There Will Be Salvation Yet

November 6, 2020.Reading time 24 minutes.

By Tania De Rozario
Winner, New Ohio Review Nonfiction Contest: selected by Ira Sukrungruang

Featured Art: The Last Supper By H. Siddons Mowbray

1993. That’s when it happens. Two months after your twelfth birthday. It’s a sweaty afternoon. This day which blisters with possibility. This day you learn that there are demons inside of you.

You’re on your way home from school. You know something is wrong the minute you get off the bus. Your mother waits at the bus stop, teary-eyed. Your relationship has grown monosyllabic, but the tears feel like a warning, so you ask.

What’s wrong?

It is when she smiles that something inside you unravels. You realize hers are happy tears. But her smile is vacant. Placid. A Stepford Wives smile. The tears fall but there is nothing behind them. She’s a mannequin crying on command. A talking-doll with electronics scrambled.

You don’t have the language for this yet.

She grabs you, holds you tight: Nana has been saved!

Jesus and My Way of Seeing Him Go

November 6, 2020.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Jeanine Walker

Featured Art: Jesus Christ, the Virgin and St. John the Baptist with Saints Paul and Catherine, ca. 1520 designed by Raphael, printed by Marc Antonio Raimondi

I was eighty-two again
and Jesus came perched like an angel
on top of my fridge, his palms spread open.

Almost old enough to be comfortable going,
I wondered if he had come to take me.
“Are you here for me?” I asked him.

I was eighty-two and my eyesight
was dimming, but I was in good health
for my age. And in my good health

I saw how lovely Jesus was, how physically
lovely, and I felt like kissing
his stomach. Not even where it was whipped

or wounded, or where the vinegar
dripped onto it as it overflowed
from the taunting sponge, but just

his belly, carefully haired, divinely
flat and strong and hungry and disciplined.
May I May I May I, I prayed,

and when finally he said I could
I pulled the stepladder out from under
the sink and gathered myself on top of it.

Then I kissed the stomach of Jesus.
It tasted like the steam that arises
from dry ice. I kept the wind at bay,

but it was difficult to do so, what
with the howling just then
picking up and all.

My IRS

November 6, 2020.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Adam O. Davis

I am two vowels strung twenty years long.
My life a ransom
letter written by a cardiogram, tympanic as traffic & the lights of traffic

that renew the tercets of Esso stations standing violent as macaws
in the ululative night.
I need lithium or language, nurse.

I need words to fall like ricin from an envelope.
Clearly, my synapses need seeing to.
So, please, repo the verb of me.

Conduct me swiftly
through the conjunction of Tennessee where nouns loiter like limbs
languid with Quaaludes, where daylight breaks

like a mouthful of fentanyl over the teeth of a country that cares not
for such news.
Should a poem be the pill or the pharmacy?

Should I pledge myself to this business as if it were Gerard Manley Hopkins
or Jesus Christ?
Here I am, Lord, earnest as a rice cooker, lively as Superman

in his leotard, my spiritual fizz empirical as Pepsi & just as cheap.
Jesus, Gerard—
who will irrigate these ears from error?

                                                                   Who will whisper that in the empire
of swans the black cygnet is Elvis?
                                                    All around me the malady of my unmaking

unmans me: roadside trash, unrecycled recyclables, my shadow laid
like a new suit over the bus bench & birds behind it.
                                                                                    All this urban tumbleweed,

all these words for worse.
When whoever’s kingdom it is comes calling for it
will the last televangelist of grammar go angled like an angel in the direction

of their god?
Or will America just eat my opioids as it like Nemo poisons
its seas to peace?

When I was a verb I thought as a verb so I did as a verb, just like the police.
Tonight the moon slouches in its straitjacket of stars.
There’s a multinational

wind afoot, some merry beast loose, all pronoun without surcease.
What rooky woods will it rouse first?
What islands will it make of our bodies yet?

On Ongoingness: a Conversation with Ada Limón and Jaswinder Bolina

November 6, 2020.Reading time 55 minutes.

Moderated by NOR editor, David Wanczyk

David Wanczyk: We’re talking on Zoom today with Ada Limón, author of five award-winning collections of poetry, and Jaswinder Bolina, author of three acclaimed collections and the recent book of essays Of Color. And we’re talking only 16 days after the police shooting of Jacob Blake, when months of predominantly peaceful protests have been met by ever more ominous counterprotest, when our election is threatened by a virus and dishonesty, when we simply miss our friends, and when many of us are even more exhausted than usual; and yet I’m happy to be having this conversation because these are two writers who have given me a clear-eyed bucking-up in the past, who refuse to ignore the struggle, but find—at least seem to find—a kind of dog-chewed, persevering, loveliness and electricity in their work. Even when, as Limón writes, quote, “the country plummets into a crepitating crater of hatred, isn’t there still something singing?”

And so I want to ask both of you—How are you? First, but also, how are you as artists listening for what’s still singing? How can we—can we resist what feels like the desperation of our country?

Ada Limón: Hmm. Hmm. Just start there? [laughs]

Jaswinder Bolina: An easy a softball to start, to lead off.

The Arachnologist

November 6, 2020.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Benjamin Gucciardi

Featured Art: Untitled (Hourglass) by Mary Vaux Walcott

When he told me his teeth felt too heavy
to study history, I excused him.
I knew he was headed for the aqueduct,

or the boarded-up houses choked
by trumpet vine where he found them.
Martel collected spiders with the discipline of a surgeon.

He kept them in empty soda bottles
under his bed. On his way into sixth period,
he touched my fist with his fist,

announced the genus of his catch,
Latrodectus, and his total, that’s nine this week!
Through this tally of arachnids captured

in sugary plastic, we learned to trust each other
the way men on tankers far out at sea
confide reluctantly in gray rippling water.

When his best friend broke the news,
they found Martel last night, her voice quavering,
stray bullet off International,

I went to his house to adopt a spider.
I imagined the red hourglass
on the female’s abdomen emptying itself

slowly, her segmented body imprisoned
in the glow of the green-tinted bottle,
but no one was home. Now when I hear

the old women gathering cans at dawn,
half-swallowed by blue waste bins,
I think of Martel finding containers

to bring to the canyon, Martel
inspecting stones, placing his fingers
delicately around the thorax,

the eight legs angry at the morning
as he lifts the arrowhead orb weaver
toward the sun, offering

what he loved to the old, hungry light.

Leaf Light

November 6, 2020.Reading time 1 minute.

