’t explain how I wound up here,
so close to the farm where she was born. At the end
of her life my mother’s mother exacted a promise:
keep the stacks of funeral visitation books, proof
the ancestors had been somebody. My own mother
dead, and thinking of my daughters, I snapped
a photo of every page and threw them into the dumpster
with her mouse-ridden sofa. In Cahokia, the Mississippians
built a woodhenge to mark the sun’s solstice. Now,
the sun is burning away the fog and across the valley,
Flat Top Mountain smolders in autumn light. I don’t know
where in these woods the copperheads are readying
their dens for their long winding sleep, where the wild
turkeys are fattening on acorns, their long necks ratcheting
down and up. If I knew how to tell you that, I would.

Mr. Levine: On Lineage and Compassion

November 13, 2022.Reading time 9 minutes.

By Kathy Fagan

A few years back I observed a class by a then-new colleague of mine at Ohio State, Marcus Jackson, a young Black poet from Toledo who’d studied with Philip Levine at NYU. He was teaching a handful of poems he called “Poems With and Without Zip Codes,” and one of the poems was Phil’s “Soloing,” from toward the end of What Work Is; it’s the poem about the John Coltrane dream that the elderly mother tells her visiting adult son. He’s driven over the Grapevine with roses from Fresno in the backseat, and he almost didn’t come at all—but there they are, thinking of Coltrane’s music together in the heaven they both, separately, believed California would be.

And there Marcus and I were, long-ago and not-so-long ago students of Phil’s, listening to a mutual student of ours read Phil’s poem aloud, far from California, much closer to Detroit, in the frigid gray of a Columbus, Ohio, winter. That’s what it’s like now—for me. With Phil in neither New York nor California, he’s everywhere instead: in a piece of music, a red carnation, a Lewis Hine photo, a classroom filled with his grand-students. It seems to me only trauma, love, and art abide with us this way.

Near Miss

September 9, 2022.Reading time 1 minute.

By Bill Hollands

Featured Art: Mall Series (2) by Doug MacDowell

Live long enough and you’ll have a few
if you’re lucky. Take me, for instance—
when my son crossed the street
and the car’s tires screamed and his body
arced into a C. Or once in the doctor’s
cold office when the air froze into a word.

Or maybe it’s a choice—your choice,
the other person’s, doesn’t matter. You sit
on the edge of the bed in the hotel room,
run your hand over the quilted bedspread
and wait for the answer. It’s not much really,
not much that determines a life.

August, Incessant

September 8, 2022.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Catherine Harnett

The frequent evening storms, the insistent humid
air, tree-frogs’ night-dark calls, crickets in their

deafening routine; and the recurrent want of you.
Our comings, furtive and reckless, recollected,

our taste touch sound; who we were, the you
and I of it, the summer us of it. Against August’s

willful heat, reason stood no chance, the heart
stood no chance against your arrant pull. We were

accustomed to the showy, open-handed roses’
bloom, the season’s lavish yield; we claimed

everything as ours, cocksure it would last. But
the sodden month succumbed to fall; there was

no now, just the once-was. Autumn, the light-thief,
cold-usher, fashioned crepey, wind-dried leaves,

oak and elm, woods conspicuously bare, no longer
our wild Eden. Fall came; frogs were hidden

beneath leaf-litter, rocks, and logs; crickets entered
diapause, yet love could not overwinter; our vine-

green ardor paled; our untended roots betrayed the
lastingness we’d counted on, had no instinct to persist.

So many Augusts since; boisterous gatherings of
frogs and crickets, occasional cicadas; and evenings’

muggy dominance recall the flagrant us; lovesick for
the girl I was, the then of her, the only once of her.

Heatwave

September 7, 2022.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Laura Linart

Featured Art: Untitled by Mallory Stowe

In the deep end of August, the sun oozes
over Jackie Onassis Reservoir.
The air is dense, crickets set to simmer.
The sidewalk steams.

Over Jackie Onassis Reservoir,
a chemical rainbow rises.
The sidewalk steams.
Cockroaches fly in the streets.

A chemical rainbow rises.
Taxis shimmer. Shirts cling to breastbones.
Cockroaches fly in the streets.
From three long blocks away, I can smell the city pool.

Taxis shimmer. Shirts cling to breastbones.
The sun tattoos a cipher across silver rooftops—
from three long blocks away, I can smell the city pool.
The rich people vanish. The heat sticks.

