Borges’s Farewell to Meadville, Pennsylvania

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Stephen Myers

Featured Art: brown leather arm chair by Markus Spiske

By then, old age had laid siege to Borges
for many years. That evening, two handlers
one at each elbow, guided him, bent
like a question mark, up a short staircase
to his seat before the assemblage.
His voice, at first, was an ancient raven’s.
But finally, out of the brain’s dark nest,
he brought forth two lines from Virgil’s Georgics.
They glittered before him. His tongue loosened.
The night heat pressed in. A fragment of
Sappho. Erato beat the blackness back.
His listeners perceived her as wanderers
hear wings among pyrocanthus branches
under a thin moon. A couplet from Dryden,
a silver chain. “Ulalume” a small chalice.
He shifted more easily. One of his men
stepped forward with a glass of water.
Outside, sudden thunder, intermittent
flashes. After he’d spoken, they brought on
the musicians. He sat tapping his cane
to “St. James Infirmary,” smiling,
leaning forward toward the low-lit stage
as if in submission, he who had loved
the Goddess, and she him, letting himself
be lifted and carried off on the shoulders
of Milt Hinton’s gold-greaved bass.

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It Depends

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Lisa Rhoades 

Featured Art: Still Life with Bottle, Carafe, Bread, and Wine by Claude Monet

We are all sick. We are all dying.
This is more or less
the truth, depending on the day.
Depending on the location,
some more than others
are headed home with hospice, toward
a tragic confrontation, a chicken bone, black ice.
Maybe it’s because of breakfast—
years of bitter coffee, the eggs
we were warned away from,
bracelets of sweet cereal O’s.
Perhaps it would help
if more of us knew CPR,
unless it all depends
on the weather of our hearts.
Don’t be fooled
by how quickly flesh folds
back into itself to heal,
or by the ones who are limping,
waxy-skinned and quiet. They will not carry
your part of this forever.
Maybe you should cover your cough,
not be so careless with knives.

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Florida Man Throws Alligator into Wendy’s Drive-Thru Window

.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Mitchell Jacobs

Featured Art: Alligators by John Singer Sargent

The attendant hands him a soda and turns her back, thinking
of straws—how she’s running low, and their candy-red stripes,
and the way everything here comes wrapped up in paper, and

then a 3½-foot alligator is clawing the air.
                                                                          As if she pressed
the wrong button on the register. Or maybe, during lunch rush,
she’d ignored an oncoming hurricane tossing them about.

In any case, she shrieks, finding for this alligator non sequitur
no earthly explanation. Back when the heavens functioned
with less subtlety, she might have turned to the logic of myth.

The god of rapacity took the shape of a lizard
to penetrate the food hall’s oil-glossed aperture.

Perhaps the oracle of Jupiter, FL on his faux-leather throne
delivers this cold-blooded message to confront corporate greed
teeth to teeth.
                        Not that the police have succeeded

in extracting a motive. The culprit’s Frosty-smeared lips are sealed.
His charge: assault with a deadly weapon. Yet it rings untrue.
For Florida Man, we need a more particular punishment:

accused of wielding a projectile reptile,
the defendant shall be flung naked
into the Loxahatchee Slough.

If indeed he is a criminal, there will be no proper dunking.
If he is a hero, he will don no duckweed laurel as he rises
from the mud. But the surveillance camera remembers:

it’s not so wide, the gap between the actual and the possible.
About the space from Nissan Frontier to take-out window
where an alligator, bewildered, sees the kitchen’s steam

like fog over a marsh in red bloom, smells the billows
of meaty fragrance, hears the gatekeeper’s yodel of welcome,
and for a moment
                                 flies.

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The Reflex

.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Mitchell Jacobs

Featured Art: Boats and setting sun by Ohara Koson

The scent of shampoo reminds me of carrots.
There’s an explanation, I swear, surfacing
from a developing-Polaroid brown. It’s April.
At recess an upside-down pizza slab is gooing
into the cracked blacktop, and a grainy beat
blasts from some girl’s hot-orange earbuds.
On the grass all the boys are playing wallball
with one of those rubber balls like a big pink eraser,
and when I’m up I don’t chuck it far enough
so Austin says, “Come on, Mitchell, you can’t
even throw like the girls,” which is heartbreaking
for a bunch of reasons. Back home, Duran Duran’s
“The Reflex” spins in the Discman on my bathtub rim.
You’ve gone too far this time, and I’m dancing
on the Valentine. My tunes are twenty years out of date
but I know them by heart. I’ve been lying there half an hour,
tub empty, stoking a burn in my gut. Next day in L.A.
(that’s Language Arts), it’s Fat Shawn’s turn at vocab charades
but he just stands there thinking until somebody shouts
“Rotund!” and that’s not his word but it is the end
of the game. That’s how cruelty works around here.
I’m no Shawn but I am Tree Kid and no one
tells me why. The reflex is a lonely child . . .
Jake calls me a poser for wearing skate shoes,
which is how I learn I wear skate shoes, and then
I chase him and kick him with those shoes. Mostly
I’m a head-down kind of kid. I don’t peek at the pull-down map
during the geography quiz. I don’t snicker when
the health teacher says gluteus maximus, but I am
the one who laughs when she can’t spell epididymis.
Another night and it’s the tub again, lights off, interpreting
the song with nonsense lyrics I’m sure have something
to do with all this clench and spasm. The reflex is a door
to finding treasure in the dark. I un-twist-tie
the plastic produce bag and glob out more Pantene, hating
the boys who run around cocksure with their narrow
calves and their throwing arms with actual
visible muscles and those stupid impossible taut butts
and I’ll show them with this soaped-up carrot
what I can take, how it stings, how I tighten my fist
as I hear them spit out my name.

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Love’s Been Good to Me

.Reading time 40 minutes.

By Andrew Robinson

Featured Art: Zurich by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner

The girl from Zurich is deathly quiet. But even in a king-sized bed her presence prickles me awake. Her fetal body rises, falls, a pillow wedged between us. A natural end approaches now; I’m sure she knows it too. We met six months ago, flotsamed onto the misfit table at a Chinese wedding. There was nothing to do but drink, and seven wines into the night we decided to go slumming at Orchard Towers—Singapore’s neon throwback of tacky sleaze. Sailors go there for the prostitutes, and bankers for the irony, but for her it was the Filipino bands. I love to dance to them, she said, they always try so hard. But she wouldn’t go there without a man, and so, still in my suit at 4 a.m., I held her as she cried on the sticky dancefloor. Cried with drunken empathy for the Indonesian whores she was dancing with. At their age I was still in school, she said, And they have to sell themselves to these fucking men. She feinted at the sweaty marines, bewildered with Burmese whisky and shore leave, and she had me at that. I’ve always been a sucker for compassion—it doesn’t always serve me well.

Then as she sniffed into the smoky bathroom I texted her something about goodness—I don’t remember what—which showed up as her Facebook status the next day. But like the young marines, she was shipping out in the morning, her company posting her to Paris. And it wasn’t until her stint was up—four months later—that we got to meet again. And all that texting and mailing and chatting online, it didn’t serve to warn us that after just a few weeks it wouldn’t be working the way we’d hoped. And now it’s coming to an end—no relish of redemption here—my thoughts rise on a sleepy surge of affection. The girl from Zurich: I’ll remember her—I will.

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Seafaring

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Marie-Elizabeth Mali

Featured Art: Eddystone Lighthouse by Mary Altha Nims 

As if love were a lighthouse and I
the creaking rain-lashed vessel

heaving through the waves.
In the wheelhouse, a heart

that refuses to give up, despite
sharp coral under surface churn

waiting to turn the boat
into a rusted hull the sun vermillions

each morning for photographers
who revel in the sea’s dominion.

I’m tired of chop but don’t remember
calm, the hatches battened down

so long they’re salted shut.
No, that’s not true. That’s someone

else’s story, not mine. I say,
for every hungry ghost in the hold,

ten thousand iron-spined sailors
with rope-calloused hands navigate

around the coral minefields, eyes
on the lighthouse, its revolving beam.

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I Never Met a Flower That Yelled At Me

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Julie Moore 

Featured Art: Flowers by L. Prang and Co

her neighbor always says, explaining why,
every year, he plants & hangs
geraniums, begonias, impatiens, petunias,
even blue lobelia, amid his blooming bulbs.

She wants that sentiment to infect her, too,
the summer her husband leaves.
So on the hottest day Ohio can muster, she faces
the roses her husband sank in soil ten years before.

On the side of the house, they grow weed-loud—
even cantankerous saplings push through
the bushes, silencing all the kind words in their red mouths.
Everything has to go.

As she digs, thorns & muscular weeds
thick with prickles recite
her husband’s remarks on her skin,
scratching, clawing, tearing:

I can’t commit to you 100%, only 75%.
Shovel meets hard earth again & again.
Gasping for air, feeling her back spasm in protest,
she clings to the wood handle. You’re too hardline.

You want too much. She lets the sun scold her,
lets the heavy air weigh on her shoulders,
lets all of it, the whole fucking force
of his question—What do you mean I ‘disregard’ you?—

fuel her resistance, her freedom to say,
No, you & your furious mess
will not stand, not here, not any longer.
In their place, she leaves behind

what perennial peace she can—
pink Asiatic lilies, purple coneflowers,
& threadleaf coreopsis shining
their favor without ridicule or question.

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Here Below

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Sarah Carleton

Featured Art: The quadrille at the Moulin-Rouge by Louis Abel-Truchet

Before a careless bulldozer buried him under a ton of dirt
he played with impeccable pulse.
He anchored tunes with a standup bass,

left fingers spidering, right hand patting pauses,
a running commentary that thumped below the chitchat,
bristling with off-color intent.

Just as hothouse plants rooted and swelled
to his sweet, muttered, nasty guy’s-guy nothings,
we set our feet in the soil of his crude jokes and thrived.

His wife didn’t pay much mind to the dirty stories
and sly non-secrets. When he laid their deck,
he penciled women’s names on the underside of the planking,

like an ode to abundance, and she just laughed, shrugging.
We take our cue from her and refuse to fret,
but celebrate him in smut and subtext.

Without crawling among the snakes to check, we hope
we made the list––divas of warm skin and rayon dresses
immortalized on a two-by-ten––

and we also aspire to be like his wife,
who stands aboveboard, rolling her eyes, knowing
her name has been etched more than once in that slatted dark.

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Giverny

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Emily Sernaker

Featured Art: Bridge over a Pond of Water Lilies by Claude Monet

I try not to think about falling in love
too much, although sometimes I look
at pictures of Giverny.

You can visit you know.
See Claude Monet’s lily pad garden,
that famous footbridge.

I enjoy a good trip with my girlfriends.
A walk with my sweet mother.
But I want to see Giverny

with my partner. Whom I haven’t met.
Who might not want to fly 3,585 miles
to see a lily pad garden in France,

all of those pastels up close and floating.
Sometimes I check the website
confirming it’s open. That anyone can go.

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Writing What You Know and Whom You’ve Known

.Reading time 18 minutes.

Feature: Of Essays and Exes

By Joey Franklin

When I teach the essay to new college students, I usually put the kibosh on three subjects right away—the Big Disease, the Big Game, and the Big Break-Up. One reason for this blanket prohibition is as simple as it is selfish: I don’t want to read bad writing about tired subjects; and there are few subjects more exercised in the essays of new college students than dying family members, fleeting athletic glory, and the pains of first love.

I do have a more legitimate reason for this prohibition than my own desire to never read another internal monologue about teenage unrequited love. You see, I steer my students away from these subjects because, while the loss they represent is certainly real, it is a loss so common as to tax the ability of any writer—let alone a young writer—to say something worthwhile.

Perhaps, then, it is unfair that I follow up this prohibition by challenging my students to write according to Phillip Lopate’s dictum: “The trick is to realize that one is not important, except insofar as one’s example can serve to elucidate a more widespread human trait and make readers feel a little less lonely and freakish.”

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What Binds Them Together

.Reading time 19 minutes.

Features: Of Essays and Exes

By Rachael Peckham

When a MacArthur grant-winning poet and classicist writes about her ex-lover, she doesn’t commit a “thick stacked act of revenge” against him, a tempting “vocation of anger” enacted on the page. Yet Anne Carson, author of “The Glass Essay” (from the collection Glass, Irony, and God), knows it’s “easier to tell a story of how people wound one another than of what binds them together.” It makes sense. Where there’s an ex, there’s the story of a relationship—a clear beginning, middle, and the dreaded end, with a natural protagonist in us versus them, the Exes.

