How Blank an Eye? Seeing and Overlooking Nature in Coleridge’s “Dejection: An Ode”

July 20, 2022.Reading time 15 minutes.

By Matthew VanWinkle

While contemplating an Italian sunset in 1822, Byron couldn’t resist getting in a dig at his friend Shelley’s affection for the previous generation’s poetry: “Where is the green your Laker talks such fustian about? . . . Who ever saw a green sky?”¹ The Laker in question is Samuel Taylor Coleridge; the meteorological observation drawing Byron’s ire occurs in “Dejection: An Ode” (1817), Coleridge’s anguished exploration of a damaged response to the natural world and the implications of this damage for his poetic vocation. It’s tempting to attribute Byron’s objection to the zest he takes in stirring things up generally, or to his intermittently vehement distaste for the Lake School of Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey specifically. Yet Byron’s snarkiness on this point is far from idiosyncratic. Romantic era poetry frequently and famously evokes Nature with a capital N, but these evocations sometimes lead a reader to wonder if the devotion to the big picture comes at the expense of acute observation. More pointedly, the big picture seems less a landscape with a life of its own and more a portrait of the artist’s own ambitions. Nature is unmistakably present, even prominent, in romantic era poems, but what, or who, is it there for?

Coleridge’s ode presents a range of possible answers to this question. At the very least, the green sky in “Dejection” suggests a considerable degree of attention to the speaker’s surroundings. That sort of chromatic shift can occasionally precede especially severe weather, and the poem begins with the anticipation of an impending storm. Coleridge’s awareness of the phenomenon (perhaps rarer in his day than in an era wrenched by climate change) attests to the sustained cultivation of his local knowledge. On this occasion, however, his awareness leads neither to an appreciation of the celestial palette nor to a self-congratulation on the speaker’s eco-aesthetic refinement:

Reflections in Lake District Mist

July 19, 2022.Reading time 11 minutes.

By Alycia Pirmohamed

At an event I once attended titled “Landscape and Literary Culture,” Aimee Nezhukumatathil said something along the lines of, “The trees don’t ask you where you’re from.”

Lately, I’ve been asking myself why I rarely imagine my body, a brown woman’s body, moving through the natural world. It makes me wonder what I have internalized about ecology, about the borders between “natural” and “urban.” About access to green spaces and the bodies that are perceived as belonging within them.

It makes me wonder about what it means to “belong” at all. I think of the ocean I have crossed to arrive at my current home in the U.K. The ocean crossings of my ancestors who migrated under colonial rule. The great sea of separation, the great sea of coming together. All the distances my poetry has traveled, distances seen and unseen, and all the imaginations I have metaphorized to crack through the borders.

Poetry as a Lakeside Trailer Park

July 18, 2022.Reading time 6 minutes.

By Tina Mozelle Braziel

Featured Art: Silk Snapper Wild USA, $14.99/lb by Rachel Ann Hall

1.
Poetry is a trailer park on a lake that isn’t really a lake but a dammed river and not on the main channel but along a slough, a fraying edge of a body of water that draws some of us to buy a double-wide, rent a lot, build a pier, and dock a boat in the marina.

The dam “lets the water out” each winter, a phrase conjuring a bathtub whose pulled plug leaves a dirty trickle down the middle. This is a far cry from the face of the deep where light, sky, land, and creatures were spoken into being, yet even such a slough is mysterious, elemental, germinal.

2.
Because of Larry Levis, I think of poetry as a lakeside trailer park.

He says in “Some Notes on the Gazer Within” to “think of poems as . . . landscapes . . . refer to them by the virtue of their places.” I see the virtue of orienting each home and resident, human or mallard or frog or muskrat, toward water.

Summer Online Edition

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

To Save a Life

May 19, 2022.Reading time 3 minutes.

Co-Winner of the Movable / New Ohio Review Writing Contest

by Kari Gunter-Seymour

Featured Art: Aperture, by John Schriner

We did what we could,
hid the bottles, drove what
was left of him deep
into the yawning hollow,
built a campfire, drank water
from a long-handled gourd,
a galvanized bucket.

We set up tents for triage,
counted his breaths, worried
over irregular heartbeats,
sweats, persistent vomiting,
his jacked up adrenal system.

We waited. Listened for a canvas
zipper in the night, each long slow
pull a call to duty, our legs folding
over duct taped camp stools,
tucked tight around the fire,
his gut-punch stories, stenched
in blood and munitions,
overpowering the woodsmoke’s
curling carbons.

Home Fires

May 18, 2022.Reading time 46 minutes.

By Anne Kenner

I didn’t want to live on Sonoma Mountain. I was busy in San Francisco, with my job and my children, our friends and activities. Cities had always been my preferred environment; I like the noise and jostling crowds. But Jim needed more room and fewer people, country vistas and wide-open spaces. He wanted privacy and verdure, bike paths and hiking trails. So I agreed to look for them with him, first in Carmel Valley and finally, one afternoon, by myself in Sonoma county.

The real estate agent selected a few houses that fit our careful budget, and pointed to the first on a map, three miles up Sonoma Mountain from the valley floor.

“That one,” I said, “is too remote.”

“Don’t worry,” she assured me, “we won’t stay long.”

Triage

May 17, 2022.Reading time 4 minutes.

By Lance Larsen

Featured Art: Fresh Air, by John Schriner

My job is to mow. My job is to coax the prairie
around my mother-in-law’s house into green
chaos, then decapitate it on Friday till it looks
like carpet. My other job is to say dang
it’s hot and enter the kitchen and sip juice
and nuzzle my beloved at the stove when her
mother’s back is turned—an eighty-seven-year-old
back but still super quick. My beloved
has her own job—open and close the fridge,
push me away, and keep some things
cold like cucumbers and Gouda and yogurt,
and others hot like caramelized onions
and yesterday’s sweet and sour, and pretend
her mother’s Alzheimer’s is a shrine we’ll visit
someday like the Taj Mahal and not daily triage.
I still have other jobs, like having cancer cells
burned from my face at 3:00. Or is it 3:30?
I check my phone. Oh good, 3:30, more time
to decapitate the prairie and sip juice
and maybe swim slippery laps at the rec center.

Anthropologist of the Apocalypse

May 15, 2022.Reading time 32 minutes.

By Samantha Krause

Featured Art: Janoski (Deconstructed), by John Schriner

Welcome to the museum of secondhand savings. The journey starts like this: when something is donated to The Thrift Store, the attendants at the store decide whether to sell it there or send it to my department to sell online. In each of the 13 stores in our district, there is a list of items that are always to be sent to us. We get all the jewelry, every musical instrument, any expensive-looking art, all video games, computers, clothes with tags over $75. All brand-name purses, every vinyl record, typewriters from certain years and countries. American Girl Dolls, vintage Barbies, Pokémon and Yu-Gi-Oh! and baseball cards. Stamp collections. Fur coats. LEGOs. Cameras, digital and film. It goes on.

