Bacon

.Reading time 56 minutes.

By Alan Sincic

Featured Art: “My Blue Garden” by Madara Mason

“Look at you, boy.” Cochrane gave his junk another shake, stuffed it back into his Levi’s. “You trying to tell me you could lift—we’re not even talking carry here—lift a quarter ton of bacon?”

“I been training,” said Barnett. The pudgy frame, the warble in the voice, the baby-fat of the face all pocked with rivets: we nobody believed he was old as he said he was. Fifteen? Sixteen maybe?

“Training?” said Cochrane.

“Dynamic Tension,” said Barnett, parsing out the syllables in the verberant tones of a preacher.

We laughed. We pictured the ads in the back pages of Gun Molls and Flying Aces and Popular Mechanics. Charles Atlas. The guy in the skivvies with the strapping chest and the husky, solid fighting muscles that every man should have.

“You mean bacon in a barrel,” said Joe from behind a tree, “so you could roll it.”

No sirree. No,” said Barnett. He rocked from side to side, careful not to back-splash off the azalea and onto his bare feet. “We’re not talking about a barrel. Like I said. We’re talking about bacon. Bacon by the slab. Four hundred pounds.”

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Construction Paper Flags Tacked to a Primary School Bulletin Board

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Adam Tavel

Featured Art: “Noise in the System” by Madara Mason

for my sons

This one has concentric frames
that on close inspection are
pink strips of floss. This one
swims inside itself, three shades
of blue. This one’s stripes
are dead calligraphy: R.I.P. Abuela,
R.I.P. Cousin Juan. This one grows
bored and morphs into a sketch
of a cartoon baseball twirling
its handlebar mustache.
This one begs God Bless. This one
has sticker pistols saying BANG.
This one’s wrists wear broken chains.
This one is lost inside the glitz
of caked-on glitter gold. This one
is impasto red on red that bled
on everything it touched. This one
has forty macaroni stars
and this one has the husk
of a dragonfly where stars
should be, its glue-gobbed wings
unstitching from the corpse.

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Now in Color

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Jacqueline Balderrama

Featured Art by Courtney Bennett

the migratory patterns of sheartail and warbler continue back and forth

       and on foot—the grey wolf,

                                                       the armadillo,

                                                                              the coyote.

Now paper, now papel—we learn to listen in different ways,

             at night, hear the floor vents empty their chamber of words,

and again, they ask for the source of me

                                                                    as if water could stop

                                                                    or would.

Now the agents dress us in the terms of their casting calls—

               anonymous beneath the sombrero, or fiery latina, or gardener, or alien, or drug lord.

Now Maria Montez, Katy Jurado, Rita Hayworth speak back to the funny mirror,

             which reflects them only as cut tulips.

And my mother shakes her head for the childhood dog the neighbors took in

then abandoned in the desert.

Now the wildfires on the San Bernardino Mountains

             when families at night set out lawn chairs to watch the flames.

And a man on the news electrifies his fences and shows the camera large photos

                                                                     of bodies he’s found beneath his trees.

Now a prayer to Mother Cabrini, patron saint of immigrants.

Now the radio is breathless . . .

The television like an escape portal streams color through undraped windows,

but inside we are still here

fumbling to turn on the light or floating down in our chairs,

          wishing the room to unleash its plum, its marigold, the blue of our jeans, the white walls

          covered with frames, wishing too that everyone had been there with us.

Now we separate monstrous shadows from the broomsticks, the coils of rope, the strangers,

             assuring ourselves that somehow we can still have good days.

Somewhere prickly poppies are blooming and want to.

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An Unordered List of the Not-Beautiful

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Katie Pyontek

Featured Art by Courtney Bennett

Beauty depends on magnitude and order.
Hence a very small life cannot be beautiful,
for the view of it is confused.

 — Aristotle

Not the green bellies of hummingbirds, not

one set of wired bones shown behind glass.

Not the plump folds of tardigrades, not quarks,

not marbles on carpet, not pinhole stars.

Not the improbable orderliness

of ants, not feverfew or curls of hair,

not quick love notes left out on the counter.

Not a dozen kumquats, not an average

of six minutes. Not the intricate coils

of a snail’s shell, inching down the sidewalk.

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After Hours

.Reading time 4 minutes.

By Maria Nazos

Featured Art: “Illusion of My Studio” by Yan Sun

When I exited the stall, she was standing at the sink.

I knew her best from one night at the bar, when she’d said

my ex was handsome. Then asked whether I’d mind if she

called him later that night. I’d pressed my lips together

and said, go ahead, certain she held an unspoken malice

which young women carry into small towns. I’d moved

to the Cape to escape from my talent for tearing through

love, only to follow a trail of broken glass into every bar.

Only to find every fisherman with a penchant for failed

marriages and pot, and myself, again,

staying up too long and late.

As I stood beside her in the bathroom, washing my hands,

I thought of another night when she’d told me, as if casually

draping a dark blouse across a stool, that her father had just died.

I’d squeezed her hand. She pushed her blonde hair off her face,

said, that’s okay. But I’d seen her at the bar every night since,

drinking with a red-haired fisherman who’d tried to strangle

his ex. I shook my hands dry. Tear my shirt, she urged, interrupting

my reverie. Why? I asked. Did she want to show off

her seashell-curved cleavage or simply feel something

besides her heart splitting down the middle?

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Heat Index

.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Kerry James Evans

Featured Art: “Ursa Major” by Madara Mason

Summer, but not cantaloupe-ripe summer,

not tomato-ripe, not watermelon-ripe,

not making love with the windows open,

riding downtown at midnight

with the top down, radio blaring

another teenage pop sensation

too-bland-to-be-offensive summer.

No, it’s burnt sod, thunderstorm summer.

Don’t lie to me! It’s a World Cup summer.

Don’t lie to yourself, Son. Get up

and drink that Dr Pepper. Another

bullets in the street summer.

Another blood-hot, angry Apollo

chasing the ice cream truck with a buck

for a Popsicle kind of summer.

When the walk gives way to dandelions,

gives way to Charlie Chaplin,

then Charlie Murphy walks into Tick Tock Tavern,

and what? Want a punch line, Punk?

You’re only smiling because you’re scared.

The kind of summer that makes you

beg for winter kind of summer.

That fear-riddled mangy dog summer,

and don’t the butterfly weed

smell like petunias to a dirty-minded Monarch?

Go on and tip your crown into the lake.

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The Poetics of Blues

.Reading time less than 1 minute.

Featuring interviews with Kiese Laymon, Tyehimba Jess, and Derrick Harriell, as well as new poems by Angela Narciso Torres and Eleanor Kedney. Plus, Blues poems, essays, and a story from the NOR archives.

Perpetual Reckoning: An Interview With Kiese Laymon

.Reading time 37 minutes.

“For me the blues is the perpetual reckoning with what should be agony, but finding ways of making that reckoning pleasurable. The agony and the pleasure exist right up next to one another. The question is how do we most effectively hold ourselves together through the pain, through the suffering, and through the agony? My history in this country teaches me that you have to do it through art. That doesn’t mean the art that gets sold. But the art of talking. The art of listening. The art of making sounds. The art of rhythmically manipulating repetition, which I think was really at the core of the blues.” – Kiese Laymon

Interview conducted by Josh-Wade Ferguson

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Obsession, Desperation, and Curiosity: A Conversation on the Poetics of Blues with Tyehimba Jess and Derrick Harriell

.Reading time 73 minutes.

“And that’s what you’re talking about when you’re talking about the essence of the blues and its relativity to what we’re doing today. Because we’re working in the tradition of the literature, right? That’s inseparable from that stream. That was the literature we had before we could read and write. And once we were allowed to read and write without the force of death being put upon us, all that imaging went right into the literature. And that’s the connection between African American literature and the blues. So there is no separation between the two.” – Tyehimba Jess

Interview Conducted by E.M. Tran

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From the Archive: Jazz and the Blues in Poetry

.Reading time 9 minutes.

Horn

by Robert Pinsky

Originally published in New Ohio Review Issue #7

This is the golden trophy. The true addiction.
Steel springs, pearl facings, fibers and leathers, all
Mounted on the body tarnished from neck to bell.

The master, a Legend, a “righteous addict,” pauses
While walking past a bar, to listen, says: Listen—
Listen what that cat in there is doing. Some figure,

Some hook, breathy honk, sharp nine or weird
Rhythm this one hack journeyman hornman had going.
Listen, says the Dante of bop, to what he’s working.

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Harmonica

.Reading time 1 minute.

by Eleanor Kedney

When it was clear my brother
wouldn’t kick his drug addiction
and return to all the things he was great at—
baseball, tennis, downhill skiing—
he still played the harmonica.

Once, at a summer wedding, in the lull
between the toasts and dessert
he took the band’s mic,
tossed his curly hair to one side,
and put the blues harp deep in his mouth—
puckered lips, blocked tongue,
the bending sound like a train
going through a tunnel.

My mother stood and clapped.
That’s Peter, she kept
saying. That’s Peter.

                                   His eyes closed
to everyone in the room.
“Not Fade Away” took all his breath
to play.

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From the Archive: “Influence” and “Homer and Jazz”

.Reading time 41 minutes.

Both essays originally published in New Ohio Review Issue #7

Influence 

by Sydney Lea 

Those who know me know that I’ve long been deeply in love with what Roland Kirk called “Black Classical Music,”

especially of that era whose great practitioners include Monk, Rollins, Davis, Jackson, Roach, among others;

and I’m frequently and unsurprisingly asked about the influence of jazz on my poetry.

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Pantoum With Lines From Lucille Clifton’s Memoir

.Reading time 2 minutes.

by Angela Narciso Torres

It’s a long time after, and I just wanted to know.
What was it like on the boat?
I wonder what became of our Mama?
And they would just rock and rock.

What was it like on the boat?
Oh slavery, slavery, my Daddy would say.
And they would just rock and rock.
Even the good parts was awful.

Oh slavery, slavery, my Daddy would say.
In history, even the lies are true.
Even the good parts was awful.
She walked from New Orleans to Virginia. Eight years old.

In history, even the lies are true.
Slavery was terrible but we fooled them.
She walked from New Orleans to Virginia. Eight years old.
We come out of it better than they did.

Slavery was terrible but we fooled them.
Don’t let nobody tell you them old people was dumb.
We come out of it better than they did.
Things don’t fall apart. Things hold.

Don’t let nobody tell you them old people was dumb.
Our lives are more than the days in them.
Things don’t fall apart. Things hold.
I only wanted to find out about these things.

Our lives are more than the days in them.
I wonder what became of our Mama?
I only wanted to find out about these things.
It’s a long after, and I just wanted to know.

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From the Archive: “Audition”

.Reading time 36 minutes.

by Leslie Rodd

Originally published in New Ohio Review Issue #20

San Francisco, 1969

Outside the jazz club where I’ve been audience, player, and piano tuner over the years, it’s quiet at this sunstruck ten o’clock, and I have a shivery thought of a guitar and a girl that began inside my head last night. No rocking, no rhythm, no foot-stomping or window-shaking. Only the fifty measured strides I’ve counted from the corner where the 30 Stockton dropped me off, past the police station to the alley, the dip in the pavement and the sloping rise, the manhole cover to my left, yes, here it is, the last of my landmarks, reassuring me I’m in the right place. A thought of a girl, who used to make my music glow.

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2018 Winter Exclusive

.Reading time less than 1 minute.

Featuring stories by Caro Claire Burke, Daniel Paul, Jonathan Durbin, Frankie Barnet, and Gunnar Jaeck, and poems by Kateri Kosek, David O’Connell, Christopher Brean Murray, Dylan Loring, Lance Larsen, Cody Wilson, and Susan Ramsey.

Dark Matter

.Reading time 53 minutes.

By Caro Claire Burke

1.

The mother and father received the news on a Friday afternoon and were in the car driving south an hour later. They drove until midnight, then checked into a Courtyard Marriott for five hours before hopping back onto the road at dawn to cover the last hundred miles. They were silent in the car, which was strange: in their twenty years of marriage, they had never run out of things to talk about. There were, of course, things to talk about now—perhaps more than ever before—but neither the mother nor the father could find the words to start the conversation. By the time they navigated through the college town and parked at the police station where their son was held, they were both exhausted, irritable, and fit to burst with all the questions they’d swallowed on the way down.