By Emily Tuszynska

Featured Art: Forest by Arnold William Brunner

We live in green
depths of trees
planted by those
who grew old
and died or moved
away our children
play in yards theirs left
behind and sleep
in rooms that held two
or even three until
they grew our children too
are growing in summer
we box outgrown
clothes repaint
the walls new tiles
for the bath new
shingles the trees
don’t seem to change
though of course
they must the backyard
beech and oaks
that will outlast us
casting a deeper
shade the front yard
holly reaching farther
over the drive we pull in
and out of always
in a rush someone
running back for what
they forgot the trees
keep some other kind
of time spend whole
seasons taking in
their sustenance
strange food
without substance
every summer a feast
of light

Train by Edward Mitchell Bannister

November 6, 2020.Reading time less than 1 minute.

Night Train

November 6, 2020.Reading time 5 minutes.

By Emily Tuszynska

Featured Art: Train by Edward Mitchell Bannister

The interior landscape shifts, erodes.
                While the children sleep we shore it up
                                with flotsam but the next day another

tide-bitten chunk of coastline
                crumbles. The trouble is we’re living
                                all at once. We keep rearranging the furniture

to try to make it fit. By day we push
                aside the clutter, lay the baby
                                on the floor she drums with open palms

as if to feel it’s there. Something solid
                underneath. Mostly everything sways.
                                A tree falls and the house next door

stands empty for years. The boy holds his sister
                to the window and shows her how
                                to wave goodbye, and that’s the morning,

fingerprints in the dust of it. Outside the day
                moves away in all directions. Streetlights
                                come on. When as I walk the baby the night train

whistles through its distant crossing,
                why does it feel like we are the ones
                                hurtling toward some unknown destination?

I lean my forehead against the icy, rattling glass,
                look through our reflection at the moon
                                rushing through branches. Look, there’s a farmhouse,

miles from the lights of any town. Someone
                turns on a lamp in one of the windows;
                                someone stands there, watching us go past.

Awe

November 6, 2020.Reading time 1 minute.

By Peter Krumbach

Featured Art: Blossoming Cherry Trees by Kano Sanraku (1559-1635)

I waited for it in the fork
of a cherry tree. On the LL
train. Made bed for it in my 8th
Street room. I left gaps in sentences
where it could land. Dug holes, smoked
ham, lost bets and innocence, granted
exculpation long before it sinned.
To track its scent, I stripped
and whorled, committed perfidy,
burned effigies and caramelized
figs. I rubbed nougat with licorice
and seven sprigs of dill. I renamed
myself after it, just to see
how I rang. Morning, midnight,
noon and dusk, I texted,
sexted, called and faxed it.
For years and years, I slept unkept,
sculpting pleas and letters
of regret. And then one day
it was in my palm. Smooth
as a peanut, smelling of pine.
Dzweep, said a jay from the elm
above my head, then bolt-like
he dove and snatched it away.
Beautiful hard-eyed thief, leaving
nothing but an ampersand.
My core cracked like a deer-
struck windshield. It splintered
into little hearts shuffled through
a deck. So I wrote this
in red.

An Uhlan (mounted soldier with a pike) by Jean Baptiste Edouard Detaille (1848-1912)

November 6, 2020.Reading time less than 1 minute.

Amtrak Psalm

November 6, 2020.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Craig van Rooyen

Featured Art: An Uhlan (mounted soldier with a pike) by Jean Baptiste Edouard Detaille (1848-1912)

The sway-backed horses of Lompoc don’t spook anymore.
They keep their muzzles pressed, sharing a pulse

while you clatter past, invisible in tinted business class.
And whose business are you minding anyway

as you peek into the pitbull’s backyard wreckage,
glimpse the bad cuts and dye-jobs of students smoking

behind Oxnard’s International College of Beauty? Camarillo,
Moorpark, Simi Valley, recede into heat-shimmer oblivion.

At home, your daughter’s behind a closed door
with Carnivorous Red nails posting stories that dissolve.

The entire universe big-bangs away from her irreducible center
of disdain. I’ll be gone soon enough, you want to say.

So this afternoon you’ve fallen in love with the common
mourning dove, tilting at the wind on his coil of razor wire.

You’re rooting for the tag crew artists
in their neverending arms race with Parks & Rec.

Boomer and Lil’ G, Fatlip and The Dog, Fraho, Buzz,
Rollin’ Sixty and Bashr. Naming themselves

over and over in the middle of the night, learning
like Buddhist masters the lessons of impermanence.

And now you’re waving at ranks of garden gnomes—
little domestic terra cotta soldiers waiting to be found

in the Burbank Home Depot back lot. I see you, you whisper
through the glass at their earnest bearded faces.

I see every one of you.

By Giovanni Francesco Barbieri (1591-1666)

November 6, 2020.Reading time less than 1 minute.

“Take the Neck Step Against Aging”

November 6, 2020.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Craig van Rooyen

Featured Art: by Giovanni Francesco Barbieri (1591-1666)

Today my wife bought a twin pack of neck-tightening cream
for me, and I’m trying not to take offense.

It’s not that I haven’t noticed the thinning crepe paper
over my Adam’s apple, or the way it bunches when I tie a tie,

but I guess I had hoped she would be my accomplice
in pretending. The book I’m reading’s called The Denial of Death.

It says civilization’s an elaborate symbolic defense mechanism
against the knowledge of our mortality. And yet I can’t help but hope

this cream will work. My wife learned from her mother
who learned from her mother, and so on, how the crushed

bark powder of a Thanaka tree, abraded in water and a stone dish,
will form a milky paste that protects the faces of the ones you love.

Do you know how it feels to have a woman massage her history
deep into your skin? So we pretend this is a Costco twin-pack of Thanaka

and that we have all the time in the world as she opens the jar,
warms the cream between her palms and wraps her slender fingers

around my throat. It’s one thing to try to bridge the basic duality between
the physical world of objects and the symbolic world of meaning

with neck cream. It’s another to trust a woman’s hands around your throat.
“Point your chin up,” she says, cradling my head in her lap.

I’m hoping we’re part of something eternal, but if not,
that the decline of our bodies will be gradual and in tandem, and

that we will continue to be startled every March when
the flock of cedar waxwings reappears in the clattering branches

of the apple tree outside our window. See how their little masks hide
fatigue as they settle in by the dozens, Lone Ranger faces all pointed

in the same direction. Just one night in our tree on their long trip
from the sun-lashed Yucatan to the tundra of the Northwest Territories

Requiem with “Little Wing”

November 6, 2020.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Craig van Rooyen

Featured Art: by Kenyon Cox (1856-1919)

Perhaps, on your downtown lunch stroll
in unseasonably cheery weather,
you walk up on a flock of grackles
on the ground in front of Urban Outfitters,
their impact marks still drying on the window
recently washed to display Big Sur Ribbed Pullovers
and the Willow Fuzzy Drawstring Teddy,
as if anyone believes October’s still a sweater month.