The Natural World

May 14, 2022.Reading time 1 minute.

by Chris Crockett

Featured Art: Cosmic Eye, by John Schriner

The moon rises
to the left of the kitchen sink.

I go outside to check on
the world’s artistry:

Moths and stars;
bats whose blind ping-pings

pinpoint insects,
accurate as an adding machine.

Horses are head down in the soup
of flooded grass fields;

All day long
they solve their hunger.

Everything partners and trades
nutrients. Billions

unseen in the black roots.
Inaudible hum.

My fingers keep time
to a barely comprehended

background beat.

Buried Fruit

May 13, 2022.Reading time 59 minutes.

by Robert Stothart

Featured Art: Generations, by John Schriner

…I am re-begot
Of absence, darknesse…
Things which are not.
—John Donne

Now they’re standin’ in a rusty row all empty
And the L & N don’t stop here anymore.
—Johnny Cash

Winter’s first fuel came cheap, scrap wood, free for the taking, piled along the road next to the sawmill half a mile back toward town from my house. Lying in bed—borrowed mattress on a patched linoleum floor—I listened to wood fires pop and snap taking night chill off my two rooms. Light from the yellow flames pierced through slots in the iron stove’s iron door and danced in reflection across the inside of my front window.

In September, Mother Annie told me to go get wood at the sawmill. I had no running water, only a well with a handpump and an outhouse at the place I rented. I had electricity and cooked on a hotplate. The potbellied stove stood cold in the center of my front room for two months.

Partition

May 12, 2022.Reading time 2 minutes.

by Carolina Hotchandani

Featured Art: Fissure, by John Schriner

In your version of the story, people butter their fingers

with notions of God, splitting India into a smaller India,

a new Pakistan. The way a single roti’s dough

is pulled apart, the new spheres, rolled in the palms,

then flattened. The idea of God—the destroyer of human bonds,

you will say in the diatribe I know well—the reason for new

borders, new pain to sprout on either side of a dividing line.

You’ll go on. I’ll picture the edges of your words blurring

to a hum as I think of how to wrest your rant from you.

A rolling pin barrels over dough, widens the soft disc,

makes it fine. You are fragile. Like a story that stretches

belief. Like a nation. Like a thin disc of dough that sticks

to a surface, tearing when it’s peeled back. I don’t know

how to part the story from the person and keep the person.

Culprit

May 11, 2022.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Carolina Hotchandani

Featured Art: Hello, Hello, by John Schriner

As you finish your morning cup of tea,
an identity thief rings.

You answer.

Sleep wraps loosely around your mind
like the flannel robe you’re still wearing.

It’s almost noon.

The television is on
but muted.

On the screen, Lieutenant Columbo’s mouth moves
as he pesters his prime suspect.
Soon, he’ll reveal how the murderer
murdered the murdered.

Ahhh, you say to the voice on the phone
that dubs over the episode’s denouement:

Tell me the story behind your name.
So you do.
Can you spell it for me?
So you enunciate:
M as in “money” — A — N as in “Nancy” — O — H . . .
till all the letters of your name go down
into the small holes of the phone.

You were born in India before Partition?
Those were hard times.

When the voice solicits your social security number,
you want to know why,
but the logic you’re offered makes sense:
there’s money to be claimed
by survivors of arduous times.

Columbo lights his cigar.
The murderer’s exposed, and the credits are rolling.

The end is not surprising; we’ve known it from the start.

We won’t learn who trafficked in your memories,
committing this crime.
You aren’t the best witness,
forgetful these days.
But you watch and rewatch your favorite TV sleuth
intuit the culprit, apprehend the truth.

12th and McGraw

May 10, 2022.Reading time 49 minutes.

By Hillary Behrman

Featured Art: Epidermis, by John Schriner

I moved fast always hoping to slip into the house and up to my room unnoticed. I made it to the first landing of the wide staircase before I heard the pop pop and grind and looked up. My little brother, Alex, was perched above me, kneeling on the long cushioned window seat. His chicken-wing shoulder blades stuck out on either side of his old fashioned undershirt. The afternoon light, filtered through the two-story stained glass window, hit his pale skin and formed a glowing checkerboard of red, yellow and green patches all across the back of his shorn head and bent neck. He gripped the plastic handle of a large Phillips-head screwdriver with both hands, pumping it like a tiny jackhammer straight out from his concave chest, shattering square after square of swirly rainbow glass. He must have been at it for a while, because by the time I reached him the first three rows of bread-slice sized panes were gone.

My brother was a watchful, wary sort of kid, circumspect in all his actions by the age of six in a way I still can’t manage in my thirties. I gave him a quick once over. I didn’t see any blood, so I left him to it. The snap crackle pop of each new shattered pane followed me up the stairs to the next landing and down the long hallway to my room. I wasn’t an idiot or monster. I was fourteen. I got it, Alex’s desire to expose that house to the elements, chip away at its candy colored Victorian shell.

I kept listening until the sounds of Alex’s demolition project stopped. The silence freaked me out way more than his vandalism. I don’t know why. I should have been thinking about broken glass and the paper-thin flesh on the undersides of his skinny wrists all along. But I wasn’t. He had seemed so preternaturally competent back then. I don’t know why I finally had the sense to sprint back down the hall. Alex was curled up on the window seat, his cheek pressed into bits of colored glass. I don’t know why there wasn’t more blood, why the cuts weren’t deeper. I scooped him up and carried him up the stairs. He stayed limp and floppy until I reached the third floor, where he wrapped his legs tight around my waist.

Bumping Around

May 9, 2022.Reading time 1 minute.

by Eileen Pettycrew

Featured Art: Vaider, by John Schriner

Then I saw a man sheltering from the rain
inside a concrete circle meant to be
a work of art. I didn’t want to think
he was homeless, just a commuter waiting
for the light rail. Forgive me,
I’ve seen trash spilling from hillsides,
tents popping up like mushrooms in the dark.
Mattresses, ripped tarps, lamps, rugs,
metal and plastic twisted into a pile
reaching the top of a broken-down RV.
Last week I saw a flag flying at half-staff
after another mass shooting,
and underneath the flag, an electronic billboard
that said Walk Away from Joint Pain.
Forgive me for thinking it was a signal
to drag my sorry body up and over the wind,
to rise like vapor, like water cycling
around the earth, sky to land and back again,
one big circle that never ends.
Let me feel a little love for everything.
The steaming pile of wood chips, the barren
stumps, the grove of trees still bearing
open wounds from February’s ice storm.
The days I shivered in a cold house,
bumping around in the dark with a flashlight,
hoping the batteries would last.

The Year After Jeff

May 8, 2022.Reading time 46 minutes.

By Andrew Polhamus

February

The evening after Jeff hangs himself my friends and I meet up at Stephen and Danny’s new house. We converge in a neighborhood of brick rowhouses and form a circle of denim in a tired living room. There are six or eight of us, not here to sit vigil, but for lack of better ideas and a nagging feeling that we shouldn’t be alone. We speak in the circular logic of boys, too old to be thinking this way by our mid-twenties, but too inexperienced to handle it any better.