The police officer behind the desk looked up as the entrance bells went off. “You must be the boy’s parents.”

The father stepped forward to shake the police officer’s hand. “That we are. Where is he?”

The officer was jovial to a fault. “Just down the hall a ways.” He turned toward a door in the back and waved an arm at them to follow. But the mother and father were silent, almost frozen, and at that silence the police officer turned around, his hand on the doorknob. “Hey, now,” he said. “Now’s not the time for that. Your boy is pretty shook up. He could use some support. Between you and me, these cases happen all the time. My guess? Your boy will be out of here in no time, clean record and everything.”

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2018 Summer Exclusive

.Reading time less than 1 minute.

Featuring stories by Mari Christmas, Scott Koenig, LaTanya McQueen, JH Bond, Tamar Jacobs, and Traci Sauce, and poems by Mark Williams and James Lineberger.

A Non-Orientable Surface

.Reading time 56 minutes.

By Mari Christmas

My husband manages a cheap hotel off the interstate five days a week, and every Wednesday night he visits the community center pool. Some days I meet him there. I like to watch him push the water around. It helps with the arthritis, he says, sculling the surface, making frog legs. He believes I deserve an office job, something that allows me to move between cities while wearing a thin blouse. We hardly speak. This is because of all the guilt. I look out across the pool. Children shiver in wrinkled suits, sucking their hair. Inside, it is airless, hazy, the windows fogged. The water a dark tangle of rope. Even though I cannot see him, I know he is there.

*

After swimming my husband will stay in his small room, equipped with a desk and a plastic lamp, and berate his romantic Romanian pen pal over the phone. He feels the need to give important looks, to demonstrate his rigor over a crowded table, and so forth, even internationally. “If you piss in the corner, I piss in the corner,” he tells her, speaking in English. For two bars of chocolate a month she puts up with all of that. He refuses to learn her language, as he cannot be bothered with the gender of specifics.

Tonight, he comes into the kitchen with the phone saying he wants a son, one he will name Atilla. Atilla? I think. Like Atilla the Hun? I marvel at my attraction to this bareheaded man, whose age has a secure density to it, like a landmark, and how this makes me feel intimately bound to him. “Something that does not weaken the spirit. Nothing that gives him an ironic existence,” he explains to his girlfriend, and then retreats down the hall, padding softly, his shirt untucked. Through the walls I hear him say the name ennobles mankind and something about plundering a northern province. He is never done. He talks and talks. Another blind Milton dictating to his poor daughter. The top of my head says, at least they’re not sleeping together, but I no longer believe in any of that.

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Special Days

.Reading time 15 minutes.

By Scott Koenig

It’s so bright even though the blinds are closed. Streaks of white light gash the wall. The wall Dad painted blue last month. Your favorite color is red but you like blue, too. There’s the humming of lawnmowers in the distance. Open those blinds.

Out there it’s green everywhere.  Up above, it’s blue. There’s a white car in your driveway, too. Not our car, you think. Whose car is that. Green grass down here, around the strange little white car, and blue sky up there. The colors are so pure it kind of hurts.  It’s nice, though. Do your eyes hurt? You could open the window to smell the grass but Dad got mad last time. Up on the hill where green turns into blue are big brown houses. If you squint they look like blobs of oatmeal raisin cookie dough when Mom lines them up on a baking sheet. And between the houses are thin lanes of grass where the older kids go sledding on snow days. The older kids with the colorful backpacks and the best Pokemon cards. Andy said one of the Meyer boys had three holographic Charizards. There’s no way. You aren’t allowed to go sledding on the hill yet. You just got allowed to ride your bike up to the black mailbox. The green mailbox after that is too high, too far up the hill, too dangerous, Mom always says. You know you can do it but you aren’t allowed.  But soon you’ll be allowed to go all the way up – to the top of the hill. Then back down super fast into the coldy sack. Like how the older kids do.

The man across the street is bent over by a bush, the man whose house is white and black and pointy and looks like a castle. He’s bent over by a bush using those big shiny scissors. The scary ones. The kind Dad uses a lot. Is Dad outside?  Look down into your part of the green.  Dad isn’t in your part of the green yet. Maybe later. There’s still the humming. Humming is an outside activity, Mom always says. Sometimes she hums but she does it quieter than you. And mostly outside. Her humming is nicer than lawnmower humming. Especially because when there’s a bunch of different lawnmowers all at once it sounds like buzzing. Like bugs, kind of.

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Bit

.Reading time 5 minutes.

By LaTanya McQueen

Because of her own curiosity she said yes when he asked her to put the bit on him. The bit, or gag, was an iron mask shaped like half a moon with a hook that went around the front of a person’s head. A spiked collar connected to the mask through a lock at the back of the neck.

He collected historical artifacts like these, the iron bit and scold’s bridle women were once punished with wearing, the shackles and chains forced upon slaves, items all from a not-too-distant era. When she asked him why, he told her he had a fascination for history long forgotten.

“Forgotten?” she asked and he shrugged in response.

She was used to men wanting things like this from her, to be blindfolded with her wrists cuffed and legs tied. She’d been expecting a day to come when he’d ask her if she would wear the bit, because hadn’t their relationship been leading up to this? Men, both white and black alike, were always asking in various ways to put her in this position, one of servitude, of serving. They wanted her on her back with her legs spread, body motionless, a mouth open only for moaning or what he’d force in. So many of them held this secret desire within themselves but eventually, with time, they always found a way to tell her.

She picked the bit up. As she felt its weight, she imagined what her fore-bearers must have experienced as the iron was fastened on. “Where did you get this?”

“eBay,” he said. The simplicity of his answer made her laugh. She asked him if it was real.

“I think so. Go ahead. Put it on,” he urged, and she did.

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Roses and Begonias; Or, Things That Can Crush You

.Reading time 40 minutes.

By J.H. Bond

We’re in a bathroom at McDonald’s and it smells like pee and I’m helping my dad put his makeup on. It’s his eyebrows that he struggles the most with. They’re supposed to arc like dark rainbows high up on his forehead. He can’t do them in the mirror—they look like mountains.

“Get ’em even, Mitchell,” Dad tells me, as he kneels down, eye-level.

I’m always drawing pictures. Now I’m drawing one on my dad. His real eyebrows are gone, lost under a mask of white. I give him some new ones with a makeup pencil, then paint the tip of his nose bright red.

He pulls on his stockings. Zips up his yellow-gold jumpsuit. I hand him his giant shoes and ask how come they’re so big. Goofy factor, he says.

He fits on his wig and it blazes like fire.

“How do I look?” he asks me.

“Like a clown,” I say.

*

Dad’s got three parties this afternoon. I count eight kids at the first and I don’t know any of them. Dad’s trying to make a wiener dog balloon and I’m at a table in the corner, drawing pictures of the motel I’ve been living in with my mom.

I sort of hate the kids Dad entertains. He gives this boy with braces the wiener dog balloon and a freckle-faced girl a turtle. They’re all cracking up and happy like Dad’s a good clown, but he’s not. Every time he tries to juggle he splatters an egg. Kids laugh, but still. He can’t do tricks. He doesn’t tell jokes. He just falls down and spills stuff, and slips in the stuff he spilled.

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Sidekicks

.Reading time 49 minutes.

By JP Gritton

I guess you’re wondering how I ended up with a woman like Syrena, in the first place. Truth is, it’s Mike’s fault. He’s the one to blame. Or to thank, I don’t know which. It was Mike Corliss who turned to me on this too-hot afternoon beginning of September. The four of us ought to go out sometime. Double Dutch, I mean. And I remember him smiling at me while my guts turned somersaults.  He was a different man those days, full of piss and vinegar. He had a smart mouth on him, and he wasn’t afraid to use it either, which is why Laughton Starbuck kind of had it out for Mike.

“Where’s your protective eyewear, Corliss?”

“My protective eyewear?”

“That’s what I asked you.”

“My protective eyewear’s protecting the dashboard of Sheldon Cooper’s truck. That’s where I left it this morning.”

Sheldon, he used to call me, ’cause he knew it got on my nerves. To everybody else I was Shelley.

I was just a journeyman carpenter back then. I drove Lij’s truck to work and home every day, give my best friend Mike Corliss a ride. Half the time, he’d forget something on the dash: that blue bandana, that pack of smokes, that pair of goggles.

I guess I looked up to Mike, who was a couple years older than me and besides that had a way about him. He told a story better than anybody I know, though you never knew how much was true and how much he’d half-made up. He told me how a honeybee flies through the rain, missing every drop. He told me nobody’d ever saw a giant squid, but even so scientists know they exist ’cause sometimes, he said, a whale or a shark will wash up on the beach, a great big bite took out of it.

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At Bay

.Reading time 42 minutes.

By Tamar Jacobs

I was chopping peppers when Ronnie came home. I’d been thinking to go to Safeway to see if there were any open bags of candy I could take from, or maybe walk down to the water to feed my birds, but then I saw him and all those ideas went up like smoke from my head. I hadn’t seen him in two years. He got out of the car and stepped into the sun, one whole big part of his skin a new lake of blue. I saw later up close it was all made of little tattoos lifting and blending together, but from behind my side of the kitchen window that day, it looked like he’d been afflicted with some kind of blue sickness. Down his arm and up his neck and some up on his forehead right above his eyebrows and a little trickle from just one eye. He’d gone away, got dipped in color and come back. I found this extraordinary and mysterious, and it kept me up at night thinking about it, touching my own skin wondering what it might feel like to go blue.

After Ms. Eva got done bumping into everything around her with her car like always when she parks, and they slammed their doors closed and went inside her house, I squeezed my eyes shut and chopped as fast as I could, felt tiny sharp prickles of cold pepper water punching into my fingers. I could not look down, because if I did the pepper water became the licking tongues of snakes trying to kiss me away from my knife, trying to slither out from under the blade I was hacking on them with. But as hard as I could I refused to see and they gave up moving and I heard Ms. Rose roll over the loud spring on the couch and I tried even harder because I could not let her hear me chopping in a crazy-sounding way or she would know I’d been skipping pills again. I would not feel sorry about those snakes. Would not, would not, no, I told myself.

I would not then, but when I sleep, I can’t stay as careful about my thoughts as when I am awake. That night while I slept feelings began to creep in about those snakes I killed. They were just being themselves. Being snakes. And there I had been chopping them to pieces trying to pretend I thought they were peppers.

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マ I 克 (ma-i-ke)

.Reading time 9 minutes.

By Warren Decker

Mike came to Japan because he was tired of being Mike. He was the only guy in the dorm who would never take lime Jell-O vodka shots, and would get mad if his roommate woke him up— stumbling drunk through the door, and turning on the florescent light, before passing out snoring in the lower bunk, fully clothed, wearing shoes filthy with mud and wet grass clippings from the university lawns. Mike would climb down from his top bunk and turn off the light but he could never get back to sleep, and his morning study routine would be disrupted.

Mike preferred Chinese characters to people, specifically the kanji characters used in Japan. He had already worked his way through the bright red “First 500 Kanji Workbook,” and was halfway through the light blue “500-1000 Kanji Workbook,” while some of the other freshmen were still struggling with the phonetic hiragana characters. His teachers praised his diligence, but for Mike it was very simple: he preferred Chinese characters to his roommate but he also preferred Chinese characters to Mike. If he spent an hour carefully memorizing the stroke order of a kanji like 鬱, then Mike—with all his doubts, his unfounded sadnesses, and fears—would be somewhere far away.

In his junior year, he arrived at Kyoto University as マイク (ma-i-ku). When people spoke, he could quickly associate the syllables of sound with a specific kanji, and decipher the meaning within a few seconds. The other exchange students were still fumbling around with “ohayo gozaimasu.” Within a month マイク had lost his virginity in his single-occupancy dorm room with Reika, an English major, who wore huge sunglasses and had long hair that was dyed a dark shade of reddish-brown.

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The Red Bird

.Reading time less than 1 minute.

This story originally appeared in New Ohio Review 8. Here, Joanne Serling, author of the new novel, Good Neighbors, reads for our NOR Audio feature.

Illustration by Devan Murphy.

First Date

.Reading time 15 minutes.

By James Lineberger

In the sixth grade I asked
Sissy Morgan
if she would go to the picture show with me
on what was supposed to be
my first date but when I said it her eyes got wide
and her mouth fell open and she just backed off till she ran into
a chair and had to sit down and didn’t say a word.