The sun tattoos a cipher across silver rooftops:
One down: suffuse desire; Across: quiver boombox.
The rich people vanish. The heat sticks.
In the distance, the grid is viscous.

One down: suffuse desire; Across: quiver boombox.
We chase our shadows down the avenue.
In the distance, the grid is viscous
—borders fading, partitions coming undone—

we chase our shadows down the avenue
speeding toward the promise of night
—borders fade, partitions come undone—
the city exhales, releasing its secrets.

Speeding toward the promise of night,
in the deep end of August
the city exhales, releasing its secrets
and I am falling in love with everyone.

Who knows why the bay was that color

September 5, 2022.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Rose Auslander

Maybe it was hot, I was out of work & the car actually started, maybe I didn’t
even think to bring a towel, just drove & walked into the water, walked in &
let my feet rise, floating in salt & seaweed, fishlike, minnows darting below me,
maybe that’s why I got to lie like I belonged in a horizon of water smooth as
the sky, a rich silk luxury of blue, early evening in Paris blue, the blue of the
Comtesse d’Haussonville’s opera dress, not the way it was, trapped in fabric,
but how Ingres painted it, the way it still looks even in the print in my room,
faint ripples flowing smooth in reflection, the kind of blue you’d wear & your
bank account would never run low or maybe if it did you wouldn’t notice,
or wouldn’t care, that rich Comtesse blue ferrying me seaward, blurring the
smells of suntan lotion & fries, the echoes of men loud on phones, into the
holiday happiness of striped umbrellas & beach chairs & who knows, maybe
the Comtesse herself sunbathing right here at Sandy Neck, floating in time, sure,
just a day at the beach like any other day, maybe, the way if you didn’t look,
you might think the water was just blue.

The Windowless Room of Wisdom

September 4, 2022.Reading time 62 minutes.

By Drew Calvert

Featured Art: Coastal View by Madelyn Bartolone

Jim Dahlberg was eating a bran muffin and reading The New York Times when he saw that Lucas Bloy had won the Joslyn P. Fish Award for New Conceptual Art. Jim put his muffin down. He wondered if there had been some mistake—not that he was an expert in the field necessarily. He wasn’t an artist, or a critic, or a scholar. He didn’t know the first thing about the Josyln P. Fish Award. He did, however, know a thing or two about the recipient. Lucas had been his nemesis.

Years earlier, Jim had entered a sandwich shop in Madison, Wisconsin. He was in his third year of law school at the time and had just completed a lengthy exam on copyright litigation. Whenever he finished a big exam he liked to eat a roast beef sandwich slathered in tangy hot sauce. It was, for him, a kind of joy. And so he was deeply touched when he saw that Joanne Neier—by far the prettiest girl he’d ever seen at Ralph’s—chose the same condiment. On the basis of this connection, he was able to score an impromptu date.

Life is astonishing, he thought. One minute you’re biking through town with a roast beef sandwich on the brain, and the next minute you’re sitting across from a beautiful stranger with hazel eyes, convinced that all your days on Earth were prelude to this fluke encounter. There had, of course, been one or two highlights. Kissing Natalie Finchbaum at the Cineplex was a clear triumph. Receiving his law school acceptance letter—and the scholarship it came with— had opened his life to dewy pastures previously unfathomed. And there had been that interesting brush with nature during a baseball game when he was sixteen. He’d been grazing in a trickle of meadow along the left-field foul line—his team, the Borlyn Reds, were playing in Ripon, Wisconsin, home of the Tigers— sniffing his glove and watching Trent McGinnis mow down batter after batter, when all of a sudden the wind picked up and sent the trees into a frenzy, and he was able to recognize—though he couldn’t say exactly how—that trees are in a struggle against the heavens, just like the rest of us. But between that night on the baseball field and the moment he and Joanne Neier shared the corner booth at Ralph’s, it seemed that very little had happened.

Residue

September 3, 2022.Reading time less than 1 minute.

By Maria Dylan Himmelman

Featured Art: Portrait of Kaitlyn (2018) by Erin Dellasega

Each generation learns from the previous
so said my mother who never left
the house. She would close herself up
in her bedroom for days, only to emerge
in a wig and a dress made of paper on which
she had sketched vague faces and landscapes
with fat pieces of charcoal and spit. Once
I thought I saw her in the street, a fur
hat and hooped earrings, eyes vacant
and no response to my call. Doppelgänger
she would say later, like the thick-boned
villager who helped load the trains
with mothers and daughters
and turned to the camera to swear
it wasn’t her.