Perhaps you become suddenly dizzy,
a strange gravity drawing you toward this constellation
of twitching black holes
opened in the sidewalk at your feet.
And perhaps this brings to mind
how it feels when your face falls from your face.

In the old days before the imminent apocalypse,
the pattern would be read as omen:
a toothache’s coming on, the breath of your bride-to-be
will sour every time she walks in moonlight,
your best cow will soon grow milk-sick.
The prescriptions would be just as clear:
wash your warp and dye it while a new moon waxes;
steal a neighbor’s crickets and install them in your hearth;
milk with one hand only.

Perhaps, even now, you try to read in the little bodies
some feathered correspondence: this relates to that.
If you step on a crack, the snowy plover will slip
into extinction; if you breathe out while passing a cemetery,
Greenland’s ice shelf will break off and float away.
But the letters blur and you can’t discern the news
from the wrecked wings and necks.

On Ongoingness: A Conversation with Ada Limon and Jaswinder Bolina

November 6, 2020.Reading time 74 minutes.

Moderated by NOR editor, David Wanczyk

David Wanczyk: We’re talking on Zoom today with Ada Limón, author of five award-winning collections of poetry, and Jaswinder Bolina, author of three acclaimed collections and the recent book of essays Of Color. And we’re talking only 16 days after the police shooting of Jacob Blake, when months of predominantly peaceful protests have been met by ever more ominous counterprotest, when our election is threatened by a virus and dishonesty, when we simply miss our friends, and when many of us are even more exhausted than usual; and yet I’m happy to be having this conversation because these are two writers who have given me a clear-eyed bucking-up in the past, who refuse to ignore the struggle, but find—at least seem to find—a kind of dog-chewed, persevering, loveliness and electricity in their work. Even when, as Limón writes, quote “the country plummets into a crepitating crater of hatred, isn’t there still something singing?”

Ada Limón: Hmm. Hmm. Just start there? [laughs]

Jaswinder Bolina: An easy a softball to start, to lead off.

The Personal Political, November 2020

October 31, 2020.Reading time less than 1 minute.

New Ohio Review Issue 16 (Originally printed Fall 2014)

October 28, 2020.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 16 compiled by Hannah Hoover.

What Comes Next

October 27, 2020.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Maxine Scates

Featured art: A Flowering Cactus: Heliocereus Speciosus by Pierre-Joseph Redouté

Life’s police car, lights flashing, on the sidewalk

in front of McDonald’s and two boys on the bus stop,

one boy moving quickly away from the other

who raised his hands and dropped his pack as the officer

approached, gun drawn. But how did the cop know

which one he wanted since both wore watch caps

and gray parkas and carried backpacks? He seemed

certain enough as he handcuffed the boy

then helped him into the back of the cruiser

his now gunless hand almost gently dipping the boy’s head

into what comes next, all we don’t see swallowing him, the

signal changing, day swallowing me until this morning

Small Boy

October 26, 2020.Reading time 6 minutes.

By Joseph Scapellato

Selected as runner-up of the 2014 New Ohio Review Fiction Contest by Aimee Bender

Featured Art: Pepita by Robert Henri

The small boy says to his big sister, “Why did we kill all the Indians?”

They’re in the basement playing a video game. Both of them are white.

“We didn’t kill them,” says his big sister, “our ancestors did.”

“Why did our ancestors kill all the Indians?”

“Okay, not really our ancestors because Dad’s family came in the 20s and Mom’s in the Sixties and the Indians were already totally dead by then, mostly.”

“Why did ancestors kill all the Indians?”

“But I guess you could say it was us, pretty much, because today we’re basically the same culture as the culture of the people who killed the Indians back then. And it’s ‘Native Americans,’ not ‘Indians.’ ‘Indians’ is ignorant.”

The small boy says to his angry stepmom, “Why did we kill all the Native Americans?”

They’re returning from the grocery store in hardly any traffic. Plastic bags stuffed with food rustle in the back seat.

Someone Threw Down a Wildflower Garden in an Empty Lot in Newark

October 24, 2020.Reading time 1 minute.

By Theresa Burns

Featured Art: Flowers in a Vase by Odilon Redon

And now, instead of staring at the weeds
and broken bottles from the train platform,
we’re taking in a scene from a Monet.
Asters, cosmos, little yellow fists
of something. All random and confetti.
I’m half expecting a lady in a high-waist
dress and bonnet to appear on a diagonal
stroll through its splendor, pausing
with her parasol so we can selfie with her.
Maybe she’ll hop aboard the light rail
to the Amtrak station, get off in D.C.,
step back into the painting she escaped from.
Who was the genius who thought of this?
What meadow-in-a-can Samaritan
got sick of passing the four-acre eyesore
on the way to work? Shook pity into blossom.
To whom do I write my thank you?
Mayor, surveyor, county clerk, church lady.
Who marched down to city hall, begged
anyone who would listen?

Putting Girls on the Map

October 23, 2020.Reading time 34 minutes.

By Irene Keliher

Featured Art: Orchid Blossoms by Martin Johnson Heade

Only a few students competed in Kingston Junior High’s first geography bee and nobody came to watch. We lined up in the band room submerged in our flannel shirts, fidgeting, happy to escape sixth period. Pine trees pressed the window. No one expected to win except me, though I wouldn’t admit it and tried my best to look bored. I tucked my hands into my baggy Adidas jacket, the only brand-name clothing I owned—I almost never took it off—poised to triumph if I could answer the next question. Mrs. Raymond, chubby purveyor of the world to our damp county, read us questions from a stapled packet stamped National Geographic Society.

“What world river has seen the greatest number of refugees cross its shores?” She pronounced ref-u-gees in three careful beats and looked mournful, as if uncertain there could be an answer to such a question.

Mango Languages

October 22, 2020.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Linda Bamber

Featured Art: Still Life with Birds and Fruit by Giovanna Garzoni

—For Chris Bullock (in memoriam) and Carolyn Bernstein

In that world people are not discussing The End of the American Experiment.

Yo soy de los Estados Unidos. ¿De dónde es usted?
(I am from the United States. Where are you from?)

In that world people are not in a rage at their relatives for voting wrong and sticking to it.

Buzz Can Happen Here: Sinclair Lewis and the New American Fascism

October 20, 2020.Reading time 31 minutes.

by Michael Mark Cohen

The exquisitely named Berzelius Windrip, known to all as “Buzz,” is the fictional politician and “Ringmaster Revolutionist” who ousts FDR from the Democratic ticket in 1936 and gets himself elected dictator in Sinclair Lewis’s speculative novel It Can’t Happen Here. No uniformed buffoon like Italy’s Il Duce, nor an awkward, vegetarian mystic like Adolf Hitler, President Buzz Windrip is a decidedly American kind of fascist.