That said, Carson’s “The Glass Essay,” which begins with the speaker’s losing sleep over an ex named Law, can hardly be called a clear or easy break-up story. In fact, it’s not a story at all but an essay in verse—one that doesn’t mention him much. Perhaps it’s no surprise that it’s not about him (is it ever, with the essay?) but about her. About several hers, actually; Carson oscillates between “three silent women” each struggling, each alone or left behind in love. It’s loss that binds them together.

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Breakup, Break Down, Break Open: Intimate Partner Violence and Life Inside a Daily Ending

.Reading time 14 minutes.

Feature: Of Essays and Exes

By Sonya Huber

Some relationships fall apart in a gradual and mutual cooling, and others rise toward a crescendo of irreconcilable differences. Still others are threaded with periodic or daily heartbreak and even violence. Imagine living a love in which every moment was a breakup, and every next moment was a reunion, over and over and over. The essay of domestic violence is the essay of a living bonfire of a breakup, an extreme breakup in slow motion, and in this writing we can see essayists shining a light on heartbreak, but also on thornier issues of identity and personal safety.

Many of the best essays in this genre have to deal with misconceptions about domestic violence first, since the query applied to an abused person in a relationship is often: “Why didn’t she leave?,” why wasn’t a simple breakup the solution, as if the abused had a decision to make and then failed to make it correctly. For some people affected by domestic violence, though, the breakup hovers as a longed-for destination, an impossible shore to reach. Others fear the breakup due to real hazards and the effects of trauma. And so the question reveals the asker’s naiveté. The nature of violence is that it won’t simply be left. Violence pursues, damages, threatens, and changes the reality that contains it. Several notable essays have dealt with this painful truth.

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More than a Vanished Husband: Jo Ann Beard’s “The Fourth State of Matter”

.Reading time 17 minutes.

Feature: Of Essays and Exes

By Holly Baker

“My vanished husband is neither here nor there,” Jo Ann Beard writes in her 1996 New Yorker essay “The Fourth State of Matter.” She’s describing a relationship caught in the freeze-frame of a collapse. The rafters have buckled   and the walls are caving in, but the marriage structure is falling, not yet fallen. Beard, though, is not centrally concerned with the catalyst of this disaster, nor  its aftermath. She does not reflect on settling dust or salvage work. Instead, with a sense of foreboding, her essay captures the days and hours preceding a series of inevitable tragedies: divorce, the death of her dog, and a horrific campus shooting that leaves seven people dead and a survivor seeking new self- definition.

Beard’s lack of control over these horrible intertwining events permeates the writing, and her failing marriage hovers continuously and gloomily in the background as she thinks about her “vanished” husband. But why vanished? Why does Beard paint him this way, not as estranged or simply gone, but vanished?

In this word, she seems to want to elicit a magic trick, and readers may just as well finish the phrase in their minds: vanished without a trace. Unexamined and unexplained—this is exactly the approach Beard uses to distance herself from the heartbreak of impending divorce, from allowing herself to mourn a relationship that has died. To spare herself and the relationship from bare examination, she instead creates buffers and barriers as tools to cope with and contextualize these losses.

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On Breaking Up with the Dream of Your Former Self: Megan Daum’s “My Misspent Youth”

.Reading time 10 minutes.

Feature: Of Essays and Exes

By Kelly Kathleen Ferguson

We all know “you can’t go home again,” but what does it mean to long for a place we’ve never inhabited, to love that idea so much that it feels like the beginning of a relationship? And what does it mean to finally admit defeat and break up with that ideal?

Megan Daum, in “My Misspent Youth,” writes of her infatuation with—and split from—New York City, and her long-cherished imagination of the life she would lead there. Daum begins by recounting a time in high school when she first saw a couple’s artsy, romantic Upper West Side apartment. From that moment she was driven by an “unwavering determination to live in a pre-war, oak-floored apartment on or at least in the immediate vicinity of 104th Street and West End Avenue.” Daum goes on to detail how this obsession influenced every major decision of her late teens and twenties, until she discovers—as in most relationships—there’s no escaping money trouble.

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On Natalia Ginzburg’s “Human Relations”

.Reading time 21 minutes.

Feature: Of Essays and Exes

By Dinah Lenney

“ . . . the friend we’ve dropped is hurt on our account . . . We know this but we have no regrets, indeed we feel a kind of covert pleasure, for if someone suffers on our account, it shows we have the power to cause pain, we who for so long felt utterly weak and insignificant.”

So writes Natalia Ginzburg in “Human Relations” in which she considers the way people come together and grow apart; and come together and grow apart; not a breakup essay exactly, and yet it will serve, I think, I hope, since Ginzburg breaks (or anticipates breaking) with parents and friends and relations from beginning to end. She hangs her reflection-on-the-human-condition (that’s what this is)—in which we humans are eventually forced to come to terms with how human we are (as in helpless in the face of the universe, as in doomed from the start)—on a story of coming of age, beginning in childhood when we are understandably baffled by adults and their “dark and mysterious” ways. Next, sparked by adolescence, comes the long middle of the piece: Enamored of our peers, Ginzburg admits “we punish the adults . . . by our profound contempt”; by the end of the essay, she herself has grown up, of course. “We are so adult now,” she tells us, “that our adolescent children are already starting to look at us with eyes of stone.” In other words, what goes around comes around, right? As for what happens in between: Relationships—hers (ours?)—keep ending and ending and ending of natural causes, which (if we don’t count death) only means we eponymous humans—naturally (hopelessly) fickle and self-serving—are to be held responsible more often than not.

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New Ohio Review Issue 21 (Originally Published Spring 2017)

.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 21 compiled by Averie Hicks

Push

.Reading time 3 minutes.

By George Bilgere
Featured Art: by Clay Banks

I’m trying to look as if I’m suffering.
I have this anguished expression on my face
but it’s wasted since I’m wearing a surgical mask
and anyway the focus here is really on my wife
and the doctor is right there between her legs
and he’s shouting Push, and my wife
is doing this astounding thing, she’s pushing
yet another human being into the world, a world
that so far seems to be pushing back,

and the baby’s heartbeat is down to 90
so the doc says, I think maybe one more try,
then we do the Caesarean, so things in the room
really are a bit tense, it’s definitely a moment
that demands a lot of attention, and my wife
is gathering whatever shreds of strength
remain in the shaking exhausted sleeve of flesh
her body has become, the blood and sweat and fluids
everywhere, and this is It!—when I hear
the attending nurse standing just behind me
saying to this guy in scrubs standing next to her,
I think he’s the anesthesiologist’s assistant,

Well, just because Karen says she has a boyfriend
doesn’t necessarily mean she won’t go out with you,
and the guy says, his voice rising because my wife
really is screaming quite loudly at this point,
Yeah, OK, I guess I should give it a try, I mean
what’s the worst that can happen, other than
getting shot down and looking like a total fool,

and the nurse says, as the doctor is shouting PUSH, 
Yeah, but hasn’t it been like a long dry spell for you?
Aren’t you getting a little desperate here? And the guy
laughs and my wife screams again and the doctor
says Yes and into the world comes the bloody head
followed by the naked lovely bloody little boy
insanely ill-prepared for any of this, and I guess
the guy actually is going to ask Karen out
and I say go for it.

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Void Unfilled

.Reading time 3 minutes.

By George Bilgere
Featured Art: Long Exposure Couple by Jr Korpa

I walk past Erin’s house at dusk
and there she is at her kitchen table,
working on her book about the Reformation.

She needs to finish it if she wants to get tenure,
but it’s slow going because being a single mom
is very difficult what with child care and cooking dinner
and going in to teach her courses on the Reformation,
which I can see her writing about right now,
her face attractive yet harried in the glow
of her laptop as she searches for le mot juste.

Meanwhile Andrew, her nine-year-old son,
shoots forlorn baskets in the driveway
under the fatherless hoop bolted to the garage
by the father now remarried and living in Dayton,
as Andrew makes a move, a crossover dribble,
against the ghost father guarding him, just as I did
when I was nine, my daddy so immensely dead,
my mother inside looking harried and scared,
studying thick frightening books for her realtor’s exam.

And although I hardly know Erin,
I feel I should walk up, knock on her door,
and when she opens it (looking harried,
apologizing for the mess) ask her to marry me.
And she will smile with relief and say
yes, of course, what took you so long,
and she’ll finish her chapter on the Reformation
and start frying up some pork chops for us

as I walk out to the driveway and exorcise
the ghost father with my amazing Larry Bird jump shot,
and tomorrow I’ll mow the lawn and maybe
build a birdhouse with the power tools slumbering
on the basement workbench where the ghost
father left them on his way to Dayton.

I will fill the void, having left voids of my own,
except that my own wife and son are waiting
down the street for me to come home for dinner,
and so I just walk on by, leaving the void unfilled,
as Erin brushes her hair from her face and types out
a further contribution to the body of scholarship
concerning the Reformation, and Andrew
sinks a long beautiful jumper in the gloom.

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Horseplay

.Reading time 1 minute.

By George Bilgere

Featured Art: Abstraction, 1906 by Abraham Walkowitz

I am floating in the public pool, an older guy
who has achieved much, including a mortgage,
a child, and health insurance including dental.

I have a Premier Rewards Gold Card
from American Express, and my car
is quite large. I have traveled to Finland.
In addition, I once met Toni Morrison
at an awards banquet and made some remarks
she found “extremely interesting.” And last month
I was the subject of a local news story
called “Recyclers: Neighbors Who Care.” In short,
I am not someone you would take lightly.

But when I begin to playfully splash my wife,
the teenaged lifeguard raises her megaphone
and calls down from her throne, “No horseplay in the pool,”
and suddenly I am twelve again, a pale worm
at the feet of a blonde and suntanned goddess,
and I just wish my mom would come pick me up.

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I Tie My Shoes

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By George Bilgere

Featured art: ‘Sorrowing Old Man (At Eternity’s Gate)’ by Vincent Van Gogh

I’m walking home late after work
along Meadowbrook Road when I realize
the guy half a block ahead of me
is Bill, from Religious Studies.
I recognize his bald spot, like a pale moon
in the dusk, and his kind of shuffling,
inward-gazing gait. Bill walks
like a pilgrim, measuring his stride
for the long journey, for the next step
in the hard progression of steps.

And while I like Bill, and in some ways
even admire him (he wrote something important
maybe a decade ago on Vatican II),
I slow down a little bit. I even stop
and pretend to tie my shoes, not wanting
to overtake him, because I’m afraid
of the thing he’s carrying, which is big
and invisible and grotesque, a burden
he’s lugging through the twilight, its weight
and unwieldiness slowing him down,
as it has for five years, since a drunk
killed his teenaged son, and Bill’s bald spot
dawned like a tonsure and his gait
grew tentative and unsure, and his gaze
turned inward as his body curled itself
around the enormous, boy-shaped
emptiness, and the question
he spends his days asking God.

And if I caught up with him
and we walked together through the dusk
he would ask me about my own son,
who is three, and the vast prospect of the future
onto which that number opens, involving
Little League and camp-outs and touch
football in the backyard would hang there,
terrible and ablaze in the autumn twilight,
and the two of us would have to slog
down Meadowbrook Road like penitents,
adding its awful weight to the weight of his son
on our backs, our shoulders, and so I fail
Bill, and stop and pretend to tie my shoes.

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Facebook Sonnet

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Tanya Grae

Featured Art: by Prateek Katyal

Someone thinks I’m beautiful again
                & likes posts of my day, comments.
I stifle smiles & feel uncontainable—
                bungeed off ether & the interplay.
Punch-drunk in this blue-sky space,
                a rush of the past, the in-between,
whole chapters, I open annuals
                & albums from storage. His change
in status: single. Papers in hand,
                this backlit man heaves toward
the kite’s trailing end: What if?—
                that butterfly. My youngest lights
onto my lap. Who’s that?—
                as a key turns the lock, I log off.

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Your Mother Wouldn’t Approve

.Reading time 44 minutes.

By Krystal Sanders

Of the way you spend Saturday morning in your room, instead of helping Papaw with the lawn work. You watch him on the riding mower, in customary slacks and suspenders, coasting back and forth beneath your window as if the ragged scream of the machine will summon you like a siren to your manly duty. You raise the binoculars Papaw used when he was stationed in West Africa during WWII, long before his shoulders bowed and his skin darkened with liver spots. They are clunky, large in your hands even though you’ve had a growth spurt and you’re well on your way to catching up to Peter, who’s a whole six feet and had college basketball scouts watching him at every game last season. It was Peter’s senior year of high school, your freshman year. The fall had been glorious, riding the cloud of popularity as Peter Thompson’s younger brother. The other kids, the teachers and coaches, cafeteria ladies, librarians, all looking at you with an expectation that was not yet a burden. You joined the Fellowship of Christian Students, which Peter was president of, and took the Advanced Placement classes he’d taken. You had more friends than you’d ever had before. Through the lens, Papaw’s face jumps up at you. You’re intimately aware of every wrinkle, every nose hair. He guides the mower in long, straight lines, first in front of your window at the corner of the house, on the second floor, and then away toward the county road. The motor’s howl falls to a low growl, builds back up as he returns exactly two feet to the left, is eventually reduced to a low grumble at the back of the house.