“He could’ve called me,” says Kurt, who is taller and more handsome than the rest of us and was closer to Jeffthan anyone. I’m annoyed with myself for noticing how nicely Kurt’s good looks carry grief, turning him from a jock in a t-shirt emblazoned with the name of a hardcore band into something romantic and world-weary.

“He always used to call me,” Kurt says.

“He didn’t call you because he didn’t want to,” I say. “It wasn’t you.”

“It wasn’t that he didn’t want to,” Michael says. “He just didn’t.”

“We don’t know what he wanted.”

“Well, we know he made up his mind.”

“I think we have bed bugs,” Danny says, his heavy Italian brows furrowing. The conversation drifts to pest control for a while.

Dear Austin,

May 7, 2022.Reading time 1 minute.

By Brian Builta

A year after your death we keep receiving college brochures
telling you how nicely you’d fit at certain institutions, under a
pine I guess, or next to a Doric column. The earth would bear
you up. In youth group one of the leaders reads about Jesus
raising Lazarus from death. Lazarus’ sister says to Jesus, If you
had been here, my brother would not have died. Your sister leans over,
says Same. She may be pissed for some time. Sometimes we
think of you as Judas, hanging there, unused coins scattered at
your feet. For a minute it helped to think that God also lost
His son, but then, you know, the resurrection. I’ve been
assured by Fr. Larry Richards you are not in hell. Something
about full consent of the will. The way you made your grandma
heave, though, I’m not so sure. Still, I said a few hundred
thousand Divine Mercy Chaplets for you, so by now you
should be on some beach in Costa Rica blowing through a
palm toward a new day, rising.

If

May 6, 2022.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Marie-Claire Bancquart
Translated from French by Claire Eder and Marie Moulin-Salles

We had a ribbon of words to say
like the machines with their coffers of signs
prêt-à-porter.

We would have finished going over them.

Returned to the first ones
we would pronounce them with our renewed body.

Dead horses climb back up the trails.

Silence.

They would carry us finally toward
our solemn communion with objects.

Featured Art: Eldridge, by John Schriner

Evergreen Oak

May 5, 2022.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Marie-Claire Bancquart
Translated from French by Claire Eder and Marie Moulin-Salles

Standing before these thick trunks that sow our wrinkles
in windbreak

standing before these leaves that persist
in the fuzzy gray-green of a caterpillar
complementary to our bloods

I uprise a contradictory forest

A tree
where the cool flow of water would saturate the sap
with a transience that we would find habitable.

I invent a species:
the short-lived live oak
so pleasing to say, it must exist somewhere.

Margins

May 5, 2022.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Marie-Claire Bancquart
Translated from French by Claire Eder and Marie Moulin-Salles

Eating the apple
I eat enigma
and I glimpse us in the mirror the apple and me
inaccurate and profound.

Something trembles inside us with mouths
of saps and metals.

Long trees
go out from us toward the suburbs of the horizon.

Is it us
at the center?

Or the center of the drift?

Featured Art: Reflection, by John Schriner

Mass

May 3, 2022.Reading time 1 minute.

By Jeff Tigchelaar

1. Jana, in for a mammogram

So they give you these special shirts:
easy-open fronts.
Post procedure they herd you
into this room where others in the same boat
and shirt
must sit
and wait.
I walk in say Oh how embarrassing
we’re all wearing the same top
to no response. The TV’s tuned
to daytime talk, nobody watching. I offer
to change the channel or turn it off.
No takers. A few seconds later: “Up next!
How one woman got the news that would
change her life forever: ‘I found out
I had breast cancer!’” Then someone
says Yeah no we’re shutting that off
and gets up and does the deed.
A minute later this same woman gets
her results. And they were
good. Very good.
They were perfect.
And she jumped, whooped, pumped her fists
said Praise Sweet Jesus and her boobs
popped right out of that special shirt

When she calls me and confirms it it’s

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

By Jeff Tigchelaar

not a shock but still
we’d had that three percent
chance that it wasn’t
still I leave work
run home and hug her
before we tell the kids
before we decide to just
get in the minivan
and go see LEGO Batman
in the theater downtown
where we laugh as much as
or more than the kids
one review called it
relentlessly frantically
funny and it is
LEGO Batman’s got a 9-pack of abs
Jana’s got her phone on her lap
when it lights up she sneaks off and takes the call

To the Israeli Soldier—

May 3, 2022.Reading time 13 minutes.

By Emily Franklin

Featured Art: Sur La Plage, by John Schriner

I believe it’s possible to know someone’s name and have them be a stranger. I know you are Ihran, but in this world of being able to locate anyone (elementary school bully, heartbreaker, former colleague), I cannot find you. There’s the cruelty of having you Un-Googleable and also the relief of you receding in the rearview mirror of my past.

France. Summer, 1988. I’m an American studying in Villefranche-sur-Mer; a teenager unmoored, supposedly learning to be more fluent in French, but really gathering intel—where to buy oversized icy beer down the hill in the dark, a shack where the old French men gather in stained overalls and barely register me—seventeen and desperate to keep from being fully seen. I tuck my face behind a swathe of blonde hair and order beers—ten francs each—for me and the friends I’ve made. Anandi is Canadian-Indian, Caroline is Korean-American, Everly is from the American South with the drawl to prove it. I’m just blue-eyed and blonde, a master at sourcing beer or soft cheese or finding the hidden beach where we wind up the following day.

Lonely, Lucky, Brave

May 3, 2022.Reading time 44 minutes.

By Jillian Jackson

When I hit on the scratch ticket I was at Castle Island with Hannah. We used to go there every Friday. After Hannah finished walking dogs and I finished up my shift at the café, we liked to pack a lunch and watch the planes flying into Logan airport. We always ate turkey sandwiches that I stole from the café and drank wine out of cans. We finished a family-sized bag of salt and vinegar chips.

That afternoon Hannah was wearing my favorite cardigan, a Good Will find, pink and covered in sparkles. She had on pink lipstick that had smudged a little bit on her bottom lip. We were watching the planes, our bare feet in the cold sand. It was April and we were glad we could sit there without our jackets on, even though we were a little cold when the wind picked up.

“It’s time,” Hannah said. She reached into her bag and dug out the tickets. She dealt them like cards at a poker match, back and forth, one and one. All ten.

Ice Cream

May 1, 2022.Reading time 29 minutes.

Co-winner of the Movable / New Ohio Review Writing Contest

By Kandi Workman

Featured Art: He’s Got the Works, by John Schriner

“Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer.” – Simone Weil

1
“Drop ’em dead like a dealer.”

“What’s that mean?” I asked.

