NOR: Embrace Your Conjunctions
By Kathleen Holliday
Despite blistered heels
in new shoes,
I can’t seem to leave this gallery
of sarcophagi.
I limp closer to a glass case
where displayed en pointe
a pair of tiny sandals lies
pristine, and I wonder—
never worn?
Parting the stream of visitors
two statues rise monolithic
a man and woman, side by side
each an arm circling the other’s waist.
Look at them, still standing
never turning back.
Look, I’d say, if you were here
how they’ve outlasted us.
By Cecilia Hagen
Once, for fixing a car, my husband was paid with a large bag
of small fish—smelt, frozen into a block that was flecked
with scores of silver eyes. I would bring a dull knife
out to the chest freezer and break off a chunk,
let it thaw in the sink and feed it to the cats and dog.
Another customer shaved off some of the cost of her engine rebuild
by knitting my husband wool socks that needed to be washed
a particular way, which I failed to do, because this customer
wanted to do more for him than knit his socks, and maybe did.
After they shrank, I could have but wouldn’t wear the socks myself,
a waste I could live with. In the pantry sat another trade, a jar
of home-canned venison I never dared to open.
Those purplish cubes of meat in their purplish fluid
pushed against the jar’s insides for years.
My favorite trades were the things the metalsmith made:
a hammered a rack for pans, a copper vase,
and three bright numbers that still mark that house—
beautiful things with the tang of the earth inside them.
By Tanya Bomsta
First, it was a painting of sunflowers. He had always been afraid of them, had always thought their gaudy yellow petals blossomed from something sinister. And their height—it was unnatural, he thought, for a flower to stare you in the face. They were plants, not people. Christopher was tall himself, just about six feet. Tall enough to meet a short sunflower, but not quite tall enough to tower over one. It unnerved him, the way they seemed to look at him, the seeds in their disks like so many spider eyes. He shuddered every time he drove by the boundless fields of them on his way to work, with their leggy stems bending under the gross weight of their heads, their huge blank faces open and screaming in the wind.
But there had been a painting in the museum, and he hadn’t been able to stop looking at it. In the background, a nasty storm with deep purple clouds billowed against a bruised sky. In the foreground, the shadowed, golden petals of three sunflowers were being buffeted by the fierce gusts. Dark sky, dark flowers, the threat of storm so strong he almost turned his head and looked out the museum window to see if it was raining.
Read MoreBy Tracey Knapp
There’s a man with the rope of a cowbell curled
around his Captain Morgan. He whispers his poems
from a stack of papers, sees your own and nods,
buys you a drink. No conversation needed.
Another person adjusts their blonde wig and quietly
sings Mi mi mi mi meeeee repetitively. You wonder
what song they’ll actually sing—their wig slightly off tilt.
A man cradles his ukulele like a baby. Everyone stares
into their drinks, performing their rehearsal, rubs
the dark worn wood of the bar. You doodle stars
on your pages. Half the people here will only show up
once. No one will tip, and they’ll leave their empty glasses
on the sticky tables, their printouts of songs and poems
on the floor. You were the first to arrive, not thinking
to stop home and put on something more formal
than yoga pants. It doesn’t matter. There is some
common urge to perform whatever thought you have,
to share with these strangers. It’s Sunday night
and raining. Why sit alone silently on your faulty couch
with the endless drone of 60 Minutes on the television,
the single-serving life of pasta and tomato sauce, the rain
driving the ants into your kitchen? Someone taps
the microphone, says HELLO, HELLO. The wig rises
to the stage, sings “I Fall to Pieces” unconvincingly.
By Tracey Knapp
By Kathleen Loe
The gravelly edge of the old macadam
crunches when Daddy Man veers, slightly over
his two-cocktail breakfast limit—whoa!
And Mama’s all, “Bi-ill!”, sherry sloshing
in her Dixie cup, me and my altar-boy brothers
welded to the backseat of red Chevy summer
vinyl, our own trinity, looking and not looking
for a tiny worn-out sign set meekly back
from the scorching road—St. Lucy’s Catholic Church,
faded and falling away, not the go-to
for the church-going in this neck of the north
piney woods. Far from a hundred cathedrals
sinking in the soft black silt of New Orleans,
we aim toward a single consecrated
gray rectangle stuck in the Chitimacha’s
red clay of North Hodge. Lucky pagans,
or even Methodists, might miss the turn
and be flung past the money-stench
of the paper mill, or further still to actual
wet towns with no need for Jubilee—
Jubilee, cross-dressing bootlegger
come to wax our floors and pocket the cash
and slip my mama her black-market hooch
every week in our dry-as-dust little podunk town
in East Jesus North Looziana, the pure
whitewalled tires of her luscious pink
booze-bought Caddy cutting trenches
in the sweet St. Augustine grass
of our front yard. It ain’t me that’s drunk
in this story about having to go to church
every damn Sunday morning all summer long,
no matter how crazy hot, no matter
if my best friend Bernadette is fixin’ to go
waterskiing on Black Lake instead,
worse thing about that being the snakes
you might wake falling in the wrong spot,
but I’d still pick some dozing water moccasins
over this weekly ecclesiastical misery.