Your mother wouldn’t approve of the way you watch the world, binoculars pressed to your face, aimed into the neighborhood across the county road. The man who owns the nearest corner lot, 5371, has some kind of shepherd. The dog roams along its chainlink fence, pants in the heat, takes a shit. You catch a glimpse of motion deeper in the neighborhood and sit up straight. You focus on the door that caught your eye, at 5377 striding out of the back of her house in shorts and a man’s plaid shirt. She is headed to the metal trash barrel at the back of the lot. You know she will stand there for a long time, and then go back inside. You imagine burying your fingers in the tangle of her long hair. She is barefoot, and the thought of the stiff crunchiness of the yellow grass against the tender arches of her feet almost makes you moan.

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The Worn-Out West

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Pamela Davis

Featured Art: by Jannes Glas

I drive past motel signs advertising
free cable for bikers, truckers numbed
by cracked asphalt. A looseness,
as if everything is slipping
away, and the sky shaved thin as mica.

Stretch of dusty storefronts hung
with local art—warriors astride
painted horses, mesas. The Rio Grande
cuts in and out, shape-shifting
between cottonwoods. In the café,
regulars remove their hats, sit alone.

One gathers himself judge-straight
as the waitress refills his mug,
her bar rag slung over a bare shoulder.
She gifts him a sudden, chipped-tooth
grin. Yesterday she banned
a drifter for fouling the toilet she lets
everyone use. Today she walks a cup
of coffee across the street for
a homeless guy wrapped in his own arms.

On her own this young, every new boss—
town, lover—will treat her like a stolen car.

Smooth, how she glides
from radio to grill. Easy, her talk,
comebacks quick. And outside, a mountain
looms, split long ago by a blast. Wire mesh hugs
some of it back. I want to tell her temporary
lasts a long time. The air is thin
up here. It’s nobody’s idea of home.

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What My Massage Therapist Girlfriend Discovers When I’m On Her Table For the First Time

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Robert Wilder

Featured Art: ‘Avocado’ (1916) by Amada Almira Newton

Your right leg is shorter than your left.
There’s something funny happening in your left shoulder.
You should change your detergent and go fragrance-free.
Is this too much pressure?

You once had a girlfriend who threw bottles at your head.
You haven’t slept well in decades.
You store all the grief for your dead mother in your solar plexus.
Breathe.

You grind your teeth.
You have the musical tastes of a seventeen-year-old girl.
There’s tension in your neck which runs down your left side.
No one believes that you are not attracted to Rebecca.

Does this hurt?
Let me stretch you out a bit more.

For someone with such little flexibility, you have a surprisingly good vertical.
You’ve wounded more people than you’re willing to admit.
Your father will die soon and you’ll have no clue where to turn.
You and your brothers will drift apart.
Sorry about that. Just trying to break it up.

Nothing will get easier for a long time.
You loved the bottle thrower something fierce.
You can’t hear your mother’s voice anymore.
Turn on your side, please.

You still love the sun sneaking through cracked windows.
You have a closet full of clothes that no longer fit.
Holding your breath won’t help either of us.
There you are.

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Stuff

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Claudia Monpere

Featured Art: [Villa d’un Chiffonier (Ragpicker’s Shack)], 1920 by Eugène Atget

I saw you, daughter, sneaking
a garbage bag of my treasures
into your car. Those heaps of eyeglasses are art.

Never mind the cracked lenses
and broken hinges, the bent frames.
Some day I’ll make a sculpture or hanging lamp.
I’ll make a mobile.

The broken picture frames and dried-out
pens. Even the bottle caps beg
to be known. And how patient
those stacks of hotel soap.
Waiting. Just in case.

Yes newspapers haystack the walls.
But it’s all there: knowledge at my
fingertips. The postman will bring more.

There is an ocean liner inside my heart
that waits to set sail. The crowds wave
at the dock. My shades are drawn.
Bring me, daughter.
Don’t take. Bring me a basket 
brimming with words.

Not fester, not filth—
fang words that surgeon my heart.
Bring me gossamer, lagoon, violet-crowned
hummingbird.
Bring me, daughter, elixir of cloud.

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A Race Car Made of Sand

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Margot Wizansky

Featured Art: “Beach of Bass Rocks, Gloucester, Massachusetts” by Frank Knox Morton Rehn

Everything made my mother nervous:
the baby crying, sand on the floor, the flies.
So we went out to the beach.
I took my bucket and shovel.
My mother sat my little brother up on her shoulders
and carried the towels and a canvas chair for my father,
who was too weak to carry anything.
He wore his cabaña suit, light green with white palm trees,
his legs, pale like the sheets in the hotel room.
He hadn’t shaved.
His face had been blue for weeks,
the circles under his eyes, dark as his beard.
Mother said I was too heavy to sit in his lap.
All afternoon I dug a string of frantic little ponds.
Nothing was right; my back was sunburnt;
my father hardly moved.
Uncle Robert came, like a bus from the city,
to build me a race car of sand, with jar lids
for hubcaps and for headlights, clamshells,
and he found a quoit on the beach for the steering wheel.
He dug me a driver’s seat that just fit,
and a rumble seat for my little brother.
My father peeled me an apple with his penknife,
in one long piece, that didn’t ever break.

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Some Things Rosa Can’t Tell Little Esmeralda

.Reading time 35 minutes.

By Barbara de la Cuesta

Featured Art: by Farrukh Beg

A late afternoon after work, Rosa puts the flame down under the rice and beans and sits with her feet up in Laureano’s recliner. The knock on the front door Rosa thinks must be Mondo’s social worker, the only person she knows who doesn’t just walk in the back door. Mondo is in detention again for defacing a wall, or an overpass, something.

But it isn’t the social worker, it’s little Esmeralda, daughter of the Mexican grocer on Moody Street, who comes in politely, sits opposite her with a notebook, and asks Rosa can she ask her some questions. Hah, like the social worker, Rosa thinks, then corrects herself. This is a child she used to see sitting on the floor of her father’s abasto sorting red beans. The girl tells Rosa she needs to write a biography of an older person for her fifth grade class.

Ah, Rosa, with her aching feet, feels old.

Not old, old; just older than me, says the child. She used to be in Rosa’s catechism class at St. Justin’s and was notably better behaved and brighter than any of the others.

Hokay, says Rosa, not yet realizing what will happen to her.

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Miles

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Craig van Rooyen

Featured Art: by Mike Lewinski

It was dark, sure, but the city’s halo
whitewashed the stars.
We drank good bourbon from Dixie cups
to mock our sophistication.
Two black men and a white one
who needed a brother.
We drank to Ghana advancing,
not so naïve to believe
they had a chance against England.
We toasted our wives of many colors
and our barefoot children chasing fireflies
like the first night in Eden.
But it was Oakland.
So when the boy climbed the porch steps
cupping a winged and glowing offering,
I called him by the wrong name, as if
I did not know him, as if his father
was not my friend.
The brothers exchanged their look,
too polite to call me out
on a summer night in paradise.
And we all pretended not to notice
the bats that let go their roosts
to flap old patterns in our chests.
Suddenly I felt like humming
“Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” professing my love
for Serena, telling them all about my black Scout leader
whom I hadn’t thought about in years,
assembling, in other words, my own minstrel show
to prove how down I am.
All the while, the party soundtrack plays on
through hidden speakers, Kind of Blue 
from the end of that gorgeous terrible horn:
Live, no net, each note feeling its way
into the dark as if we can still improvise,
as if there is always another chance
to get it right before the night ends.
The boy, who isn’t Miles after all,
keeps coming closer
to show me his gift, opening the dark
hemispheres of his hands so I can see
the pulsing fireflies lift off
to join the others in the city’s halo
far above our heads.

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Mitigation

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Craig van Rooyen

Featured Art: by Romina Farías

Somehow it’s good to know
the wildfires have not touched the face
of our local TV anchor
delivering her lines
with a touch of sadness that never approaches
despair, even as her bangs cascade
onto her forehead like evening clouds
descending the Coast Range.
I think of her in her dressing room
before she offers her face to us—
the one that will help us fall asleep—
while a line of flames somewhere far away
descends the ridge and licks into a kitchen,
melting the refrigerator magnets,
popping cans of spray oil, and setting
the dog out back to howling, jerking
against its chain.
I see her in front of the mirror,
surrendering to the ministrations of tiny brushes— 
a makeup artist leaning in like a lover.
Foundation first, an A-side attack
on brow furrows and laugh lines.
Then concealer to suppress the advance
of crow’s feet into the Botox buffer zone.
Within a half-hour, the spread of creases
and fissures 95% contained.
The brushes flit across her face
like prayer flags, and I can almost smell
the warm breath of the girl who sticks out
the tip of her tongue, leaning close
to line the boundary
where the fullness of a lower lip
begins its concave plunge
into smooth white chin.
Our TV anchor practicing her lines,
mastering her face.
We need to love her for this.
For the way she shows us how to keep
a chin from trembling, an eye from twitching
even while the chained dog
curls in on itself in the burning.

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Parrots Over Suburbia

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Craig van Rooyen

Featured Art: by McGill Library

There are two,
as if some ark came to rest
on the high school football field
and Noah flung them through an open window
to test whether this cement-skinned town
can sustain life.
See them there, trimming
lava-dipped wings in the sky above Costco,
bills curved like question marks.
And what do they ask, out of earshot
of the man with sunflower seeds?
Do you know what it means
to circle, to draw and redraw the tightening
circumference of your life
above the grid of 50-year roofs,
in steak smoke risen from backyard barbecues?
The parrots’ owner is no prophet.
Summer evenings, he wrenches
on a ’67 Mustang that drips its innards
onto his Avenue L driveway.
And at dusk, he makes his arm a perch,
takes the two from their cage,
feeds them from his lips, knowing
if they love him he need not maim their wings.
So they fly in circles
and on every pass above the fenced playground,
swoop near to watch the girl in high-tops and earbuds
swinging, head thrown back to reveal
her pale and wild throat.

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Steno

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Mark Kraushaar

“Hypergraphia is a behavioral condition
characterized by the intense desire to write . . . ”
“It is a symptom associated with temporal lobe epilepsy.”

It’s as if . . . , he says, It’s like . . . , or, It’s ABOUT
things being simply THERE, molecular,
blue, strewn, flattened, aflame.
He pulls up the shade and looks out.
There’s this kind of accounting he does:
sidewalk, hedgerow, phone pole.
He lists the round and the ready-made.
He notes the hand-carved and the curved.
He sorts by color and shape.
He lists by size and by brightness.
He notes the nautical, normal and nameless.
It’s Wednesday and he’s moved from columns
to rows: alphabetic, magnetic, majestic . . .

He lists the unowned and the changed,
the charged, unsuitable and smooth.
He leans forward turning the page.
It’s like . . . , It’s as if . . . , he says,
as if these THINGS, this STUFF:
hunk and clod, object and article, gizmo,
whatnot, doodad, exactingly placid, substantial
and actual, for knowing nothing,
know it all: guruish shoe-tree, savvy axle.
He opens the door and sits on the stoop.
It’s as if each thought over-laps the last.
A girl on a bike goes by.

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Fable

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Sally Bliumis-Dunn

Featured Art: Formerly attributed to Zhao Boju (ca. 1120s-ca.1162)

People often spoke
about her mousy behavior,

her gray squeaky voice,
but no one made the connection

that the words they used,
which she devoured like giant crumbs,

commenced her change,
so that when she drew the curtains

to darken the air
it was not a sign of depression

as they had begun to suppose
but simply a trait as she became

more and more nocturnal,
scurrying about the rooms, the tail

of her housecoat trailing.

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Safehouse

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Sandy Gingras

Featured Art: by Pierre Châtel-Innocenti

Pull up any rug, there’s a hole.
An easy chair sits on a trap door, which leads to
a slide. I am still surprised, after all these years,
how many tunnels are in my house.

In the basement, which is under the place
you would consider the basement, is
what I call “the secret room.” But all my rooms
are really secret rooms. It has a large
colored map on the wall, a folding table under
a fluorescent light, a red couch.

I go down there to find
a way to slip something into my dreams or to
block my escape routes. I am a spy, don’t
you know? I don’t look like a spy, and I’m paid
nothing for my work, but I do it anyway.
I was called, as they say, to duty.

Under my clothes, I’m naked.
Within my ID card is another identity.
I can change at will. I have a machine
that scrambles my words into code,
a pill I can bite to shift my mood,
a certification to never sleep.