He turned his slim face away from me, looked toward the muddy Elk River flowing with ease, shifted himself around on the cement ledge, kicking his dangling legs back and forth, bouncing rubber heels off the wall. We’d been sitting there for a while, talking, enjoying the late afternoon in early Spring. In the low light from the sun, the black-lined ice cream cone tattoo on the right side of his face, high on his cheek bone, just under his eye, stood out. I sometimes forget it’s there.

“Drop ‘em dead. That’s when your sales go up. It’s really fucked up. Addicts find out your shit killed somebody, they want your stuff. That’s just how it works.”

What We Did at the End of the World

April 30, 2022.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Sunni Brown Wilkinson

We played charades to words we’d forgotten. We made a fire of them with our hands.
We wrote songs on the piano, gave them names like “Fox and Mouse” and “Lightning Chase.”
We watched our parakeets dance in front of their tiny yellow-framed mirror.
We watched them sleep, three on a perch, with their quick beaks tucked in.
We made bread. The top cracked open and we peeled it back and spread butter on
and ate it. We didn’t wear shoes. We wrapped ourselves in scarves.
We opened birthday cards to listen to the music hiding
behind the plastic button. We opened and closed, opened and closed until the songs grew tinny.
We gathered snail shells from the garden. 47. We saw one naked at the base of the daisies.
We made music with ice and water and glasses. We hummed under the covers at night.
We waved tree branches like arms. We waved at the stars. We waved at our silent neighbors.
We taped song lyrics to doors. We swept the fuzz from the rugs
into piles of gray hair. We lifted them carefully when they huddled together like a nest.
We listened at the door of an uncracked egg.
We watched the quail scurry across the street, that one feather on their heads quivering
in the wind like the feathers of great ladies in the movies we watched at night.
We dreamed of the sea untangling its wide blue braids.
We opened our mouths in the morning and salt leaked out.
We called each other dear and laughed at words like rudbeckia. We planted
rudbeckia. We danced like it. We wore yellow too.
Just before we flew away, we were mirrors. That deep. That true.

A Mind at Home With Itself

March 30, 2022.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Marcia LeBeau

My brain is always complaining as it crawls toward
El Dorado, eyes upturned waiting for a lightning storm
to stun it speechless. But the sky never claps

open and there is no silence. Its knees bleeding,
mouth running, my brain doesn’t hear the alarm go off
in the morning, forgets to cancel its gym membership

even though it stopped going years ago. I have no choice
but to ignore my brain. Walk to the other side
of the street when I see it. Stop answering its whiny

voicemails. I have a vision during a massage of my brain
glistening like raw hamburger meat on the pavement
below a flashing motel sign. The meat turns

to blue glitter slime the neighborhood kids
sell for fifty cents a bag that smells like cotton candy.
I steal a bag because it’s my brain, after all, and toss it

on the kitchen counter. My brain is petrified I’m going
to throw it away and begs for mercy. I pick it up,
slap it on the table, pound it, then ooze it between

my fingers. It feels smooth and cold and reassuring. I knead it
a little longer before I throw it in the trash. My hands
are stained blue, glitter flecks my clothes, but finally, silence.

A Covered Dish

March 29, 2022.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Katie Condon

Instead of attending
The End of Semester Holiday Potluck,
where Kimberly will hold forth
about the unmatched dexterity
of her cat and Jim will call together
his congregation by the hors d’oeuvres
to virtue signal about virtue signaling,
I will stay at home and bleach my mustache
and drink a dirty gin martini and read
the scene in The Corrections where Chip
throws cocktail parties for the academic elite
and I will laugh at them as Franzen intended
and you will laugh at me for reading Franzen
because no one is supposed to like Franzen
except in secret and to bring up Franzen
in conversation would be social suicide
at The End of Semester Holiday Potluck
where now, I presume, Kevin is misquoting
Nietzsche to talk about his sex life and Camille,
who up until this point has said nothing,
says nothing still, raising an eyebrow
with indecipherable anger because Kevin
is just another self-absorbed academic
who got his degrees thanks to grade inflation
in the early 2000s and has made a career
out of complaints and well-timed jokes,
which is more than I can say for myself
whose career is made merely of words
strung together in a clever order, saying
nothing much other than I am happy
I am not at The End of Semester Holiday Potluck
but that if I were I would find a way
to kidnap the cat, poor thing, quarantined
in the bedroom, forced to listen to the muffled
noise of a whole people who forgot about
the night outside, its utter size.

Poem in the Romantic Tradition by American Adult

March 28, 2022.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Katie Condon

Featured Art: Peach Bloom by Alice Pike Barney

Every morning, I want sex.
Historically, men only give it to me
at night, after we’ve spent the better part

of the evening in the safety of the neon-bruised
dark of an American Sports Bar
that serves eighty kinds of mayonnaise.

In the morning, when I want sex,
I look out at the garden alive despite the frost.
Only gardens have a language

for light that spreads itself across the lawn
like marigolds or molten gold, like footage
of a wildfire with the sound off.

I drive down the highway and am
surrounded by language so American:

Gilded Dildos! Real Gold!
High Fashion Sweatpants Sold Here!

I try to pray, but can’t.
This is my sickness.
I am an American Adult.

Does light have sex
or is light sex?

is something I’d like to learn
while I’m still aboveground.

I hate our American language.
We call our most holy ceremony:
fuck bone nookie cram it in your ass!

Meanwhile, in silence, on fallen logs
the lichen makes ecstatic love to itself,
not to dawn’s wide-eyed dew.

Once upon a time I wanted
to be a viaduct when I grew up
or a lawn, well-kept and wantless.

I know now what Wordsworth couldn’t:

with my mouth on a house-sized
plastic road-side peach I chant,
What I desire this world cannot provide.

Befuddled

March 27, 2022.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Kim Farrar

I don’t speak Cantonese
or Mandarin, and she spoke
little English, yet kindly
explained each scroll
adorning the stairwell:
This one happiness. This fortune.
This family. Then she paused,
slightly panicked, and rushed
to her register for a stashed index card.
The creases were soft as fur
from many foldings, and printed
there in all-caps was BEFUDDLED.

This one befuddled.
Our heads cocked in doubt.
Did she mean it befuddled her
or the scroll signified befuddlement?
How had that peculiar word
landed here? What seas had it crossed,
what deserts, to be inked on a card
in the palm of her hand
in Flushing, New York?
Perhaps she copied it
from a battered phrase book,
or when she asked a bilingual friend
he said, I’m befuddled,
and she had him spell it out.

The scroll had six prawns—
four paddling in one direction,
with two turning left—
maybe it meant befuddled after all,
but it easily could have been
knowledge or friendship or destiny
as we searched each other’s eyes
for understanding. Then, in the clarity
of our human need, I said: I’ll take it.

A Winged Skeleton Holding an Anatomical Drawing, 1779 by James Gamelin

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

The Classical Archaeology of My Skeleton

March 26, 2022.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Michael Derrick Hudson

Featured Art: A Winged Skeleton Holding an Anatomical Drawing, 1779 by James Gamelin

You’ll trip over it whenever you stroll the Forum, teeth
and spalled vertebrae, my phalanges

used as pavers, liony yellow and crumbling in situ . . .