But during recess I could see her at the swings
giggling and whispering to her girl friends
and all of them staring at me
but if it was a trick or what I didn’t know
cause while I was waiting for the school bus
she came up to me and said
well all right but she would not go to
the Paramount which all
they showed was double-feature westerns with people like
Sonny Tufts or Charles Starrett
and if there was anything she could not abide it was Charles Starrett doing
The Durango Kid.

But when I told mama she said not
to worry because
we could go see Forever Amber at the Visulite
with Linda Darnell and Cornel Wilde
which was kind of like Gone With The Wind mama said
and the name was because of the color
of her eyes which ought to be just the kind
of story that a little girl would go for
and what we will do
mama said was I will drive y’all to the Visulite
and meet you out front again when
it is over.

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Hurricane, 3rd Day

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Melissa Studdard

We hid in the belly of porcelain. The world 
sang sirens overlapping, the sound of wind

taking gates from the hinge. That whistling, yes.
Whistling and whipping, the world the cry 

of a cow caught in the spin of a twister and lifted. 
Water creeping to the back door like a thief. 

It wanted the jewels of our eyes.

In the house next door, a woman breastfed 
another woman’s baby, the thin-sweet milk.

Across the street, a man wrote social security numbers
on his kids’ arms with a Sharpie—a game, he said. 

And in our tub we held the news in our palms:

forty dogs from a kennel rescued by boat, a guy
on paddleboard heaving toddlers from a window, one

by one. And trapped across town, a shop full
of bakers sleeping on flour sacks, baking all day—

they slept and baked, slept and sprinkled.
For whoever might need. Not even sampling

or licking a finger. Once, I thought humankind 
brutal and nature benign—foolish child

with my frog in a box, my holey lid. 
Once, before, I asked to be delivered.

O sugar-hungry God, the world 
has been dredged and is waiting.

Read More

Love Story in an Alternate Universe in Which Small Talk Is Answered Honestly and in Detail

.Reading time 26 minutes.

By Daniel Paul

I run into her on the street. We haven’t seen each other in a few years. “The weather is really nice today, especially for winter,” I say.

“I know,” she says. “It’s been so gray and depressing lately that I’ve been thinking a lot about how much I hate living here. Or at least I hope I hate living here. Otherwise it means that I just hate living in general.”

“No,” I reassure her. “I’m sure you just hate living here; this city is terrible.”

“I feel a bit better today,” she continues, “though it’s probably only warmer outside because of climate change, which makes me feel like enjoying a day like this is stealing joy directly from future generations . . . which I guess is okay, because I don’t want to have children: babies look like aliens, and I can’t even keep a houseplant alive; honestly, sometimes I don’t even want to keep the plant alive; I’d rather lord over it with my power to decide its fate, though that’s probably just a way of rationalizing the fact that even if I did want to keep a plant alive—to feel like I was contributing to the cycle of life and warmth even if just in my living room—I’m sure I would fail somehow and it would die anyway.”

Read More

Surfacing

.Reading time 4 minutes.

By Kateri Kosek

When copyediting the small-town monthly, things press in.

Chair yoga. Croquet. Bears that pull laundry off clotheslines.

Someone following GPS drives onto the dam,
slips off the narrow bridge.

Someone unscrews his neighbor’s porch light, gets caught on surveillance.
He said the light was annoying at night but promised to stop doing it.

(Why live here, if you can’t see the stars?)

Fire alarms.

Unattended fires.

Every month more news of the lake’s battle with Eurasian milfoil—
who will come to study it, to harvest it, to keep the lake from clogging up.
How to keep it from fragmenting, spreading.

(I don’t know Eurasian milfoil from the next lake weed
but I’ve given up worrying about them.
I swim on the surface, don’t put my feet down.)

I learn:  the cereus plant, a desert native, blooms just one night a year
and has an exquisite scent.

Spider wasps encase their prey in mud; their larvae
eat spiders for a week then spin a silk cocoon to spend the winter in.

Petrichor is a husband-wife duo who will be exploring the sound world
of the musical instrument digital interface.

More importantly, it’s the word for the smell of the forest just after it rains.

The school is closing (hardly any school-age children!).
The historical house is holding a swanky fundraiser.
Guests will have a marvelous time while enjoying the stunning poolside views.

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Parliament Lights

.Reading time 31 minutes.

By Jonathan Durbin

It is too early to be up when the girl rises to pack. Winter rain taps the window but otherwise outside the street is silent and dark. No joggers or dog walkers or idling delivery trucks. No cars, not yet. No sign of Mike Lavoie.

The girl wishes for a cigarette but there isn’t time enough to smoke. She isn’t allowed anyway. There is no smoking in the shelter, the boy made that clear. If she smokes there they’ll be forced out and then where will they stay? Her mother’s? Nowhere is safe. Not anymore. The boy rolls onto her side of the bed, his hair thick with night grease, and mutters into her pillow. It sounds like You know better.

Their luggage lies open on the rug at the foot of the bed. The girl and the boy agreed to take just the one suitcase. Any more luggage and they’d be weighed down, that’s what he said. They might have to leave the shelter in a hurry. But the suitcase is half-full and they’ve barely the things they’d want for a long weekend. A fraction of their socks, a sampling of their underwear. A small quota of tees and jeans and hooded sweatshirts. Her things and his things thrown together, mixed up inside.

They argued about this last night, like they argued about it the night before and the night before that too. The girl cannot imagine how they will pack everything into a space so small. Fear of mistakes has led her to dither and ask the boy’s opinion about silly things. Which Nalgene bottle he prefers. If they should buy instant coffee or grounds. If it’s all right for her to bring whiskey.

Stop worrying, he has told her again and again. The shelter is equipped to last a long time. Months, maybe a year. Mike Lavoie has stocked it with tins of tuna and bags of salt-cured pork, iodine tablets and a generator and fresh batteries for flashlights. Oxygen canisters and Ibuprofen and cases of disinfectant wipes. Two motorcycles with full tanks of gas, and all the bullets and rifles they’ll need to hunt or defend the land.

Read More

Told You So

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Craig Bernardini

If I had a choice
between being wrong
and the world dying—
you know, the oceans
turning into lemon juice, the air
to Lysol, the forests
cinder, tundra
swamp, shipping lanes
jammed with dead
polar bears, Manhattan
a gondola, the world,
a Gondwana of dengue—
I would, of course, choose
the latter.
And maybe, just maybe,
clinging to the last
antenna of the last
skyscraper to be swallowed
by the waves, pointing
my big fat finger
at the dead world,
and at all the mother-
fuckers who did it,
shouting, Told you so,
Told you so—maybe,
as the water was closing
over my mouth, I’d understand
how we got into this mess
in the first place.

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In the Borderlands

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Kateri Kosek

Today on the back-roads, where Connecticut
and Massachusetts bleed together unnoticed—
the large, gangly silhouettes of two llamas
weaving across the road ahead of me, not
where they are supposed to be, where I always
pass them, stoic and shaggy amid a spread
of crumbling outbuildings.

A young woman has stopped.
She gets out of the car and I stop too,
and more llamas rush out from the broken gate,
ears erect like horns on their pert pedestal heads.

I wonder for a moment, could they hurt us?
These animals we usually see standing still,
chewing dumbly while we gawk?
We forget their long legs, forget
they can move.

But they head for the field
and there’s something exhilarating
about their sudden temporary glory,
the larger world asserting itself
in the form of llamas on the loose, llamas
spreading through a whitened February field
and no one around who can stop them.
I should mention, I had been crying.

Starting for the door of the farmhouse,
I hear someone coming out.
Fucking cocksuckers, he drawls, this older man
we can’t see, as if the llamas plotted this breakout
on a regular basis. Jesus Christ Almighty—
adding a new dimension to my image of the cluttered
farmyard, hushed and exotic, too much to take in
though I always slow down, riveted
as I am now, but I drive away
and leave him to it, lifted.

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National Pastime

.Reading time 13 minutes.

By Daniel Paul

Walking in the West Village, I stop at the park on Clarkson Street to watch some little league baseball. I lean against the chain-link fence and am grateful for how its curves accept my weight without comment or judgment (as I imagine the inside of a whale might). A man is standing near me; he speaks in easy platitudes, and I nod along, not so much because I agree with him—for example, he says the weather is perfect, and all I can think of is how one of the clouds looks like you and the other looks like Nixon and how I’m in no state to rank omens in terms of their relative inscrutability—but rather because I really like nodding: as with launching a satellite, once you’ve done the work of getting your head to the top of its apogee there is a pleasing feeling of submission to a higher power in letting gravity complete the act. The man, who I decide to name Bubba (because I have never met a Bubba and fear if I do not take this opportunity, I never will) tells me that its been a crazy year for the team, though I don’t know which team he is referring to (one is in blue, the other green, and I wonder if I’m the only one who is bothered by the fact that the team whose shirts do not have piped collars is the one sponsored by a local plumbing concern).

It’s been a crazy year for all of us, I say, unsure of what a “sane year” would look like.

Oh yes, he answers, lots of ups and downs for the squad.

Don’t I know it? I say, and with each nod I become more emotional about the (no doubt unjust) obstacles that the team has faced as they have tried to do nothing more than live their lives and play some baseball on Saturday afternoons.

Bubba does not look at me as he speaks, keeping his eye on the field (and I wonder if he is actually talking to someone on his other side instead of me, and, by extension, what percentage of the conversations I’ve ever had did not actually require my involvement). He says that the team has struggled with fundamentals.

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The Roots of Phobia Lie in History

.Reading time 6 minutes.

By David O’Connell

I hate their tiny hands, the silent-screen-villains’ way they have
of rubbing them together, chest-high, as they squat on countertop

or wall and stare me down with gas-mask goggle eyes.
Hate how they materialize from clear blue sky to picnic, to garbage,

to shit. It’s their disregard. Their monotonous, dull thudding—wings
to window—so persistent that it bullies my attention. As does

that intermittent buzz, somewhere in the house, taunting me to try
and stalk it down. In swarms, if possible, I hate them more. Despise

their ganged-up arrogance, the lazy way they rise—helicopters
from midtown—when I approach each mutilated victim of the cat.

But it’s more than that. If not a full-blown phobia, my aversion’s
on the spectrum. And I believe them, those psychiatrists

who guess true phobic hate (blistered, crippling) may indicate
that terror’s being leeched from something other than experience,

that, right now, somewhere in my genome’s mud, there lies
a clutch of rusting drums leaking grim ancestral memories: flies

inside the suppurating wound, flies on the gangrene rot, flies
alighting on the child too weak—or worse—to brush them off.

And if that’s true, wouldn’t it account for why I sweat
when I catch sight of one upon my pillow or hear its stuttering hum?

No. Not entirely. Terror’s well delves deeper. Its waters seep
from hollows in the Id infested with the blind, albino worms of nightmare.

And more than suffering, more even than the thought of the loved body’s
eventual decay, its stench a honey drawing clouds of flies to mate

and lay those eggs that, hours after death, make cold skin pulse,
then writhe—more than this, it’s what comes after that fuels phobia.

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A History of Clouds

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Christopher Brean Murray

You can think while walking, running,
washing the dishes, reading, grocery shopping,
or sleeping. Driving across Nevada at night
breeds thoughts—they leap from sagebrush
like jackrabbits into your high beams.
Most people can’t think while writing.
They have ideas, yes, but not thoughts.
Anyone can snatch an old idea out of the dust
and show it around. Trying to think
will invariably prohibit thought. I thought
of writing this poem while driving to work
this morning. I made sure not to
think about it much. The wind swayed
a stoplight until it turned green.
A man in a yellow tank top leaned
into the window of a parked car.
It was not yet 8 a.m. Wisps of cloud
coursed though the sky over Houston.
Someone should compile a book
called A History of Clouds. It could be,
among other things, an anthology
of descriptions of clouds, from novels,
from the love letters of exiled princes.
Shakespeare’s “pestilent congregation
of vapors” speech would appear, as would
Mayakovsky’s “A Cloud in Trousers.”
Clouds aren’t mentioned much in the Bible.
God did, however, call to Moses from inside
a cloud. Enoch speaks of “the locked reservoirs
from which the winds are distributed.”
Crane’s “To the Cloud Juggler” and
Stevens’ “Sea Surface Full of Clouds”—
and that passage from Gogol where
a cloud slithers over Nevsky Prospect.
It stretches and coils and becomes an intestine
embracing the anxious protagonist until we realize
he’s being suffocated by his thoughts.
Somewhere Rilke speaks of “vast, ruined
kingdoms of cloud.” That, from the love letter
of another exiled prince.