Now I must run.
Even though there is no such thing as a
hiding spot in this house. Even if I put on
my invisible suit. Even if I cover my face
so I can’t see myself.
In the bathroom cupboard is a shelf that lifts
to reveal a chute which looks like it’s for laundry,
but it isn’t. I can’t hear when I hit bottom.

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Other People’s Ranch Dressing

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Kate Maclam

Featured Art: by Au Lido Plate no.14 (1920)

I wanted to smell less like
a restaurant and more like
a woman.
I tried my best.
All the women I know could
have sex with famous men
like J Hamm or Leo D or BJ.
All the women I know smell like
French Vanilla perfume
and fresh cigarettes.
They smell like thin people.
When I describe them I say,
she is thin like a rich person.
I say, she eats paper
and melts diamonds,
to stay thin—
she huffs paint thinner.
I say, she has never touched
another person’s ranch dressing
or brushed it onto her thigh
where it looked like
the seed of a famous man
or anyone really.

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Nightmare on Elm Street

.Reading time 3 minutes.

By T. J. Sandella

Featured art by Vrouw aan kaptafel

Though they’re meant to be our protagonists,
we detest these teenagers
who fall for the same tricks and traps
in every film
and because they keep coming back
dumber and hotter
decade after decade
with their perky breasts and discernible abs
and the way they throw themselves mercilessly
against one another
in backseats and on twin beds
and because they smoke cigarettes
and slug soda and beer
and because dialysis and diabetes
will never creep like Freddy
into their dreams.
Because they’re always in love
and loneliness is as unimaginable
as feigning sleep
so the person next to you
will stop kissing your neck
though you still care for her
and he’s still beautiful
or maybe you don’t
and maybe he’s not
or maybe the workday has emptied you
of desire for anything
but seven hours of silence
and maybe these are the words you say
that can’t be forgiven. Curse the children
for not knowing
that if you live long enough
life is mostly washing dishes
and may they suffer
for not believing
that young love dies
when the first person
goes to college
and meets a sorority girl
who can put her legs behind her head
or the backup point guard with the bulging
biceps. Twelve bucks is a bargain
to see these brainless babes
pierced by pitchforks, their chiseled flanks flayed
and hung from hooks. It’s because
their failures will never grind them
into something so small
that they’ll go to a theater alone,
buy some popcorn, and sit in the glow
of another slasher reboot, trying to distract themselves
from their disappointing lives.

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Loving by Numbers

.Reading time 35 minutes.

By Frances Orrok

Featured Art: by Nick Fewings

10
my dog, climbing trees, apples, my sister
On two separate car journeys, one with my mother, one with my father, I ask each of them to choose the last thing they’d give up. At ten, my questions take this form with some regularity: exaggerated parameters, carefully explained rules. “It can be food or water or something solid, but it doesn’t have to be. You only have twenty-four hours to live.” Both ask if they can think about it. Both remember to answer by the end of the journey (a hastily added rule).

My father: “the capacity to love.”
My mother: “to know I am loved.”

11
anywhere outside the classroom; mud, cold, leaves, not sports, lists
I start smoking in ditches. I ask my father if he’d still love me if I went to prison. “Of course.” He doesn’t hesitate or ask what crime I will have committed. I think about this and watch the back of him digging. I don’t doubt his words but I am curious. “What if I joined the IRA?” There is a long pause and he straightens out for it. The Irish Republican Army is in the news a lot. They drive fear into every school child, make public transport and Saturdays anxious. There are no longer bins on the streets, litter blows frightened of b-o-m-b-s. “There will always be things you could do to make loving you harder. That’s not the same as not loving you. Difficult doesn’t mean no.”

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Advice

.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Emily Sernaker

Featured Art: by Fran Hogan

Don’t ever make him a take-me-back
mix CD. But if you do, open with Sam Cooke’s
“Bring It On Home To Me.”
If Kim from high school wants to wait
in the really long line for the panda
at the zoo, don’t complain.
That panda is going to be so cuddly cupping
its paw around the bamboo, your heart
will do a somersault. Besides,
you’ll miss Kim when you’re away
trying to tell her updates
before the metro goes underground.
“I’m going on a date and wearing eyeliner.”
“You’re going on a date with a minor?”
Distance can be so hard. If you take
a dance class at the gym don’t stand
in the very back. Halfway through they turn
around and that side becomes the leaders
of the choreographed dance
everyone knows but you. You want
a middle-back spot for minimal shame.
One more thing about boys—
sometimes they’re sending a message
by not sending a message. There are many
films and books about this. If you need
an easy Halloween costume
go with Clark Kent. You just wear
glasses, a button-up shirt, a loose tie,
and show a Superman logo
underneath. You can even make
a Daily Planet badge if there’s time.
That noise you hear in the morning
opening the coffee shop isn’t
the other barista sneezing.
It’s the espresso machine warming up—
you don’t need to say bless you.
Ask your mom how she’s doing. Early
in each phone call ask her and really listen.
If you don’t, she’ll let you talk and talk
and what kind of person
do you want to be? You should
probably read Dante, that gets referenced
a lot. Anyone who hates Bob Dylan,
especially the Blood On The Tracks album,
is wrong. He’s given us a road map
to life, they should be grateful.
One last thing—don’t be scared
when the Georgetown cross-country team
is running toward you full speed
on the bridge. I know
it’s the bridge with the narrow walkway
close to traffic, where there’s nowhere
for you to step to the side.
Just raise up both of your hands.
Sixty people will give you high-fives
and keep going.

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Mawwage

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Catherine Stearns

Featured Art: Rising Dove, 1934 by Harold Edgerton

Mawwage is what bwings us together.
—The Princess Bride

At five, a clamorous bird
proposed outside our window: 
Will-ya will-ya will-ya, then? 
when a high-pitched vireo
like a shotgun bride
interposed fuck-you fuck-you 
before his liquid goddess
could reply, with a flirty little 
who-me who-me? followed by
something like my mother’s 
tch-tch-tch-ing at my father’s
stories she’d heard a million
times before, nattering
away as if strapped on
currents of confused desire,
but finally speeding up
to an ascendant trill—I do
I do, I do / aspire to—

broken off by our alarm clock’s
insistent beep. Aspire to . . . ?
Aspire to . . . ? Happiness?
Transcendence? Sleep?
I turned it off to hear
not the long-married coo
of doves I often do
upon waking, but the shameless
heart of a bird
quivering in song
that knows itself alone

except for you, afloat
among the highest shelves
of dark and light, singing
and singing the changes through.

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Marriage at 17 Years

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Gary Dop

“Come here—quick!” You know it, her serious, nearly
               whispered call. She says, “I think it’s a squirrel.”
Brown bulb of fur, it’s tucked behind an old chair.
               The kids sleep upstairs; you have both abandoned
your evening’s screens. You are here,
               a step away from a baby flying squirrel. You grab
the wicker hamper. She says, “Don’t scare it.”
               Hamper in one hand, towel in the other, you wonder
how to catch it without scaring it. The big-eyed squirrel
               knows you’re there. “Be careful,” you hear as you swipe
at the squirrel who scampers, fast as life,
               into the wicker trap you lift and close.
Then she says, “It’s in there,” a statement of fact
               that feels like a question. You say, “It’s in there,”
your voice an octave too high. She peeks through
               the wicker gaps to snap a picture. You relax
your grip on the lid, and the wild thing wriggles free.
                You scream. She smacks you
upside the head, a gentle reminder of the hibernating children.
               You both scurry after the squirrel
which seems so scared until it’s near the stairs—
               then it’s a feral beast between you and your offspring.
With animalistic ease—her leap and block, your swipe
               and scoop—the rodent’s back in its cage,
and you’re out on the sidewalk, clutching the hamper,
               waiting for your neighbors—just pulling away—
to be far enough not to see your business. You both smile
               and wave too easily, like stoned teenagers startled by cops.
A moment later, the flying squirrel is off:
               The thing that just happened is over.
And you are outside, suddenly together.

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The Double

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Gary Dop

Featured Art: by Tim Mossholder

When I order fast food, I feel superior
to the place I am in, the people
who serve me, and the grease
about to grip my gut, but
the cashier asks “Is that poetry?”
pointing at the distressed volume I hold.
I say, “Yes,” and she says, “Yes,
I thought so,” her eyes bloom,
no longer machines. Her hand rests
on the input screen as she quotes Frost
or Dickinson: something about “long sleep,
a famous sleep,” and she adds, “Was ever idleness
like this?” Flustered, I reply: “I’ll take
the double with mustard and pickles.” She sees
into me, a mass-produced poetry patty
stamped for the look of flavor. She sees
my surprise and knows that beneath our exchange,
burger for cash, is deeper change:
The life I’ve slept inside, she takes, discards,
and watches me wake.

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Red Beans and Rice

.Reading time 1 minute.

By James Sprouse

Featured Art: ‘Modes et Manières de Torquat‘

The medium said you were not coming back.
So I ate my red beans and rice
same as on our wedding day
down in Algiers, Louisiana.

The next day you rode
off with the Russian, Porshenokov,
in a little MG, your long straw hair
whipping in the streets

in the wind of the French Quarter
and down on the bayous, where it’s
too hot to sleep. The cemetery on Ramparts
was a forest of stone, the dead

above ground. On account of
the hurricanes, they said, and high water
on the Mississippi that stirs underneath
and raises them up.

That time you came back,
in heat, in sweat, with cotton-mouth
and juju. The South was our
time to be hot.

Next day you shipped out
lithe as a dolphin
rolling and tumbling down to the delta
on whiskey and water we called our lives.

Beautiful dreamer, awake unto me . . .
on Lake Pontchartrain, in the boat
of our nights, your prodigal smile
alive with fabulous poison.

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Year of the Rat

.Reading time 26 minutes.

By Lucas Church

Featured Art: Chinese Zodiac Animals in Harmony by Kerima Swain

On my birthday, the twenty-fifth anniversary of a space shuttle disaster, I move in with Uncle, who lives next to a trash heap. The heap is privately owned, not the county dump, not open to just anybody, and it’s haloed with crows. I squirrel myself upstairs while Uncle watches the video of the spaceship disintegrating into smoke, repeating. I mention in passing an ex-boyfriend with fists like cans of beans, that he’s looking for me, probably. Outside the crows bicker while I hide under the covers, the house full of Uncle’s sobs back to the television.

The shuttle exploded hours before I was born. A question of timing, my mother said.

Fast forward to our routine each morning: Uncle sloughs to the door and asks if I am okay, if I need anything. I always say no, but offer to clean his pool, where trash from the heap sometimes catches. Uncle doesn’t ask about Ex, though he’s gleaned I’m running from Ex’s jealousies and agendas, but rattles out something about decisions, good and bad, where they end us all up.

After weeks of this dance, he finally needs something: We lack pudding. Uncle has a sweet tooth. Or maybe we could go for dinner, he says, talk about things, hit some of the friendly bars, etc. Two guys on the prowl then silence and we all feel embarrassed for him together.

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My Mother’s Dogs

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Sandy Gingras

Featured Art: Three Dogs Fighting by Antonio Tempesta

They are big and smelly and mean,
and they’re living in her basement.
I think they are dogs, but they might be wolves.
Eight or eighteen of them, something like that.
They all would bite me if I gave them
the chance, so I’m really careful
when I herd them out into the yard.
What is it with my mother?
Most families just have pets—usually one dog
and a cat, nothing like this. How
did she let this happen to her?

She’s living in some decrepit house now on Rt. 9
in the next town over and she’s evidently lost
her taste in furniture. Everything is gold
with rickety legs. She and I watch
the dogs patrol around the yard
from behind a glass sliding door. My mother is angry
now that she’s old, and I think that maybe
she and the dogs deserve each other, but
I can tell that my mother is scared too,
and I want to help her out because
I’m the problem-solver in our family.

The dogs don’t play like normal dogs,
they just move around the yard
like big bullet-headed missiles. We have to get rid
of them somehow, I tell my mother who is
suddenly smaller than she was, and then I hold her
in my arms and she’s a little girl. Whatever you do,
don’t let them in, I whisper, but
she’s already dead of lung cancer.

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Serenity Room

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Linda Hillringhouse

Featured Art: Buste van een oude vrouw by Anonymous

There are five recliners in a circle,
each with a spongy blanket.
The lights have been dimmed,
but an aide has left behind her walkie-talkie
and it sounds like it’s ready to lift off.
My mother is in one recliner, I’m in another,
an easy way to spend time now that she’s afraid
of the color red and distrusts windows
as if the glass weren’t there and the fingers
of the dwarf palmetto would reach in
and pull her down into its dark center
to cut out the last cluster of syllables
huddled beneath her tongue.

