Nights of Noise

November 30, 2021.Reading time 1 minute.

By Rachel A. Hicks

Featured Image: Untitled by Tanner Pearson

“I don’t want to be cured of beautiful sounds,” insisted Milo.

—The Phantom Tollbooth

Must I implore you for more of what I want?
A clanging of fine china, symphonies of wet
spoons, clattering of forks falling from the violent
sky, a click-clack-click of yellow teeth
saying not much of worth in the night.

If trash can be treasure then I can be sound.
I can be the scream rising like steam
from the red kettle sitting on your mother’s stove.

I am the thumping & cheering & crying
of every bum, junkie, bride & boy in town.

Ms. Appalachia

November 30, 2021.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Rachel A. Hicks

I’m an Appalachian beauty queen,
a capable kitten with smooth birthing hips.
Applaud the cinema kitty cat caught in the smoke ring.

I rule over Kentucky junkyards, zoom in as I sit on refrigerator thrones,
play pianos by the highway, cigarette-thin fingers give a tinkle tankle of a tune
perking ears that belong to someone twenty years ago.
The honeysuckle sweetness of my fingertips, syrupy sweet on the dirt keys,
greasing up the notes, F, E, B & so on.

Underneath the toasters & the books from all those rummage sales
sits some hot ghost of a memory. Smitten kitten, the smell of trash
makes me think of our place & the breeze outside is the same one
I feel at night when trains go by.

Stack the broken binds of hymnals for a stage, wrap, rip, some leaves, some dirt,
pack, perch, pack it all in, real tight, until the only clumps to fall
from my deciduous crown are intentional. A tap dance for you, a finale
with hula-hooping hubcaps & juggling light bulbs. I sing in a rusty tune,
decaying notes in the keys of D, C, G & so on.

To Love Love the Beloved

November 30, 2021.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Rachel A. Hicks

Featured Image: Pride by Ellery Pollard

When I die, no fly will buzz,
no bird will crow, no man
will cry. Or maybe when I die,
every man will cry

and say, “There goes the love
of my life—a beauty—if only
she had known.” Women
will hate me stealing

their men’s hearts even in death,
for taking over their dinner conversations
after they’ve carefully prepared
the pink-orange ham loaf.

Forks & spoons—the men will swear
to see my eyes—my teeth will show
up in all the fine china. My legs prance
through the women’s heads

as they look at the octopus waving
its arms, wrapping its tentacles
around another. Dirty salt water
will turn red with their fury

as their husbands say, “She was such a beauty.
If only she had had eight arms.” A constellation
will form in the shape of my face & planets with
my thumbprints will be discovered.

When I die, don’t send me roses
because I am now the dirt, I am the plant,
I am the seed that sits in the crook of your skull, always
reminding you what it’s like to call a place home.

Stomach Pains

November 30, 2021.Reading time 53 minutes.

By Danie Shokoohi

When the doctor found the tumor in his brain, when the surgery was first scheduled but not yet scalpeled, before the poorly fitted tracheostomy tube which introduced the sepsis, your father forbade you from coming to Connecticut. He didn’t want you to see him like that, he said. That when your grandfather died, your father could only picture him ill and threadbare in a hospital bed. He did not want that for you, if he didn’t make it.

“No.” You lifted your laptop from the coffee table and clicked your internet browser. “Absolutely not. I’m pulling up Delta.” The ticket would be expensive from Iowa City, but you would pay anything to be there.

He told you that you could visit when he was well again, for Thanksgiving, maybe. “Look, Kimmy,” he said. “I got some bad apples, but we can still make applesauce out of them. It’ll be okay. The surgeon’s good. I’ll have to do some PT, but I won’t lose any cognitive function. That’s pretty good applesauce.”

You wanted to tell him there was nothing applesauce about a brain tumor. That you didn’t care how small, or how easy the recovery, or how experienced the doctor. You wanted to tell him that twenty-two was too young to be fatherless. If it was your Iranian mother, you would have had permission to scream and rip hair from your scalp and weep. But he wasn’t one for big sentiments, your father. He was American. So you laughed because you knew he wanted you to laugh.

After the phone call, you drove to the grocery store and picked out a jar of applesauce. It sat in your cupboard through his entire sickness, and you ate a spoonful a day as if it could keep him safe.

Compassion Fatigue

November 30, 2021.Reading time 2 minutes.

By: Mary Ardery

Driving the group back after a wet July week in the woods,
a week with a bulimia watch for a woman who’d trained herself

to purge so quickly, so quietly, she did it between numbers
when she counted aloud as she peed, we came across

a raccoon in the center of our lane. Run over, still alive.
I stopped the van. I knew the worst injuries are internal.

The raccoon’s eyes were moving toward glassy. Slow blinks.
Someone said, Mary, you have to put it out of its misery.

I considered the tires, my hands, the knife in my backpack,
then I gripped the wheel and guided us, slowly,

onto the shoulder instead. A wide, weak berth.
No one said a word. I glanced at the fading raccoon

in the rearview mirror. My worn-out body—
its overripe smell seemed suddenly sharper.

That night I dreamt a flood. A torrent of water, the street
a river. A child’s empty car seat rushed by on its side

while I stood at my window just watching. Countless times,
women asked me simple enough questions, but I was winding

through mountain roads. I was treading water. I was barely
afloat. I told them not now and I turned up the music,

spinning the volume knob like a planet about to break orbit.

Crayola

November 30, 2021.Reading time 10 minutes.

By James Lineberger

Featured Image: Sun by Sam Warren

On the hayride night
our senior year in high school
we lay side by side
holding hands under the stars
trying to figure out how we could remain together
because back then
to a couple of cotton mill kids in the 50’s
what else did our first-time kisses and hugs mean
except true love
but after graduation she made a sudden decision to attend
the Richmond Professional Institute in Virginia
and learn commercial art
to get prepared to paint advertising pictures
for newspapers and magazines she said maybe even like
a cover for The Saturday Evening Post
and how was I to manage
a long distance relationship across the state line
when I didn’t even have a car which
I tried to tell myself was the problem but the real difficulty
was Jenny seemed like
some kind of pioneer woman to me
and already out of reach
a person who knew exactly what she wanted and wouldn’t
let anything or anyone stand in her way
while all I could come up with was maybe I would join
the army and get to see
the world myself someday – Hollywood or Africa maybe even what we did
to Hiroshima – some place
Read More

Kiddos

November 30, 2021.Reading time 44 minutes.

By Leila Mohr

We are walking along the dunes at Corn Hill Beach with my grandfather, Baba. The sun is broiling our backs, and there aren’t any clouds. We smell like suntan lotion and laundered clothes. Baba breathes heavily as he walks. He wears clean sneakers with white socks pulled halfway up his calves. I have a new pair of flip-flops in one hand, my toes seeping into the sand. My brother runs ahead, an inflatable red lobster tucked under his arm.

We were supposed to leave the Cape a week ago to go back home to our mother, but we are still here. At night, after we’ve been bathed and fed, my grandparents fight about what to do with us. The day camp with the dreadlocked artist has ended; neither of us did well with tennis.