“This Time I’m Going to Fool Somebody”: Willie Stark and the Politics of Humiliation

October 19, 2020.Reading time 25 minutes.

By Dustin Faulstick

Featured Art: The politician’s corner by Honoré Daumier, 1864

“Folks,” roars Willie Stark on the eve of his impeachment trial, “there’s going to be a leetle mite of trouble back in town. Between me and that Legislature-ful of hyena-headed, feist-faced, belly-dragging sons of slack-gutted she-wolves. If you know what I mean. Well, I been looking at them and their kind so long, I just figured I’d take me a little trip and see what human folks looked like in the face before I clean forgot. Well, you all look human. More or less. And sensible. In spite of what they’re saying back in that Legislature and getting paid five dollars a day of your tax money for saying it. They’re saying you didn’t have bat sense or goose gumption when you cast your sacred ballot to elect me Governor of this state.” From his colloquial diction and insults to his collegial banter with his own supporters, from his invocation of corruptly used tax money to his reference to the sacredness of the ballot, Stark identifies himself as one of the people. Before neurosurgeon Ben Carson or business moguls Carly Fiorina and Donald Trump, farm-boy-turned-lawyer Willie Stark was the ultimate political outsider.

Take Me to Your Lady Leader

October 18, 2020.Reading time 14 minutes.

By Kristen Lillvis

Featured Art: Profile of Shadow by Odilon Redon, 1895

Contact, Carl Sagan’s best-selling 1985 science-fiction novel, tells of alien shape-shifters, wormhole-traveling spacecraft, and—perhaps the most fantastical element of the bunch—a female president. Yet Contact’s protagonist, Eleanor “Ellie” Arroway, compares President Lasker to her predecessors with no acknowledgment of their gender difference, noting that Ms. President demonstrates an appreciation for science seen in “few previous American leaders since James Madison and John Quincy Adams.” Despite her tie to the presidential establishment—and regardless of Sagan’s attempt to make her gender unremarkable—President Lasker still fulfills the function particular to women world leaders in literature. Whether she erodes or extends existing gender stereotypes, the female president operates as a sign of the apocalypse or, at least, a harbinger of the unfamiliar, a reminder to readers that they have entered a world drastically different from their own.

The fictional female commander-in-chief, as she appears in texts such as Brian K. Vaughan’s Y: The Last Man (2002-2008) and Harold Coyle’s The Ten Thousand (1993), figures as both progressive and absurd: She points to future possibilities while highlighting our stunning lack of progress. Since literary representations both shape and are shaped by real-world situations, it may come as no surprise that Hillary Clinton’s own presidential run has had few fictional precursors and that reactions to it have followed their patterns of possibility and putrescence. Let’s look at some of the extreme responses that Clinton’s campaign has brought about. For every “I’m with Her” T-shirt and tweet, we see misogynistic pins mocking the “otherness” of her body and hear public calls for her imprisonment or execution. Tens of thousands have “liked” or retweeted the claim that “corruption and devastation follows [sic] her wherever she goes,” a statement her opponent released the night Clinton accepted the Democratic Party’s nomination. The range of reactions indicates that a Clinton presidency marks an apocalypse of sorts for some, one that is widening as the election unfolds.

Of the People, for the People, by the Robots

October 17, 2020.Reading time 22 minutes.

By Christopher A. Sims

Featured Art: Triumph of the Moon by Monogrammist P.P., 1500/10

American fiction has its small share of memorable politician characters—Willie Stark in Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men and Robert Leffingwell in Allen Drury’s Advise and Consent to name a pair—but there’s a strand of this tradition that is becoming more relevant in 2016: Artificial Intelligence politician figures in the work of two of our most prominent science-fiction writers, Isaac Asimov and Philip K. Dick.

While SF traditionally serves as a space to explore futuristic ideas, Asimov’s 1950 I, Robot and Dick’s 1960 Vulcan’s Hammer can now be reread as prescient visions of the looming potentiality of an AI political leader (perhaps as early as 2024, if Joe Biden chooses not to run).

As the so-called “Internet of Things” takes shape and works to synthesize the physical with the cyber, we can begin to speculate about how long it will be before AIs take over even our most complicated tasks, such as governance. But the genius of Asimov and Dick lies not in their depiction of the technologies that make AI leaders possible; instead, it’s in their assumption that we will one day, not too long from now, be faced with a critical choice between human and mechanical rule. That, it’s fair to say, will be a consequential election.

2020 Summer Exclusive

September 1, 2020.Reading time less than 1 minute.

When a Friend Writes of her Pregnancy

August 3, 2020.Reading time 1 minute.

By Josephine Yu

Heft up the door of the storage unit
where you sequestered the baby
things after the second miscarriage.
Board books, plush animals,
clothes sorted in file boxes
like evidence in a cold case. Kneel there

on the concrete floor. Choose a gift
to send her—act of penance
for the low sob that groaned
from your chest like the cry
of some prehistoric flightless bird.
Penance for the bad math that clacks
its abacus beads: one infant plus
one infant equals zero infants.

Fold footie pajamas in tissue,
as if relayering an onion. Scrape
curling ribbon with a scissor blade
until grief sloughs off
like charred skin debrided. This,

this is your feat of strength,
a woman lifting a car
off a toddler.

That terrified. That furious.

Josephine Yu is the author of Prayer Book of the Anxious (Elixir Press, 2016). Her poems have appeared in Ploughshares, The Southern Review, Crab Orchard Review, The Cincinnati Review, TriQuarterly, Best New Poets 2008, Welcome to the Neighborhood: An Anthology of American Coexistence, and other journals and anthologies. She is a faculty member at Keiser University and a hospice volunteer.

Originally appeared in NOR 27.

When the Doctor Calls After the Final Round of IVF

August 3, 2020.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Josephine Yu

It’s a good thing he caught you on the threshold
of Publix, so you can cross into
that tiled acreage of plenty.

When you’re pushing a cart with a temperamental
wheel, you won’t cry. When you’re putting
chicken salad with tarragon and almonds

into the cart, you won’t weep, and choosing
a tray of ground chuck, plump under Saran Wrap,
you won’t howl.

Stacking cups of fruit-on-the-bottom yogurt
into the cart, you wouldn’t dream
of collapsing on the tiles in a spectacular

Old Testament hair-pulling fit—not there
before the stoicism of buttermilk,
the solemn dignity of Greek yogurt.

As you reach into the frozen food case, hand above
a bag of mixed vegetables, an old voice
appears in your head, as clear

as the piped-in Billy Joel, that familiar voice
insisting calmly, I told you
you were worthless, didn’t I?

You and your moldy rat turd eggs that will never
make a living thing, and you wait, numb
in the artificial cold, and let that voice say

the truth it has to say with its smug authority,
and then lay the bag of peas, carrots, and lima beans
on the metal seat where the infant would sit.