Self-Portrait as a Half-Deserted Town in Germany

September 2, 2022.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Greg Nicholl

Featured Art: The Sacrificial Lambs by Brooke Ripley

The stores have closed early even though
it is the middle of the week.
The cathedral begs forgiveness, promises
to open tomorrow. No reason is given.
At an intersection, two women
ask for directions to the town square.
They only venture a couple of feet
before they consult their phones, are given
the same instructions: Walk down that street.
It’s not like it is a large town.
If this were a Western, there’d be tumbleweeds.
Despite recent warnings of a thunderstorm,
it hasn’t rained in over a month.
Six years ago a 300-year-old bridge
washed away for good. There have been
three floods in seventeen years. The two women
are still looking for the town center, stop
in the middle of the street to look west,
then east. And it’s clear they’ll never find
the center even though all they need to do
is look up. In the square, employees
from a supermarket chain are camped out
in booths. They carry trays of cubed cheese
and melon that smells like cold cuts.
It is too hot for cheese. The city is building
a new wall to fight future flooding.
Does it matter that the shiny metal gates
rest against centuries-old stone?
Back in the town square, a mime on stilts
waves coupons in the faces of passersby,
bends down to gauge their response.
No one accepts the coupons. The supermarket
employees suddenly appear at every side street,
each dressed in a matching red shirt,
ambushing anyone who dares get close,
calling after them: Excuse me. Excuse me.

The Pillow Museum

September 2, 2022.Reading time 7 minutes.

By Claire Bateman

Most people find a trip to the pillow museum so exhausting that afterward they need a long nap to recover from experiencing all the dreams the display items have absorbed from their original sleepers.

Theoretically, anyone could navigate the museum according to taste, steering clear of, for instance, the homicide pillow, the fetish pillow, and the arson pillow, as well as the pillows of Arnold Schoenberg, Charles Manson, and all those dental hygienists and IRS attorneys. Theoretically, one could choose only the pillows of the confectioner, the Olympic surfer, the dolphin-whisperer, and so on, but nobody does this, since it’s common knowledge that every shunned pillow takes offense, vengefully suctioning out a single breath from the visitor’s lifespan as they pass it by on the micro-sleep tour—a tiny, insignificant portion until you start adding up all the individual penalties over the years.

Nevertheless, not only does everyone return frequently, especially when hosting out-of-town guests (the museum is our only tourist attraction), but most of us are employed here as well, sanitizing, repairing, plumping, positioning, and working as docents or gravity-adjusters—there are also the soothers, wakers-and-shakers of visitors, members of the custodial, managerial, and administrative staffs, and the guards who protect the pillows from theft, vandalism, and all possible forms of dishonor.

O Isn’t This Just Easy

September 1, 2022.Reading time 1 minute.

By JC Andrews

Featured Art: Pulse 1.2 by Rachel Ann Hall

The octobered sky. The overarching
evolution of your abdomen. The salutatious
relove we do once we’ve forgiven our
mommas. Let’s go arachnid and eat
our mommas or   ok   we can just
wrap each other in silk. O yes   I am
an aprilfaced king. O yes   I am
a uterus genius. O yes   I bleed
while I walk down Seventh.
O yes & yes & yes
I have made such
a snow of your hands,
an astronomy of your syntax,
an ambulance of your eyes,
and I’ve decided that I
have no issue with meeting
your mother next Tuesday. Wait.
I can wear a green coat like Chalamet
in Little Women or a red tie like
a coach. I should practice my little voice
in my little mirror hi my name is how are you
impressive charming not at all   o yes  afraid

Sneaking Out to Play House with Ana

August 31, 2022.Reading time 4 minutes.