It’s so sad, this reduction to time’s kibble. Junked and
recycled, my gravel’s been scattered

citywide: wrists left to the lime-burners, molars sold
for scrap. My jawbone’s a goat corral

up to the hinges in fodder and filth. Of my ribcage
only a few splinters remain, still stuck

to the leathery black rind of Caesar’s heart. Tourists
shuffle through my pelvis, a grotto famed

for the cat-piss stench of centaurs, their pornographic

graffiti and the tarry stalagmites
of wine-dark scat. How their flinty hooves clattered

over the mosaics those nights when they’d gallop off

in pursuit of the virgins. Ah, the virgins! How easily they’d
slip our grasp, gathering up

lingerie and toothbrushes, blowing us kisses goodbye . . .

Scholars took years to identify my skull, the brainpan
fouled with mouse droppings, owl pellets

and busted amphorae, spooky winds shush-shushing

through the cracked dome. O lost luxury! Splendid baths
featuring salons, outrageous

cuisine and twenty-four-hour boutiques. Every niche

its own nude, every spigot its own flavor. Caesar whet
once his exquisite appetites here, a depilated tyrant

up to the jowls in his own broth. So much stale purpose, so
many dead language protocols. The tedium

of yesses and wants. So many same things over and over.

On Finding Out My Genome Includes About Three Percent Neanderthal DNA

March 25, 2022.Reading time 1 minute.

By Michael Derrick Hudson

It explains a lot. The unappeasable nostalgia at sundown. Those oof-oofs
when first I wake up. Or that faraway doggy look

I get when gazing at full moons. Every doggy thing, in fact,
about these eyes: heterochromia, astigmatism, and a remarkable capacity

for registering disappointment. Furry knuckles. Weak chin. A receding
brow too shaggy for such latitudes. A touch of depression and

my susceptibility to tragicomedy. Clownishly splayed
size twelves. Occipital bun. Knock-knees. Gracile shinbones (but robust

pelvic girdle). Hypercoagulation. My adhesive, prehensile lips puckering

around a single grape. A craving to know my whereabouts. A real talent
for sniffing out thunderstorms. How easy it is for me

to spook. My susceptibility to hoaxes, too-good-to-be-true scenarios, and

going-out-of-business sales. Grooveless canines. Skin tags. My tripwire
gag reflex. The prelapsarian nightmares. My prototype

conscience. My poor handwriting. A dread of abstractions. The flowers

I’ve sent to corpses. My shambling gait. Flight always
before fight. My shrugs. A limp handshake. My prophylactic revulsions.

Sonnet with Acne and Hawk

March 24, 2022.Reading time 1 minute.

By Robert Thomas

Wadsworth: the homeliest boy in homeroom.
My acne looked like the gentle foothills
of the Sierra next to his Rockies.
Kenneth, but kids (not me) called him the Wad.
Our class went on a field trip to the snow,
and I, the most romantic of the bunch,
wandered up the frozen river, giddy
screams of rowdy carousers soon eclipsed
by the softer scream of a distant hawk.
Ken came around a bend in the river,
hand in hand with Kate Dunn, her shirt open,
her breasts brazen in the pine-scented air.
No one spoke, but they had no fear, while I
was suddenly afraid of everything.

Bad News, Baby, Good News, Dog.

March 23, 2022.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Britt McGillivray

this morning a meme queen reminds me we are living
                 in a hot catastrophe. i’d been dreaming

about an island lover a small puddle away,
                 then woken by propane tanks exploding fire

in next-door’s tent city. where i live, we were in crisis long before
                 this. indoors i receive 2D dispatches, pull myself through

the endless scroll: bad news, baby, good news, dog.
                 slow-build cries of freedom from the vaccinated crowd. a pomegranate,

split just so in a drippy palm. where i live, we’ve been eyes cast up
                 and chins tucked down. masked indifference to ‘save’ our ‘souls’.

this morning a meme queen reminds me: when the world ends
                 grab for whoever makes you happy. they took the quote from O’Hara

in times of crisis, yada yada. i de-seed a pulsing pomegranate.
                 what do you call an unending interruption? limbo,

bardo; a sad sabbatical, turned normal. i double-tap a crisis, offer an orange
                 heart to a public miscarriage, twenty more dollars to mutual aid.

look! more pals engaged, island lover blinking, hot sun hitting
                 face. more touch, deferred. i thumb a gender bomb i don’t believe in,

identity derailed by blast of parental well-meaning. my face burns pink.
                 my veins throb blue. i had decided who i love, this juice

drips from knee to tile floor, again and again, more stains to clean
                 i tried, meme queen, my decision just didn’t want me. bad news, baby.

where i live, we learn to look away. i close my eyes, see speckled
                 skin, a welcome face. pulp slipping through a ripe, plump

laugh. i backtrack through rupture, thick and brutal. then, somehow,
                 passed. a fruit plate, some apple stars. the future

halved, in separate palms. bleeding out. split, just so.
                 a meme queen reminds me: we still live in a hot catastrophe.

yes, but we’ve been dreaming
                 a way out

Doppel

March 22, 2022.Reading time 41 minutes.

By Max Bell

Selected as winner of the 2021 Fiction Contest by Anthony Marra

Featured Art: King Lake, California by Albert Bierstadt

I hear every word. I know exactly where I am. Dr. Shelley, sitting across from me in her white lab coat in her air-conditioned Westwood office, has told me that I have cancer. The pain in my chest does not signal the cancer’s home but its most recent lodging. Each scan and test reveals that it is too late for any combination of surgery and chemotherapy. I should not have ignored the signs. I delayed it all for too long.

Dr. Shelley pauses after delivering the news, searching my face to deduce how soon she can relay more information, how quickly she should speak, how she should modulate her voice. No speed or timbre seems apt. I do not worry about how she will sound after the silence. Taking offense at anything in this moment, or in any other, suddenly seems a waste of valuable time.

Why have the movies lied when depicting the cancer revelation scene? The world does not dissolve into a warm haze. Everything is clear, sharper than before. It’s as though I am someone with astigmatism who’s found the perfect corrective lenses. The sun strikes through the glass of the office’s wall-to-wall window, accentuating the details of each object in the room. The ridges of the lone paper clip on Dr. Shelley’s desk are as clear as the dotted brushstrokes of the purple-red sunset that casts a shadow over the sand in the reproduction of Lemmen’s Beach at Heist, which hangs in a dark brown frame next to her college degrees. I can read the spines of the books on Dr. Shelley’s shelves, the letters on each embossed in muted gold on leather that looks like tanned human skin.