Wyatt is eight, and I am ten. We sleep in bunk beds in my grandparents’ renovated wing. When I close my eyes, I hear large ice cubes fill my grandmother’s glass, the freezer open and close. We have a whole dresser of new clothes they’ve bought us, some colorful toys in a wicker basket. If they yell at each other loudly enough, Wyatt sniffles and cries. “Be quiet,” I try to tell him, but he doesn’t understand. On my back, I lie as still as I can be in the top bunk, pretending I’m frozen in glass. If my grandmother hears my brother cry and peeks into the room, she’ll think that I’m asleep.

“Over here,” Baba says, and we move toward the water. He’s packed a cooler with Goldfish and Milano cookies, juice boxes, and cans of Coke. His white hair sneaks out the back of his baseball cap. Wyatt throws his shirt off and runs into the water, thrashing wildly in the waves. Baba takes off his shoes and socks carefully. He looks far out into the ocean, his soft skin glistening in the sun. The waves crash onto the sand, and the wind twirls through my hair.

Last week, when I asked my grandmother why we weren’t going back home to our mother, she wouldn’t give me a straight answer. “Your mother is busy,” she said. She was staring at herself in the mirror of her bathroom, fluffing her hair. “She’s writing a paper for her Statistics class.” My grandmother sprayed perfume on her wrists and then rubbed them together. Her gold bracelets slid down her arm. “She needs more time.”

“Don’t you want to go in the water?” Baba says.

The truth is I am afraid of swimming, but I get up and walk slowly through the thick sand, sitting down at the water’s edge. Wyatt is pretending to be a shark, flapping his hands like fins and growling. We are two different islands; we almost can’t see each other.

* * *

My Mother Meets the Cast of Hair

November 30, 2021.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Adam Grabowski

Featured Image: Rush by Sam Warren

-Ludlow, Ma. May 1970

Let the sunshine
Let the sunshine in…

Smoking against the façade of a moon-
bleached gas station she listens
with a waitress’s patience to the local boy’s prattle
—her senior year of high school

& already the air stinks of coveralls.
Her hair is black. Brushed out long. Flyaways.
The occasional breeze & his good blue eyes.
A mile from here the highway shakes.

If the manufacturer’s promise holds true, the new roof will outlast my father

November 30, 2021.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Jessica Pierce

And he admires that probability. It’s far more likely
than the chance of us being here as who we are; someone calculated that
as about 400 trillion to one. He admires this, too, and how the sun

sits on our shoulders right now. Under the eaves of that sturdy-as-hell roof,
the common ariel hornet tucked her nest for the summer.
I was about to describe the season as brief,

but that is only how my stuttering synapses
process time. So, I assure myself that my father will live damn close
to forever, with a quick sidestep to knock on the closest tree and shush

any wisp of a god still hovering nearby. The bit of sun moves,
so we move. Dolichovespula arenaria probably notes
where our ungainly grounded bodies take up space

How to Choose a Mattress

November 29, 2021.Reading time 1 minute.

By Leslie Morris

Featured Image: Forget the Flowers by Tanner Pearson

Twenty-six years have passed since you tried
out mattresses at Macy’s, hands folded over
your chests as if laid out for a viewing. No,
that was not how you lay on a mattress at home.
You had read in the paper that couples who rated
their marriages “satisfying,” slept spooning
and those who rated their marriages “highly satisfying”
slept spooning with their hands cupping their spouse’s
breast or penis, so nightly you wrapped your hand around
his sturdy cock believing that you secured a happy marriage
in your grasp. But after googling “how to” diagrams
of spooning on the web, you’ve learned that as the smaller spoon
you should have been the spoonee all those years.
So now you are shopping for mattresses by yourself
and the sleep expert at Slumberland wants to upsell you
a queen even though you are still weepy and lost
in your own trough within a double, a sinkhole
of busted continuous coils. He asks how you sleep.
Badly. You need something supportive, he says,
but with plenty of give. Yes, absolutely!
Memory foam, he says. Oh God, no. Knock me out
on horsehair or kapok, sheep fleece or pea shucks.
Give me a nightcap of nepenthe. Certainly not memory.

Love, Dungeons, Magic, Dragons or Some Combination Thereof Will Save This Marriage

November 29, 2021.Reading time 52 minutes.

By Marvin Shackelford

Featured Image: Power Shots by Sam Warren

My finest moment, the occasion that defines me as a person. Okay. You have to imagine the cliffs. Sheer and bleached in the light of a moon or two and rising from the foam of a screaming ocean. The sky is bleeding down in a magical haze, and a horde of monstrous creatures roars nearer. That happens all the time. This isn’t metaphor. They’re armed and armored and charging from the landward side, and the petulant face of a dead god breaks open out over the waters. His teeth drip with death and his eyes are storms, literal lightning and thunder and hailstones, bearing down on where I stand at the edge of the world. He’s starting to take physical form. He’s getting real. I’m the focal point of the material plane for once in my miserable life, and I thrust the crystal, that plain-looking clear-color gemstone pulled unwittingly from a dragon’s trove, I drive it straight into my heart. Breastplate undone and hair flinging in the wind and my lover wailing as I drop into his arms. Our enemy screams and begins to fade. I’ve saved the world.

Clue Junior

November 29, 2021.Reading time 1 minute.

By Luciana Arbus-Scandiffio

I cut the crowd loose, I stack the deck twice
I feed you shrimp cocktail
I sort through the loose mail
When it rains, it worms and we blow the house down
Wishing on the wick
I am the boss of this clique!

My uniform is a pebble, my mouth
Hums trouble. All I do is stay inside
One-legged, I hide
In the clutter of my mothers
Turning red with permanent marker
Wasting hours with Colonel Mustard

Eating ring-dings for dinner
Singing happy birthday forever
On Facebook, searching father
Then deleting my browser
Faceless, I cower and wave to the mirror
Eating the angel hair of the dog

Sonnet (I Have Two Moms)

November 29, 2021.Reading time 1 minute.

By Luciana Arbus-Scandiffio

In the seventh grade we debated gay marriage. I was con.
I stayed home. Kept my hair in a braid and kept my braid
to myself. Tucked my name like a secret up my sleeve.
Wore hideous loafers. Ate full-sized boxes of Twizzlers.
Became rigid, a painting. Still Life with Social Studies.
My skullcap, full of doves. My face, a hot button.
Press it! Pierce my timid ears. In the bathroom eating
a turkey sandwich and Jenny dragging my zipper down
to see what was there. Con: my whole life riding
on a hyphen. Con: my hands blue with luck. An eyelash
on my finger. Two of anything can build a bridge.
The love makes me lonely. The love makes my family.
A slogan of roses. A crown of sugar ants
eating through the gymnasium floor.

Mr. Cosmos

November 29, 2021.Reading time 37 minutes.

By Jill Christman

Featured Image: Shadows by Sam Warren

It matters not who you love, where you love, why you love, when you love or how you love, it matters only that you love.