By: JC Andrews

the day gathers up     in a blonde     geometry     and we     drive out
    to turn     phantom on DeSalvo’s dock     because we can     because
DeSalvo went dead     and left his pond unattended     so we come     here
    and watch     the moonback     like maybe     it might turn around
and make us     real to somebody     sometimes I wish     I could throw
    her up     in the air     and watch her     spin forever     she’s like
yawning     during the pledge     and missing     indivisible     or picking
    scabs during     catechism     you see     I am stupid as the weather
when she says     Please     like a field waving itself     into the blade     when
    she rubs     her thumb     in circles     in the middle of my palm     I am
honest to god     adjacent to me or     ajar     there is no halo     like leaving
    yourself     ajar     you become a room     so danced     it thumps violet
or you become ready     for another room to enter     you back     she is
    a room too     asking me     if this is alright     like she can’t see
my face     already decided     under this light     we call our space juice
    because we     drink it     we pray for no spoon     in the persimmon
we sit down scared     like substitute teachers     we learn     how to love
    with one hand     and we scrape our backs     on this wood like     we’re
rubbing off velvet     or making     the muscles in our traps     to fight
    and we know     this house     is a gift     even if     invisibled

Fugitive

August 30, 2022.Reading time 1 minute.

By Karen Pojmann

Featured Art: Looking Back by Madelyn Bartolone

If my heart breaks loose and
darts across a lawn—if,
stopped at crossroads,
my heart pries my ribs apart,
takes wing through the open
car window—if my heart
gets away from me—
help me bring it back.
Walk with me, hedge to hedge,
with a butterfly net,
a baseball glove,
a sauce pan. We’ll crunch
over cicada husks, duck
the sprinklers, race
the coming dusk.
When we spot it, cupped
in a daylily or
tangled in chain link, by then,
relieved and grass-stained,
we’ll be laughing and crying
and the streetlights will be just
starting to sputter above us.

Sometimes Creek

August 29, 2022.Reading time 41 minutes.

By Steve Fox

Featured Art: I Wish I Knew Of by Brooke Ripley

Our move to Halloween Street was one of necessity, not choice. Following the death of my wife, Sylvia, the home we had rented was sold. The new owners gave us nine months to vacate. And this place, situated on a leafy and wealthy street in the town’s eerie historic district, was the only thing available within walking distance of my daughter Claire’s school. So I took it, despite the steep rent commensurate with the austere economic laws of Supply and Desperation.

An energetic and put-together neighbor tells me I will need somewhere between three and four thousand pieces of candy, treated out one piece per kid, as well as gallons of a stiff grog for parents, to get me through the hours-long Halloween night here on Halloween Street. Based on some simple arithmetic and plot-pointing along a mental timeline, starting with the next paycheck, I have just enough pay periods between now and the end of October to buy a total of four thousand pieces of candy. Or eight hundred pieces of candy each payday, all totaling in the end approximately six hundred American dollars. Candy. For one happy motherless night for our only child more than two months hence.

It is barely August.

Tails

August 28, 2022.Reading time 2 minutes.

By William Wenthe

Featured Art: Flow by Rachel Ann Hall

Houses on a bluff; below them, off-limits
to construction, a few acres of watery woods.
A clear simmering of spring water
glazes bright moss and gravel, slows
to a bog, where a marsh wren reveals
its single note. Slow growths of mistletoe
on thick-gnarled limbs of elm and oak.

I’m here with my two wolves—
my daughter and her friend, both twelve,
who’ve tied to their waists lush tails.
They prowl among the folded smells
of leafmold unleashed by winter sun.
They run, they fade behind trees.
From the woods I hear long high howls.

Is it only make-believe? Each day, they feel
an approaching metamorphosis.
They’re at an age for trying things on:
clothes, hair, such baubles that dangle
from pierced ears, language fanged to affront
their parents—whose worst fear remains
the child might be no predator, but prey.

But these two wolves are at play.
Are they too old for this? In Finland,
my daughter tells me, teenage girls
ride stick-horses, in organized events.
It’s like dressage, except the living
and too expensive horse is assumed
into the girl herself. Spine and head convey

the rider’s attentive, upright carriage,
while legs perform the horse’s measured moves.
It’s ignorant to presume an animal
will share a human’s feelings in a human way;
just so, I can’t presume to think I know
the nature of these wolves, or cultivated horses
the Finnish girls become, as if to say

what’s best might just be something else
than human. The houses crowding
the edge of bluffs know nothing
of these changelings, who bark and bay,
wander the unruled ways
of the leftover woods, and in becoming, renounce.
Unless these houses breed them too.