Originally appeared in NOR 27.

American Horror

August 3, 2020.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Jessica Alexander

You should have seen me then, under those yellow stadium bulbs, my lips so
full they’d burst in your fingers. I had this top on: a floral print and ruffles, red,
to match my lips, and my tight Levi jeans. And my sun-kissed cheekbones and
the sun-kissed bridge of my nose. And my smile was just like America—like
a cornfield stunned by its own golden beauty—my gorgeous delight! I went
braless, wore no makeup. It rained and the grass was slick. The way it goes is
that something happens next. It happens by a lake or in a parked car. You take
one look and know I’ll never survive it. My teeth were like a horse’s. A feeling
they mistake for a girl. A feeling they write songs for. The kind of songs that
played in pickup trucks and there’s me standing in the bed of one, hurling my
top into traffic. Could be a hitchhiker. Some guys carry knives. What is it about
blonde girls and America? Blonde girls and wherever? I was so all–American.
So cute I could have murdered my own goddamn self. What is it about a blonde
girl that breaks the world’s heart? I miss those days. Not Bobby or Leo or
James. Just miss that particular ache, which was not unlike a bulge in shorts,
that summer rage that could break my chest apart and hurl my beating heart
into the bleachers. Like them I could not keep myself. There is the stadium
again. There is Bobby, cheering. Isn’t that how it happens in America? Topless
in Texas. My little red shorts. In the back of a pickup, again. The window
breaks. In Tennessee? In Indiana? The sound of a power drill, a chainsaw. The
sound of summer. The bleachers, those bright white lights waiting to throw
my shadow to the ground, and there I am, arriving, and it’s always like what
happens to me next has everything to do with every one of us.

The Tour

August 3, 2020.Reading time 49 minutes.

By. Erica S. Arkin

It occurred to Dennis six hours into the road trip that he might have made a terrible mistake. His daughter Natalie sat on a fold-down seat in the back of his pickup’s not-so-extended cab, plugged into her Discman and propped against the small window behind the empty passenger seat. She was reading a magazine with a cover that said something about Bedroom Tricks to Blow . . . Dennis only caught a glance when she’d pulled it from her backpack at the last rest area. He was glad he couldn’t see the whole thing in the rearview mirror.

One Night

June 17, 2020.Reading time 1 minute.

By Jeff Knorr

Featured Art: Sarina’s Flowers by Sarina Winner, Nancy Dick, Wendy Minor Viny

But not just any night,

on the 26^th floor of the New Otani Hotel

the night of your aunt’s wedding

your new uncle and I threw centerpieces,

beautiful flowers in glass volleyball-sized

vases out of the window of their hotel room

in downtown L.A. We dropped them, in

amazement, the air flattening petals of roses,

the baby’s breath. They blew out

like cannon balls on the sidewalk—

flowers, soil, Styrofoam, glass. Ten times

we could have killed someone with one of those

centerpieces, our drunkenness—

it could have been over as soon as it started.

Your aunt’s anger flared hot as a brand.

We could be wearing the same prison orange.

I escaped some wild death, manslaughter

by wind, by stupid luck, but you on the other hand

drive the car through our neighborhood,

stop for a cigarette with friends, have brown skin–

you ride, get pulled over, the cops

looking for you and your brothers.

California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitations: Dial 2 for Inmate Information

June 16, 2020.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Jeff Knorr

Featured Art: Winter Dreaming of Spring by Nancy Dick, Norman Calkanic, Kate Goreman, Patty Mitchell, and David Dewey

What information could you possibly deliver—

that he’s safe, that the kite he put in

for the GED has come through.

If you know the party’s extension you wish

to speak to, you may dial it at any time.

To dial his reference number

and have a phone ring in his cell.

Otherwise hold for a representative—

Information, Officer Medeiros speaking.

Yes, Officer Medeiros, can you wander

over to dorm C, bed 211

and check on my son for me?

Can you tell me what he’s been fed the last two weeks?

Can you check if the light flickering

above his bed at all hours has been fixed,

Instead I ask, is he allowed to

receive packages yet, new books?

Passion Works

June 15, 2020.Reading time less than 1 minute.

The art in this summer online edition emerges from Passion Works Studio, a collaborative community arts center located in Athens, Ohio, at the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains. “At the heart and soul of Passion Works is a core group of practicing professional artists with developmental differences. Offered a responsive structure, quality materials and welcoming space the artists reciprocate with wildly imaginative, beautiful creations that are fresh and approachable. Passion Works Studio invites makers of all abilities to work and thrive within partnerships celebrating the power of creativity, connection, and purpose.” New Ohio Review is proud to present these vibrant pieces as complements to our contributors’ writing.

We Can Fry Anything

June 15, 2020.Reading time 4 minutes.

By Abby E. Murray

Featured Art: Sunshine by Bill Dooley, John Marquis, Wendy Minor Viny

I’m at the fair to test

how American my blood cells are

and whether my heart

is the monster pumpkin I forced

from the mouth of a flower,

big as a tractor and thirsty AF.

When I say give me something fried

I don’t mean cubes of cheesecake

or spools of battered bacon,

I mean give me what I never thought

could be skewered in the first place,

give me executive orders,

give me stolen land

served on a stick and wrapped

in white paper smeared with oil.

I want to put my failures

on a Ferris wheel then watch them

pause at the top, ready to jump.

As Always

June 13, 2020.Reading time 4 minutes.

By Robert Lynn

on the first not quite warm day of March the park filled with the delusion of spring

our friends napped by the half dozen against a tree dogs gathered loose

bikini tops from sunbathers made maenads by 53 degrees we gave time away

in handfuls to the ducks pairs of men emerged from winter to wave lures

at the water an excuse to love each other without looking I read your

cheekbones’ anger at how I got more time than you before the good earth was

over fed you grapes the closest I could get to an apology for something I didn’t

choose someone sitting at our tree and very high asked Is this the Golden

Hour? and the light answered with yellow silence the way it does all questions

so obvious later walking you home I told a story how my parents fell in love

first drunk then again sober only after I existed I didn’t think you were

listening until the moment you stopped mid path mid sentence a way of making

me turn around you told me There isn’t time to do anything twice How

come? you let the light give its yellow reply I don’t want the world to end

you said when it does I will remember it this way the sun picking mulch from

your backlit hair your fresh burnt shoulders making the gesture for All this?

and I give up at the same time this last first day before the good earth was done

Fourteen Meals

June 12, 2020.Reading time 42 minutes.