~ John Lennon

This morning I made a single-cup drip coffee and poured too much water through the small yellow cone. When I lifted the cone to peek, strong, black coffee filled my white mug to the brim.

Nay, not the brim, I thought. Past the brim. I hung onto the edge of the counter and brought my eyes down level with the top of the mug, marveling at the way in which the coffee arched up out of the mug, a bitter mountain, the strength of the surface tension pulling the coffee molecules beyond what seems possible. I would like to die on a coffee mountain, I thought, straightening my legs. I hadn’t yet had even a sip. Maybe it was time. The house was so quiet I could hear the muted ticking of the wall clock in the kitchen, thumping her plastic hands around inside her plastic face, bearing witness to the wonder of the coffee rising up and out of the mug, ticking off the seconds of our lives.

Mr. Cosmos

November 29, 2021.Reading time 37 minutes.

By Jill Christman

“It matters not who you love, where you love, why you love, when you love or how you love, it matters only that you love.”

~ John Lennon

This morning I made a single-cup drip coffee and poured too much water through the small yellow cone. When I lifted the cone to peek, strong, black coffee filled my white mug to the brim.

Nay, not the brim, I thought. Past the brim. I hung onto the edge of the counter and brought my eyes down level with the top of the mug, marveling at the way in which the coffee arched up out of the mug, a bitter mountain, the strength the surface tension pulling the coffee molecules beyond what seems possible. I would like to die on a coffee mountain, I thought, straightening my legs. I hadn’t yet had even a sip. Maybe it was time. The house was so quiet I could hear the muted ticking of the wall clock in the kitchen, thumping her plastic hands around inside her plastic face, bearing witness to the wonder of the coffee rising up and out of the mug, ticking off the seconds of our lives.

This is when I heard another voice in my head. Mr. Cosmos, my fifth-grade science

teacher at the round school in Newbury, Massachusetts circa 1980. He’d given us all big cups full of water and little cups full of nothing and told us to pour water into our little cups until our cups runneth over. That’s the way Mr. Cosmos talked. Children, he’d say as if we were attending boarding school in mid-century England, Children, are you ready? Pour. Pour your water. Pour your water out—and let your cups runneth over.

Poem for Paul Who Never Forgets My Birthday Even Though I Never Remember His

November 29, 2021.Reading time 6 minutes.

By Alyssandra Tobin

paul says                                careful with the benzos
& I’m like I think of you
whenever                 my therapist brings em up      &
he’s like aww dunno if sweet’s the word
but it’s nice                                        to be thought of

okay sure let everyone see my cute belly let
everyone know I covet some people I’m
supposed to hate paul’s stupid meth’d
out calls unbearable his empty bottles his days
& months wild-eyed & away

once we wore each others jeans
his tiny gold waist in my teen girl pants
now    on the phone he says what’s up
ya fuckin guinea! he teaches me to play iron
man he gives me that   ninth step apology that
making of meandering amends

me so scared of dying & him always
chest deep in it I sit so quietly       a
very good dog in her dim little room
but he            gives me cocky courage he
gives me warm love that boston street salt
kinda love that let’s never brawl kinda love
that I’ll kiss your dirt love          that I’ll help you lie
to chicks love that mall parking lot love      that
if I’m a blight you’re a blight kinda love
that noogie that cackle that snakebite that
augur        that yeah                          I’ll call you on
your bullshit pastures if you call me when
my dumb pig jumps her sty off to somewhere
cleaner than both our loud green yards

I Love You Too, Bro

November 29, 2021.Reading time 1 minute.

By Alex Howe

Featured Image: Mun by Sam Warren

–for Catya McMullen

Beauty rears its ugly head – Assassins

You can be non-suicidal and less than jazzed about being here, two
Juuls at once like a pacifist dragon or the mild Dionysus of bad

ideas. Skip the Trix rabbit’s abjection: gift yourself the gift of
desperation, the terrible utility of popcorn for breakfast. “Whatever

you find uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium becomes its
signature, cherished and emulated as soon as it can be avoided”

explains Brian Eno bombing by on rollerblades into the flip phone
flipping shut into his fanny pack. The hotel’s Mahogany Hall

blooms two hundred vape plumes the moment the emcee mentions
prohibition on same. These teen alcoholics don’t drink, they bong

Monster, fuck senseless, talk about drinking. Pray to doorknobs.
Play Mafia. Splash the ping-pong ball into the cup of Red Bull.

Drop the sick beat. Crack your glow stick.

Turn To Kristen Bell

November 29, 2021.Reading time 1 minute.

By Alex Howe

–for Darcie Wilder

Turn to Kristen Bell and ask if you should do something a little
reckless. “You know the world is ending, right?” She’s not the
person you go to when you want to be talked out of something.
That’s what probation officers are for. Kristen Bell doesn’t think
people take yolo seriously enough. It’s tough to argue with her. She
says, “What’s a little reckless?” You tell her you’ve always loved
her. Love-loved. She laughs. “That makes sense. No offense.”
You’re starting to have second thoughts about flying this plane into
Exxon headquarters. You’re starting to panic. Name three objects in
the cockpit. Name an animal that cloud resembles. Estimate the
plunging angle of descent. As if sensing your turbulence, Kristen
Bell says, “Have you ever seen First Reformed? With Ethan
Hawke?” “Daddy,” you respond. “Exactly,” she whispers. “Daddy.”

Domestic Chess

November 29, 2021.Reading time 28 minutes.

By Andrea Bianchi

Featured Image: Pink Rat by Ellery Pollard

1. His first move is checkmate.

2. A punch that expels the laughter from my stomach as I stand before him at the end of our chess game.

3. “Wipe that smirk off your face,” he hisses beneath the Saturday morning chatter and jazz of the coffeeshop. “You’ve been gloating. Taunting,” he says. And yes, after our first sips, I did tease him to try for a victory, challenge him to a game of chess. Wanting to imitate another couple, heads bent intimate over their own little world of 64 checkered squares, at a tiny table just a bishop’s diagonal from the sofa where we sat.

4. He waits there afterward, tense on the cushion’s edge, when I return from the restroom, from a respite after his loss of the competition, his loss of composure. But his eyes pierce my smile as I pause in front of him. My stomach at the same plane as his arm. And then his fist connects level with the center of our lives.

5. It breaks the rules of play—and of the law, and of our love. Our months of happy Saturdays at the beach. Dinners beneath twinkling lights. Fights, arguments, yes. But afterward, mornings under the sunlight-checkered bedcovers, where we fed each other breakfast and curled together with our cats, as we mapped out plans for our shared weekends, then our first shared apartment. Our relationship’s next moves.

My Daughters Sometimes Dress as Ladybugs

November 29, 2021.Reading time less than 1 minute.

By Brian Simoneau

Featured Image: Untitled by Tanner Pearson

and I hope they won’t
outgrow it—little heroes
flitting leaf to leaf
in their polka-dotted suits
of armor, their vicious
pursuit of the feasting
pest that destroys what
beauty these days still lives.