Little Manifesto

August 27, 2022.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Jeffrey Harrison

There is always someone who suggests
that his poems would be far better than yours
if he’d only bothered to write them. What’s more,
he would have handled the whole enterprise
with more grace and aplomb than you ever did
had he chosen to write those poems instead of
making a killing in investment banking.
And yet you keep going, even in the knowledge
that the poems you are writing are not as good
as his poems, the ones he didn’t write . . .

and, for that matter, not even as good as the ones
you didn’t write. “Your poems would be better
if you didn’t write them” is either a Zen koan,
a quip by Yogi Berra, an insult, or just nonsense,
which is why no one says it. I hate the idea
that any poem written down is somehow
inferior to a poem that does not exist.
Yes, plenty of bad poems have been written,
but out of all the poems that have gone
unwritten, there’s not a single one I love.

A Message from Tony Hoagland

August 26, 2022.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Jeffrey Harrison

I got an email from Tony just now
though he’s been dead for a year and a half,
and in the instant before my rational brain
told me it was spam, I felt the thrill
of seeing his name pop up in my inbox,
the dopamine rush that he was writing me
from beyond the grave. And when I clicked
on his name to open the message, the body
of the email consisted only of my first name
followed by an exclamation mark
(as though he was excited to be writing me)
and, under that, a compressed link
in the electric blue that indicated
it was live. My giddy finger slid
the cursor over it, to see what Tony
was sending me—maybe instead of
infecting my computer with malware
that would harvest my data and require me
to pay a huge ransom in cryptocurrency,
the link would take me to a web page
where I could find all the poems
Tony has written since he died.
I paused a moment and thought about
what those poems would be like,
but my imagination failed me. Then
I clicked “delete,” and went into my trash
and deleted the message again,
which made me feel timid and puny,
as though, like D. H. Lawrence
and his snake, I’d missed my chance
with one of the lords of life.

Ode to My Father’s Body

August 22, 2022.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Jeri Theriault
Selected as winner of the 2022 NORward Prize for Poetry by a panel of previous poetry contributors

Featured Art: Lost Moment by Mallory Stowe

I lose my way in the low-note harmonica
of my father’s absence & unfold the map
of his body in the big window of his barbershop

at the corner of Summer
& Gold    where he    slow    stood all-day
poised to conduct    the chorale    clip-clip

of his trade    shears    razor    hot-towel
talc    brush & tonic    Red Sox radio
my father vaguely tidy & distant    not

dissonant. My everyone-knew-him father.
My year-round-bicycle father. My father’s
body at school nights

or Sunday mass    silent    always
silent but singing in the cellar attic
garage & whistling    as he built back-yard

swing-set    lean-to    edged
garden rows    or hosed night after sub-zero
night    the ice rink where I soothed

afternoons    cold & would-be
wild.    His body hunched in the chair
of my mother’s hospital room that time

we thought she would die    thirty years after
they divorced. My father’s corpuscles
& liver    shins & scapula

his semper fi     tough-guy body    his ear
his good eye my self-taught father in the city
of his body my beige & pastel checked-shirt

father in serviceable shoes & trench coat    who left
his copy of Camus’ The Stranger face-down
on the bed in English though his tongue

his lips    his throat    were French.    He left    too
his body    that night    left
what was left of his body    left

his Iwo Jima    his broken birth family
left his untold    his mystery    left me
his daughter    the wilderness

of my own body    that is to say    left me
half-him left the quiet why or who he was
might have been    what he most

loved    so that sometimes    I still walk
the hallways of my father’s body
half the doors gone    half of them still here.

On Throwing Things Away

August 21, 2022.Reading time 40 minutes.

By Amelia Mairead McNally

Featured Art by Erin Dellasega

My cat’s corpse is in my dad’s garage. She died four years ago, November of 2017. There was a tumor somewhere in her brain that pressed outward against one of her eyes quite horribly in the end, according to my dad. I had moved to New York by then, a five-hour drive from his northern New Hampshire home, and could only listen, powerless, to his news over the phone. She did one of those animal things where she grew very sick very fast but refused then to just die, prolonging us all in the anxiety of her suffering and the knowledge that we would, finally, have to choose which day she would go.

In some ways, it was okay—she was old. My parents brought her home to surprise me when I was eight (after we had to condemn our last elderly cat the month before), and I was twenty-three at the time of my dad’s solemn phone call. But there’s something undoubtedly terrible about scooping an animal into a carrier, taking them from their home for the last time, telling them, “It’s okay,” as they panic, like on all the trips to the vet before, but knowing that this time it is not.