I look over to see if she’s sleeping
and her eyes are open as though
she’s forgotten to close them. Maybe
she’s on some dusky street where half-drawn
figures drift and sounds almost blossom
into meaning. Maybe she opens a door
and her aunts from Brooklyn are there
and clutch her to their mountainous breasts
where she could stay forever.

She tries to inch out of the recliner but an aide
intercedes with a cup of apple juice
which my mother examines closely
for poison and studies her hand as if it’s
screwed to her wrist. Then she brings the cup
to her lips as if it’s the last thing left
from the world when she was Shirley
and carried keys, lipstick, cash.

And I hope that the cold, sweet liquid
brings a moment’s pleasure, but how can it be
that it comes to this, that at the end you get
thrown in the ring for one more brutal round
without enough stamina to put on your shoes
or enough strength to say Thank you or Go to hell.

Read More

Catpants

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Richard Allen

Featured Art: The cat at play, c.1860-1878 by Henriëtte Ronner

dead cat on the shoulder
my heart aches for a moment
until I realize it is only
a balled-up pair of sweatpants

why would I feel compassion
were it a cat lying dead there
and not a balled-up
pair of sweatpants

I think it is because
cats are defenseless
and innocent then
I re-evaluate

they are neither
the average housecat
has injured several people
in its short life

just for laughs
the person who had to throw
his sweatpants out the window
a moment’s thought for him

for his sweatpants
and for the sad conflict
that must have unfolded
between them

Read More

The Meat of It

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Michael Bazzett

To make a good book you need what William
Faulkner called “the raw meat on the floor.”
So before I started in I got some ground beef
and dropped it on the hardwood with a Spat! 
It felt wrong. Like dropping a baby. But I did it
for art. When my son came home from school
he said, Why is there meat on the floor? I said,
Art. He nodded like maybe that made sense
and said, It’s kind of freaking me out. I know,
I said, me too. We all have to make sacrifices.
Is that blood leaking out or juice? he asked.
I’m not sure I’m one to make that distinction,
I said, mostly to avoid answering the question.
I didn’t tell him how strange it was to unwrap
the meat so carefully, the plastic peeling away
like a onesie on a warm day, and then just sort
of hurl it down at the hardwood with a Spat! 
Are we still going to eat it? he asked after a bit.
I’m not sure, I said. I think it depends upon
a lot of different factors, a lot of ins and outs.
Is this a writing thing? he asked, because you
have that weird look in your eye. I’m your
father, I said. I held you as a baby. I’d never
use a moment like this just to make a poem.

Read More

Dune Cat

.Reading time 48 minutes.

By Winnie Anderson

Featured Art: by Oliver Goldsmith

Eons ago, during the Pleistocene Epoch, the jaguar left his home and traveled across the cold arid grassland: his resolve set. The floods were coming again. If he stayed, the land would either be covered with water or be broken into land pockets, from which there’d be no escape. The time was now. He had to go.

In him the jaguar carried echoes of history, tens of millions of years’ worth of heat spikes, ice ages, tectonic upheavals, and mega-explosions. Time swirled uniquely around him. He felt two trajectories at once—like a stone cast into the deep lake of time, sinking down to the bottom where all life may have begun, as well as the outward rippling cat’s paw upon its surface. History. Present. Future. All there, his for the grappling.

Alone he headed south: crossing over what one day would be named the Bering land bridge. Well-suited to the task, weighing close to 400 pounds, the norm then, he ran through a dense mantle of cold and silence. In the morning light his rust-colored coat appeared red, broken only by dotted circular cave-black rosettes. The travel was hard, but the jaguar came into it, growing stronger as he went—proof he’d done the right thing by giving his instinct its due.

After months of traveling, and though he was not cold, his body began to shiver. Prescience told him change was imminent seconds before a rogue wind thrust the jaguar into a zigzag shudder of time, as if the stone sinking deep into the lake had jerked off course and suddenly crabbed sideways. Calling on everything he had by stirring up wells of power contained within him, the jaguar fought against this unknown force he could not fathom.

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Now the Truth Can Be Told

.Reading time 1 minute.

By David Gullette

Featured Art: by Francis Augustus Lathrop

While I was assailed by a gaggle of captious sighs
you were somewhere else groping for lost teeth
or something or otherwise empty of solace, of course.

Or the time my edges all fell away taking
gritty treads and guy wires with them, where were you?
Breathing ethereal! Moonstruck!

Jesu! Did you think I couldn’t see you
slithering down the pike on your twenty axles,
the wind in your snoot, the coontail aflap flopping

in as crisp a tornado as any whip since
the blow that beveled Dubuque? Eh?
God knows you have failed me in need,

in time, in every intrusion of ice through my
window or down my back, every
whine of the plastic slug through my inner ear.

Do you think my patience is gold as glue,
sturdy as wings, marmot, asleep in your own aura?
Gelatinous posture! Asterisk! Aspic! Strip for your lashes!

Read More

Nobody Can Pronounce the Name of This Volcano

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Mike Wright

Featured Art: by Paweł Czerwiński

I was choosing a bag of almonds at the grocery
when a volcano erupted. These almonds
were an impulse buy, and now they commemorate
catastrophe. The volcano is elsewhere,
so I won’t experience cinders bruising the sky.
On another continent ash settles on buildings
and my snack is dusted in cocoa powder,
the packaging says semi-sweet. I’m realizing
this is the wrong flavor for a natural disaster.
Nobody can pronounce the name of this volcano.
I can’t speak its name and I want to know it,
to know destruction, the reality of molten
rock. Instead I’m standing around the store,
befuddled by almonds, by how to choose.
If enough pressure built under the surface,
I could be relieved of every decision.

Read More

A Friend Encourages Me to Travel to South America

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Mike Wright

Featured Art: by Bertha E. Jaques

I can’t handle cherries. When I see
them at the store, full of tart surprise,
I pass them up; it’s the breaking of tight
skin and release of flesh. I want
the thing ten steps down from the ecstatic.
Instead of cherries, cherry soda.
So how could I handle South America?
What would I do with a sea, with salt
air winding through me like a shell?
I live the nub of life, the thumbnail
sketch, fish sticks and cigarettes.
I would never survive the cherries
of South America. What’s a cherry
soda after a cherry? What do I dream of
after Brazil?

Read More

Nomenomancy

.Reading time 3 minutes.

—divination by names

By Mark Wagenaar

Like each of us, it could only guess at its own begetting. A careless cigarette, electrical spark, Molotov cocktail hurled by an angry senior who had his letter to the editor rejected, we never found out how the fire started. Only smoke suddenly billowing above the town. Shreds of ten thousand newspapers upon the air, in slow drift through open windows, coming to rest on the eyelids & lips of men sleeping off the night shift at the furnace. Embers floated for hours through the streets, through back alleys, & ended up in the black fur of cats, gray hair of old men playing checkers, on the tongues of children who didn’t know better. A shroud upon the impatiens & petunias in tire & barrel gardens, on the feathers of pigeons in rooftop cages. In the silos the tatters found space amid the grains, & our news made it across the oceans: liquidation sales, stories on the alderman’s affair, the mayor’s new dog. And one death—one obituary. Larry, the boy who jumped his dirt bike into the canal. His name now upon the air, with our questions for him. We looked up at a sky that whirled with clouds of his name, & saw on that air once more the arc of his bike between the bridge and the rest of his life. His name rained down upon us, confetti for a parade of his absence. For years we found his name—in our underwear drawers, in our cereal boxes, in the big hair of our pageant contestants. In the open bags of sugar in the Home Ec classroom, the ones that girls would name and care for, & come to remember when their own babies were held up, his half-burned name against the brilliance of the sugar crystals, these sugar babies, each one named Larry.

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Bodies That Drift in the River Flow

.Reading time 43 minutes.

By Scott Gould

Featured Art: by Oscar Bluemner

Sometimes you know things before you know things. Mrs. Tisdale comes to the door, and I know something is wrong. I know. From the top bunk of my bed, I watch her coming up the sidewalk, walking fast but walking like a woman who is already lost, her skirt moving quickly around her, like a wave to anyone who spies through the window.

I know the doorbell won’t ring. She is not a bell person. She is too good a friend of my mother’s to announce herself that way. She knocks once and opens the door. What she doesn’t know is the bell doesn’t work anyway. It is shorted out somewhere along its line and my father has never pulled the wires and traced down them to find the problem. I hear Mrs. Tisdale’s voice flow up the staircase, so faint I can barely make it out, strained and pitched higher than normal. Her voice sounds like an animal she is trying to keep on a leash, trying to make it heel. Because her voice wants to run away from her. I hear my mother fall back on her nurse’s voice, that healing tone. I climb off the top bunk and move closer to the doorway.

“Now, Roberta, we shouldn’t jump to conclusions,” my mother says. “Let’s not worry until we have something to worry about.”

“Something’s gone wrong,” Mrs. Tisdale says. “I feel it.”

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Men’s League as January

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Michael Pontacoloni

Featured Art: by Mark Landman

After we untie skate laces wound twice
around our ankles and knotted
like the ribbon of a plastic kitchen garbage bag,

and we pop our cold-socked feet from
stiff black Tacks and Grafs
like hard pits from leathery dates,

all the blood worked up in thighs
screws down our shins and
floods our numb feet new again.

We laugh through clenched teeth at the charge
and fuzz of it, our toes
swelling round to halogen bulbs and

buzzing with a filament of joyful pain,
that brittle wire.
Burning cold they

might shatter so in old gray sneakers we
hobble to the parking lot,
at the open trunk of Ryan’s gray Corolla wobble

under sweaty hats and clouds of breath
and dispute the long-gone referees
with Narragansett cans till midnight.

We cough. We kick a snowbank.
Our neck hairs
icen to filigrees. Geno
glows in a T-shirt. What bright glass,
this golden crescent of beer in a can rim
yearning to freeze.

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Midnight Snack with Leon

.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Darren Morris

Featured Art: by nrd

I ran into the boxer Leon Spinks in 1992.
Spinks had won the heavyweight belt 14 years before
from Muhammad Ali. He had also won bronze
in the Olympics and gone to the penitentiary
for possession. By the time he got to me
he was all done with fame and fortune.
But he still scrapped with life, just trying to be.
At that time, I was staying with my brother
in Springfield, Missouri. He ran a pool hall
and kept an apartment in back of the place.
I snuck into the kitchen late one night for a slice
of that industrial orange cheese that I was
addicted to. I flipped on a light and
there was a large man sleeping on a cot
in the middle of the white-tiled room. But
I went ahead and opened the fridge because
when you are visiting someone, nothing is
unusual. It should all be that way, every day,
everything new, but it rarely is. I reached in and
lifted out a long orange sleeve. That’s when
the sleeping man said, “Leon hungry,” and instantly
I remembered my brother telling me that Spinks
had started coming into the bar, but I did not
believe him. It had been so matter-of-fact
that I barely retained the anchor to the info.
I made sloppy towers of tomato and cheese
sandwiches for Spinks and me and we ate them
in silence except for all the tooth-sucking
that bread and cheese promoted, especially
for Spinks who had more than a few teeth missing.
I cleaned up and Spinks lay back down. There
was nothing really to say. But when I turned off
the light, as if still a boy, Spinks said, Nigh-night.
They call it American cheese because it is processed
from nothing much. In 1978, Ali taunted him
and Leon beat his ass in one of the biggest upsets ever.
I met a ton of people back then who ceased to matter.
But that did not stop them and they persisted.

Read More

Just Say No

.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Kelly Michels

Featured Art: by Feliphe Schiarolli

We didn’t say a word when the officer visited our classroom.
We didn’t pass a note or mumble, didn’t blink when the TV
flickered on, when the stats, wrapped in white, settled
on the screen. We didn’t dare color outside the lines
of the worry-eyed cartoon character buying weed from a teenage
bully or the gang of stick figures shouting in the margins.

We pretended not to see each other,
not to know the smell of bong smoke, late at night,
how it would drift through the air vents with their
laughter, how it would rise in a fog as we slept.

We pretended not to flinch when the egg hit the pan,
the yolk thundering against the cladded aluminum,
or when the officer pointed to the display of syringes
on the screen, the scenes of cherubic teens
snorting a line for the first time, the background darkening,
their eyes, lifeless, because the result is death,
the officer said, while pointing to a photo of a casket.

We pretended not to know how the dead could rise,
how they rose each morning to put away our cereal boxes
and make our beds, how they were waiting for us now
in their long white robes smeared with peanut butter
and hair dye, their tired bodies floating across the pearly
linoleum floors, the bones in their fingers thrumming
the edge of the kitchen sink to the sound of Clarence Clemons
in their heads, “The Promised Land” rising like a dark cloud 
from the desert floor, their eyes lost in the throbbing
autumnal light, the snaking of branches across
the kitchen window, the tick-tock of the wind against
the leaves, how it feels like eternity, as they watch
for the bus, the broken ice maker buzzing,
the dishwasher rumbling, milk parting their burned coffee,
waiting for their children to return to them
to wipe their small skulls clean.