Make Sure There Is Breathing Room: A Conversation with Tania De Rozario, author of And The Walls Come Crumbling Down and winner of the 2020 NOR nonfiction contest

November 26, 2021.Reading time 14 minutes.

By Kay Keegan

Kay Keegan: Describe your writing practice and how you sustain it. Has your process changed over the course of your writing career? How about during the pandemic?

Tania De Rozario: I am not a very organized person by nature so I work really hard to set detailed schedules and deadlines for myself because if I don’t have a schedule to look at, I am unable to get anything done. Setting aside daily time for my personal writing becomes part of my overall schedule. That said, I am not one of those people who has output goals. Like I don’t have a word count I need to meet every day. I am actually a very slow writer -slower than most, I think- and I need a lot of time for things to percolate. So in that time that I set aside for my writing, I am not necessarily literally putting words on paper – I could really just be sitting with an idea and dwelling on it and letting it develop in my brain. And when I am blocked, I use that time to do something that activates a different part of my brain (like drawing or baking, for example) so that the writing part of my brain can continue to solve the issues it needs to solve subconsciously without me bothering it. Once things are on paper, I try to make sure there is breathing room between edits – again, this is to let things percolate, and to make sure I come back to the draft with fresh eyes every time. I don’t think my process has changed very much over the course of the pandemic. One thing that has changed over the course of my writing career is that I am now in much less of a rush to get to the “final product” and more focused on giving every piece of work enough breathing room to develop into the piece it wants to be.

Review: Jessica Pierce’s Consider the Body, Winged

November 22, 2021.Reading time 10 minutes.

By Eric Stiefel

Jessica Pierce’s debut collection of poetry, Consider the Body, Winged (First Matter Press, 2021) is earnest, contemplative, and hauntingly elegant. Perhaps most importantly, the poems in Consider the Body, Winged are unflinchingly honest; they say what a less courageous poet might shy away from, what a less thoughtful poet might hide behind unnecessary flourish. Throughout the process of reading it, I found myself thinking of Jessica Pierce’s collection as a collection of meditations, each poem devoting its unfettered attention to the subjects at hand, from divinations and incarcerations to postpartum depression and lapsed faith.

The collection opens with a poem called “What do we know of endings?” (p. 13), which begins with an extended hypothetical: “And if the earth could gather up all / it contains, all its clouded greened / burning dusty torrential glory and grit…” the poem continuing on with bloated vultures and scrawny cats drawn into the image, new blues and crescent moons and wicked gods alike. Near the end, the poem turns toward introspection, asking if the world has room for “my grief / and my longing and your grief.” Then, after a pause, the poem makes a point to include “And maybe, / maybe, forgiveness.”

“The Way You Might Search a Dark Attic”: A Conversation with Faith Shearin, Author of Lost Language and winner of the 2021 NOR nonfiction contest

November 6, 2021.Reading time 12 minutes.

By Kay Keegan

Kay Keegan: Describe your writing practice and how you sustain it. Has your process changed over the course of your writing career? How about during the pandemic?

Faith Shearin: I write in little notebooks. I keep one in my bedroom under the bedside table, two in the study, one in the kitchen where it is frequently stained by soup, and one in the back seat of my car. These notebooks are full of images that seem to require my attention. One of my professors in graduate school, Thomas Lux, recommended writing ten pages a week about anything that captured my imagination; he though the act of putting pen to paper regularly kept a writer in touch with their own unconscious and creativity. (Two of my favorite books for writers The Artist’s Way and Writing Down the Bones offer similar advice.) He taught me to revisit this stream of consciousness writing with a highlighter the way you might search a dark attic with a flashlight if you were seeking love letters or fine china. I have managed to keep this habit in place, mostly because I enjoy routine and solitude. I write, in part, to see what I think since this is not always immediately apparent. In a letter to [her] literary mentor Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Emily Dickinson wrote: “I had terror since September, I could tell none; and so I sing, as the boy does by the burying ground, because I am afraid.” Like Emily, I also write because I am afraid. I wrote much less than usual during the pandemic; my daughter came home from college and we went hiking together among the rows of slate headstones in old New England cemeteries; we hiked through the remains of four towns that were drowned to create the Quabbin Reservoir; we made soups, and tie dyed masks, and watched every rerun of Northern Exposure and M*A*S*H.

Review: Taylor Byas’s Bloodwarm

November 3, 2021.Reading time 8 minutes.

By Eric Stiefel

Taylor Byas’s debut chapbook, Bloodwarm (Variant Lit, 2021), does the work that a good chapbook should: It’s bold, concise, and daring, and it hones in on what it wants to say, collecting its poems as variations on a theme without spending too much time retreading worn territory. Bloodwarm dances between the formal and the formally engaging, from sonnets to pantoums to erasures, to poems written from the past, to poems written as voicemails, as highway exit signs.

The collection starts in media res with “My Twitter Feed Becomes Too Much” (p. 1), opening with a pair of violent images from 2020’s George Floyd protests against police brutality (and the further police brutality inspired by the protests). “I come across pictures of two rubber bullets / nestled in a palm,” the poem begins, later telling us “The caption reads These maim, break skin, / cause blindness.” These lines are contrasted with the next image: “Another photo—a hollow / caved into a woman’s scalp, floating hands // in blue gloves dabbing at the spill.”

New Ohio Review Issue 29 (Originally printed Spring 2021)

July 11, 2021.Reading time less than 1 minute.

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

New Ohio Review Issue 29 (Originally printed Spring 2021)

July 10, 2021.Reading time less than 1 minute.

Issue 29 compiled by Brady Barnhill, Benjamin Bird, Sarah Hecker, Callie Martindale, Ellery Pollard, and Julia Smarelli

Ode to the Fresh Start

July 10, 2021.Reading time 1 minute.

By Susan Blackwell Ramsey

Featured Art: Untitled by Joseph Taylor

Sock drawer with its moth husks, limp mismatches,
rank refrigerator’s stink of shame, closet
whose back wall I don’t remember . . .

In Sanskrit abhyasa means practice, discipline,
not giving up, but starting over
and over and over again. Just start. Abhyasa.

So when I unroll my yoga mat
and it promptly rolls back up, I flip it over,
fling myself down on it, grunt “abhyasa.”

Veteran of fresh starts. I’ve trained myself
to believe there will be dustless bookshelves,
push-ups, French refresher courses, kale.

This time will be different. It always is.
Maybe the trick is shorter and shorter gaps
between the restarts until they run together,

like rolling out the lawn mower in May,
working to get a cough, another, three, and with a roar
it starts again. Once more that green smell rises.

Entropy

July 10, 2021.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Elton Glaser

Featured Art: Apartment With a View by Tyler Thenikl

Will this be one more summer spent
Among the ornamental mailboxes and garden gnomes,

As if I’d come down with a dose of lassitude,
Too much muck in the bloodstream?