He called me again after it was done. He said, “They gave me some options on what to do with her.” Cremation and eventual return of remains in a commemorative urn, which cost money; burial out on their farmland gravesite behind the office, with visitation opportunities; or self-disposal at home.

He took her home.

Winter Solstice

August 20, 2022.Reading time 1 minute.

By Natalie Taylor

Jupiter and Saturn closer than they’ve been since the Middle Ages.

Swinging around to check on the puny humans,
see how we’re coping with famine and war and plagues.

How many drinking from a Dom Perignon fountain,
how many grubbing over gritty water.

A celestial shindig of tilts and orbits
arriving, right on time, 800 years later.

Saturn’s lightning storms create giant clouds of
soot that blacken thunderstorm alleys.

After it falls the span of two and a half earths, soot
solidifies to graphite, then diamonds.

Diamond rain melting to sea.
Jupiter’s million-megawatt aurora escorted

by Io’s 400 volcanoes,
gem-crusted Galilean moons.

Now they’re dancing to the compressed heart of an old star
—a 10 billion-trillion-trillion-carat cosmic diamond

that pulses and rings like a gong.
Maybe not much has changed

since last time they rolled in together.
Trolls still digging for buried treasure

when all the dazzle—methane and crystalized carbon
and hot cores transformed to brilliance—

like the persistence of awe, is above. Look up.

Late, Dark, and Windy

August 19, 2022.Reading time 1 minute.

By Kathleen Lee

Featured Art: Mall Series (3) by Doug MacDowell

After you left the party
someone’s dog picked a fight
with the resident ancient hound
and big human hullabaloo ensued
followed by talk of infectious diseases,
tricks for making perfect piecrust,
the battle of Waterloo. Literature
was avoided (too controversial),
as was real estate (too dull). The Sanskrit scholar
refused to recite a poem we yearned to hear
called Remembrance of Songs of the Future.
Everyone wanted to know the truth
about you so I spun one tale after another
about lost items, Cochabamba
(remember the awful soup we ate every single day?),
and the exigencies of soul retrieval.
They toasted your future with pretentious cocktails
while I sat on my heart to keep it quiet.
Without you, my partner in all things stealthy,
I couldn’t slip away early.
Then it was late, dark and windy.
I stepped outside to gaze into the vastness
overhead and the cosmos was as it ever is—
persistent and forgettable.

Sad As Is

August 18, 2022.Reading time 1 minute.

By Kathleen Lee

I’m trying to nap for ten minutes
before swimming laps when two voices

waver as if in a dream. If you died today
we could know everywhere you lived from your bones.

Because I am alert to death, I listen—
I tend to believe in the neuroplasticity of the human brain

to adapt—and half-open my eyes to see
two dudes in beards and surf shorts on a bench

poolside. It’s February. There isn’t surf
within 2,000 miles and even if what they say is true,

they make it sound like bullshit. Still, dread
winks at me as if it has spotted my weakness:

insufficient neuroplasticity. I’m not adapting!
Where’s Adam? Family funeral.

A lozenge of silence dissolves in the room.
He’s a sad boy as is. I know the world

is not ever about me but here I am on a chaise longue
in a too-warm room, the air redolent of chlorine,

while a couple of idle chatty dudes seem,
I’m sorry to admit, to be speaking to me

in an intimate way, and I’m helplessly listening
because what else am I to do with myself inside time?

Assimilation

August 17, 2022.Reading time 1 minute.

By Kelly Rowe

Featured Art: In Remembrance Of by Brooke Ripley

Turku, 1962

Out the window of the tram
stone buildings, cobblestone streets,

the sitter handed back the apple
core for me to eat.

Now, I know her children
went hungry in the war;

then, I understood nothing;
I was four.

But sixty years on, I remember
her hiss—“finish it!”

And how the seeds and stem
caught in my throat,

how I coughed, how I choked,
how I sat silent,

looking out at the snow
in triumph.

A Good Thing Going

August 16, 2022.Reading time 48 minutes.

By Marguerite Alley

Sitting at a corner table on the patio of a Lebanese restaurant, I watched Hank Nguyen chew viciously on a hangnail until a sliver of skin came loose. A flash of blood appeared on his teeth before it was wiped away with a brisk dart of his tongue. “You are the worst kind of tourist,” he said, with an elaborate eye roll.

I was working through a mouthful of flatbread and hummus. “I just don’t think it looks that tall.”