By Stephanie Early Green

Featured Art: Happy Couple Jason Douglas and Mallory Valentour

The first meal we share is ribeye steak with scalloped potatoes and three wilted strands of asparagus cowering on the side of each plate. He takes one bite of potato. I pretend to cut my steak but don’t eat any. I don’t want to ruin my lipstick, or get steak-fat caught in my teeth. We talk about our families, and how we both value the concept of family, and how we both hope to have families of our own someday. We agree that we have a ton in common. We find out that we both enjoy country music and have corny senses of humor. We tell each other knock-knock jokes. Mine are better, but I laugh at his, while still trying to look pretty. It’s difficult to laugh out loud and not look a little ugly, a little wild. The trick is to keep your eyes open, and gently scrunch your nose, but not open your mouth too wide, so as not to expose your gums. When a man sees a woman’s gums, he is put in mind of a horse, or a chimpanzee. That’s what my grandmother always said, anyway, and she was a smart woman.

After dinner, we kiss. His breath tastes like white wine and scalloped potato. I hope my breath smells minty fresh, since I snuck a breath-mint while no one was looking. When the date is over, I’m ravenous. I go to my hotel room and order a burger, no bun. It comes with French fries, even though I didn’t order them. I eat the burger with a fork and knife while sitting on the vast hotel bed. I watch a trashy reality show in which women drink and cry and hug and scream. I would never make such a spectacle of myself on television, shrieking and clawing, mascara running down my cheeks. I’d sooner die. As I take the last bite of hamburger, a blotch of ketchup falls on my white hotel bathrobe. Later, I fall asleep with the television on, and have strange dreams. When I wake up, there’s a French fry on my pillow, curled sweetly next to my cheek.

Family by Harry Grimm, Nancy Dick, and Carolyn Williams

June 11, 2020.Reading time less than 1 minute.

I Should Know a Millionaire

June 11, 2020.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Erik Wilbur

Featured Art: Family by Harry Grimm, Nancy Dick, and Carolyn Williams

two-jobs-having-scrubbers-of-piss-stains-from-pitted-grout-in-fast-food-bathrooms.

I’ve met my fair share of honest hunched-over-the-dish-pit-scraping-
nibbled-on-fork-fucked-duck-confit-into-trash-bins-SOBs.

You’ve hauled that trash to the alley tons of times. I’ve seen beads of sweat
on many American faces. I’ve seen a bead of sweat catch the right light

on a man’s brow and then fall into a scrap-metal bin like a lost diamond.
Each of us should have how-we-made-it stories, instead of stories about waiting

all day in a line that runs down a city sidewalk for nothing. Man, I’m tired
of only knowing broke-ass-just-tryin-to-get-by-motherfuckers,

tired of seeing skinny dudes my age at intersections twirling cardboard arrows
or watching mothers put items back on grocery shelves after silently adding up

the contents of their shopping carts. America, by now I thought
I’d know one millionaire, at least, ‘cause I’ve seen enough bootstrap-pulling

to pull whole ghettos out of crab grass and chain link, enough to pull the bars off
every window and every kid off stray-bullet-stray-chihuahua-streets—

if no one were pushing down on them, I mean.

Preparations

June 11, 2020.Reading time 1 minute.

By Madeleine Cravens

Featured Art: Bats by Jason Douglas and Wendy Minor

I worry what it says about my character,
that I cannot picture the reality of sickness,
I just wake and read Whitman
and watch the sun on the brick
of the next-door apartment.
I have three cans of chickpeas,
freezer-burned strawberries,
half a bottle of wine. You have
a stronger sense of the anthropocene.
You buy soup, talk with your father.
You know microbes are alive
as they move across the grid.
And in France each small town
has a street named for Pasteur,
who made men dig drains,
convinced them to stop spitting.
I wash my hands with hot water.
I don’t want to be clean. What does it say
that I am fully on my knees to this,
that I admit such weakness willingly,
that should you want company
after any of your transatlantic flights
I would take a cab immediately
to your red and burning door.

The World We Wanted Shone So Briefly

June 9, 2020.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Gail Martin

Featured Art: Cicadas by Scott Brooks and Wendy Minor Viny

Real life was finally about to begin.

Remember the romance of the silver cigarette case

in college? The integrity of your firstborn’s eyelashes?

We discarded alternate destinies like tired cards

in the Flinch deck. We were only looking forward.

Of course, like the teeth of beavers and horses, there

are parts of the past that never stop growing.

Garage – tree house – vacant lot kinds of cruelty–

how we took turns being mean.

And later, some serrated evenings, dinners

of bluster and recoil, dodge. Flowers sent

or not sent to someone’s funeral.

Mostly there are the years you watch

your neighbors’ cars slide in and out of their garage.

Between blue herons and tumors, you change

the sheets.

We were all surprised to find ourselves old

but really the signs were everywhere, and we

acknowledge we’d been told. Name one

important thing that has not already happened.

The Helms Man

June 8, 2020.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Kathryn Jordan

Featured Art: Creative Abundance Flower by Wendy Minor Viny

The Helms Man, we called him. I mean the man in white

baker’s trousers who drove the Helms Bakery van

around our bright California cul-de-sacs and streets —

coastal hills carved to asphalt, tract, and pink ice

plant that we broke open to write on sidewalks.

He drove slowly down our block, stopping to open

wide temptation’s door, inviting adolescent girls in

to view his wares: jelly and glazed doughnuts,

cinnamon twists, sparkling crystal sugar. We ponied

up quarters for paper bags of treats, to be consumed

out of sight of perfect mothers, lying out in lawn chairs,

all Coppertone and Tab gleam, who gave us Teen Magazine,

left us to banana and milk diets, vertical stripes, and scales.

Left us to ripe womanhood and the gaze of men,

to shape and flavor we could never taste ourselves.

To motherhood and stretching of skin, joint loosening,

the joy of being food. Then cronehood with arroyo

of wrinkle, slump of breast, lump of belly.

Each one alone now sees herself in hollow mirror,

flattened chest, belly bulge assessed, while outside

the window, teenage girls parade in short cutoffs,

long legs supple and smooth. And our long-gone

mothers watch us watch them. We, who still hear

the van coming and run, hurry, to be ready, radiant

and thin for the helmsman, just turning the corner.

The Pathologist’s Wife (or, When My Daughter Leaves the House I Will Go Watch Baby Sea-Turtles Being Born in Savannah)

June 6, 2020.Reading time 4 minutes.

By Jeff Tigchelaar

Featured Art: American Gothic by Jason Douglas and Wendy Minor Viny

Volunteer vacations. That’s what

I’ll do, so help me. Go away

for a week at a time or two. You know, have fun,

help out. Save some

baby turtles. And I’m not going

to ask. It’s my money too. Money’s not

an issue. My husband’s

a doctor. Well not

just a doctor, my Lord: a forensic pathologist.