That’s better, I guess, than a long month in Lubango,
Not far from the hovels and dead dogs,

With something strange steaming in the heat
And a bad case of the squitters,

And no worse, in its own way, than hearing someone
At the next table praise the taste of

Extra virgin truffle oil on the rutabaga fries,
Parsley butter sliding down a bison steak,

When what I crave is cruder: ecstasy of the unraveled,
Loose elations in a rumpled bed.

I’ve got nothing against sampling a farmer’s stand,
All those honeydews nestled in straw

And peaches fat and pink and above reproach,
Or an afternoon rocking on the front porch,

Sipping a tall cool glass of julep and watching
The dappled daze of sunlight on the leaves.

Ambling through the season, in a moveable feast,
Suits me like balm on a busted knuckle,

But when this life winds down I’d like to leave
Clean and alone, like a bone

Scrubbed free of the misery it went through,
And with a knob at the end

Big enough to knock some sense into
God On the messier side of heaven.

Here, in this bulging summer, too stuck or lazy
To rent another place to roost,

Let me at least reach out to what remains,
Anything still succulent and touchable.

A Summer Wind, a Cotton Dress

July 10, 2021.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Kate Fox

A glance held long and a stolen kiss,
This is how I remember you best.
—Richard Shindell

Little fires light themselves in the hearth, like tongues
of flame that reclaim the Holy Spirit, like pitchforks

in this clapboard house where mayflies swarm and crackle
against the porch light. On down, a gas station, a five-and-dime,

and your house, which I can see from the kitchen, where
clothes on the line billow and collapse, billow and collapse.

This small town holds everything I will ever know and have
to leave behind: bidden and forbidden glances,

voices from the second-floor landing that warn, Go no further.
Night will fall and you will fall with it. Which is what I want,

for the universe to take up where I leave off, this longing
so deep it can hold entire planets in its bottomless pocket,

yet shrink to the size of a finger at the hollow of your neck,
heart drawing blood from the branchwork of your breathing.

Above San Gimignano by Tyler Thenikl

July 10, 2021.Reading time less than 1 minute.

4D

July 10, 2021.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Jon Fischer

Featured Art: Above San Gimignano by Tyler Thenikl

The 3D printer made a man and gave him a beard
to rub thoughtfully. It printed a book on mortality,
a pamphlet on sin, a monograph on time, and many other
fine things to keep in mind. Then it spun out two
of each animal and a boat around them. It printed rain
so long we thought it was broken, then
it printed an olive leaf. Its final act
was to print a 4D printer, which printed a memory
for the man, who said with his rubbery tongue,
I remember there were olive trees,
and he released one of the doves from its cage
below deck, where it spent the time we were given
under the gaze of two housecats and two weasels.
But the 4D printer started to print more
than the time we were given. Weeks rolled off in pairs, still
warm from the furnace of creation,
and wedges of space to move the stars apart
so the man had room to fill the weeks with many
fine things to keep in mind. That’s how we turned the world
into a dream, where time doesn’t know what to do with itself,
and you always end up falling.

Heron or Plastic Bag

July 10, 2021.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Jon Fischer

Far off in a vacant field beside an irrigation
canal alights a stately gray heron

or a plastic bag. The plastic bag flaps
and in the tricky light thick clouds leave behind

trembles in and out of translucence,
just like a heron. The heron flew here from another

land in search of a plot to fill and warmly
fulfill and mute the Sisyphean rhythm of restless

creatures’ lives, across countless miles
that would never do, just like a plastic bag.

Close up it’s clear the field holds both
a stately heron and a plastic bag, each

studying the other like figure and reflection.
Now the difference is obvious. The heron’s eyes

recognize the predicament he’s in, the infernal
froglessness of all this wiregrass, the length

of the horizon, the lean of a eucalyptus. Behind
his eyes is the continent where he first

leapt into a crystalline gust, and at beak’s end wriggles
a continent uncharted, fleshly, ready to be snapped up

like a young shad. But this time of year his wings
know everything there is to know about south

and nothing else. Whereas the bag simply is
the predicament it’s in and billows

with all the joy that has ever flown through
a thousand years of wind.

What the Drawing Explains

July 10, 2021.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Jon Fischer

It’s hard to describe a drawing of a millennium,
but you know it when you see it

on a sticky note fallen to the speckled tile
near the lockers in a high-school hallway

It’s rendered half of the social commentary
inherent in a peach-colored crayon, half

of ablative carbon fiber and iridium dust,
the artist’s signature a sketch

of the human genome. This millennium is half past,
half future, neither all that great.

The drawing smells like a philosopher’s feet.
It tells a story that rises off the paper

and reads the palms of passersby, turning life lines
jagged and love lines into spirals. It tells a story

that sinks deep inside the paper, seizing
for its fibrous heart the best and most harrowing

plot twists. Nonetheless, the drawing explains
why the Nile changed course, why tornadoes

and the sea found fancier homes,
why we made no new religions

but let the ones we had grow brittle, why we still
lose languages and serenade machines

and can’t be bothered to speak with aliens.
There you are in the middle, anatomically accurate.

Built around you are a cathedral and a labyrinth
then skyscrapers and scaffolding, a rational galaxy,

a fleet of anxieties, ignorance
efflorescent in a waxing tide, and your personal

win-loss record. You do with the drawing
what fine art does to you,

folding it into a Möbius strip for later,
and also for earlier.

Spring Reflection

July 10, 2021.Reading time 1 minute.

By Stephanie Choi

Featured Art: Scarlet by Joseph Taylor

You crave
For the wheels to ride across the puddle, muddied
With pebbles & all your past lives too

You want to find again
That sky blue that’s been shut tight
All winter long

You don’t know why
When you finally do
The birds mistake each strand of your hair for a branch

You wish for the pecking to stop
And for the stillness of a bud before blossom
To return to you

You ask for a taste
Of the warm cold wind on your wet lips
Just once more—

You try to remember
What everything was like before
But you take a sip from the cup filled with dust
& ash, instead

In the Garden

July 10, 2021.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Kelly Rowe

Featured Art: Mimic by Dylan Petrea

When you were small,
we lived in a tropical state,
and you spoke fluently
a language only two could understand.

It had one word
for bean or ball or m&m or kiss,
three for water, six for dream
or any other risk.

When we talked, the dog danced on hind legs,
and the house sailed down the river,
waving its red and white flags.
The rain took you wading under the live oaks

and mispronounced your name,
but showered you with opals,
while high in the branches invisible birds
whistled back and forth in code.

Now, you live somewhere else,
I’ve gone a little deaf.
I press the phone to my ear
as your voice cuts out, fades,

and like the last speaker
of a lost language, I grope
for one of the hundred names for river,
or the single shouted syllable: Ma!

Meaning flash flood, meaning ark,
meaning the one we need
no words for, the one who flies to us
when we cry out in the dark.

Garden Sitting

July 10, 2021.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Jennifer Dorner

– for my mother

Season of moths in the strawberries.
An apple or two fallen from the tree.
Plums not yet ripe, through the cornstalks
are burdened with silk,
the vine tomatoes split,
and the sunflowers track the sun,
a bee in each dark center.