Read More

A History of Clouds, film by Caitlin Morgan

.Reading time less than 1 minute.

Christopher Brean Murray’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Colorado Review, Copper Nickel, Epoch, jubilat, Pleiades, Plume, and Quarterly West. He lives in Houston.

Caitlin Morgan is an independent filmmaker. She splits her time between New York City and Michigan.

Mexican Standoff

.Reading time 6 minutes.

By Dylan Loring

This summer afternoon on the blacktop
of an elementary school playground
Steve and Rachel have their guns pointed at each other,
as tends to happen every once in a while
between two people who have dated for months,

that is, until Chet shows up brandishing his revolver at Steve,
causing Rachel to complete the triangle by shifting her gun
toward Chet, at which point, Steve says, “Well lookie here.
Seems like we have ourselves a Mexican standoff!”
which makes Rachel say, “Wuh? None of us are Mexicans.”

“I could call my bud, Raul, if you put your guns away,” Chet says.
“That would ruin our Mexican standoff!” Steve says.
“Adding a Mexican to our Mexican standoff
would ruin our Mexican standoff?” Rachel asks.
“Have you ever even been to Mexico?” Chet asks.

“A Mexican standoff,” Steve says, “occurs when each person
in a given vicinity has both a gun pointed at himself
and his gun pointed at someone else.”
“Or herself and her,” Rachel adds.
“Sounds to me like a gun deadlock

or a James Bond-high-stakes-poker-thingy,” Chet says.
“Mexican standoff is just what it’s called,” Steve says.
“I could sure go for some Mexican food
after this . . . Mexican standoff,” Rachel says.
“Are you sure it’s called a Mexican standoff?” Chet asks.

“It sure sounds either made-up or racist or both.”
“It’s not racist, it’s just what we call it,” Steve says.
“You mean like how we call the Washington Redskins
the Washington Redskins? Because that’s still racist
even though it’s the name of our local football team,” Rachel says.

“Go Redskins!” Chet adds. Chet is an avid football fan.
“The Mexican part of the Mexican standoff
is literally the least important part,” Steve says.
“You probably mean figuratively.
People almost never mean literally,” Chet says.

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Aphorisms for a Lonely Planet

.Reading time 4 minutes.

By Lance Larsen

1

Conception, gamete meeting gamete, cells dividing and differentiating. Who wants to imagine themselves coming into the world this way? Instead think of your parents as amateurs lying down in the enchanted dark and rising up as seasoned weavers of light.  Picture fire, with sparks flying off. One was lucky enough to catch—and now pulses inside you.  Listen to yourself breathe.

2

Like a rolling billiard ball we touch the world one green millisecond at a time.

3

A good story possesses its own magnetic north, to which every vibrating sentence must point.

4

To live is to doubt.

5

At the exit of the Paris catacombs, which houses the remains of six million sleepers, the guard looked me over, then fanned a flashlight into my backpack: Any bones, any bones?  No, I said, then smuggled my skeleton into the morning.

6

Should I read Descartes or listen to Motown? Depends whether I want to interrogate my doubts or slap them on my feet and dance them under the table.

7

The young are young. The old are young and old at the same time. You have to be old to know this—that’s the problem.

8

Seek labor which both tires and renews.

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Box in a Closet

.Reading time less than 1 minute.

By Faith Shearin

Slutty Rush

.Reading time 25 minutes.

By Frankie Barnet

All throughout my girlhood it was my primary ambition to be as dumb as possible. My father was a professor of mathematics who attempted to teach me algebra at age nine and preached discipline and rationality above all else. My mother was a reform Hutterite who cut her own hair. He once bought her a Costco membership for Christmas and she went only once, finding the experience gluttonous.

I had a best friend in this youth, a girl named Kelly who lived down the block. At her home I tried many foods for the first time: sushi, avocado, specialty cheese. I once saw her parents dancing without any music playing on my way to the bathroom while she and I watched It Takes Two in the basement.

Yet still, despite these differences in our home lives, Kelly shared my dream: to be weightless from a lack of knowledge. To float up and up and up. Away and free.

Our favorite thing to do together was to play a game in which we imitated two girls from our grade at school who were so dumb it was impossible. Their names were Stacey and Sasha. In addition to being idiots they were also sluts, a not uncommon pairing Kelly and I both coveted. “Like, totally,” we’d say, pretending to be them. “Like, oh my gaaaawd.” “Like, like, literally like.”

During the summer between ninth and tenth grade, Kelly and I walked through the river valley playing our game (“So oh my God, what did you, like, do last night?” “So I like literally boned Matt G. soooo bad!”) when we spotted an injured rabbit just off the path and decided to pick it up. Dumb, right? Just the kind of thing we, as them, loved to do.

“He could be, like, our baby.”

“Let’s take him home, like, literally.”

“Oh my God, because I’m pregnant, like, from boning all the time.”

“Totally pregnant, and I don’t literally know who did it to me.”

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ASL on Memory

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Cody Wilson

Here is the sign for remember:

With one thumb, pull a line
from the spool in your forehead and set to tether
on the cleat of your other thumb.

Now the hull of your head can stay
docked to this thought.

Here is forget:

 Wipe your forehead with fingers
—the sign of relief—then pull
them into your palm.

Except your thumb. That sticks up,
like there is something good about this.

(Click “Read More” to see this poem signed by Kirsten Pribula)

Read More

from Real Things

.Reading time less than 1 minute.

By Nicole Hebdon

Fugitive

.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Susan Blackwell Ramsey

Knowing everything fades—youth, love—doesn’t excuse
using red lake in a painting you plan to sell.
Red lake is the bad boyfriend of pigments;
red lake invented ghosting. That bastard Whistler
would use it, take the money, then ignore
the outraged complaints that rained down later
when the red faded away without a trace.
Colors that don’t last are called fugitive.

So many ways to make pigment—dirt, rocks, bugs
plucked from cactus and crushed. If pigment, then art.
We so want to believe that art preserves.
Oh, over the centuries art may lose a nose,
an arm or two. “Very fragile, penises,”
Alice Neil said, sitting below the statue,
but the medium itself, the stone, the paint,
shouldn’t be the agent that betrays.

Some betrayals are worse than others. Poor Seurat,
with his complicated theory of optics,
where the brain blends tiny dots of color.
Its demonstration, his La Grande Jatte masterpiece,
used, for its intensity, zinc yellow.
Within a few years it faded to dull ochre,
passion to affection to indifference.
By that time, mercifully, Seurat was dead.

Pigments that last may come from minerals
ground to powder. Lapis lazuli,
only found in the mountains of Afghanistan,
is expensive, cinnabar can poison you
with mercury. Other pigments, red lake, for one,
are organic and we know the problem there
all too well, don’t we, being organic ourselves.

Seurat didn’t know, and Whistler didn’t care.
But Van Gogh? Paintings of iris and of roses,
three of each, those six paintings the whole exhibit.
White roses on a blue tablecloth, blue iris
against a white wall. Yet that tablecloth,
that wall, were pink, the roses shot with red,
the iris were purple. The red lake is gone.
Surely he didn’t know? But there’s a letter:
“Paintings fade like flowers,” he wrote to Theo.
“All the more reason to boldly use them too raw,
time will only soften them too much.”
Where is your first love today? Your second?

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Lower

.Reading time 22 minutes.

By Gunnar Jaeck

Featured Art by Emma Hamilton

Two men watched fireworks from a rooftop on the night that the alien landed. One man was Scott, who had inherited the house from his father, who had built it with his own hands and, according to his will, had been buried in its basement. Scott thought that was kind of weird, but those were the man’s last wishes, and last wishes are what they are. The other was Lucas, who had brought over the cooler full of Duvel, which the alien’s landing pod incinerated. After the alien slithered, skittered, or shivered out of the pod (it depended on which section of the alien’s body was exiting the hatch), the pod lifted off on its own and zoomed back up into the boom, crackle, and hiss.

Scott and Lucas backed up until they reached the edge of the roof. The alien waved feelers and glowed red from sucking orifices as it came closer. Scott had a feeling that the alien wanted to communicate, but its appearance was so terrifying he couldn’t think of anything to say. Lucas had some ideas of things to say but also thought the alien might be dangerous. Like, just look what it did to the beer.

Here was first contact with intelligent life from beyond our world, the most important event that had ever happened to anyone ever in the entire history of everything, but both men kind of wished it was other than it was. The alien sensed this telepathically, and obliged them by skithivering down from the roof into the attic, where it wove a cocoon for itself. Scott and Lucas climbed down the ladder after it.

The cocoon hung from the ceiling and throbbed accommodating shades of blue and turquoise with calm, floral scents. When it was done, the cocoon split open, unraveling to the floor like a spilt flag, and when the last alien folds fell away, a man Scott remembered from the war stood before them.

Read More

The New Yorker Cartoon Caption Contest

.Reading time 11 minutes.

By Mark Williams

It is better to write of laughter than of tears,
for laughter is the property of man.
                      François Rabelais

Monday

I’m stumped. A man angel with a giant halo
is talking to a woman angel with an average halo.
They appear to be a few feet apart,
but since they’re standing in the clouds,
they could be miles apart, in which case
they are giant angels and the man giant angel
has a ginormous halo and the woman giant angel
only has a giant halo. Either way,
I have no idea what the man angel is saying,
but I have six-and-a-half days to figure it out.

Possibly, cartoonist, Will McPhail, had an idea
when he drew the angels for this week’s contest: #526.
Or maybe he was Sullivan in search of a Gilbert.
I thought I was a Gilbert when, in response to #520,
Corey Pandolph’s drawing of a banana peel
slumped on a psychiatrist’s couch,
I had the psychiatrist saying,

Depression, heart palpitations, fatigue?
     You could be low in potassium.

Still, you have to hand it to first place winner, Michelle Deschenes
of Fort Collins, Colorado, who wrote,

It’s normal to feel empty after a split.

Tuesday

He never used one word when ten would do … 

is what I’d write if someone were to draw my tombstone.
I can see why everyone might think
the angels got me thinking about my tombstone,
but I’ve been thinking about my tombstone
ever since the banana peel in #520 when,
before I came up with

Depression, heart palpitations, fatigue? et cetera,

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At the Edge of Everything

.Reading time 47 minutes.

By Traci Skuce

For the past hour, Alli had been sitting against the small oak, her eighteen-month-old son latched to her breast. His molars had finally—thank God—broken through, and now he suckled, cheeks sticky and eyes lolling with pleasure. Alli had hoped another mom would show up. Jeannie was off visiting her parents in Vancouver and Clay, well he was just plain off, so she hadn’t had an adult conversation in days. She wanted someone, anyone, to gab with about the impossibility of lost sleep, errant husbands, and teething. But there were only the crows, waddling around the rim of a garbage can, diving in for pizza crusts then flying off across the playground to the giant cedar.

Alli’s daughter, Tavia, looked at the birds from under her floppy sunhat, and then dumped a handful of sand onto an accumulating pile, patted it down. Alli mimed eating, mumbled yum-yum as she had been since they’d arrived. “Do you like it Mommy?” Without waiting for an answer, Tavia ran back to the production center beneath the slide.

Jack continued suckling. Both breasts were drained and she’d become a giant pacifier. His eyelids fluttered and his blond feathery hair stuck to his forehead, ear crusted with milk and peanut butter. She picked at it, and he swatted her, still sucking hard. Enjoy them while they’re young, people said, but she couldn’t wait to toss these days onto the slag heap of motherhood.

Read More

New Ohio Review Issue 25 (Originally Published Spring 2019)

.Reading time less than 1 minute.