Behind him the Burj Khalifa rose into the night sky, glittering intermittently, so large that I had to roll my neck back to behold it. The action reduced it to parts, made it digestible and no longer grand. This was the Dubai Mall, and I knew that if I had marveled at what lay around me—the swarms of tourists, the extravagant fountain show every half hour, the way everything gleamed in the perfect sharpness of fluorescent light—Hank would have mocked me for that, too.

“You’re impossible to please, Berenice,” Hank said. “I take you to the center of the world and it’s not enough.”

“Okay, okay, I have an idea,” I said. “What if they made it taller?”

Reading Li Bai During Social Distancing

August 15, 2022.Reading time 1 minute.

By Jenna Le

Featured Art: Peony – side yard by Kayla Holdgreve

In Tang verse classics, lonely wives rebuff
the orioles that flirt amidst their flowers;
they’d rather climb steep observation towers
and, wrapped in tragic shawls atop a bluff,
command a view of miles on miles of rough
terrain uncrossed by human forms for hours
than lean into the softness of spring showers,
breezes, birdsong, and such sensual stuff.
Or so the male bards of the Tang portrayed them
when writing verses in a female voice;
I cannot blame them for it. Simple boys,
they merely wanted someone back at home
to miss them in their absence, to upbraid them
for being gone, to love them through a poem.

Dollhouse

August 14, 2022.Reading time 8 minutes.

By Aneeqa Mazhar Wattoo

Walking around in Central London
I find myself even browner than I remember
feeling when I lived there three years ago
before returning to Lahore

                                                            [and her kind shisham trees
                                                            and the unkind eyes of strangers
                                                            that make my eyes heavy with the second
                                                            pair of eyelashes that grow over the first as I
                                                            navigate her narrow sidewalks]

but London looks exactly the same—
everyone seems hurried, busy
rushing to someplace else, someplace better
where suddenly, violently
like snakes shedding off their skins
they will blossom into
finer versions
of themselves.

Now at a roadside café
I try to gather my
self but I cannot
feel anything.

Instead, I watch myself from a distance—an object clad in
red pants, practical blue Toms, and wristwatch
with a cluster of crystals around the dial

and I wonder
how the faint London sunshine
manages to erase me
so efficiently, so completely
every time

until one of those absurd motorbike rickshaws targeting tourists
races by and the notes of a loud Bollywood song slash the air
and I feel sudden, improbable delight, recognizing in the sound
something I cannot name, but which turns me briefly into
some
body

and it slides into me
the way a ray of sunshine slides perfectly, angularly
into the dark patch on a windowpane

that all of London is a dollhouse
and I am a doll in the dollhouse—
a tiny object in the gloved hands
of a woman in a factory, hunched over an assembly line

                                                            [now she wipes away the sweat on her forehead,
                                                            now she imperceptibly stretches, the muscle in
                                                            her back relaxes by a tiny degree
                                                            and the ache recedes for a bit]

she glues me to one of the
miniature sidewalks
and I sit there
forever afterward
            my wristwatch gleaming
            my new Nikes shining
            sipping a cup of tea
            with petite,
            manicured hands.

Allegory, NJ

August 13, 2022.Reading time 4 minutes.

By Julian Koslow

Looking back, perhaps I should have known—
I mean, I had a crossing guard named Hope,
and my third-grade teacher was
Mrs. Schoolman—that life in Allegory
was not as it seemed.

But of course in childhood the marvelous
will greet you as the given,
and the habitus of your natal genre
accommodates even the extraordinary
without interpretation:

The lady on the white mule, trotting through town
followed by a dwarf carrying her purse,
certainly inspired her share of wonder
among the seventh-grade boys out for bagels
at the Jewish Deli. And the knight seen
galumphing after a beast with a thousand tongues
(very Monty Python) prompted serious
concerns among local parents, even
an emergency assembly with the police
at Everyman High. But no one ever thought
to call in the exegetes.

If, in grammar school, we suspected
the gym teacher (Coach Lust, an amateur
taxidermist) and the art teacher (Ms. Seeley,
a talking paintbrush) were having an affair,
we didn’t think to say, “Aha,
the marriage of soul and body!”
We just wondered what they were up to
in the custodian’s closet.

And when the snow fell, it was white
as regular snow, sparkling just as cold
and diamond-bright in the sun. That it
spelled out the word INNOCENCE
in the parking lot of the municipal building,
made no difference to us as we threw
snowballs, built igloos, went sledding,
and peed our steaming names in gold
behind the library.