Late to the tasks you left me
I unfold the watering instructions again,
late to harvest the beds circled
on your hand-drawn map.

The evening is a haze,
sheets of starlings stretched
over the mown grass field,
a brush of red beneath
the shadowed tree line.

This week I read about the dying,
how those who have passed
can speak to the ones left behind
in the language of what they loved.
One man who tended rhododendron gardens,
a canopy of blossoms suddenly falling
over his first daughter’s car
while the second daughter
gathered a loose cluster
blown down into her path
the moment their father died.

I slide your patio door open, step over
trays of vegetable starts
on the faded rug
packed with potting soil.
Your handwriting vertical on the slim
labels beside each stem:
chard, fennel, romaine, madeley,

winterkeeper. I wish I’d known better –
this world of straw hats and arthritic wrist,
the duct-taped trowel,
these rubber boots that fit my feet.

How to Peel an Orange

July 10, 2021.Reading time 53 minutes.

By Stephanie Wheeler

Featured Art: Peeled II by Samantha Slone

The dryer was making a monstrous sound. The repairman stood with his hand resting flat on top.

“I feel the vibration,” he said. He was a fat man with a three-day stubble sprouting in uneven patches on his face. His uniform shirt was belted into his trousers around the front and haphazardly untucked in the back. Hazel could see his milky eyes shifting rapidly through smudged glasses. She hated him a little.

Hazel nodded. “And you can hear it, too.”

He squinted his eyes, then squeezed them tight, concentrating.

Hazel decided that she hated him a lot.

“The grinding sound,” Hazel said, straining to make her voice heard above the din. “It’s quite obvious, really.”

“Ah, yes. The grinding. I hear it.”

Hazel’s cell phone chimed then, and she looked at the screen. The name Walt appeared in white letters, glowing.

Raw Numbers

July 10, 2021.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Jasmine V. Bailey

During his reign, four hundred bears.
On the bloodiest day, twenty-four.
On a hunting trip with friends, staged,
as they all were staged, twenty-two
and eleven for his friends. No one
tallied the boar and deer.
Ceaușescu sitting in his perch above a clearing a gamekeeper chases the bears through,
firing an automatic rifle.
One hundred thirty bears
in those last six years.
Brown bears, grizzlies in our West,
eat mostly plants
but Ceaușescu’s bears ate pellets
fed to them by the gamekeepers
who say they don’t like hunting anymore.
He will die next to Elena
in December, nineteen eighty-nine,
the shortest day of the year.
One hundred sixty-eight centimeters: Ceaușescu’s height.
The bears flourished with the kibble,
hunting forbidden to everyone but
Ceaușescu, their Conseil International de la Chasse points
unnaturally high.
Twenty thousand dollars
to hunt a brown bear in Romania now
if you are a citizen of the EU.
The population is smaller, each bear
smaller since Romania joined Europe—
seven thousand five hundred at the height
to fewer than five thousand three hundred
once the doors of the Carpathians opened.
Forty-three grizzlies died
when Yellowstone closed its dumpsters.
Staggering in their final, worst hunger.
Once someone hatched a scheme
to raise bears for Ceaușescu’s hunts.
Two hundred twenty-seven
bear cubs were torn from their mothers
who, crazed, had to be shot
to let them go, as I would have to be shot.
One or two: the number of toes cut off without anesthetic
to create a code by which to identify each cub,
who went insane with grief for their mothers,
who were never successfully raised for the hunt,
who all escaped or were released
haphazardly, dying on highways
and in circuses, ending in a daze
the daze of their lives.
Two: the number of days
the cubs howled
after their claws were ripped from their paws.
The number of suicides
during his twenty-four years as general secretary of the Communist Party
of Romania:
not known.
Twelve weeks my daughter’s lived
outside my body.
I want to lie with her under one blanket
until God thinks better of so much.

Ocean City, New Jersey

July 10, 2021.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Jasmine V. Bailey

I drove to meet you the first day of the year
at a B&B fifteen miles east of my childhood
on the White Horse Pike.
For three mornings we had a German pancake
and three cups of coffee
with the black-haired innkeeper
whose husband coughed in another room,
whose philodendra vined her walls
and ceilings like a cage.

You led me down the beach that first night
all the way to Longport Bridge
keeping secret what we were after.
Everything seemed a candidate—
the armor of some crab picked clean,
Polaris beneath the moon
like Marilyn Monroe’s mole.
When we got to the bay
I thought we might swim it.
Your face fell realizing
what we’d come to see was gone,
that you would have to tell
what you’d brought me there to show.

The bioluminescence you’d seen
the night before I arrived
coaxing a glistering shore
out of the dark
was gone with the jellies
or bacteria arrived now in the Atlantic.
You described it as a lit path, if
a narrow one, like the aisle
of an airplane you pace at night
when every passenger is asleep
because you no longer know
what your country is like
or if your mom will manage
to find her way to Philadelphia
to pick you up, or if there will ever
be a child to grow so tired
you have to carry her, sleeping,
all the way home on your chest,
her heavy head just starting to dampen,
her eyelids working against your heart—
and I saw it.

All Animals Want the Same Things

July 10, 2021.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Jeanne-Marie Osterman

Featured Art: “Catpurnia” by Julie Riley

I had a sickly cat whose cure,
said the homeopath, was raw meat
so I replaced the canned food with scraps
from the butcher and overnight
her gingerly eating turned feral devouring.
She’d yowl as I took the jiggling red flesh
from the fridge, pace as I cut it into pieces,
then suck it down before I could rinse the knife.

This so exhausted her, she’d lie on the sofa
for hours before getting up to prey
on the dustbunnies under my desk.
While I was watching Shark Tank one night,
a ball of Kleenex walked across my living room floor.
It turned out to be a mouse
who was carrying it to the bookcase
where she was building a house
behind my dog-eared copy of Balzac’s Lost Illusions.

Seeing the mouse brought my cat back to full health.
She stalked the tiny creature, crippled it
with her jaws, sat back to watch it struggle.
I called the building super and asked him
to take the mouse away, signing
the creature’s death warrant.

My sister and her husband raise cows for the slaughter.
Though my sister will eat them,
she refuses to go to the slaughterhouse
when their time has come.
I watched how they do it on YouTube.

An operator lines the stunner up
with the sweet spot of the cow’s brain.
The bolt inside is captive—
held like a breath in its chamber,
then expired with such force
it knocks the animal unconscious.
The bolt doesn’t penetrate.
It recoils to be used for the next.
And the cow lives!
The heart keeps beating,
which speeds the bleeding-out,
which is the actual slaughter.

When my husband left, it hit like a bolt.
He’d held his infidelity in like a breath,
then walked away, recoiled.