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

Issue 25 compiled by Nate Wilder Hervey

Work in Progress

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Lance Larsen

Featured Art: “Holy Family with Saint John the Baptist” by Perino del Vaga

Use what’s handy color pencil shavings
dirt maybe bug parts cat hair also saliva

lots of it no paint or collage nothing
modern just a smudgy finger on textured

paper grind the colors in or swoosh
them around like a muskrat in mud

no pattern at first till wet scratches
turn chance into sky fear into a face

yours and not yours call this turmoil time
and materials call this a case of falling

feelingly if stuck have your beloved spit
on the dry parts pop failures in the oven

let divinity simmer let the making
unmake you every doubt an inky wing

Read More

Compost

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Lance Larsen

I sing the dreck we make a feculent muck
of saving the kingdom come of clipped

grass whirligig leaves and deadheaded
daylilies Parrot Moon kissing Primal Scream

all mixed with the god forbid of kitchen scraps
corn cobs like the chewed legs of pigs

tomatoes sluicy with vegetal roe the mosh-pit
hair of pineapples topped and here a scatter

of artichoke leaves like a dismembered
armadillo fortune cookies minus the fortune

enough cat kibble to punctuate Ezekiel
sumpy cantaloupes ripe as betrayal

not to mention spent tissues sopped in sneezes
and nosebleeds Sunday papers fat

with want ads and exposés here an au pair
who tutors trig and scrubs bidets here a hung

jury jiggered by bribes all of it layered
with bales of peat trucked from Alberta bogs

each week I turn it each week I lift my pitchfork
to decay the ripeness almost intestinal

I’m making a bed for Osiris all things reeky
folded together stars falling nightly

from myth into loam in the shaded heat
of this plot a pair of salamanders twining

striped with fire moist as adultery
steam rising with what is buried like plumes

of heat escaping the dead how do I channel
such desire now I kneel and now

I warm my hands in this funk solstice
and dross offal and equinox if only

this sweet god of rot would hold her breath
if only she’d stop panting my name

Read More

No blueprint,

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Mary Jo Firth Gillett

Featured Art: “Fates Gathering in the Stars” by Elihu Vedder

no plan, no agenda, rather call it pulse and impulse,
zest and precipice, the mind mindful as a volcano

spilling over, or the sometimes bliss of the fisherman
dropping a line into the waters, the welters, the winds

of whatever may come from the twist and coil
of gray matter and what matter that it’s pure delusion

or that it’s—print it!—sensate escape, if it be a stay
against the onslaught of despot, tsunami, flight

of refugee, of sanity—and yes, print it flounder
in murky water, not the fish but struggle for the lure

flash and shimmer just out of reach. Or else shift
the metaphor to the heart, a steed wild for wilderness,

bucking the known reigns, the towers of Babel,
confusion of tongues. Print it hard but true,

the what’s-the-matter sudden matters of health,
the sharp word given or received, and who cares

what garb—bathrobe, hip boot—in this dream state
dangling on the edge of disaster, of paradise, each letter

a bodily sound held in the mouth, each spark a jumble
of luck and pluck, both zoo and zoom, design bucking

certain decline, a dive into the deep Sargasso of eel,
whale, syllable, tangle of seaweed, wrangle of word.

Read More

Poem for the Peony

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Mary Jo Firth Gillett

                                                                                    Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented
                                                                                             with the mania of owning things,
                                                                                   . . . Not one is respectable or unhappy over
                                                                                             the whole earth.
                                                                                                                                 —Walt Whitman

Peonies open their untutored hearts as if to write
a treatise on passion.

The raw and sensuous peony was mentor
to Marilyn and Mae.

A magnum opus,
the peony bloom unfolds, page upon page.

The peony, one with water, knows nothing
of river.

Oscar Wilde admired the peony:
“Nothing succeeds like excess.”’

Does the opening peony write odes to the ant
or vice versa?

Martha Graham, Josephine Baker, even Elvis,
studied the moves of peony blossoms in the wind.

In the presence of the peony, fake flowers—
plastic or silk—
wither.

The dawdling schoolboy presents a peony blossom.
“Tardy” is expunged from the dictionary.

Read More

Landscape with iPhone

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Emily Mohn-Slate

Featured Art: The Sick Child by Edvard Munch

I don’t want to tweet this thought that comes to me as I’m
changing my daughter’s diaper—don’t want to pull my phone
out of my pocket—my phone is growing a tree right now
with an app called “Forest” that rewards me for not looking
at my phone—and what I want is for a thought to enter,

to hold it in my head, spin the words over and around
until they’re smooth, but I should tweet soon, I haven’t tweeted
in days, and now my daughter needs me to be here with her. Still,
I want to hold a thought like an orange, peel it in pieces,
which I can’t do while I’m circling

a Band-Aid around her finger either, kissing her hand, swiping
the notification, scrolling, scrolling—Mama, watch me! Look at me!
I’m looking but my phone is a hot siren in my pocket, I touch it
but—my digital tree: its roots are thickening now, its pixel flowers

blooming, white petals, yellow center—I want to watch
my daughter learn to hold a crayon—three fingers making
a little house, a splotch of pine, her mind unfolding.
And where is my thought? It slipped out the window

of my daughter’s new house, its comet tail vanishing.
What distracted animals we are—wanting loud, wanting now.
But how do I ignore all the shine when it arrives?
Can’t it be enough to be alive with my daughter
in our dry winter skins in April, surviving until we slip

our feet sockless into sandals, when I can witness,
thinking or not, her giant puddle-jumps, her
whoops of joy? Yes. And I will grow this tree
in my pocket, and I will look at her. I will.

Read More

Roost

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Janice N. Harrington

Featured Art: Nude Figures by Cape Creus by Salvador Dalí

Circling above bare limbs, like Dalí’s wild and articulate capes,
black wings undulate. Raucous hundreds settle and splat
their stench. A murder of crows, a give-a-fuck mob,
stirs the air above ash and oak and hackberry, milling
and loud with news: day heralds, unwelcomed Cassandras.
Dawn light pinched by a crow’s beak, pieces of light falling
everywhere, bright meat that the crow pecks, strips away.

The crows know my neighbor’s face. Knowledgeable birds,
they know the way I hurry each morning, the way my eyes try
to read their dark signs: articulate smoke, curtains
of a confession booth. Blessing? Pardon? Mercy?
The stories say that crows suffer scorched wings, that they
are cursed for stealing from the gods. But the stories, as always, err,
wind-running, wings wide, a-glide on a slide of air,
black bodies, bituminous-black, cosmos-black rising to soar.
There is no damnation in their dizzying speed, the break-wing
improvisations of their flight. God–blessed and black,
their sharp notes strike my skull like hailstones or chunks
of sky, dark bodies that lift my eyes and scorn gravity, a lesser law.

Read More

Selling

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Judy Kronenfeld

Featured Art: Unfinished Monster by Hugh Laidman

Heads thrown back after one
bubbly sip—the young in soft drink commercials
seem as lavishly happy
as lottery winners. They look
the way we imagine ourselves
on the stages of our dreams—glamorous,
anointed, spotlit—our luck about to spill
into graciousness.

And even in ads for walk-in bathtubs,
incontinence pull-ups, stair chairs,
dementia care, the actors don’t merely grin
and bear it, but almost chortle,
like Cheshire cats who just
swallowed these amazing canaries,
though the old they represent
are more like expiring birds.

But the worst soft pitch: the “personal” Christmas
pictures taken in the dementia wing
of my father’s “retirement home.”
In another life, his face would say
This is ridiculous, even if he played along,
and sat in the appointed armchair
by the tree, and hugged the enormous white
teddy bear prop, as instructed.
But he is in this current life,
and guilelessly presses his warm cheek
against the bear’s fuzzy one,
and stabilizes the bear’s plump feet
with his free hand, as if they were a child’s.

Read More

Recovery

.Reading time 44 minutes.

By Max Bell

Featured Art: Monkey by Anonymous

Two Weeks

Lisa left when the droid arrived. There was no period of transition, no time for Richard to adjust. After she signed for it, she carried it into the living room, set it down in front of him on the worn shag, and began saying her goodbye. Like the stitches in his hip, she was disappearing, dissolving in front of him. He did not, however, rejoice in the knowledge of her impending absence.

“Dad, my Auto is outside. I’d stay longer, but I don’t know when another car will be in range, and I can’t miss my flight again.”

Looking up at her from his plush recliner, Richard wondered whether she’d ever felt as he did now, abandoned, marooned. Her first day of kindergarten? When he and Martha dropped her off at State? There were no tears from her then, and there wouldn’t be any now. Even at her mother’s funeral, Lisa hadn’t cried. Richard studied the vacant, inscrutable face looking down at him and realized that he might’ve been responsible for her reserve. There was rarely a day that Martha hadn’t pushed him to show more affection, to verbalize his emotions rather than fuming when people couldn’t infer them from his purposeful subtleties. Now, though he desperately wanted to, he knew he could not ask her to return that which he had never given.

“You’re not going to set it up?” he said.

The droid wasn’t in a box, though it was equally rectangular. Bulky, at least two-feet tall, it looked like the computer hard drives Richard remembered using at the plant in the late Nineties. The light-gray plastic casing probably housed the same metal, wires, and plastic. But there were no wheels he could see, no hands or feet. How would it move? How would it help him move again?

On the narrow side of the droid’s face, the one where Richard might’ve once inserted a CD, there was a black circle in the upper-left corner. Opaque and recessed like a Magic 8 Ball window, the ring stared at him. There was no out- line or indent on the right side to suggest that the manufacturer had forgotten another eye. Still, Richard felt a part was missing.

Read More

What is your favorite past time?

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Robert Danberg

The form asked, “What is your favorite past time?”
So I wrote how I loved the 1947 Technicolor American comedy classic
Life with Father.
Whereas home to me as a kid felt like the morning after a trip to the emergency room,
William Powell’s brood lived on the brink of a joy omnipresent
in the wealthy brownstones of Gay Nineties New York,
and in Meet Me in St. Louis, which opens
on Mary Astor and Marjorie Main making ketchup,
Judy Garland’s face in repose always seemed baffled by love.
And who knew ketchup could be made?

Then, I peeked and saw my neighbor’d written “tennis.”
The guy on the other side, “tailgating.”
I noted that the question before was favorite color,
the one after, what would you do with an unexpected day off.
(Blue, by the way. And, of course, watch whatever’s on Turner Classic Movies.)

Suddenly, I was tired.
I longed for the time before I was ever asked this question.
I crossed out my answer and drew an arrow to the bottom where I wrote

“When I was twenty and my body was a blossom
trembling to shake itself from the vine.”

Read More

My Life Is Like This

.Reading time 1 minute.

By John Mark Ballenger

Each night I keep trying to say something
specific before sleep, something about time
or the horizon. How time unwinds
like a copperhead or the fear
of a copperhead or the spaces between
hay bales, under porch steps.
                                                   I try to say something
about the ash of memory, a farmhouse
firm in my mind and burned to the ground
of my childhood, standing and consumed
every moment.
                             About the distance light
travels from the glacier-crumpled
Southern Ohio hills to the shadowed
valley bottoms. The horizon
that weighs down the eye, reduces the world
to a hollow, a creek, a hardwood canopy,
ivy overcoming ancient leaning barns,
a half-sunk Ford Pinto and the speckled blue
of a robin’s egg in the grass. I want to say
something of men talking under a great
sugar maple in the late summer dark, a mud dauber
tapping against a window, my mother speaking
her mother’s name.
                                  In my dream the words are exactly
the thing itself: time, horizon, copperhead, dark, robin’s
egg in grass, my mother, at last, a revelation.

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Marriage Prayer

.Reading time 1 minute.

By John Mark Ballenger

Featured Art: Science Instructing Industry by Kenyon Cox

Place into our mouths this day the coolness
of ice cubes from a heavy-bottomed glass, the burn
of bourbon on our barely parted lips,
                                                                  pursed
as if to receive a glowing Kentucky coal
that our grandfathers shoveled
in their youth into stoves 5 o’clock
each new morning before the barn chores.

Grant us strength to willingly undress,
to lie down naked and limp and freckled
and biopsy-scarred along the
                                                     shoulder blade
and hernia-scarred at the pubic line
and ashamed for what has been taken
and unashamed of what we have made.

And let her not fear my hand,
the stiffening knuckles or the clumsy
sandpaper ends of my fingers, as it rises
to touch her neck or cheek. And let me not
fear the look on her face
                                             as she turns away.

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Manhattan Afternoon

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Ansie Baird

Featured Art: Cigarettes by Ken Schles

In April, the nice man with the nice smile
looked straight at her and said, Desire.
It’s a matter of having no desire.
He said, This must be the most delicious
pastrami sandwich I’ve ever eaten.
Come here and see these drawings.
This looks like the house I used to own.
Two dry gin martinis, up, with a twist.
What the hell, let’s share the panna cotta.
Those new earrings are just right
on you. Also, I forgot to say I’ve met
another woman. It’s only forty blocks
back to the hotel and such a lovely day,
let’s walk and window shop. There’s still
some time before you catch your train.
It’s not about you, you’re a nice person.
It’s about desire for you. I haven’t any.