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Coronation with Plastic Flowers

.Reading time 6 minutes.

By Kelly Michels

Featured Art: by Karl Blossfeldt

She says it feels like flowers blooming in her veins.
                                The lilies watch her, unmoved
in the window.
                                She becomes the petals’
white polyester sheen, its rigid spine, slumped posture
                                leaning against the rim
of an old coffee mug filled with week-old cigarette butts.
                                This is how
I will remember her: bottles of pills, the walls scumbled
                                yellow, a flower blooming
in her veins, her gray breath rising

                                in a haze thirty years ago
the way she placed each plastic flower away from
                                the sun, the sting, anything
that could touch the color of the petal as if the light
                                could drag each one into the white,
worn sky, make it fade before her eyes. What else is beauty for?
                                but to be spun, set on a window sill
curtains drawn, petals hugged in dust, as she slept,
                                no sun to tell her if it was day or night,
the three of us kids trying to keep still, feeling our way
                                through the dark dreamt room,
unable to understand that this was the tick-tock of time.
                                 This was what it meant
to live forever.

                  Only nothing lives forever.
                                                The perfect moment—

the gardenias in full bloom
                                chatter staggering through a promenade,
the quivering flit of sparrows chasing
                                the listless light of noon
until suddenly even this ends,
                                 until suddenly a car alarm ruins everything,
the chatter dissolves into people
                                 screaming over each other,
birds fleeing, the owner trying to turn the damn thing off.

               Maybe there were too many moments
that could never stay quiet or whole in her hands
               like the day we took
our first steps, said our first words, or the day
               she fell in love,
slept all night in his open arms, dreamt of the way
               he looked at her as the ocean
wind tossed her floral dress,
               dreamt of the way time could stop,
only to wake up and find every living thing
               changed in some way

everything except
               the flowers in her hands.

Read More

At the Edge of Everything

.Reading time 47 minutes.

By Traci Skuce

Featured Art: by Alex Pasarelu

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.

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Cousin Scott on Food Stamps

.Reading time 4 minutes.

By Anders Carlson-Wee

Featured Art: ‘The Thirty-Six Star Flag of the United States of America’ by unknown

—in memory of Scott Christopher Maxwell
1961–2007

First thing is, I got as much right to get my foodstamps
as the next man. Second thing is, what I make of em
is my own Han Solo. State aint got no right
comin around sniffin halfway up my ass, tryin to catch
some little whiff of a goddamn infringement.
If I wanna fetch my breakfast with em, fine,
let a cowboy fry his bacon. If I wanna sell em for cash
or trade em for dope, that’s my own Han Solo.
You think I’m gettin rich outta this?
You think I’m puttin some greenbacks away someplace?
Saint me somebody if I’m flush in more than bellybutton lint.
And anyways I’m only sellin em to veterans.
That’s the third thing. A lotta vets can’t even get
no foodstamps, and you mind tellin me why?
You think them boys went off and lost a leg
in Iraq or some other ass crack of the planet
just to come back home to trade me a dime-sack
and some percocet? What? So they can hobble
their broke ass down to Deals Only and garner themselves
with nothin but a stone cold bite of somethin to eat?
You tell me. Me, I don’t even wanna guess.
And the other thing is, what’s the difference
if I got two-three a them food cards?
Who am I hurtin? I’m askin you––who am I hurtin?
And I know right off what you’re gonna lay on me.
You think I’m reachin in and stealin them tax dollars
right out your own privately owned ass crack.
But the thing is, I aint got your goddamn tax dollars.
Where you think all them sorry ass one-legged vets
is comin back from? Disneyland?
War aint the Lord’s plan, I can tell you that much.
Course, neither is foodstamps. Lord’s got two hands
and he aint askin for handouts with neither of em.
And you can bet your whole hard-on
he aint givin em away neither. That’s why I stopped
prayin. Lord aint givin and Lord aint takin.
Lord’s reachin out same way a tree reaches.
Real slow and easy. Sorta callin you in
without callin, cept maybe with the wind.
And your job’s as simple as goin to him, cause you’re lost
and you know it. And that’s the same shake
them vets was expectin to get when they come back
one-legged, but they didn’t get that, did they?
No they didn’t. Got percocet. And they’ll be dosin that shit
till the day they’re dead. What’s that old sayin?
Send me home in my casket. Well, tell you what,
the minute I’ve gone and dropped off dead
and been laid to rest, you got my god’s honest say-so
to bust open my casket and stick a straw
up my ass and suck and see if you find any flavors
that taste just even a little bit like your goddamn tax dollars.

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Last Seen on a Milk Carton

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Reese Conner

Featured Art: by Sebald Beham

In the photo on the left, the first Jesus poses
with a thorny crown scratching his skull
and his right arm slung around the cross
as if he and the cross are friends
or first-time prom dates,
while his mane, miraculous, immaculately
tumbles to his shoulders
in loose curlicues, the bounce of which
you can easily imagine
though scarcely believe
considering the dry, desert air,
and his skin (that skin!) is a goldilocks-bronze,
is light enough
not to alarm the whites
is dark enough
not to alarm the historians,
and his eyes are trustworthy
and inevitable—you don’t get to say
you’re the son of God
with any old eyes, no,
they need to be
more lamblike than lifelike—

meanwhile, in the photo on the right,
the second Jesus, age-progressed
two millennia since he went missing,
is a skeletal heap. And you begin to think
how sad it must be
that they keep looking for him.

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The Resort

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Preston Martin

He paces, half naked,
across his second-floor balcony,
phone against his ear.

A translucent mist moves on shore,
the swoosh of high tide hardly heard
across mannered dunes.

As the day moon hangs
over his building fresh sunlight sinks
low in the moist air like a lemon slice in soda,
sparkling dewy marigolds, dollar weeds.

The man paces, turns, punctuates
thoughts with a free hand, either
pleading or singing into the phone.
Please

let it be to an old love,
who loved him on this beach, loved him once,
on a tender morning like this morning.

Still now, he stares at the phone,
as if it were sentient, caring,
as if the conversation still goes on,

as if the greater part of life
isn’t our suitcase of memories,
handled everywhere,
the calling back

of times slipped through fingers,
the calling back
what can’t come back.

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Sneakers

.Reading time 7 minutes.

By Patrick Crerand

Featured Art: ‘blue sneakers’

My father never exercised. He chased me upstairs after a fresh word at the dinner table once or twice—quick sprints that ended with a face-slap photo finish—but no trips to the gym, hardly even a ball game on TV. On weekends, he wore sneakers—not tennis shoes—always sneakers, as if that’s what one did to hide silently from the world of sport.

But that day—my sixth birthday—after he made the cake and gave me the Frisbee, he said to my surprise, “Let’s see if it spins.” I was out the door in the backyard before he had laced up the first shoe. Neither one of us was very good, but there we stood, spinning the bee in front of the sugar snap peas he had planted, when we heard Aaron, the boy next door, scream in a high, inhuman pitch—a cartoonish noise I thought only diving eagles made, or the ricochet of bullets in old westerns. I almost laughed. My father knew better. He straightened and ran toward Aaron in the side yard between the houses. He leapt over the chainlink gate with a quick hop, following behind the crying boy until he caught him by the arm and saw where Aaron was pointing. “What?” my father asked.

“My sister,” Aaron screamed.

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Detective Story

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By James Lineberger

Featured Art: by sir Edwin Landseer

When I worked as a janitor at the courthouse
I met a detective in the Sheriff’s department
whose son, I learned, had committed suicide
some months earlier. Having lost a son myself
in a car-train collision, I tried to offer my condolences.
“Your boy kill himself?” the detective asked bluntly.
“We never knew,” I replied. The detective grunted
noncommittally and opened his desk drawer to take out
a photo of his son, a young man in his twenties, kneeling
and embracing a dog as he grinned for the camera.
“Two days before it happened,” the detective said.
“About the same age as our son,” I said.
The detective stared at the photo for a moment.
“You got a dog?” he asked.
“Two,” I said.
“Thing about a dog,” he said, “a person can screw up
a hundred ways, and his dog will love him when he can’t
even love his self.”
“Our son’s dog still sleeps at the foot of his bed,” I said.
The detective turned the photograph over on its face
and glanced up at me, his eyes as cold as stars.
“Ain’t his dog,” he said. “It’s mine.”

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Sunny Day

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Joyce Schmid

Featured Art: ‘Woman Lying in the Dunes near Noordwijk’ Jan Toorop

Verweile doch, du bist so schön.
—Goethe

I grab the young, unruly day
and say, Stand still, stand still.
I want to comb her hair and dress her up,

but she just laughs and wriggles in my grasp
and breaks away. She dances mockingly,
just out of reach, the little imp,

and runs ahead of me. I’m running
out of energy to try
to catch her in my arms,

warm, fragrant child,
her changeling eyes lit up
with winter sun.

Come here, you darling day,
and stay with me
a while, a little while.

Read More

Of Course Death

.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Roy Mash

Of course death is on its way,
       and life’s a blink,
and yes the unexamined one sucks,
       and doubtless
we’re well-advised, periodically,
       to expose ourselves
to the nuisance of these truths,
       waggling their
fingers with their thumbs in
       their ears, ever
heckling us with the raspberry
        of our mortality.

Still, we cannot carpe every diem,
       squeegee the universe
of each last moment, shovel our
       noses 24/7 into
the coffee or the roses or
       what-have-you.
Virgin-bedding stratagems aside,
       some days, maybe
even most days, the unforgiving
       minute’s happy
just to be left alone, frittered
       on some dopey
soap opera, or stewing over
       a parking ticket.

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On Being Asked to Contribute to the Villains Feature

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Richard Cecil

Featured Art: by Odilon Redon

I searched ten years of word files looking for
titles with names of politicians who
enrich the rich while trampling down the poor
and corporate criminal CEOs who screw
employees out of wages, rape the Earth,
and hide their stolen billions far offshore,
and drew a blank. I also found a dearth
of killer clowns and warlords steeped in gore,
religious rabble rousers, nasty nuns,
child-abusing Catholic priests—zero.
No bought congressmen who vote pro-gun;
no homicidal patriotic heroes.
What’s blinded me to monsters all those years?
The Frankenstein inside. It’s him I fear.

Read More

Villainous Villanelle

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Denise Duhamel

My id spits and licks his lips, trips my conscience,
my ego, Miss Goody Two Shoes.
Her neon pink laces make him nauseous.

My ego finds my id monstrous—
His red face is bulbous. He reeks of booze
as he spits and licks his lips, trips my conscience

and my allegiance is split. My id’s obnoxious,
full of tattoos, a shower long overdue.
But my ego’s pink laces make me nauseous.

My ego and id live in a province
of my psyche, battling to be my muse.
My id spits and licks his lips, trips my conscience.

He tells me evil is the only constant,
that villains are cool. Who needs society’s rules?
My neon pink laces make him nauseous.

I go to a shrink to check my noggin.
Her pantsuit is blue. Her couch is chartreuse.
I spit and lick my lips. She trips my subconscious.
Her neon pink briefcase makes me nauseous.

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Milton’s Satan and the Grammar of Evil

.Reading time 16 minutes.

By Kimberly Johnson

In the long tradition of literary villains, no figure towers with such gleeful, scene- chomping menace as the character of Satan in Milton’s Paradise Lost. Satan the arch-fiend, the über-villain, elaborated out of the bare-bones narrative of Genesis by New Testament writers into a primeval malevolence that Milton combined with epically heroic qualities. Satan the dauntless, who in the first book of Milton’s opus strides imperiously across the lake of burning marl, rallying his vanquished followers to a brave resurgence against God’s favorite creation. Satan the guileful, who seduces Eve into humanity’s “First Disobedience” (1.1). The plot of Paradise Lost offers plenty of opportunity for Satan to scheme, beguile, attack, and otherwise subvert the designs of Milton’s God. But I’d suggest that such narrative exploits are mere caricatures of evil, and distract from Satan’s most damnable offense, which inheres not in any particular action in his own interest or against God’s. Rather, Satan falls under the text’s greatest condemnation for his refusal to act as a morally self-determined agent. In Milton’s poem, Satan exposes his deepest villainy in his denial of his own agency. 