Encore

July 10, 2021.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Maura Faulise

Featured Art: “I Feel Like Pieces” by E’Lizia Perry

Pulling out of Dingle Bay
in the rental van that rainy day
after singing to the tunes
of the fiddle player in the family pub,
my father drove red-faced
and under the influence
of what I now know
was nostalgia
for the affair he’d just ended
before flying us over the ocean
to kiss the Blarney Stone.
He mumbled her name at the wheel,
and something about O’Shaughnessy’s
fine music and the fountain of tears
and the Celtic rain.
When the van slid off the road
and into a field of peat, he punched
the gas to get us out
but the wheels stuttered in the cold mud.
Unconcerned with our fate,
we four kids sat stiff
in the backseat, doe-eyed
and glued to the rhythm
of our mother’s timorous noises.
I don’t know what moved him
—the relentless gray sky
or the lightning hammering
so close to the metal,
but he looked at us one by one
for a while
before opening his mouth to sing
of the long-long way to Tipperary,
where the heart remains
and he got us singing too,
broke us down the way he always did
amid claps of thunder,
angry rumble or applause,
I just couldn’t be sure.

Heels

July 10, 2021.Reading time less than 1 minute.

By Justin Rigamonti

With a bouquet
of ferns
and lemon
yellow roses,
she looks
incandescent
in the dug-up
photo of
“the time I
got married
the first time.”

Meaning,
pain followed
hot on this
happy woman’s
heels. Meaning,
don’t think
her life has
hummed along
luminously
ever since.

Life never does.
But won’t a smile
like a string of
holiday lights
still have been
a smile?
And joy
for awhile
was still joy.

Anne Lester

July 10, 2021.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Emma Aylor

—1936–2013

Sleeping it off last night I dreamed I had one lung.
The other next to me in bed dark and putting
off smoke. When you were young
I passed my Virginia Slim so you wouldn’t get
the taste for it: I remember standing in the kitchen
lighting it up for my girl.
You never did smoke after that. In front of the TV
last night I spilled the whole drink down my shirt
a little in this world a little in the other.

I’ve been Anne Moore for most of my life.
My last morning as Lester I looked
like Liz Taylor’s sister hair dark and glossed.
It’s hard to remember myself like that.
I depend on a picture to know I was beautiful—

waist a switch in a virgin’s dress.
Couldn’t have done better at nineteen,
grew up so close to Tennessee.
We moved all over the plains for a time
and came back to Bill’s dad’s store.
I remember days up to my elbows in spicy chili,
nights raising you right up the hill.

My hands have shaken my whole life. Always think
it could have been worse. A favorite joke:
a parrot who swears is punished by being put
in the freezer. Once, it sees a frozen turkey
in the corner and says,
DAMN, that bird must have said fuck.
I remember I told you and your daughter you looked at me
like I didn’t understand a single stupid thing.
Would it make a difference if I did

that same house your father repeating GODDAMN IT ANNE
like a stuck station in front of you and all
my children’s children
and

it’s morning in the bath now and I’m not getting up yet.
In the water a bruise on my arm
develops like a litmus paper a little
yellow— hardly acidic.

I remember leaving your daughter at the pool while I wet
my brain came back to her sunburned
pink as a hot pig. Remember she fell
off the bed and scarred her little nose
a white line still cut through the freckles.
Light through the bathroom glancing sideways.
My daddy drank. I remember how bad.
It’s not really a reason but I remember enough.
My chest clutches a little
and then fills up. Water gets a little bluer
with what comes off my skin.
It’s not possible that you remember me.

Mt. Athos

July 10, 2021.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Emma Aylor

Featured Art: “Skin ‘N’ Bones” by Arianna Kocab

– 1936-2013

My granny died facedown in the kitchen
of the isolate house: atop a hill named for ruins
of a burned plantation near, whose owner was rumored
to be buried standing so he could continue to survey
the land from his summited tomb, up a lick
off Opossum Creek, itself off a bend

in the body of the James. A stroke. And grandpop
made a big show of never looking at her face
again; he said he couldn’t overlap his memory;
he let her lay crashed in her own bones until help came,
let her face settle into its death with no witness,
and I don’t know where her ash was scattered
after that, if it was, the memorial just a party in the house without
her around—a body never really there—and closing night

for my grandfather’s fifty-eight-year claim
to a good marriage. I took a train from New York
down through Virginia, eight hours marked
at intervals by the crumbling backs of Newark,
Baltimore, Washington, Charlottesville—
to Lynchburg. At one stretch, hard pink spray paint over
a whole swatch of dry grass. To tell the truth,

the ease of missing her then was almost a comfort.
Its relative water-fed simplicity. When I got the call
I had space set for further clearing.
On the walls she was nineteen and already flickering,
her hair in my mother’s curls, or mine, careful set
of her mouth, her heels and her dresses.
Down the dark hill, weeds lushed by June,
our dead gathered to murmur through the river’s red throat.

“Candid Sampler” by Amy Pryor

July 10, 2021.Reading time less than 1 minute.

We Don’t Die

July 10, 2021.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Darius Simpson
Selected as winner of the 2021 NORward Prize for Poetry by a panel of previous poetry contributors

Featured Art: “Candid Sampler” by Amy Pryor

we second line trumpet through gridlock traffic.
we home-go in the back of cadillac limousines. we
wake up stiff in our sunday best. we move the sky.
we escape route the stars. we moonlit conspiracy
against daytime madness. we electrify. we past
due bill but full belly. we fridge empty. we pocket
lint. we make ends into extensions. we multiply
in case of capture. we claim cousins as protection.
we extend family to belong to someone, we siblings
cuz we gotta be. we chicken fry. we greased scalp. we
hog neck greens. we scrape together a recipe outta scraps.
we prophecy. we told you so even if we never told you nothin.
we omniscient except in our own business. we swallow a
national anthem and spit it out sweet. make it sound like
red velvet ain’t just chocolate wit some dye. we bend lies.
we amplify. we laugh so hard it hurts. we hurt so quiet we
dance. we stay fly. we float on tracks. we glide across
linoleum like ice. we make it look like butter. we melt
like candle wax in the warmth of saturday night liquor sweat.
we don’t die. we dust that colonies couldn’t settle. we saltwater
city built from runaway skeletons. we organize. we oakland in ’66.
we attica in ’71. we ferguson before and after the camera crews we
won’t die we won’t die we won’t die we won’t die we won’t

Essentials

July 10, 2021.Reading time 1 minute.

By Todd Boss

Featured Art: Silhouette of Person in Airport by Skitterphoto

I’m down to two bags.
I use a friend’s address.

I’ve only got one last
recurring nightmare

that forces me to face
my ex. There’s still one

child I haven’t lost, but
he’s next. Even loved

ones are non-essential,
sorry to report. You’ve

come here for news of
how to live, but Grieve

and grieve, is all I can
say. Grieve enough, you

can even get grieving
out of the way. Grief’s

chiefest among chores.
Do it well, and the

mostly empty universe
is yours.