Read More

Portrait of Love as Failed Vocabulary Quiz

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Kristin Robertson

May I call you endeavor? May I call you
gingerly? I haven your sleek and luminous
ovation. My ardent of the mercenary, I’ll infinite
the wrangle, hovering and turbulent, for you.
Sublime citadel, listen to this intricate as it
teems. Let’s muse your decipher like a serene,
a voracious. Let’s just connoisseur. Is this
an awry between us or a crusade? Say era.
Say epoch. I gather handfuls of the panoramas
and the culminate: Say yes. I will comb your
legendary, straighten your desolate. My mouth
staminas ever ever for your succumb. Don’t you
hear the fluster, that sweet forfeit? You still
phenomenon me. Together, we phenomena.

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Toyota Yaris

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Dan J. Vice

Featured Art: Kim and Mark in the Red Car by Nan Goldin

The repeated syllable in Toyota Yaris
The “ya ya” at the heart of Toyota Yaris
The 2 y’s that feel like 5 y’s
and I’m far too wise to fall
for the sound of it
The roll around in your mouth of it
The rounding of your mouth like the slow slope of the roof of it
Toyota Yaris
The squat hunched hood and the back half with the hatchback
The silhouette like the cat arching its back Toyota Yaris
The dash Toyota Yaris, the seat Toyota Yaris
No part of the whole, no part of the car not Yaris
The eighty thousand miles and counting, and counting
The tires that ride round the edge of a dime
Spin a donut so tight it’s a Hostess Donette
By the grace of the artist who made the car
Have Toyota will Yaris
I didn’t know what my life was lacking, wasn’t looking
for an answer to the what-is-my-problem, but one night I waltzed
onto the lot and the rest as they say is Yaris
To name the world is to change it wrote Freire
and I am changed, enchanted by the chant of it
You, Toyota, you toy, Toyota
You, toy Toyota, yada yada
Toyota Yaris. This is not
                                           sponsored content, it’s
an incantation, a thanksgiving prayer
Because a group of men at a table in a room
invented a phrase that invented a feeling
I think I really love you, you Toyota Yaris
And how is it that that is a feeling that is?

Read More

You Want to Go Back

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Fleming Meeks

Featured Art: Johnny Dunn’s Sandwhich Shop by Walker Evans

You want to go back is the name of your car,
the make, the model, the name you give the swaying trees,
the rustle of leaves before a thunderstorm
as sun gives way to clouds and quiet falls
on a meadow of grass and clover.
You want to go back and ask the question.
Or you dream it. Or it’s a movie with Walter Huston,
the rumor of a movie at MGM, killed
before shooting began. Nothing was written down,
no minutes of the meetings, nothing
but a few scraps of papyrus, of vellum, of cuneiform
carved into stone, baffling translators.
Or typed on onion skin, brittle and cracked
in a box in the basement of the first house
you ever bought, along with a fund-raising letter
from Dwight Eisenhower, then president
of Columbia University, and a water-stained circular
from the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists warning
of the danger of a full-scale atomic war.
The temperature is dropping, the wind is erratic,
swift and then calm. You want to go back.

Read More

Rabbit Summer

.Reading time 45 minutes.

By Jane Marcellus

Winner, Editors’ Prize for Prose, selected by Dinty W. Moore

He is standing there in a spattered white lab coat, holding up a bunch of carrots. I am standing here in the doorway, hoping I’ve come to the right place.

“You must be Jane,” he says. “Guess who these are for?”

From a few feet away, I notice his eyes. They are brown—so brown that I cannot see his pupils. I keep looking at his eyes, trying to nd them, trying to make certain that it is me, here, that he is looking at. His gaze makes me aware that I am actually a person standing here, in this spot—a person with a name, which is Jane, which he knows. I am not used to feeling seen. I am used to feeling invisible. It is unnerving—blinding even—to be seen by a person whose pupils I cannot see, a person who knows my name.

I am young, although I do not know it. Twenty-one. I confuse feeling seen, and this odd feeling of being blinded, for love.

“Yes,” I say. “I’m Jane.”

*

The job is feeding lab rabbits and washing beakers in the college biology labs. It is my third job this summer, on account of an argument with my mother. For the past four summers, I have worked at one of the jobs she got me. She is a legal secretary for the state of Oklahoma, and she likes to get me typing jobs. Since the summer I was seventeen, I have gone along with this. I can live at home and make more money there than waitressing or busing tables. I save the money to pay for the college, which is in Connecticut and expensive, even with the scholarship. I am not sure I deserve the college, so typing has seemed like a kind of penance. But it is beginning to feel dangerous. I will graduate in another year. I sense relief rising in my mother like a prayer. Finally, I will come home for good and she can get me on with the state. I will be a secretary, not for the summer but for life.

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Miracle of Life

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Joanne Dominique Dwyer

Featured Art: On the Shore by William Trost Richards

One of the abounding miracles of life on Earth
is that somewhere at this moment a couple
is sitting in their backyard drinking alcohol together.
The lawn might be manicured or it might be overgrown
with Devil’s Trumpet and Lantana weeds.
The backyard might belong to one of their elderly parents
who is lying in a darkened back room watching television
as the couple imbibes India Pale Ale and mulberry wine.
Though maybe it’s ethanol, because they just got
news they can’t have children.
Or cartons of coconut water because
they just came back from the gym.
Regardless of what they are swallowing
and whether or not the backyard smells of cut grass,
Asian barbeque, or the pheromones of raccoons,
together they are watching the stars enter the sky one by one,
like teeth rising up into the gums of a toddler
as the crying of mosquitoes and horseflies
being electrocuted in the iridescent bug zapper
over-occupies the atmosphere.
To the point that when the man says
Freud would find the above metaphorical reference
to teeth sexual, the woman can’t quite hear him.
Instead she is contemplating the exacting way the man
lifts the brown beer bottle to his mouth, as if he is heralding
hound dogs through a horn; and about the way he
opened his car door last week for the neighbor woman
with olive skin and tattoos around her ankles,
because she said her car wouldn’t start
and she needed a ride into town
to return an overdue library book
and to euthanize her ferret.

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Shallow Person

.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Joanne Dominique Dwyer

Featured Art: Man Wearing Laurels by John Singer Sargent

What if I were not a shallow person.
Did not need an Arapaho blanket swaddled
around me in order to sleep less fitfully.
Did not need honey in my mouth.
Or a handsome man
to motivate me to shower.

What if we were all made of light.
What if I was able to mimic an aviary bird,
could hide all signs of sickness,
did not spend hours making rubber band balls.
We are all made of light.
Yet we still make excuses for our egos’ devastations.
Such as my mother preferred her polo ponies over me.

What if the seesaw were to come unhinged.
And your dog bit you in the femoral artery
while you were teaching your child to ride a bike.
What if I did not need opiates to talk to you,
could dress in a color-coordinated manner.
What if I were backseat enough
to never need to say another word.

Read More

Success

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Tony Hoagland

Featured Art: Space Riders by Tom O’Hara

After a year of rehab and therapy, the country western singer
went back to writing songs; but he had changed.

Lyrics like, “Good Boundaries Make a Better Kind of Friend,”
and, “When You Say Bye, I Feel So Violated”

—they simply didn’t have the punch of his best work.

*****

In New York, Famous Joe’s Pizza Parlor on Travis Street
is suing Joe’s Famous Pizza on East Ninth Ave for stealing its name.

The battle rapidly grows vicious. The courtroom smells
                                                                    of melted, burning cheese.

If he wins, Famous Joe says that his attorney will get free slices for life.

*****

“Jesus had a great career,” says one of the students, on Monday morning,
reading out loud from his assignment;
then, sensing an uneasy silence, “Well, but he was famous, wasn’t he?”

*****

The mountain climber who actually made it to the summit,
the place so many of his friends had failed to reach,
got one great photograph, plus permanent damage
to nerves in his nose and his ears, both hands and feet.

*****

“If I hadn’t dropped out of cooking school,” says Gretchen, happily,
“I would never have mastered my
                                             Sunday morning waffles for screaming kids,
which I believe will be my greatest legacy.”

*****

Why don’t you tell me about your life for a change?
Did you carry it carefully, like a brimful cup of water,
bound for a particular flower?

Or did you keep accidentally turning around
to look at something else,
and slosh it all over the place, like me?

Read More

Sunday at the Mall

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Tony Hoagland

Featured Art: Crouching Woman by Ferdinand Victor Eugene Delacroix

Sweetheart, if I suddenly flop over in the mall one afternoon
while taking my old-person-style exercise
and my teeth are chattering like castanets,
and my skull is going nok nonk nok on the terra cotta tiles
                                       of the well-swept mall floor;

my tongue stuck out, my eyes rolled up in my head—
Don’t worry, baby, we knew this kind of excitement
might possibly occur,
and that’s not me in there anyway—

I’m already flying backwards, high and fast
into the big arcades and spaces of my green life
where I made and gave away and traded sentences with people I loved
that made us all laugh and rise up in
unpredictable torrents of fuchsia.

Dial 911, or crouch down by the body if you want—
but sweetheart, the main point I’m making here is:
don’t worry don’t worry don’t worry:

Those wild birds will never be returning
to any roost in this world.
They’re loose, and gone, and free as oxygen.

Don’t despair there, under the frosted glass skylight,
in front of the Ethiopian restaurant
with the going-out-of-business sign.

Because sweetheart, this life
is a born escape artist,
a migrating fever,
a convict tattooed in invisible ink,
without mercy or nostalgia.

It came down to eat a lot of red licorice
and to adore you imperfectly,
and to stare at the big silent moon
as hard as it could,

then to swoop out just before closing time
right under the arm of the security guard
who pulls down the big metal grate
and snaps shut the lock in its hasp

as if it, or he, could ever imagine
anything that could prevent anything.

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Learning Swedish in Secret as a Joke

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Bobbie Jean Huff

Featured Art: Breton Girls Dancing Pont Aven by Paul Gauguin

All this passing on going on, almost
as if it were contagious. Words you’ve recently learned
spill easily from your lips:
Wenckebach, biliary, Cetuximab, granuloma,
the new bright colors of life. Just when
you were getting bored with the
pinks, purples, and greens on offer
for almost seven decades,

you’d happily now trade blasts and plasma cells for
brown or black or tan. But as surely
and hard as you know how many platelets it takes
to sustain life, you know that
more new words will show up soon.
Months ago you learned that “consistent with” means
you have it, and, last week, that “refractory” means
the treatment has quit working.

Now that you realize you’ll never learn Swedish,
in secret and as a joke
(to surprise your daughter-in-law with at dinner time),
you understand it’s not that you’re running out of
brain cells,
you’re running out of time.
You can’t learn sjuka and middag while you’re learning
leukopenia and transampullary.

You never expected this.
You never thought it would come to this!
(That’s the funny part. Has it ever not been there?)
Wake up and
you will see it even now,
gliding merrily in your direction,
not even bothering to look you in the eye,
as if you are the last thing on its mind—and if

you squint you will notice it gather a little speed
(the teensiest of fuck-you’s),
like a sailboat in languid waters
a moment after the wind has shifted.

Read More

You Are My Sunshine

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Bobbie Jean Huff

Let me begin by offering my condolences, I said,
holding out my hand. She shook out her umbrella
and placed it open, just beside the altar. They thought
it was an ulcer, she said. They gave him some tablets.
Did he have any special requests? I asked. Favorite
hymns? Or something for Communion, like maybe
Water Music? He was worse by Christmas, she said.
He couldn’t manage the pumpkin pie. He always loved
my pumpkin pie. The King of Love is nice, I said. I
opened the book to page 64. As an alternate to Crimond,
you know. Most people don’t recognize it as the 23rd
Psalm. In January his feet turned black, she said. Toe by
toe. It took exactly ten days. The shadow of a branch
moved slowly back and forth behind the stained glass.
I thought: When I get home I’ll check my toes. Will
there be Communion? I asked, finally.