In high school, my friend Boredom and I
spent weekend nights wandering the town,
keeping clear of Idleness and Vice
who were always hanging around
the Duck Pond of Despair, smoking weed
and listening to The Dead. We roamed
the satyr-haunted golf course and the
foundling-littered park looking for
something to happen to us that we
couldn’t explain. But adventure
in Allegory seemed in short supply.

So when we got tired of killing Time
(even in Allegory, a victimless crime)
we’d head to Music’s house and hang out,
listening to records, poring over lyric sheets
and album covers, pondering the mysteries
of life and death, love and sex, Aqualung
and Stairway. Later we confirmed our
insights by telephone, which was otherwise
useless except for getting busy signals
from the universe and silence
from unrequited crushes, which, in Allegory
felt like having your whole body
stuffed in a pressure cuff.

And if you fell in love it meant
tumbling down a heart-shaped well,
the result of not watching your step
when AMOR walked by in a bright red sash
and silver crown, with a face that no
two victims ever described the same
(and our sketch artists could only
draw visions anyway).

From the bottom of the well, you’d watch
the patch of sky above, an eye
opening and closing, going from day
to night and back to day.

And once they’d pulled you back up,
blinking in the literal sun,

nothing was ever the same again.

Opportunity

August 12, 2022.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Robert Wood Lynn

Featured Art: Insomnia by Madelyn Bartolone

There would be more mornings, more
dark pink of sun through closed eyelids.
More people rolling over to check
that the other was still there. The day they left
the rover alone on Mars, most didn’t read
the news and most of those who did
didn’t read about the rover—a wandering
machine supposed to last for only ninety days.
But ninety days passed and still there were more
mornings. People continued to wake up
startled, to churn their ways through the covers
to find someone. Some never did, in beds too big
or apartments too small. There were more
mornings for the rover too—thousands more—
until everyone who wasn’t a computer
lost count, until the rover made mornings
the wrong metric altogether. Back then,

those thousand days ago, you’d wake up
grasping for me in a panic that felt new
each time. Morning always the same dark pink
that Mars looks in that selfie the rover took
just before it stopped responding.
I’m sorry, I love you always
the first things you’d say aloud
until I stopped hearing the comma.
Not something you needed me to know
so much as a ping sent to a wandering
machine worlds away, still listening
for who knows how long.

Listen

August 11, 2022.Reading time 45 minutes.

By Pamela Gullard

Featured Art by Mallory Stowe

The day after Marta Holmen’s older sister Iggy called to say she was coming for a visit, Marta cleaned her small house overlooking the historic Santa Barbara library. She washed the kitchen and bath towels in case one of them was stale or dusty, cleaned up stacks of work files on the dining room table, scrubbed the kitchen floor twice, and bought a new lamp from Dorman’s for the guest bedroom. Marta hadn’t seen her sister in seven years. Iggy, a certified, well-tested genius, was hard to reach or predict. Maybe you said the wrong thing; you’d never know. Iggy would frown and leave the room. Marta was now thirty-four, already a respected attorney who could guide her clients through an intricate divorce. Her sister brought her back to being a kid caught up short and tongue-tied.

Marta brought her guitar out of her bedroom and propped it in the corner of the kitchen so Iggy would see it. See she was learning something new.

What I Could Not Take

August 10, 2022.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Erin Redfern

I didn’t sneak through a side door. I didn’t leave a note.
I did it so fast that, had you been next to me in his marble kitchen,
you would have thought I was still there.

When I left the abuser—I will not call him mine—
I switched a lens. I saw what he did. The last was a little thing,
his making fun of how I wanted to call my dad. A misstep. I thought it,

and clocks remembered their ticking, windows their view.
When I left, I did not take my hairbrush or work shoes
or the green girl I’d been. I did not take

the rabbit peeing down the sides of her cage
because the litter box full of shavings
was the only soft place she had to rest.

And I did not take his nine-year-old in skating skirts,
poking her cavities with a toothpick at breakfast
while no one ever called a dentist—girl so used

to being in his bed I had to lock the door against her.
What I could not take, I left. And woke, walking
between railroad tracks over an open plain,

the sleepers turning to salt as I stepped, a clean wind filling
the raised pillar of my body.
I was not good, or pure; I lived.