Tracers

July 10, 2021.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Todd Boss

Featured Art: Window View of Sea during Golden Hour by Jeffrey Czum

Let’s say one day
the ballgame from
the day before mysteriously
rematerializes in the form of
tracers—each pitch,
each hit, each catch,
each toss, each
criss and crisscross
marked—chalked
in air—here, there—
reiterated, the way a
window, fogged,
remembers the last
things third graders
wrote with fingers
on it. Let’s say it
rendered the field
unplayable so they
let you walk it.
They would. It’d be
a big attraction—
tracers interlacing,
crepe paper streamers
of a pastime past,
most between bases
and the rest of the
bands connecting
home plate with
the outfield or even
the stands in some
cases—inning on
inning of contrails
twinning and twining
in defining strands
as if the ball’d been
string. It might
not mean anything
but it would be odd.
My god, you’d say
at the sight, ducking
the not-quite-straight
line of a line drive to
right, remarking how
much of the game,
which seemed so
grounded last night,
is in fact in flight—
pure energy
transferred from giving
hand to waiting
glove, the way our
lives are made of
thought and love
and word and prayer
in particle or wave
surrounding every
numbered and
unnumbered player
on the planet in a
dome of light
that stadiums us,
immense, between
the dugout caves we
crawled from and the
outfield fence.

He Divides His Time Between

July 10, 2021.Reading time 1 minute.

By Todd Boss

Featured Art: Green Leafed Trees by Pixabay

is a line I
always wanted
in my bio.

“He divides his
time between
Reykjavik and
Sandusky, Ohio.”

“He summers
on Lake Como
and winters
in Aspen.”

As it happens,
noplace is
like home.

We multiply
when we divide
our lives, our
loves, and our
addresses.

Now my father’s
son is a ghost,
a wisp of smoke,
a metaphor.

He divides his
time between
nothing and
much and
matters and
anymore.

At the Coffee Shop on Rogers

July 10, 2021.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Robert Wood Lynn

Featured Art: Close-up of Coffee Cup by Chevanon Photography

When I was done I took my teacup
to the bussing station where the tub said No Trash
so I fished out the teabag but the only trashcan
had one of those blue liners so I couldn’t tell
if it was for recycling. I decided to throw
the teabag out in the garbage on the street
which meant carrying it there dripping
in my hand like a dead bird, one I didn’t kill
but still felt moved to bury—the barista saw
and asked me why, as if a reason was
another license I’d forgotten to renew.
Composting. I said I was desperate
for compost in my garden. Now
every morning she gives me handfuls
of spent teabags, the way the cat would
bring me offerings of dead birds
which seemed sweet until I read how
cats think we can’t take care of ourselves.
After being fitted for a hearing aid
my deaf friend was most surprised to find
sunlight didn’t hum, unsettled by how cats
could choose to move in silence. She became
obsessed with the sounds of birds: collective
at first then individual. Quiet only in repose
like these teabags I throw away on the street
and feel guilty I don’t have a garden. Not even
a balcony. The cat’s been dead for years.
It’s morning and my hands are soggy, I know,
for the stupidest reason. In spite of the evidence
I am getting good at being alone.

Albuquerque Sunrise

July 10, 2021.Reading time 33 minutes.

By Ashley Hand

Sometimes I was Melissa. Other times I was Alexis, or Estelle. One night I was Shelby because we’d just watched a Pierce Brosnan movie where he drove a 1967 Shelby GT. By the end of the night the name felt natural and you were slinging an arm around my shoulder and calling me Shelbs. You were always yourself. You were Mac. I wore wigs. I wore peel-and-stick nails. I did elaborate makeup. One night in October we went to the Albuquerque balloon festival and wandered around at dark on the fringe of the crowd, watching the torches gas up into the hollows of the parachutes like they were big paper lanterns, and I was made up in the spirit of Día de los Muertos, a pompadour of blood-red roses that we’d trimmed from the yard crowning my head, and we held hands in public and my face was stiff from paint but I felt like a queen gliding through the stalls of the outdoor fair in my black bodysuit, unrecognized. It smelled like roasted corn and the grass was wet from a rain and the night was warm and it felt like we were free.

At first we stayed in all the time. We played gin rummy and did crossword puzzles and had sex. We grilled on the patio for dinner. In the evenings we would drink wine and the house was quiet and we would listen to Taps play out over loudspeakers across the Air Force base and watch the last vestiges of violet light disappear behind the wall of cypress trees that blocked out the power lines and concrete buildings. After the final peals of the bugle call, the clicking of the cicadas would resume. We’d slick our legs and necks with bug spray and light a citronella candle and share a cigarette. We talked politics and books. We played mancala and cribbage. I’d tell you stories from my childhood and you’d pet my hair and tell me my father was a bastard.

Black and Gray Metal Tool by _ Harvey

July 9, 2021.Reading time less than 1 minute.

The Delay

July 9, 2021.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Emily Sernaker

Featured Art: Black and Gray Metal Tool by _ Harvey

Maybe by the time you read this a golden retriever with a bandana
will be snuggled up against my knees. Or the man I love,
the one I get to keep, will be kissing me goodbye for the day
his lips tasting of cereal and coffee. Instead I’m living

with my college roommate Breezy in Bushwick, Brooklyn.
Breezy just gave me a bottle of Unconditional Love
perfume she won at the gym. Her little Tootsie Roll
of a dog, Charlotte, a Boston terrier, keeps hiding bones

in my bed. My bedroom used to be Breezy’s dining room
before the divorce. It’s safe to say neither of us thought
this is where we’d be—but we’re making the most of it.
She owns wind chimes. I bought peonies. Outside our front

door someone has graffitied the words TROUBLE FUCK!
which we prefer to read as FUCK TROUBLE!
And we found that duck in Central Park, the mandarin
rainbow that isn’t supposed to be there but is.

Maybe by the time you read this I won’t be waiting
to be happy. The truth is things are going well.
Everyone I love is alive. Breezy printed a 12×16
of the misplaced firecracker of a duck. She had it framed

and matted it’s hanging in our living room.
He’s staring down the camera
saying: Aren’t you glad you got to see this?
I dare you to wish you were anywhere else.

January Dispatch

July 9, 2021.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Emily Sernaker

Featured Art: Oblong Brown Metal Mailbox by sl wong

I misread a signal and accidentally hugged my mailman.
He was just tapping me on the arm and I somehow went all in.

In other news, my former barista is meeting me for coffee
and bringing Arthur her rescue dog. I met another fantastic

dog this morning who had never seen snow before
he was zig-zag walking losing his mind with joy

trying to lick it all up. I have to wear a brace on my right
hand for a while, it’s some kind of strain. Two days ago

Tom and I broke up. We were both hard crying. It was just
one of those top five hard things in life. I keep thinking

about the time Tatianni spotted a rose-beaked cardinal
in my backyard. She knew to look for the second one,

was sure it would be there. It’s like how I feel
finding Philip Levine and Larry Levis always spine

by spine in the bookshop. Some things you can count
on. Anyway, the snow has left impossibly soft lines

on everything. Bicycle tires, lids of mailboxes.
What’s the opposite of underlying? It’s like that.

Powdery bright marks saying take note.
This will probably be important later.