Rather than looking to some episode of valor or vaunting on Satan’s  part, in order to suss out Satan’s particular brand of indolent evil in Paradise Lost we can alight with him atop Mount Niphates, where he perches at the outset of Book 4 and delivers a monologue. Unobserved by either loyal minions or intended dupes, Satan mutters his words to himself without thought of being overheard, thus introducing into the midst of this headlong and familiar tale of the Fall a moment of lyric dilation. Time suspends, plot events pause, and Satan reveals his tragic flaw not in his actions but in his language. He begins with an apostrophe to the unresponsive sun,

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The Pleasure of Browning’s Villains

.Reading time 22 minutes.

By Robert Cording

As an undergraduate in a state college, I read an essay by Howard Moss, a poet I admired and the poetry editor of The New Yorker  at that time. Though   his advice was of the usual “learn the tradition” school, what Moss said about writing poems struck my insecure hyperconscious-of my-poorly-educated self hard—he said, unless a poet knew the poems of the past, that poet was bound to repeat what another poet had already done better. Solid, but obvious advice that, nevertheless, I took deeply to heart. And so I went off to graduate school in English in 1972, closeting, like many of my fellow graduate students, my desire to be a writer inside the more mainline pursuit of a doctoral degree. In an early Victorian literature class, I first read Robert Browning. I was writing persona poems, trying to find my own voice by assuming the guise of others. Struck by the energy of Browning’s dramatic monologues, I began to think about the way he appropriated first-person narration and about the way his poems worked dramatically, through their plots.

His “villains,” in poems such as  “Porphyria’s Lover,” “The Bishop  Orders His Tomb at Saint Praxed’s Church,” and the more famous, possessively titled, “My Last Duchess,” all employed untrustworthy first-person speakers that were allowed to convict themselves. And, while Browning was clearly concerned with the immorality of villainy, his aim was modern in so far as these were poems of the “act of the mind,” as Wallace Stevens would later define modern poetry. They were not about ideas of pride and envy, or possessiveness and the love of material things, but about the reader’s experience of the villainy at the heart of them. Or to put it another way, the reader’s experience of the speaking voice, a voice that created, as it went on talking, a kind of internal, if perverted, order within the fictional entity of the poem.

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The Villain Who Shut Down an Epic

.Reading time 17 minutes.

By Jeanne Murray Walker

Recently, as I was on the way back from our usual early morning at the gym, I told my husband that the editors of New Ohio Review had asked me to write a piece about a villain in a poem.

“What do you mean?” he asked.

“Well, it’s interesting, don’t you think, that poems might have villains? Like murder mysteries?”

“Oh, I get it,” he said. “In Robert Frost’s ‘Mending Wall,’ the villain is the wall.”

“No.” I laughed. After all, how can a wall be a villain? I had been thinking of narratives like The Odyssey and “My Last Duchess.”

But when I re-read Frost’s lyric, I saw what my husband meant. It is the power of evil, both the shadows of the trees and darkness of the heart, that builds and maintains the wall between Frost and his neighbor. I began to feel deeply curious: What can we learn from watching villains in poetry?

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Maker and Prophet: Frank Bidart and the Mask of “Herbert White”

.Reading time 14 minutes.

By Mario Chard

Looking at Frank Bidart’s “Herbert White” always horrifies. The art is extreme, a mode Bidart has suggested he prefers. And why? Because he gives voice to a monster, the worst kind, a necrophiliac, a rapist and murderer of young girls. And because White’s voice is at once human, demotic, stupid even (“What the shit?”), and elevated (“how I wanted to see beneath it, cut // beneath it, and make it / somehow, come alive”), often shifting our attention the way a character’s voice can when it suddenly turns to eloquence, we get the sense of another meaning behind the words themselves, another presence.

Framed in dramatic monologue, the poem follows the associative movements of Herbert White’s mind as he recalls his murders and victims, his return to their “discomposed” bodies, his childhood forays into torture and rape, his anger in adulthood at his father for “sleeping around” and starting a new family. Above all, we are witness to White’s clawing through his mind to make us “see” and understand how “beautiful” his crimes have appeared to him, to go back to those moments when he could “feel things make sense” before his guilt would force his mind to “blur” and trick him into believing that “somebody else did it, some bastard / had hurt a little girl.” Reeling at his straightforward confessions, we forget or ignore that everything White admits is spoken in the past tense until the only line alluding to his current state of mind appears near the end and shocks us with the revelation that his guilt has finally won out, that he is burning in a consciousness of his own sins: “I hope I fry.”

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The Unredeemed Villain?: Ai’s “Child Beater”

.Reading time 13 minutes.

By Denise Duhamel

So often we are drawn to literary villains because of our shadow selves, parts of us so ugly, selfish, or antisocial we repress them. Sometimes we even find ourselves rooting for the villain—if we can’t be the heroes, we can at least find release in cackling along with Captain Hook, Tom Ripley, Hannibal Lecter, or the Joker. And we often can’t help but identify with those villains who are written with empathy and complexity.

In most novels, comic books, or films this villain will be conquered, suppressed, or will enjoy a narrow escape that makes us feel both excited and ill-at- ease. In a sequel, the hero or heroine will battle this villain again, a rematch that seems psychologically true as we recognize the cycles of evil around us.

But how do we negotiate a villain who acts with impunity, with no heroine on the way to save the injured party? How do we negotiate a villain in a poem that has no sequel or counterpart? How do we negotiate a villain in a poem that offers no rescue, just an emboldened perpetrator?

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Villains of Confessionalism

.Reading time 13 minutes.

By Kathryn Nuernberger

William Blake, reflecting on how much readers tend to prefer that old villainous anti-hero Satan to any of the good guys in Paradise Lost, remarked, “The reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels and God, and at liberty when of Devils and Hell, is because he was a true Poet and of the Devil’s party without knowing it.”

Certainly there are no shortages of ways to be a villain, but poets, freed as they are from the constraints of “plot” are also freed from the narrow alleyways of that first-order definition for villain, “character whose evil actions or motives are important to the plot.” Instead, we, or the speakers we inhabit, can be villainously “responsible for trouble” or “causing of harm” or “sources of damage.” To that end, Confessionalism is a genre of poetry that offers unique opportunities for inventions in villainy, dragging vices like wrath or pride into grayer terrain, or maybe even, in some cases, the light.

There is, famously, that time Robert Lowell quoted directly and without permission from the pleading letters his soon-to-be-ex-wife, the writer Elizabeth Hardwick, sent asking him to leave off his affair and return to her and their daughter. Or the times Sylvia Plath excoriates one aspect of an oppressive hegemony—its condescending patriarchy—while propping up its racism and antisemitism through thoughtless metaphorical appropriations. Oh, but they don’t mean to do it exactly, which makes their villainy so much more—well, let’s just say it’s no party, the devil’s or otherwise, this work we the living do of dragging our ancestors to confession. For this essay I propose instead a jubilee of recent confessional poets who have learned from these examples how to create on purpose speakers who are troublesome, reckless, dangerous, and careening. They make an art of it—these infernal confessions—and I can’t get enough of such raw lyric villainy.

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“Guilt Is Magical”: Adultery as Poetic Villainy

.Reading time 12 minutes.

By Catherine Pierce

The best villains—or at least the most compelling—are those who own their villainy, and, in owning it, reckon with it. And the most compelling poems tend to be those that do the same kind of reckoning; as Yeats famously wrote, “We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.”

Adultery is, certainly, one of the quieter types of villainy—not nearly as flashy as murder, bank robbery, or comic-book citywide destruction—but also, like all domestic villainies, far more commonplace, and insidious precisely because of that. It’s no surprise, given poetry’s historical attraction to passion, high drama, romance, and regret, that the genre is lousy, so to speak, with cheaters and homewreckers quarrelling with themselves all the way to revelation.

Read More

New Ohio Review Issue 20 (Originally printed Fall 2016)

.Reading time less than 1 minute.

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

New Ohio Review Issue 20 (Originally printed Fall 2016)

.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 20 compiled by Alli Mancz.

How to Survive on Land

.Reading time 50 minutes.

By Joy Baglio

Featured Art: Playful Mermaid by Henri Héran, 1897

Let me tell you about my mother, a mermaid: For years, despite her handicaps, she embraced land life in Okanogan, Washington—the drizzly winters and sun-soaked summers—with a steadfastness both impressive and exhausting. She read us stories with the ardor of a human mother; bagged our lunches; brushed our hair. For years, she was just Mom: Mom who snuggled up to us on the couch with a book; Mom who packed Tupperware containers full of watermelon and whisked us away to the town pool on humid summer days; Mom who cooked themed meals (Tuna Tuesdays, Waffle Wednesdays); Mom with her perpetual ocean smell and unruly laughter. Of course, there were harmless omens of her first loyalties: shellfish for breakfast, kelp pods strewn like confetti around our living room, the shrill whale-speak whines that filled our house in the mornings, our Nereid names and Mom’s insistence that my sister Thetis and I explain to every curious land-dweller our sea-nymph heritage. (My name, Amphitrite, means Queen of the Ocean, after all.)

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Bobcat

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Andrew Cox

Featured Art: Summer: Cat on a Balustrade by Théophile-Alexandre Steinlen, 1909

–For Jerry Lee (1934-2016)

There are bobcats in the neighborhood
Said the woman in the decked-out SUV
Do you have a whistle
As I walked off my grief in Texas
Where I came to see my mother die
And when I saw the bobcat
Come from the drainage system
And stare at me with black pupils
Drilling into those yellow eyes
I knew it wanted me to sit down and listen
Love your mother the bobcat asked
Not enough I said
I could have visited more
It said man hands on misery to man
One of your kind wrote that I think
Yes I said the poem is never enough
And neither are the sentences it hissed
They fail in situations like this
Yes I said punctuation doesn’t help
Nothing helps
Remember the bobcat said
You are no longer a son
You had one shot and the pistol is empty
I understand I said though I did not want to
I have two hearts it said
The one they will find when they cut me open
And the one I use to live forever
Think about that
Think about that face those hands her eyes
And it disappeared down the slit
Now I knew where my mother was
In the bobcat’s second heart
The one it uses when it growls into the night
And puts everything in its place
That face those hands her eyes
On the hunt until dawn
Only ready to sleep
When the rest of us are ready to wake

Read More

New Ohio Review Issue 20 (Originally printed Fall 2016)

.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.

Reno Redux

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Ansie Baird

Featured Art: Man holding a horse by the bridle by Dirck Stoop

My father flew to Reno, Nevada, sixty
solemn years ago to sue for a divorce.
I had no idea where Nevada was or
why my parents were divorcing.
In the mail arrived a shiny photograph,
my father sitting tall on a horse.
I had no idea he knew how to ride.
He carried a rifle across his lap and
on his head he’d set a cowboy hat.
He was smiling like all-get-out.
I had no idea what there was to smile about.

He stayed away six weeks, at some
dude ranch where rattlesnakes curled
and lurked in the underbrush. I lived
in a cluttered city house without
rattlesnakes or a father. My mother
packed up all our winter coats and boots
and sold the house. We moved into a flat.
After that, everything was touch-and-go.

Reno was a place I planned to boycott.
Sixty years later, I’m at the Reno airport
waiting for a connection,
uncertain when it’s taking off.
All of us seem to be divorced.
Slot machines clack at my elbow,
crowds of men in cowboy hats lurk
in plush corridors, looking like they
might be someone’s father.

Read More

Chino, California

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Darla Himeles

Two crows claw down to cement
between the outer and inner fences—

beaks like swords, backs slick,
slashing wings and talons.

I watch them fight from my car today
as I watched my parents as a child: clutching

a book in my lap. I cannot read
the crows or my father, for whom I wait

in my locked car, his bag of belongings
in the back seat beside the maps I printed

to find him. At once, a line cuts
from one building to another: orange

jumpsuits shocking under smoggy, industrial sky.
I pinch my lip, examine their faces, their gaits.

Not my father, not my father—maybe? No,
not my father.

Hours pass, the crows disperse.
The prison yard empties.

Two hours after the designated release, a small
group of men gathers at the gate.

Escorted by officers, they wear stiff beige chinos,
white canvas loafers, and baggy T-shirts

to greet the other side. I see him
shaking his gray head to an officer, No,

there’s nobody here for me—must be a mistake—
Sir, I need the bus fare promised me.

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Certain Things

.Reading time 1 minute.

By David Brendan Hopes

Featured Art: Tinker with His Tools by Camille Pissarro, 1874/76

For the sake of my father, certain things
must be done in a certain way:
tightening of bolts, of nuts around threads;
coiling of hoses; firm, instant replacement of lids;
spreading of seed from the hand held just so,
in furrows dug to the joint or the knuckle, depending;
wash it when you use it, never put it up wet;
don’t be opening and closing the screen door
as if you were a cat.
Be grateful for a job, a meal, a leg up.
All that.
In the seasons set aside for such emotions,
of course I hated him.
All things, even hatred, wear away.
In the season set aside I became him,
doing what he did in the way he did it,
hiding the injured heart the way he hid it.
Waking so many hours before full day
from the dream
that something certain’s gone astray.