Deep Nostalgia

March 21, 2022.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Peter O’Donovan

“Deep Nostalgia™ is the magical MyHeritage feature
that allows you to see the people in old family photos
blink, move their heads, and smile . . . The 10 additional
drivers released today allow you to see your ancestors
express a wider spectrum of gestures and motions,
for example, smile wholeheartedly, blow a kiss,
nod approval, and more.”
—MyHeritage.com

Hard not to fall deep into the fancy,
drawn into the scene as the face unstills,
blinks a bit, looks around at its surroundings,
then smiles vaguely as though just awakened
while decades melt away by our devotion
to those sacred photos, those icons of Them
revived to succor, to help us through.

But then, the illusion slips for a second:
lips open slightly too wide, reveal
dark & indiscreet blight underneath
with the miracle’s seams now visible,
skin jittering under electric current,
dead pixels stitched on an actor’s grin,
a magician’s trick, a carcass shuddering.

Perhaps They wonder where they are now,
trapped in this mannequin afterlife,
looping continually, dimly confused
at these orders received, contorted
to kiss and wink at our demand, to dance
for our nostalgia, to nod with praise
never offered, held greedily in the grave.

And so, They shall be remade to our need,
artifacts of longing shaped to be shared,
for remorse performed by social media,
by tweets and with tears for all of our followers,
as we watch their faces, again and again,
their characters molded as we reclaim
our heritage of old, our cold construction.

Scene of the Crime

March 20, 2022.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Peter O’Donovan

A worker appears just before your soirée,
a giant covered in mud and sweat-smell,
who placidly asks where you want the grave.
He won’t be turned away. He’s already been paid
over the phone by some mysterious figure.
You send him off to dig behind the willows
before the guests flit in and admire
your poorly secured rifle collection,
your recently sharpened knives,
your closets filled with elaborate disguises
and family secrets, barely concealed.

The guests mill about the salmon croquettes,
pass oblique glances and disrobe
between drinks, casually,
as though clothes were merely an interlude,
a short break for the flesh to rest itself,
while the waitstaff look on bored, stoic even.
Without your phone’s constant judgment, you breathe
relieved, you loosen up and criticize
the new regime, welfare recipients,
and your second-to-last lover, left for dead
and still a nag about it, won’t let it go.

The night winds on. Some disappearances.
A minor Party member makes a speech
on the need for greater transparency.
You dance to the old songs, those teenage dreams,
then fire a young waiter, capriciously.

The police arrive, but are easily bribed
with nothings, false promises of promotion.
The worker returns, smelling still stronger.
You refuse to leave, but are dragged out, pleading.
The guests applaud politely.

The Cabbage

March 19, 2022.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Peter O’Donovan

—after Jadeite Cabbage with Insects,
National Palace Museum, Taipei

Stumbling from the Qing exhibit
beauty-drunk on shape and glazes,
those flowing cerulean blues,
I heard a massing up the stairs,
a faint concentration calling
this pack of grannies rushing past,
with little charges almost electric,
an upward flood flowing to a plain
of people, pressing tour groups
enveloping some thing scarcely
visible, some dim verdant smudge.

I waded in, past the stragglers,
the dawdlers, the bored-slow slackers,
past the PRC operatives
skillfully disguised as sightseers
or weeping children, past the pious,
the museum completionists,
past them all, to the front, the fore:
a bok choy cabbage, barely there,
about the size of disappointment.

Mostly stem, a pale translucence
etched with veins, gentle threads curving
up discolored jade, blotchy, cracked
but weaving its flaws into form,
into ruffled leaves of sea-green,
broad blades glistening in half-light
with two grasshoppers in hiding,
revealing themselves by angles,
the slant of a leg not quite part
of that smooth verdure, that soft sway
of the foliage folding down
beneath the insects’ careful weight.

And then, I sensed it. A movement
in the stems. The faintest flicker
in the leaves, and beneath, the eye
of the locust beginning to glide
with all the swiftness of stone, taking in
this crowded, quickened place,
this tempest-blur of a time,
this maelstrom age,
this brief, sudden day.

The Last Day of America

March 18, 2022.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Benjamin Grimes

Featured Art: Washington Crossing the Delaware by Emanuel Leutze

I wake up on the last day of America.
There are sirens but a long way off:
I cannot tell if America’s last ambulance
is on its way or has already packed
the last emergency of America into its hull.
In the yard I stand inside American sunlight.
On tiptoe I creep through American grass, I climb
the fence to see what the American sky is doing.
It is making the last cloud, a cloud the shape
of America but not the shape of America
from a map. It is the shape of America as a child
concentrating tight around a crayon might draw America
in the last American kindergarten class. I want
to take a picture to remember the shape, the cloud,
the last day of America but buzz buzz buzz: here comes
the last American phone call. It is an American robot,
calling to let me in on all the Last Day of America
Big Box Giveaways. I agree to the last follow-up
email survey of America to show my appreciation
for the robot’s wherewithal & tact. I click 10 & 10 & 9
& hope it adds up to a raise when the robot’s hauled in
for the last American performance review. Of the last
humiliations of America even robots will not be spared.
For breakfast I toast the last American Pop-Tart
& head out for the last American errands.
There are many like me, wandering the aisles
as the last ghosts of America, unsure what it is
we’re haunting. There are many like me, eager
for one last peek behind the American screen.
I bring home the last shovel of America
& set to digging the last American hole.
I make a list of my ideas, the last ideas of America,
& bury it as deep as I can dig.

Despots

March 17, 2022.Reading time 4 minutes.

By Peter Maeck

Featured Art: The Wedding Party by Henri Rousseau

It was doggerel, the sappy little poem
or, more aptly put, the limerick
which we’d dashed off in seven
seconds flat: our way of saying—thanks?
Yes, thanks, why not, for all they do for us.
Without them we could not, we let them think, exist.
Reciting such godawful we won’t even call it
verse brought up the bile into our throat but they
like little half-wit schoolkids being read some
nursery rhyme from Mother Goose sat glassy-
eyed, their elbows on the banquet table,
rapt.

Our betrothed and we repaired to
separate rooms that night, tradition
dictates that, and next day bright and early
we were standing face-to-face, you now
may kiss the Holy Book, I do, I do,
and all of that. Out there they sat,
some with, some without hats,
all haunch-to-haunch and sheening
in the monstrous August heat;
some had passed out.

Most heads of state like us will fly
to islands for their wedding night but
we did not, we like to show the common
touch, we took the bridal suite atop the down-
town Marriott. Below our window
they all stood unmindful of the storm
and soot, their lonely eyes imploring
us to step out with our champagne
flutes, post-coital cigarettes between our
milky lips. We did not, and indeed wished
not to disappoint.

Black Site

March 16, 2022.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Peter Maeck

Featured Art: The Yellow Books by Vincent Van Gogh

The guards awakened us, we’d barely
gone to sleep, they strip-searched first
the women then the rest of us (trim off the
limp, discolored outer leaves of late-picked
artichokes) but Frank refused to shed his
boxer shorts, not smart, he paid the price
for his recalcitrance.

WHAT HAVE YOU DONE TONIGHT?
WHO HAVE YOU SEEN?
WHERE DID YOU MEET?
WHAT DID YOU TALK ABOUT?