More of a scientist, really. He puts away

murderers. We’ve had – he’s had

death threats. We’re absolutely

not in the phone book. And he is

so addicted to his work. He’s always thought

he can just hand me money and

that’s it. Though, he does expect his

meals.

Laywoman

June 5, 2020.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Jeff Tigchelaar

Featured Art: Blue Cat by Dar Whitlatch, Jason Douglas, Mallory Valentour

Evenings, let me tell you, are for

coming down. Going home and getting

into bed. Or slippers, at least. Yeah I’ve got bunny slippers

and there’s no shame in that. My only child

is insane. I don’t care who thinks

what about my PJs, either. I sleep

in a faded 4X orange and green T-shirt worn for years

by my father before me. So thin you can see my nips.

If you were looking, that is.

At the mercantile today I couldn’t stop thinking

about how I always just keep looking – nodding –

at Dr. Prajeet even when I haven’t

the slightest what he’s on about.

How hard would it be

– wink – just to say “Dr. Prajeet,

if you wouldn’t mind reiterating a bit –

you know . . . in laywoman’s terms?” Just ask him.

Laywoman, Dr. Prajeet. That’s me.

I wonder what I’d say if Dr. P. asked me

to elope. Off to some far land. Or even if he just asked me

out. Dancing, maybe. Here in town. I wonder what my little

Richie would think about that. If you don’t want mommy

coming home with doctors, don’t be a grown man living

with mom. Maybe I’d say that to old Mr. Ricardo.

He’s Fine with a Little College (or, All Those Pups)

June 4, 2020.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Jeff Tigchelaar

Featured Art: Atlas the Pup by Troy Goins and Mallory Valentour

College is for people who think

they’re too good to work.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m fine

with a little college, as long as it’s

in a Lego set, like.

But the kind with full-size

buildings and professors . . .

that right there’s a different sack of bait.

But you know what? Life’s like a dogsled team.

Unless you’re in the lead, the scene don’t change.

All those pups, yipping and chomping

to get ahead and be up front . . . but

the top dog’s been chosen from the start.

And that one mutt might not have to

have his nose up the asshole in front of him,

but guess what he’s got right behind him. A dog.

And another dog, and another and another. A whole

damn pack, and a few feet back there’s a sled

and you know who’s standing on that sled?

The man.

Smart Girl

June 2, 2020.Reading time 45 minutes.

By Sydney Rende

Featured Art: Cicada by Scott Brooks and Mallory Valentour

My ex-boyfriend calls from Florida to talk about his pubes.

“Are they weird?” he asks.

We go to schools in different time zones. Over the summer he broke up with me on the patio furniture in his backyard. I cried into his lap. He carried me to my car, then went inside to eat dinner with his family.

Now he plays lacrosse on scholarship at a school with palm trees and a rape problem.

“Why would your pubes be weird,” I say. My roommate, Jenny, shuts her laptop and listens from her bed.

“You tell me.” He’s angry with me for not telling him about the strangeness of his pubic hair. Why would I care about his pubic hair? One time he shaved the peachy space between his eyebrows with a disposable razor. I thought that was weird, but I never told him.

“The guys on the team are saying my pubes are weird,” he says. “Like I have too many.”

“Did you tell them you’re from New Jersey?” I ask. Jenny moves to my bed, holds her ear to the phone. She covers her mouth so he can’t hear her breathing. I want to tell her that her breath is the last thing on his mind. His pubes take precedent over her breath or my breath or even his own breath, and he needs to sort out the pube situation before he asphyxiates.

“Tell them how cold it gets at home,” I say. “How you need all the hair you can get to stay warm in the winter.”

Donna Was Not a Cat Person

May 31, 2020.Reading time 40 minutes.

By Halle Ruth

Featured Art: Chowder by Troy Goins

Donna forgot about the cat. She had promised to take care of it when her sister went on another one of her vacations. But the cat slipped to the bottom of Donna’s to-do list until he was barely hanging on, his presence barely noticed and left to his own devices, roaming her sister’s home on his lonesome. Donna did not want the cat staying in her own home, choosing to sacrifice the time it would take to drive to her sister’s to feed it every other day rather than let its fur coat her hardwood floors.

She woke early that morning and decided to take advantage of the rare combination of a day off and unusually warm October weather to tackle the overgrown landscaping surrounding the house. At the beginning of summer, she paid a neighborhood kid to pull weeds and lay mulch, but the upkeep fell to her, and she hadn’t been particularly diligent about keeping the crab grass at bay. Her husband suggested hiring the kid again, but Donna refused. Everyone else in the neighborhood either cared for their yards themselves or hired professionals who drove around in logo-covered trucks that hauled riding lawnmowers, hedge trimmers, and leaf blowers. None of them cheaped out and hired a teenager to do a half-assed job to save a few dollars. It was embarrassing that they even hired him in the first place, like they couldn’t afford to do any better than that. Ella, who lived across the street, would have never done such a thing. Donna was sure of it.

You Start To Grow Old

May 29, 2020.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Haolun Xu

You start to grow old so fast, you notice how much you love home.
Home means a local mall, it means a place with a little Thai stand with all the world in the pocket.

You walk in with mystery.
People ask you with curiosity if you’re a student, if you work, if you have kids.

You laugh with charisma. You say you’re looking forward to all your time in the world.
London, maybe, next week. But next week never comes. Today just has too much of you in it.

But you’re adventurous, right? You order a new thing everyday. A meal that can be held in your hands, it is the best part of your day. It’s the biggest pillar of your lunchtime.

One day, you have a beautiful combo. Pineapple and shrimp, rice and chopped veggies.
It’s perfect. It’s yours,

you eat it more and more each next month, every other day, every day. You gorge yourself in it,
you start to smile more and more each time,

they start to cheer whenever you come over. You ask, do you know me, and they say yes! of course we know you! They’re all so happy, you’re family now.

But they stop asking about London. They stop asking where you’re going,
they suddenly have all the jokes of a lifetime to tell you.

And they stop asking for your name,
they don’t need to know what it is to know who you are.

Memoir: Sacred

May 27, 2020.Reading time 25 minutes.

By Shelagh Connor Shapiro

Featured Art: Birds by Jonathan Salzman and Tibetan Monks visiting Passion Works Studio

Ohio

We sit in the car, my mother and I, outside a large white barn with black trim. It’s a pretty barn—less than a mile from our home—and my sister Maura keeps her horse here. The horse is Culotte. His previous owner called him “Just Cool It,” but Dad said that was too much of a hippy name. He is a proud Republican. During the last election, I picked up one of the dropped campaign buttons outside the voting booths. You aren’t allowed to wear the buttons inside. The vote is private, sacrosanct.