The last three days he started to hiccup, she said.
He wouldn’t take any water. It never stopped, the
hiccupping. Not once, not one minute until he went. I
could play Pachelbel’s Canon. That’s very popular now.
There’s no reason it can’t work at funerals as well as
weddings. At the very end, she said—then stopped, her
eyes squeezed shut behind her glasses—as if the
rejected water, each wretched hiccup, and every
blackened toe formed a chain she could use to haul
herself back to September, when she would claim
him, finally whole again.
She reached for her umbrella and frowned. Play
what you like, she said. He was never fond of music.
Not hymns, anyhow. Only once in fifty-three years
did I catch him singing. You are My Sunshine, I
believe it was.

Read More

Devil’s Advocate

.Reading time 38 minutes.

By Becky Hagenston

His kid doesn’t want a smartphone. His fourteen-year-old flute-playing boy is saying, “Nah, I don’t really need one.” Mitch’s wife Shelley says, “No one’s forcing you, honey.” She beams. The boy beams. Mitch feels a faint nausea. There’s something wrong with his kid, who still likes Legos and watches network TV and keeps his room clean and calls his two nerd friends on the landline.

“Well, that’s fine,” says Mitch. For some reason, he’s pitched his voice like an actor from a 1950s movie. He tries it again: “That’s just fine, son!” He’s speaking like a man wearing a fedora, a man carrying a briefcase. But nobody seems to notice. “So what do you want for Christmas?”

His kid, Ernie, frowns as if Mitch has just asked him to poke a kitten in the eye. “I can’t think of anything at the moment,” he says. “Can I go practice flute now?”

“Yes!” says Shelley. She rises from the sofa and kisses Ernie on the ear. “I’ll let you know when dinner’s ready. I’m making your favorite.”

“Brussels sprouts?” he asks brightly. “And Salisbury steak?”

“You bet,” she says. When Ernie has disappeared down the hall, she turns to Mitch. “Don’t force him to grow up before he’s ready.”

Mitch knows better than to argue, but he can tell that his thoughts—not grow up, just join the 21st century like a normal kid!—might as well be floating above his head like a comic book bubble. Not that Ernie would get such a reference, because he doesn’t read comic books, either.

“Okay,” he says, but Shelley has stomped down the hall to prepare the kid’s Brussels sprouts.

Read More

Poem Beginning with “My Father”

.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Craig van Rooyen

Featured Art: Ancient Roman Ruins by Giovanni Paolo Panini

–Rome

1.

My father fills a syringe with insulin,
pushes the needle through his shirt into belly skin,
looks through the window at his dying lawn.
He writes a note to me: Summer’s early here, bud.
Your mom’s still on me to lay off the Snickers.
She means well, of course.
The oak tree’s about to go—groans all night long.
Caravaggio is one of my favorites. A sensitive scoundrel.
Go see Conversion On The Road To Damascus.
All is of Grace, Dad.

2.

Four lions stick out hollow tongues
in the middle of Piazza del Popolo.
Each tongue spews water—spilling down
stepped plinths into four collection pools
whose surfaces are mildly disturbed
but never overflow. With their perspective of stone,
the lions have remained unmoved for 200 years.
How, I wonder, can they gaze without weeping
at the sun-burned stoner strumming a distorted
“Stairway To Heaven.”
I stumble from one to another,
dropping coins until my pockets are empty.

3.

When he baptized me, my father’s robe floated
up around him like the wings of a manta ray,
revealing the soft skin of his shins to the believers.
We stood in a glass tank, with nothing to hide.
He covered my eyes with a handkerchief,
dipped me backwards into new life.
I trusted his strong arms
more than God.

4.

Fountains fill my photographs: pissing cherubs,
horses with fish tails. Granite seashells emerge
amid glistening mermaids—
breasts taut in the exquisite way
stone has of lying about flesh and time.

Read More

Spring

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Lauren Shapiro

Featured Art: The Cock Sparrow by George Edwards

The nice teachers at the kindergarten open house
point out the Unifix cubes and color game;
they are professional in their analysis of play. Later
at Lainy’s party the operators of Jump ’N Bounce
just look away while the kids wrestle into an idyllic
sense of self. A mother tells me, hushed, how
one November morning Jason’s father parked the car
and blew his head off. Then it’s time for cake.
The kids are sweaty, tumbling over each other
for a spot at the table. I search Jason’s face
for a sign, a scar, but don’t find it—he’s waving
a noisemaker in Sean’s face, his mother chatting
pleasantly in the corner. Cue the birthday music.
Next day, we’re late, and I walk my distressed son
into school. “We might miss the eggs hatching!” he yells,
bounding down the stairs. The class is huddled
around the incubator, the glow from the heat lamp
flushing their faces. This must be a rite of passage,
watching a chick’s birth surrounded by friends.
It’s on the docket, tailored to the lesson plan, deemed
developmentally appropriate. It’s March, after all,
when the world glosses over its losses.

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Three Bells

.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Craig van Rooyen

Featured Art: Strawberry Tea Set by Childe Hassam

—after “Seven Marys,” by Li-Young Lee

I sit, Sister Mary, among the other relics
in the Mission courtyard—
a cracked vat for boiling blubber
into lamp butter,
a wood-wheeled cart to haul
bear carcass to the butcher.
Underneath the bricks,
all the smallpox bones.
And these three bells, Sister Mary,
named Joy, Sorrow, and Gloria.
What am I to do when they toll?
Cast before I was born, each sings
to me in a different key: G, E minor,
and Chumash. Joy weighs 279 pounds
and wakes roosting starlings,
launches them from the parched oak tree,
black leaves falling upward.
Sorrow makes the wooden Indian
in front of Founders Smoke & Tobacco weep.
Gloria, Sister Mary, makes me shake.
Sounding wilder as I grow old and tame,
they ring in three tongues:
red, wildfire, and October.
Three bells, Sister Mary, three roads back.
And one says you are the green-eyed devil.
And one says the bears are gone.
But one says, Glory, you are here,
open your green eyes.
There is a fountain, Sister Mary,
a fountain not deep or wide, and into it
tourists toss coins bearing the heads
of our fathers, white and solemn and gone.
A fountain with a bear and a girl and three fish
all bronzed and greening from the air.
Water spews from the paw of the bear,
and the fish leap on their metal spindles, always
inches above the troubled waters,
and the little bronzed girl sees nothing
with her blank Chumash eyes—not the fish,
the white fathers tumbling head over tails,
or me on my bench in the sun sipping
from a bagged can while three bells toll
their braided song. We are nothing to her,
because she is long gone.
And what am I to do?
Bells tolling my guilt, solitude, privilege, joy.
One, Sister Mary, sings the beauty of milkweed tufts
blown down dry creek beds.
One whispers to me the forgotten dreams
of steelhead trout, and the sins of the fathers
visited unto the third and fourth generation.
And one orders my fingerprints pressed
onto the black wings of starlings.
And I can’t tell, anymore, Sister Mary,
one from the other

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Mailing a Letter

.Reading time 4 minutes.

By Dawn Davies

Featured Art: Evocation of Roussel by Odilon Redon

The letter came back from the post office so mangled
it was as if the mailman had plucked it out of my box
before being jumped by a clot of street thugs.
Then, still carrying his mail bag, stumbled into a bar
because it was the third time this year that he’d gotten jumped
in my neighborhood, and why do guys gotta pick on him
just because he’s short (under five-six don’t make a man,
his father always said). Then drank scotch and soda
until the bartender made him stop, walked the dimming
summer streets in search of his truck, slept in a doorway,
woke up and vomited into his mailbag, found his truck
and skulked home to his wife, who had sent all four children
to the neighbors and was waiting up in yesterday’s clothes,
with a suitcase and a left hook brewing. Because she hated
the late hours the USPS forced him to carry, and by “late hours”
they both know she meant his cheating with the tiny
Castilian woman two zip codes over, and this thought
that poisoned her days now propelled her to stomp on his mailbag
and kick it off the porch for all that the mailbag stood for:
the overtime, the philandering, the childless Castilian
with the twenty-two inch waist. But then when she saw his face
with his eyebrows tipped and sorry, and she knew
that he hadn’t been sneaking around, but had gotten into trouble,
she sat him down, fed him coffee, and washed his wounds
before sending him back out for his morning shift,
because they both needed him to keep this job
(there was a pension attached, she had secretly started divorce
proceedings, was hungry for the alimony).
And so he got back to work and wiped off the fouled, wretched
letters in his bag, feeding them through the system
before getting called into the supervisor’s, and because
the letter was wet, it got mangled in the maw of a sorting machine,
the address smeared and clotty, the stamp curled and dystonic,
and three weeks later, once the mailman was off probation,
the letter came back to him, smelling like machine oil and vomit,
clawed and shredded, stamped “Return to Sender,”
and he shoved it back in my mailbox with bite marks
from the beast that had mauled it, this letter to my father
on his deathbed, explaining why I wouldn’t be going to see him.

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Graduation

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Maria Nazos

Featured Art: Fern Alley by Felicity Gunn

As my father hands me a bouquet of roses
dyed the shade of a dozen sinking suns, my mother grasps
his steady arm, teetering. Her body
has begun its slow revenge for what it begrudged
all along, and she’s afraid to walk since her last fall, which
snapped her hip in half. My father is tired
of holding her up. He scolds, Just take it. Her hand shakes
as she holds the iPhone to get a photo
of me in my mortarboard and hood. Let go
and take it, he says, and she tries a one-handed
snapshot, her trembling arm still looped through his.

I stitch a smile across my face. The phone flashes.
As she grips his wrist, I can hear him in Greek,
the language reserved for anger and, once, for sex.
The language they speak and still think
I don’t understand. Can I live this way, Tia? he asks.

I clutch my bouquet to my chest, trying
to pretend these flowers aren’t lopped off at the stems.
Trying to move into the next phase of realization
that love is unsteady on its feet. That two people
can resent each other, but care for their daughter
and each other enough to stay put.
                                                               Refusing to wilt
into that place I’d go as a child—when I’d hear
their fights and retreat to the backyard to play
with cats, praying to make something else of myself, however
small—I stand tall.
                                 How can I live like this?
he says to her again. Still, I’m posing, smiling
into the face of their slow decline.
And all three of us trying, best we can,
to hold each other shakily, and steadily upright.

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I Go Back to Mykonos 1976

.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Maria Nazos

Featured Art: “Mykonos” by Maria Karalyos

                                                                             —after Sharon Olds’ “I Go Back to May 1937”

By the third martini, he’ll ask her to marry him.
She’s a tourist, he’s a captain, home by chance.
I stand at the window, watching. I want to walk
into that bar, order an ouzo, and tell them
that, together, they’ll create a new generation
of pain. I want to tell him to court the island girl,
the one who, forty years later, will see him, run
to the restroom, and return with a fresh coat
of lipstick. I want to tell my young mother,
in the words of the great North American philosopher,
Pamela Anderson, “Never get married on vacation.”
But this is long before Pam and Tommy Lee, before
I existed. Before Reagan reigned over his long line of wreckage,
and couples shot themselves, together, in their cars. The Vietnam War
has ended, but here I am standing
at the window, watching while they meet,
both oblivious of wars they’ll wage. They’ll move
from Greece back to the Midwest—she’ll drink, alone,
in her kitchen. He’ll return to the island every chance
he gets. When he’s back in Illinois, he’ll stare
into the aquarium and long for water. She’ll look
at him, frozen, behind her highball glass. Still, I stay
at the window of the bar, wanting to use Pam’s biting wit.
But this is long before Baywatch, and they’re gazing at the
bay. I tap the glass like Morse code. Sealed in
my own tank of silence, I say, Please let go.
But as they take each other’s hands, I softly touch
the pane and turn away. Because they, too, have the right
to plunge. Even if they’ll swim out too deep:
holding onto each other until death.

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Tough Love

.Reading time 34 minutes.

By Paul Hansen

I was one of those kids that spent a lot of time on the internet. Chat rooms, message boards. ASL, S2R, and some gender tricks too. That stuff was normal in the Nineties. And it was all good clean fun until I fell in with some gun nuts when I was fifteen years old, the type of people that encrypt shit. Way down in the web. Amateur blacksmiths and whatnot. I got so into it I ended up putting together a makeshift muzzle loader out of Schedule 80 piping, cold American steel, something I saw on the blacksmithing forum. I tried it in the basement but it didn’t work so I got a slightly bigger ball bearing for ammunition, about the size of a marble. I took it to the backyard, propped it on some dunnage, put a flame to the fuse. And by god, it worked. There was this huge discharge, a cloud of smoke. It shot wildly though. Fucking hit my kid brother square in the leg. He was clear across the yard. Dad came running from the house. There was so much blood that none of it seemed real and after Dad stopped the bleeding he came at me and that’s the deepest fear I’ve ever felt.