We shrugged, stayed mute.
(The artichoke grows wild in
shallow water, in canoes is
how you harvest it, our good friend
Nancy Sheffer says to trim the stalk,
cut off the limp, discolored outer
such and such.)

IF YOU NAME NAMES
THEN YOU ARE FREE TO GO.

By our silence we said no,
we won’t give up our friends,
that’s not what good friends do.
Then as expected we were hit with
pipes, my kneecap shattered with
one blow. Just think, I thought,
if I just shouted:

Nancy Sheffer!
She’s the one we met!
Here is what we talked about!
then all the blows would stop
and we would be released.
(The way to teach your cockatiel to
play with toys is play with them
yourself thereby to show your
feathered friend the way to
merry-make.) But we were
beaten every hour all that night
and all the rest of that whole week.
(A cockatiel needs time to feel at home
in human space just as, if we were birds,
we likewise would.) Now badly beaten Frank
is in a catatonic state. We do not dare to make
the sound that we would make
if we were fools enough
to weep.

(You want a good read pick up
Nancy Sheffer’s book about the
artichokes of New York State.) Frank
sprawls there on his back and looks
just like a cat run over by a Mack
truck. (Once a bird’s chicks fledge
they’re all pushed out and some
fly free and some are mauled by
catatonic cats in heat all howling
all the night. Trim off the outer part,
it’s blackened now and much too limp
to eat with pipes our best friend Nancy
Sheffer noted in her pioneering book.)

WHAT HAVE YOU DONE?
WHO HAVE YOU SEEN?
WHAT WAS THE SUBJECT OF YOUR CHAT?

We play dumb: What chat?
And then the pipes, the pipes,
she wrote.

Adrift

March 15, 2022.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Peter Maeck

The year we were a State Farm agent
we would rather now forget.
We hated scaring folks: Imagine that
your house incinerates or God forbid
you’re stricken with a fatal this or that
(it could be symptomless) or there’s
a workplace accident, you’re dis-
membered then what happens to
your spouse and kids? They’re up
the so-called creek.
Adrift, we turned to animal husbandry but we wept
to slaughter pigs; we planted beets but with the drought
we just gave up the naïve hope of ever making
gentleman farming work. We entered politics
sometime after that, ran for a City Council seat,
lost in a rout. We drowned ourself in drink.
Our spouse absconded with Meg and Mike
the twins and sued us for divorce.
Depressed, to say the least, we drove
out on a ferry boat, the one that goes from
Boxport out to Riley’s Point. We gunned it, shot
straight out the other end, right through the safety
chain, think Thelma and Louise. Our canyon, though,
was harbor water, sludgy, twelve feet deep. We didn’t die,
they pulled us out. The Camry was a total loss,
of course, the motor’s scrap once salt gets in it.
Stupid the attempt to drown ourself
in shallow water, better odds
out farther in the rip.
The blues run there, we caught one
at the age of six, in our father’s
Boston Whaler, never had a
better day than that one since.
One day a life can make.

A View of the World

March 14, 2022.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Linda K. Sienkiewicz

Featured Art: Woman at a Window by Casper David Friedrich

I believed I could communicate
with the female mink on my great uncle’s farm
until I put my thumb up to the cage
and she sliced the tip as keenly as a razor.

I believed Pippi Longstocking
could save the world.

I believed I could save myself
from the men my mother warned me about
the ones who might come up through the woods
from the far road by feeding them mud
cakes made with millipedes and spiders.

I believed I could live alone in a boxcar
with a can opener and blanket
and care for six orphans, too.

I believed my father actually would
flush my brother’s head down the toilet.

I believed if I walked three times fast
past the long picture window
my parents would not crash the car
on the way home from Talko and die.

I believed I was exotic when I danced with
two washrag triangles over my flat chest.

I believed germs followed me home
on my shoes when I used public bathrooms.

I believed even after I lied to my mother
about what I showed the boys behind the fir trees
that my heart was made of gold.

I believed my brother when he told me
we have one big eye in our head with two dots
from which we view the world.

Snapchat at the Magical Arctic Puffin Exhibit

March 13, 2022.Reading time 1 minute.

By Shelly Stewart Cato

Maybe he has magic to keep himself
alive forever, says my little boy,

palms parallel to the floor,
elbows pulled in like a chubby T-Rex.

He grins and flaps and smoochy-lips
himself in the aqua glass.

A murder of teenagers captures it all.

The Dog Run

March 12, 2022.Reading time 34 minutes.

By Anne Cooperstone

The old adage that dogs look like their owners was not true at our dog run. The one of us with blond hair and collagen-plumped lips had a German shepherd. Another of us was a Persian Jew with a golden retriever. We were bulky with skinny vizslas, hard-looking punks with long-haired dachshunds. One of us was a young man with perfectly drawn eyebrows whose poodle had drawn stares ever since the day it played keep-away with a dead bird. Some of us were thirty-somethings clad in workout wear who paced the perimeter of the park, throwing tennis balls with plastic contraptions so we did not have to touch the slobbery felt. We had French bulldogs, five of them in matching harnesses. We had a corgi named Joy who was known to snap at dogs twice her size.

We did not raise our dogs in our own image. If we had wanted carbon copies, we would have had more kids. But we had dogs.

We were intimate strangers, united only by place and time. We heard everything. There were no secrets among us. Not due to trust, but to proximity. We did not know each other’s names but we knew which of us had to work through lunch, which of us was studying for the LSAT, which of us had no responsibilities at all. We knew who was fighting with their spouse, who was crying silently into their paperback because of their father or their landlord or the closure of their favorite neighborhood haunt and subsequent end of New York as we know it. We were the first to see new haircuts, tattoos, piercings. We were witness to sudden experimental and drastic shifts in fashion, one-night stands who came along for the morning walk. One of us was a short, bald man who wore khakis and spoke loudly to anyone who would listen about his incompetent urologist. Another of us was a woman with curly hair and perpetually crossed arms. We were Pakistani, Taiwanese, second-, third-, fifth-, eighth-generation immigrants who wanted our dogs to be happier than we were ourselves, which is why we spent our free time standing on a concrete island in the middle of the West Side Highway. One of us, fresh out of college, would go the rest of his life recalling the paradoxical remoteness of this park as his induction into adulthood. Fifty-three percent of American households have dogs, twenty-seven percent of New Yorkers. We were not special. We were not unclear about the difference between space and community. Our very unity hinged on our tacit refusal to acknowledge it.

Riders through the Canyon by Frank Nelson Wilcox

March 11, 2022.Reading time less than 1 minute.

Graduation Day

March 11, 2022.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Ian Christopher Hooper

Featured Art: Riders through the Canyon by Frank Nelson Wilcox

There was a time when
I measured the distance from June to August
in the rise & fall of empires, when
each summer night reached

from Jerusalem to Karakoram, when
the abandoned apple trees behind our house
became primeval forest, wild except for the shadow of rows, & as a child I dug

holes in the garden, found
buried treasure,
dredged the creek for the rusted shards of Excalibur,
wandered the streets with Sara & Michael
from the first hiss of the sprinklers
until long after the street lights winked on.