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She-Monster Gets Fired

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Kim Farrar

Here you are again, running from the villagers
with their torches and pitchforks. You thought
you finally fit in. You filed down
your neck-bolts, got rid of your high-waters.
You watched Oprah, kept a dream diary,
a gratitude journal, pictures of your thinner self
on the fridge. You tried to keep your need
for electricity minimized: licking the outlets,
rubbing your hair with a balloon for just a crackle.

You knew it would happen. Every morning—
the affirmations, the meditation, the positive thinking.

You longed for lightning and rain.
You did everything right to escape
the old ways of staring into the well.
It took years of practicing the right laugh.
You did your best. Married up.
Got a job teaching ESL. Now and then,
a grunt would slip and
crickets     crickets     crickets.

People liked you. You were funny.

But one day you found refuge
eating flies in the faculty lounge;
soon you stopped hiding
your green undertones with foundation.
You missed being the girl
who loved her square head,
touched her thick-stitched scars like Braille.

The villagers yell, Kill her! Kill the monster!

You’re barreling through the woods,
nettle whips your ankles as you soar
over logs in your clodhoppers.
You’re filled with the old familiar joy
of being free and incredible.

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Why It’s Hard to Write About My Brother

.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Kim Farrar

Because he called me numbnut
            now no one calls me numbnut
Because in therapy I learned the word infantilize
            and stopped asking him if he was all right
Because I want to recite the titles of his paperbacks instead
             Dune       Silent Spring       Slaughterhouse-Five
Because he showed me how to give the finger when I was six
             and then I showed Mom
Because I listened to him curse in the bathroom
             after Dad buzz-cut his hair
Because at 54 he could still bruise the same spot
             with a knuckle-punch
Because we discussed the etymology of kerfuffle
             but never mentioned emphysema
Because the last time he lit a Marlboro to rest
             I joined him
Because he taught me Sudoku
             but said he couldn’t help with counting to ten
Because they took him away in a midnight body bag
Because he could pinch open the beak of a baby robin
             to feed it drops of milk
Because he once touched me and I cooperated
Because to wreck cars, to drive drunk, was a form of apology
             for being a disappointing son
Because he comforted my worry that his tetras were bored
             They have no memory, numbnut,
             each swim back is a new ocean
             and then I envied them
Because his longest relationship was with a club-footed lovebird
Because I’d ask about the impossible physics
             of the hummingbird’s flight to spin the conversation
             away from troubles
Because he said I couldn’t get good at Sudoku
             because he had to beat me at something
Because he drove me around the city
             to point out the cement he’d poured,
             the flagpole at the post office, the Kroger’s sidewalk
Because he said the one thing he liked about the job
             was leaving something permanent
Because his ashes are in a box and I worry about moisture
Because our last day together at Newport Aquarium
             we watched sharks swimming overhead
Because he would withdraw for months
             but I left messages anyway
Because he loved my dream of him

Read More

At the Threshold

.Reading time 32 minutes.

By Marilyn Abildskov

Featured Art: Dilapidated House, 1811

She hesitates, then opens the unlocked door. The house is not hers. It’s nobody’s yet. That’s why she’s here. To walk on red tiles in the empty entryway. To see if there’s carpet yet in the bedrooms. To touch the smooth white marble fireplace that reaches the ceiling in the living room. To wander empty rooms before the rooms are filled.

Here in the entranceway of the new empty house she says out loud—hello hello—and listens for something, a spirit maybe, to say something back.

Nothing. Not even an echo.

From the kitchen window, she can see her home, the tip of a modernist triangle roof. In the distance, she can hear her mother playing the piano, lost in the music. Her shoes squeak against the floorboards of the hallway. No carpet. Not yet.

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My Good Brother

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Young Smith

Featured Art: Two Boys Watching Schooners by Winslow Homer, 1880

If I had a brother, he would be called Enoch or Ephraim—
a name alive with the wisdom of some long forgotten past.
Though older than me, there would be no gray yet in his beard.

There would be no lines on his face, and his full hair—
not thinning yet, like mine—would be brown as the wings
of a thrush. He would whisper Roethke in his sleep,

my brother Ephraim or Enoch, and his poetry would lift
the weight of old bruises from my eyes. He would visit
our father’s grave and feel none of my dark anger there.

He would sing the dead man’s favorite songs, recalling
only his happiest hours. He would have learned to live gently,
my brother, and would teach me that secret with nothing more

than a nod or a warm arm across my shoulders. You, Enoch; you,
Ephraim—how I long for the cool press of your hand on the back
of my neck, my good brother, my quiet companion of cruel nights.

Read More

Here There Was a Stool with a Crippled Leg

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Young Smith

Featured Art: The Chair from The Raven by Édouard Manet, 1875

There are no ghosts in her rented house—
only the shadows of objects

removed by other tenants long ago.
Here there was a stool with a crippled leg,

here a bookshelf filled with fat Russian novels,
here an upright piano with wine-stained keys.

These furnishings have vanished, but their shapes continue—
like spots on the retina after looking at the sun . . .

Though she can find no path from one door
to the next where the shades of their sofas

don’t stand one within the other, of the former
tenants themselves, very little can be said . . .

The mirrors have collected the pale stories of their eyes,
but the glass is too crowded to tell them clearly—

yet even now, among the wraiths of hat trees
and recliners, where the dust of their voices

drifts like smoke along the baseboards,
she can often feel their sorrows, breathing

slowly in the corners, still alive
with a helpless longing to sleep.

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Gorilla

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Young Smith

“Sullen” only begins to describe it—
his all too lucid, all too human stare.

His mate sits nursing an infant behind him
in the mouth of an artificial cave, while,

just to busy his hands, it seems, he strips
leaves from a twig of bamboo. His gestures

are slow and deliberate, but as his fingers work,
his eyes never leave us, moving in turn

from one face, from one camera to the next.
This, of course, is what holds us at the rail—

that he watches back, like no other animal
in the zoo—and there is only one way

to understand his expression: he has little
hope for the health of our souls.

Read More

Moksha

.Reading time 30 minutes.

By Alexander Weinstein

Featured Art: Street at Saverne by James McNeill Whistler, 1858

I.

Rumor was you could still find enlightenment in Nepal, and for cheap. There were back rooms down the spider-webbed streets of Kathmandu where they wired you in, kicked on the generator, and sent data flowing through your brain for fifteen thousand rupees a session. It was true, Jeff from the coop had assured Abe, though passport control could be a bitch when you returned to the States.

“They pulled my buddy when we hit Newark,” Jeff had said, sipping maté from a gourd. “But he was showing. His third eye was completely open and he wanted to hug everyone. Just think about porn and you’ll be fine.” Jeff had handed Abe a crinkled business card. Namaste Imports. “Go to this place.”

So Abe had saved his money, bought the ticket, and traveled the endless hours, numbed by bad sleep and bland airline food, to find himself in Kathmandu. Finding Namaste Imports, however, had proved impossible. The streets had no names, and looking up, all Abe saw was a tangle of electrical wires and lights blinking on in the dusk. Around him, masses of tourists, heavy with backpacks and vacant looks, milled about. And amid all this churned a perpetual stream of cars and mopeds, nudging their way around pedestrians, honking, yelling out of windows, and raising endless dust. It all seemed far from enlightenment.

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Bluebirds Are Cavity Nesters

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By W. J. Herbert

Featured Art: Bird’s Nest and Ferns by Fidelia Bridges, 1863

Cement truck crushing stones
at 3 a.m. on a Flatbush side street?
No, must be the double bass player
grinding his seven-foot case along broken sidewalks,
as if inside his sarcophagus
whose fist-sized wheels are screaming
there’s a mummy dressed in lead,
and it’s so hot again my ceiling fan’s blade
is a soldier’s lame leg that is drooping
and each time he turns,
it drums on the inverted edge of the light bowl
while someone upstairs
drops the booted foot he just cut from a corpse,
but he keeps cutting and dropping,
cutting and dropping,
so it must be a dozen corpses, or
maybe it’s a frozen hen landing again and again,
as though my landlady’s niece, still drunk,
has made up a game in which you get ten points if,
when you drop it from the top of a ladder,
the hen lands on her severed neck.
I can’t sleep. Even if Sialia sialis
relies on dead trees for nest sites,
it’s smart enough to live deep away from the world.

Read More

Anniversary Gift

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Robert Cording

Featured Art: Peacock and Dragon by William Morris, 1878

After reading that hummingbirds
are so light eight of them can be mailed
for the price of a first-class stamp,
I close my eyes and see them, fully revived,
rising out of some envelope of old memories.
I’ll name them again as we once did
so long ago—Rufous, Anna’s, and Broad-tailed—
darting to and from the feeders, sipping,
then retreating, flying jewels
the Spanish called them, and now I recall
how one of the Anna’s, its garnet head
and throat glowing in the misted air,
hung like a jewel at your ear.

Here they are, or the memory of them.
Remember that trying-too-hard-to-be-hip
B&B in Telluride, a hot tub on the roof;
above the water, crisscrossing strings
decorated with Japanese lanterns
and four red heart-shaped feeders that brought
close the ebullience of the hummingbirds.
They surged around us, their kaleidoscope
of iridescent colors lightening
the cool, rainy day and helping us forget
the fogged-in, dim presence of the Rockies
we had come for and couldn’t see.
Curtained in the tub’s steaming air,
soon enough our eyes were in love
with birds we couldn’t stop looking at,
their scintillant existence drawing
jeweled lines we swore we could see.

Which is why I’m bringing back the past,
those tiny birds disappearing
into all the years behind us now,
but today returning all at once,
as if some blessing had been conferred
without my asking; and so
I offer them to you, hoping these words,
even though they dim the colors as they must,
will draw for you their sweet transport.

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The Cave

.Reading time 3 minutes.

By David Gullette

Coming back from Escamequita past the curve at the peak
there was the valley of Carrizal with its steep mountain rising above it.

What’s that up there? I asked. Looks like the entrance to a mine.
Oh, the old man said, That’s the Cueva de los Duendes.

I knew the word from Lorca’s great essay
but he meant some dark flamenco trance when strummed sheepguts
and a shout beyond reason jam in our ears the mesmerizing song of death.

Here in the back woods of Nicaragua it just means little people,
fairies, minor local deities, trolls, semi-domesticated goblins.
Or witches. Things that rustle the bushes after the moon rises
or borrowing feathers shriek in the sky above your chickens.

Why do I feel this perverse relief that something remains here
to challenge the cult of the soft Galilean and his stay-at-home Mom?
Some trace of the pre-Columbian, or something from the hills and caves
of Spain, smuggled in with the priests and horses?

Once I was in Yucatan: An afternoon storm was brewing
and when the thunder shook the limestone world
the Mayan lady at the kiosk looked up and said “Xac!”
The old god of lightning, rain, and fertility.

Remember how Wallace Stevens’ Crispin, hearing
a rumbling west of Mexico fled, and knelt in the cathedral
with the rest? The thunder unleashed a self possessing him,
some quintessential fact that was, he says, not in him in Connecticut.

My idle thought passing through Carrizal was to find a way to climb the hill,
enter the giant portal of the cave, probe the interior with my LED.
But “to know a thing is to kill it,” says Lawrence,
and I’m too old to court more disenchantment,

so back to town: a little rum, check the banality of the Internet,
news of winter’s vacancy back in Boston, a little European music
to sprinkle on the sizzling red snapper . . . How easy to live it,
this our minimal unhaunted twenty-first-century life.

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Still

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Alison Jarvis

Featured Art: The Artist’s Sitting Room in Ritterstrasse by Adolph Menzel, 1851

Somewhere up in the Bronx,
in rented space I’ve never seen, seven
rooms of the old life, waiting
in storage. Shrouded wing chairs,
Persian rugs, your mother’s
engraved silver, nesting and spooning
in a mahogany box. Racks
of your oils. The body of the grand piano
had to be separated from its legs
so everything could fit—

     I miss our music.

Sunday, on the little radio
I heard Lotte Lenya sing
that song about searching, her urgency
tilted the room, I was that
off-balance

and dying to hear it again,
even in my own voice. The ether
offers up dozens of versions, none
the one I wanted. One night,
years into your illness—I was whirling—
singing “Pirate Jenny”
when you calmed me—Wait
sweetheart, you said, Lenya
is perfectly still
when she sings that
in the movie.

It’s true. This morning, the light
a slit in the blind, I finally found it
on YouTube. Her body
never moves, only her eyes
and even they stop
near the end. Rapt,
I watched it for hours—

Typed your ghost email,
pressed send.

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