But that all happened fifteen years ago. I’m an adult now, turned thirty recently. Lacey’s my girlfriend these days. We met at a support group for those that’ve been injured by firearms: Tuesday night, St. Vincent de Paul, where I was the only one whose wound wasn’t visible. It’s like Lacey says: “Pretty baby’s hurt on the inside.” When she was ten years old she was making herself a necklace out of scrap—a little bit of twine, whatever else—then she found the perfect final piece, this shiny gold thing. All it needed was to be flattened. She grabbed a hammer and that was that. It was a live .22 round. Went off in her face. Took a half-dozen surgeries to put her back together. As a result she’s permanently blind in the right eye, with a spiderweb of ice covering the whole thing; little scars that don’t look like much until they’re pressed together.

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Without Pain

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Kelly Michels

“Swing in the Right Direction with OxyContin”
—marketing slogan from Purdue Pharma

All day the rain spills onto the backyard deck.
The narcoleptic hours, darkened and dim, rewind and nod off.

My mother walks five miles to the emergency room on a Sunday.
She complains of a toothache, tells the doctors she needs something

to get by. It is predicted the temperature will rise 30 degrees in the next
twelve hours, then drop 20 more tomorrow, which means more talk

of global warming or the next ice age, more waiting for the Earth’s
fever to break like a sick child.

On television, people are dancing in a field of wildflowers.
The sun hits their faces, their pupils confetti.

A man appears in a lab jacket, claims he has found the cure for all pain.
He crushes the flowers, alkaloids running white across his chin.

You too can be like them, he says. And maybe we can.
But then, without pain—

What will the monks chant? What shrouded
music, what raspy voice will rise from the A.M.

radio, move like heat lightning against our spines?
Who will hear our minareted cries, our tangled

whispering, lowered breath pleading with
the moon? What hand will rock us

to sleep, float through our hair
like bath water, bring us to our knees,

lift our awkward heads
toward the frayed dawn?

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Lucky

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Steven Dawson

Featured Art: Firer by Felicity Gunn 

The first time I watched Braveheart
was in the basement of Lucky’s dope house.
I remember the soft cone of light

reaching out from that small box TV
as if asking for spare change from the dark
and how that little glass frame made

blue-faced Wallace look so much
like an action figure (back when Mel
was somebody’s idea of a hero).

And in the downstairs bathroom hung
a cage with Lucky’s bird, a gray parrot
he took from a woman who couldn’t

pay him and that bird would pull
every dull feather from its back
and curse in Spanish as I watched.

I was nine or ten and alone with Braveheart,
that bird, and basement boxes I imagined filled
with a life before Lucky, when his name

might have been Greg or Brandon or even Mel.
This is how my brother babysat—
upstairs and horizontal with a needle

sleeping in his bowtied arm
like some guardian angel taking
work naps among hallway sleeping bags

swollen with strangers
practicing how to be dead
and Lucky’s bird downstairs

screaming chinga tu madre.

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Repossession

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Steven Dawson

To apologize for your vanishing
you brought me a loosey
and a rolled-up Hustler and we sat

in your new car trading smoke.
This happened every few months,
a kind of church service for holiday

Catholics. In that steel cathedral
you preached what you thought
I’d absolutely need: how to cheat

the cylinder inside a lock,
what words undress a virgin,
why I can’t confuse the compass

with the cross and how to blame
heaven if you went to hell.
From the passenger seat of that

stolen Cutlass you were a ruined
simile—the way the back
of an empty tow truck looks

like a crucifix and how in the small
light of that blinking patrol car
you blushed like a martyr.

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Train Prayer

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Steven Dawson

Featured Art: Indulge by Felicity Gunn

In Denver all days end standing up
packed like dried fish dry-humping
each other on the H Line. Some
passengers in their drunken wobble
or even in their haze of sobriety
pull down hard on the rubber handles,
the ones meant for standing,
the ones that swing dumbly above
our heads. They think this action
stops the locomotive but the train
is automated, stopping itself
at Broadway then Osage, Lincoln Blvd.
Since the train, as it always does, stops—
the travelers learn to keep tugging
& I can’t help but think this is how
prayer works. Like when I prayed
to a god I don’t believe in that your
morphine drip might soothe the wounds
that chemotherapy would not
& how I swear it worked sometimes
but didn’t others & yet in my drunken
sobriety I believe that it was me
who eased your pain, that it was my
failed pleas that bleached your blood.

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An Oral History of Hands as Told by My Grandmother

.Reading time 6 minutes.

By Mercedes Lucero

Featured Art: Seated Youth Writing in Book by Raffaello Sanzio

This all began because Mother was making tortillas. This all began with mothers and kitchens. We live in Crowley, Colorado, or maybe Rocky Ford, Colorado, a place where there are not a lot of doctors. We live in a place where there are always mothers in kitchens and daughters who wait nearby to watch their mothers watch the tortillas.

The year is 1949 or 1950 or 1951. I am nine or ten or eleven and not allowed to touch the stove. We have a wood-burning stove with a large at surface for cooking. I stand on the pile of wood at the edge of the stove to see the tortillas. I like to stand close to watch Mother. Father has a habit of kissing me on the back of the neck and I fall. It is the middle of winter and water from the well is cold.

I want to be like Mother. I have a rolling pin Father made me, small enough to fit inside my hands. Father is always making things with his hands. He makes things for me out of wood. Father has a habit of kissing me on the back of the neck. I am the youngest of nine and they say I am his favorite.

Mother hands me a small mound of dough and I flatten it with my rolling pin. I watch Mother put dough on the stove. I stand on the pile of wood at the edge to see the tortillas. I stand close to watch Mother place dough, perfectly round, on the stove. I am not allowed to touch the stove. Father has a habit of kissing me on the back of the neck and I fall.

I can hear the sound of my hands sizzling on the stove. My hands sound like a stick of butter in a frying pan. We have a wood-burning stove, with a large at surface for cooking. I like to stand close to watch Mother watch the tortillas.

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A Fistful of Dirt

.Reading time 43 minutes.

By Sujatha Fernandes

Manuel relayed buckets of moist earth to the concrete stairwell. It was Héctor’s job to hoist the buckets up and ferry them over to the dumpster. They had to work quickly to keep the buckets moving or the Bangladeshi contractor, a slight man with a beard, would start yelling at them, “Taratari koro.”

The workers down below had broken up the existing basement floor of the six-story building with jackhammers and then used pickaxes to pry out the concrete. Now they were excavating eight to ten feet of earth to increase the height of the basement.

Héctor was grateful to work in the open air instead of underground like a mole with the thick damp air and the artificial light from lamps. It was also safer up here. The men in the basement would dig themselves into three-foot-square holes up to eight-feet deep and there weren’t even any planks of wood to brace the sides. Suddenly someone would look up to see the sides crumbling in on him. He suspected that the contractors didn’t know what they were doing. It was only a matter of time before a worker was buried alive.

Still, it was regular work, something Héctor hadn’t had in a while. He had spent several months going to the parada on Roosevelt Avenue, getting picked up occasionally for one- or two-day stints in demolition or renovation. He found this job through Jesús, a slim Oaxaqueño, always clean shaven with dimples and a broad smile. Jesús used to talk big on the corner about his influence in the construction world. The men would rib him. “So why are you here at the parada, dumbass?” It didn’t bother Jesús.

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Then and Now, the Essex Street Market

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Roger Mitchell

Featured Art: Hollywood Africans by Jean-Michel Basquiat

The person who took this picture took it
well above the parking lot across the street.
“Malted Milk with Ice Cream” cost five cents
once. Leroy’s on the corner sold “knishes
frankfurters and root beer,” and the cars
and everyone stopped moving for a moment
so this proof could be snapped of the way
a few things stood at the corner of Essex
and Delancey sometime between the Fall
of Rome and now. Which is also falling.

In the upper-right-hand reaches of the shot,
a line of laundry sags out of a tenement window.
The other end seems suspended in air,
like everything else, both in and out
of the window, the photo, the cowl of dust
that wraps the earth in its own heat. Damn,
said Napoleon, and he turned his horse
and started back across the steppe toward Josephine.

The half dozen newly planted trees lined up
in their iron jackets along Essex were leafless,
so winter must have been on its way, in
or out, we can’t tell. The little lie the picture tells
is that, though everything is about to change, it brought
life to a halt, so someone could open the door, now,
and let in a large whack of dust and noise,
the kind they make no room for in pictures,
passing them on to the woman in the next booth
who is giving, maybe the air, maybe her mother,
a colorfully athletic lesson in Spanglish,
involving, from what little I can make out,
most of what we call history, as it’s apt to look
when the future gets here, and “that fucker
Reynaldo.” I have no idea what Reynaldo’s crime is,
but, if you are listening, Reynaldo, get over here,
quick, if you don’t want to be history.

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Thief

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Owen McLeod

Every Thursday, on his way to therapy,
he drives past the house of the woman
he’s having an affair with. What interests
his therapist isn’t the sin, which she views
as a symptom, but the root. So they dig,
or seem to, and today he talks about his wife—
how, before they take a trip, she makes him
connect those timers to lamps in certain rooms,
and how much this annoys him, even though
it didn’t used to. As if their belongings were
of value. As if an automatic light might stop
an addict from breaking in.
                                                  As if the thief,
awake beside her, had not already come and gone.

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In Dog Dreams

.Reading time 1 minute.
by Karla K. Morton
Featured Art: 

I run,
palms like paws on the earth,
muscles, long and sinew.

I smell wet clover,
the musk of home,
cooking meat.

I do not think about tomorrow
or yesterday,
but I remember the cactus
and the snake,
and the music of your voice
even when language fails.

And when I wake, I roll
to the nest of your shoulder.

Your arm does not reminisce
when it first wrapped my waist,
yet it comes to me;
heals even as you sleep.

I feel the peace of gravity;
the subtle spin of planet;
the rise of the mountain.

In Dog Dreams,
I have known no other hand;
no other time
when I wasn’t yours,
or you, mine.

Whoop! you call in the deepening forest.
Whoop! my descant back.

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Confirmation

.Reading time 3 minutes.

By John McCarthy

You taught me how hands could be laid, how they could touch
     a head and heal, but all of those hands eventually fell limp
like a field bent by threshing or a lit match dropped in water. Once,
     we used to dance in The Corner Tavern’s neon light
where the pickup exhaust wafted inside like harvest dust.
     Life in the Midwest is like one long goodbye because it is the same
every day, and I didn’t realize you had left until there was nothing
     but hard work and long days ending with the wind’s silent dirge
that sounds like trying not to die but always dies in smaller ways—
     screen doors that slam closed but don’t shut all the way
because the house has settled and the roof is warping from the sky
     boiling over with thunder and rain. I wake up now to the flashing
falling from the gutters and the water dripping through the holes
     in the ceiling. All I do is recall your voice like a prayer thrashing
my skull that mines the night begging our fathers our fathers
     our fathers in prayer, but they are off begging other women
in other towns. This town is not the memory I want, but I know
     how sadness works. It’s like a kettle-bottom collapsing onto
the details of every thought. I shouldn’t have, but I stayed in town
     to try and keep what I love alive, but no that never works. We were
a long time ago and a long time ago is too hard to get back.
     The last time we talked you said, We will end up like our mothers—
waiting for nothing. Then you didn’t come back. No. Not ever.

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Trattoria Tagliati, Positano

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Karla K. Morton

Featured Art: Stowing Sail by Winslow Homer

Vesuvius will claim a day like today—
serene September winds
blowing ashen siren songs
through each sail,

disintegrating each white triangle
as they make their way
across Li Galli Islands,
through the Gulf of Sorrento,

and into this perfect bowl of carbonara,
this excellent Brunello,

sky blues replaced
by the dark dollop of death’s digestivo—
claiming the check
the café
the city of Positano;

the accordion player
pausing only at the thunder of eruption,
then slowing his tarantella
to the flow of lava.

Let them dig us up, love,
10,000 years from now—
with a full belly,
and a third glass of wine,

our legs entwined like spaghetti,
our charred hearts
served up to the gods
at the very same time.

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