Then time came
unstuck,
the years collapsing into relationships, holidays, family,
formulations,
blueprints,
accidents & horrors, the sudden realization

there was never any age of kings,
just some rusted pennies & a splintered plastic cup buried in the mud.

How on that very last day of childhood, I picked up Sara
from her parents’ house, drove
her over to Columbine,
how we noticed there was no snow left
on the mountains, that it was
oddly hot for May.

A Flaw in the Mirror

March 9, 2022.Reading time 1 minute.

By Ted Kooser

It was at eye-level, a small swirl in the glass.
I had to hold my head just so to see it.
Something had surfaced and seen me there,
and, with a flourish, turned back, leaving
the glare only slightly disturbed. Could it
have been someone I’d hurt years ago, or
a secret I’d kept so long that it had all but
disappeared, settling fathoms deep to lie
in the darkness, waiting, for fifty or sixty,
perhaps even seventy years? It seemed
there was something the flaw sensed in me
that had at last awakened it, and it had
risen up through and into my reflection.
It flashed, just once, and then it sank away.

A Stained Glass Window

March 8, 2022.Reading time 1 minute.

By Ted Kooser

We can imagine this saint as if she were
seen from the side, a shimmering film

of iridescence, like that of a bubble,
those brilliant colors not actually there,

nor she with her golden pan-pipes, robe
like a waterfall, not cast in the glass itself,

but as if reflected from another window,
distant, two thousand years in the past,

yet at the speed of light across a shadowy
sanctuary, empty but for you and I,

the cold pews, rank upon rank of them,
turning their backs to us, facing all that’s

ahead, and the patron saint of music,
not yet ready to put her lips to the notes,

to play against this silence, St. Cecilia,
who sang out to God as she died.

Dancer

March 7, 2022.Reading time 1 minute.

By Ted Kooser

Somewhere along the Front Range of the Rockies
someone who loved you poured you into the wind—
the you I remember, your hair up in pink rollers—

and then, without thinking, turned the carton
bottom-side up and gave it a pat, the dust of you
gone with your baby-talk lisp, the flat sound

of that news taking three years to reach me, over
five hundred miles of Nebraska, word of the you
I remember, on pointe, in scuffed ballet toe shoes

in that duct-taped, cardboard-walled “studio”
I fixed up for you in the stuffy hot attic above your
apartment, sweat on the hard forehead I kissed.

Not like you, the news of your death taking so long
to arrive, you always so quick and light, flouncy,
running away from me, over and over, then gone.

Alone

March 6, 2022.Reading time 1 minute.

By Ted Kooser

One of my oldest friends, widowed a year,
drifts on, riding low in the water, north
into his eightieth year, his rudder
broken away, the stillness of ice fields
ahead, and little aboard but Hershey bars
and Diet Pepsi, as he floats in one of two
twin La-Z-Boys, his late wife’s dachshund
asleep on his lap, a big flat-screen TV like
a billowing sail, pulling them forward
into the years, his choice of the two
recliners now his—if he wanted to choose,
which he doesn’t—hers still with the last
of her flotsam around it, the Christmas
decorations she’d hoped to finish in time,
her hot-glue gun still at the ready,
the empty cardboard toilet paper tubes,
the red and white construction paper,
some of the red already glued in cones—
unfinished Santa hats—and cotton wads
to pinch apart for making Santa’s beard.

Picking Up After the Dead

March 5, 2022.Reading time 1 minute.

By Ted Kooser

This brother and sister have come
hundreds of miles to sort through
the mold and clutter left in the wake
of their maiden aunt, who as the future
closed about her assembled a proof
of the past, heaped in the rooms
she’d played in as a child, her toys,
her picture books, piles of newspapers
nibbled by mice, and over the years
all of the black-and-white issues
of Life, though life for her was there
without having to pay for it, in color:
the bone-yellow ribs of plaster lath
where the ceilings had fallen, some
of the crumbled plaster on her bed,
and in the parlor an upright piano,
dark orange-peel finish clouded
with mildew and half of its keys
stuck down as if a tremendous chord
had been hammered into the silence
to fade only a moment before.

Winter

March 4, 2022.Reading time 51 minutes.

By Faith Shearin
Selected as winner of the 2021 New Ohio Review Nonfiction Contest by Jerald Walker

The last day of my old life, the one in which I knew my own identity, was Halloween 2018. I was out walking our dog, Wookiee, a small, flat-faced shih tzu with an underbite, through the streets of our Massachusetts neighborhood, when I felt the presence of my husband, Tom, though he was away, on a business trip in Colorado. It was evening and I was flanked by children wearing masks, capes, and wings, all of them carrying paper sacks of candy. I paused beneath a maple tree decorated with cloth ghosts, near a lawn littered with fake tombstones, and the dog sniffed the air where my husband’s apparition formed. I saw Tom materialize for a moment and he was young again: slender and dark, his hair a mass of black curls; he was opening the window of his dorm room at Princeton; I felt as if he was trying to show me something; I was aware of a rush of velvet air and the full intensity of his love before he vanished again, into the blowing leaves, and pumpkins, and the sounds of children knocking on doors. I was expecting him to fly home in a few hours and thought perhaps he had fallen asleep on a plane and begun dreaming of me; he sometimes came to me in dreams. But when I checked my phone I found no text; instead, there were a series of phone calls from a number I didn’t recognize, which turned out to be a hospital in Colorado, the last from a chaplain who said: your husband has had a heart attack and is being prepared for emergency surgery. I do not know if Tom was awake or under anesthesia when his ghost found me; I don’t know if he was fully alive or if his spirit was already seeping away. All night his Australian colleagues held vigil in the hospital, sending texts while fashioning boomerangs from coffee stirrers. By the following day, Tom’s sisters and mother and I converged in a waiting room, along with his friend Bob, who had flown home to Virginia from the Denver conference, then back again, when he heard Tom was in surgery.

Mimicry

March 3, 2022.Reading time 1 minute.

by: Allison Funk

Last night I heard the barred owls calling
        from the white pine that brushes

our windowpane, the muffling snow
        falling all around. Where had they been hiding?

For months, silence. Or, perhaps,
        lately distracted by my own weather,

I’d stopped listening,
        having nearly forgotten the nights

we’d wake up together
        to their plaintive cries and caterwauling,

their comic mating of cackles, hoots,
        and caws. How much

had they been drinking?
        you mused once, imagining a party

of ornithologists in a bar
        slurring the owls’ Who looks for you?

Yoo-hoo, you’d murmur
        before we joined the full-throated parliament

in their ecstatic racket.
        Now, into the space that echoes

between us, I’m calling,
        though you’re out of hearing.

I’m telling you who still looks for you
        in the snow that keeps falling.