We have stopped, as we do each morning, for Maura to feed Culotte. In March 1972, I am nine. In five minutes or ten minutes, when Maura comes back to the car, Mom will drive me to the William E. Miller Elementary School. She will drive Maura to the parking lot of the A&P, where Mrs. Besaunceny and three other students meet every day to drive to Columbus School for Girls, an hour away. CSG has no room for me in the fourth grade class. I’ll join the fifth graders next year.

Our breath is frosty in the car. I ask my mother to repeat her question.

“If your Dad and I ever got a divorce, who would you want to live with?”

Second-Hand Tongue

May 26, 2020.Reading time 1 minute.

By Tamara Miller

Once I bought a beautiful tongue at a second-hand store. It was an impulse buy; I probably paid more than it was worth, if it was even worth anything at all. After I got it home I felt a little ashamed and regretted my purchase. What did I need a second tongue for while my own just wasted away in my head, unused? But the thing about this new tongue was that it liked to wag. When my god-given tongue locked down tight against my teeth, this second tongue would start in, first about righteousness and then about salvation, until I realized something terrible: my new tongue had caught religion. It was a preaching kind of tongue, silvery and sly as the devil. I tried to silence it, with candy and pride and fear, the way you do with tongues, but it would not deviate from the path of righteousness it liked to march up and down my esophagus like a parade of Stormtroopers. Shut-up, I called with my other tongue. Please. Shut-up before someone hears us. Before someone realizes we are not who we say we are.

Difference

May 25, 2020.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Sara Moore Wagner

Featured Art: Floating Guy, collaboration between Passion Works Studio (Athens, Ohio) and Colores del Alma (Chile)

When I used to read my son the book
where the outcast girl becomes friends
with the alligator, where they dance
in the sewer to the burt-burp of her
tuba, I would imagine he was the gator,
that one day he might find someone
to teach him not to put everything
in his mouth, to go into the water
where he’s meant to return—when
I read my daughter that book, suddenly
I see the girl, tiny soft body in the mouth
of the gator, being pulled down into the
swamp with her tuba blaring. And
the story has always been about this gator,
how he’s not meant to live in regular
society, how neither is the girl so they
find each other and even though he eats
all the local dogs, he leaves her alone
and she saves him. When I am walking
with my daughter downtown, a man
comes up to me and moves his hands
around in my face, gestures at
my daughter until I’m lying
on the sidewalk with my arms around her,
folding her into me like a pair of socks
in a suitcase, like a lolling tongue into
a mouth. And I’m yelling at the construction
workers come help me—and they do,
rushing out in their orange vests. And I think
in that book, these would have been the villains;
in that book, my girl would have risen and danced
for the man who wanted to pull her out of me
like a tooth, would have shown him how to live
in the civilized world, how to cover
his fangs, let them out at night when the slow
lull of the Ohio river takes them so far away
from her home, from her mother that he
thinks about his nature. How even this
little make believe world wasn’t built
for the girl. How even still, it’s my girl’s favorite
book. How even still, I read it.

Iguana

May 24, 2020.Reading time 23 minutes.

By Jim Cole

Featured Art: Chameleon by Scott Brooks and Mallory Valentour

The New Girl’s boss was fired. Then, her boss’s boss was fired.

People said her boss’s boss had, like, this vein of ore trapped deep down in his large body – imbedded, inscrutable. When he said Good morning that wasn’t usually what he meant. When he laughed it was not at what you supposed. Inside, he longed to fire you.

Everyone said it. Her boss said it. Then he was fired. Her boss’s boss fired an old woman with a limp and a new pair of high heels, he fired a guy who went to his college, he fired a husband and wife who said they loved the company because they got to work together. Then, they got fired together. Everyone knew it: her boss’s boss yearned to fire; avoid him if you could. How many he’d fired, nobody could say. A dozen? Maybe twice that. His hit list was long – everyone. From a distance, and around corners, in the elevator and hallways and restroom stalls, outside on cigarette breaks, they talked about him, they joked nervous, and they called him something: the Reptile. When you talked to the Reptile, the air you breathed grew clammy. He smiled and was polite, he asked about your family’s well-being and your home appliances, and if your weekend was satisfactory and busy, and he looked at your surroundings, and said you had a nice workspace and to have a nice day, then you were fired. It was what he wanted, what satisfied the Reptile. It showed in his eyes and his stiff hair and his gait, in the way he exhaled or didn’t, the way he wore a pearl tie clasp on a pearl-colored tie, and how he pronounced the word bagel.

Memoir: I Went, Running

May 21, 2020.Reading time 24 minutes.

By Caroline Manring

Featured Art: Bird by Emmett Reese

. . .as if loss were a fire he was purified in again and again, until he wasn’t a ghost anymore.
–James Galvin, The Meadow

Running is the only thing that made sense to me after miscarrying at fifteen weeks pregnant. I had almost lost my own life as well, and spent three weeks in two different hospitals, linked by a trippy ambulance ride with an EMT who thought I couldn’t hear him singing along to U2. Pretty much everyone thought I was unconscious for much of my hospitalization. I wasn’t, of course, and between waves of Fentanyl I noted or hallucinated many searing moments, which, though warped by fear and pain, were still less bizarre than the daily life I had to get back to, eventually.

Even after I came home from the hospital, crying because I had to be wheeled out to the car, and even when I slept most of the day, propped on our eglantine couch with the help of ten or so lesser drugs, anything other than the thought of running again was absurd: people walking across the street? Ridiculous. They weren’t screaming. Sunsets? Ruthless. They ended everything, over and over and over. Someone else’s baby? An abrupt and tenacious violence; a violation of the possible, an extravagant body made radioactive by my pain, like a fur coat soaked with blood from a bucket I hurled myself.

Radiology

May 20, 2020.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Kim Garcia

Sitting on the x-ray dolly, gown fastened front to back,
steel girders propping the tracks of the x-ray cam,
resting in half-dark with a lead blanket
size and weight of a doormat over my belly
while the tech disappears behind the wall
and a light flashes blue and white,
then more waiting, every joint in need
of repair.
                   The cam floats over my body.
The tech touches me gently. He’s nearly bald
and pale in his scrubs. I sit up, hearing
a soft popping of cartilage as I swing
my knees over the side. Knee-capped
by nothing. I am so poorly
designed and executed that one might call
this incarnation accidental, unintended.
And against accident, what can I do but keep
intending?
                   So, bless the half-hearted pinging
of the Philips logo saving the screen.
Bless the lead aprons and blankets,
the plastic stretcher board hung
on hooks on the wall, the stacks
of towels and plastic gloves, the cream
and cocoa checkerboard tiles, the tech
with his soft hands in this cheerful wing
that promises nothing
                   the lame will not walk
                   the deaf will not hear
but more light
to see our suffering by.