Any minor road accident would be welcome
I pray, I pray we hit a huge nine-banded
armagorilla if it means I don’t have to go
to Confession today, having traded
The Examination of Conscience last night
for finishing Catcher in the Rye under the covers,
accompanied by muffled laughs from Johnny Carson
in my parents’ bedroom. Okay. Pinched
my brother, lied to Mama, ate my best
friend’s Twinkie. Wished and wished
that I was the pretty one, instead of her.
By John Bargowski
I’d already watched him do it a hundred times,
my old man talking me through each step
since I was a young kid, forever warning me
about blow-off, all the hazards
of pressurized air as I stood behind him silently
mouthing: toggle, regulator, output port,
and watched him slide the tap into the spear
of the barrel and lock it down.
So as soon as I’d grown strong enough
to handle a full barrel,
maneuver it around the beer cooler, I followed
him into the basement of the D&J.
I can still hear the rattling compressor kick in,
feel the blast of CO2 sizz past my face,
the ache from the squeeze of his chapped hand
on my shoulder that big day
he shadowed me as I straddled the barrel
then opened the cut-off valve
and let the Rheingold stream through the tubing
to the upstairs spigot.
And after I sopped up spillage from the lip
of the bunghole, tumbled the empty
onto it’s dimpled belly and rolled it out
the double-sealed door into the cellar
then stacked it in a webby corner, I wish
I’d gone back inside, to finish the job,
scratched my name next to his on the rime
coated walls of the walk-in cooler.
By Sarah Cypher
Kelly took a bookkeeper/handyman job at his friend’s deli. He showed up at Abu Hani’s whitewashed corner shop in East Palo Alto three mornings a week. While Abu Hani prepped the food for the lunch crowd, Kelly squared the receipts and paid the bills. He made sure all the little lights in the deli’s sign were working and stocked the anemic rack of trinkets—hamsa talismans, blue-eye pendants. Then, if Abu Hani was still busy, Kelly sat at the register and charmed customers with his radio-announcer voice. The job, to him, was the most dignified way to hide that his energy was draining fast through the sieve of his sixties.
One morning when he was entering receipts in the side office, he heard a customer talking to Abu Hani. Kelly hovered at the door—he couldn’t place the accent, though its dense consonants were almost familiar. He poked his head around the corner. Over the top of the deli case, the guy looked like any of the old-country Arab geezers who came in for their weekly breakfast olives: that gull-wing hairline gelled back from the brow, hair so silver-bright it made a blurry reflection in the polished deli case. Abu Hani had stopped working and was leaning his bulk on his two hairy fists planted on the counter.
The man noticed Kelly standing there, and he swept up his parcels and exclaimed to Abu Hani, “But you are busy! I am keeping you from your day.” In a last flurry of goodwill, he paid his bill and left.
“New guy?” Kelly asked.
Read MoreBy Sydney Lea
An old man sluggishly waves a hand.
He looks spellbound, as if by an apparition:
A stranger, me, in a place few visit.
I’m sidetracked into my own odd spell—
Both sadness at bleakness and fascination.
There’s a sign in another dooryard, bizarre:
Atrini, World’s Finest Files.
A softball arcs on the blistered common,
A father pitching, a son at bat.
One newer car, a Buick, glitters
Like gemstone in front of a postage-stamp store.
Back lots full of witch-grass show unwheeled pickups
Dead amid whips of lilac and sumac.
I drive out of town past further signs:
BECKYS TRUCKERS HEAVEN ONE MILE
COME IN AND HAVE A “CUP” WITH BECK
BECKYS CLOSED FOR RENOVATION
Its windows, boarded over with wanes,
In brush beside it, a bedspring, a dryer.
I notice a black cat eyeing a bird
On its roof, too high for him to consider.
By Nancy Miller Gomez
was after the memorial, her laptop propped on the table
cluttered with half-empty teacups and books
as her mother’s body was buried two time zones over
in Louisiana. After the eulogies and prayers,
and the few people standing graveside walked away
and all the others clicked off, there was nothing to do.
But she couldn’t bring herself to close the screen.
So she sat a long time watching her own face
looking back, and imagined she was her mother,
and watched to see what her mother would have seen
if she’d been there, and in her expression
she could see the love she knew her mother had felt
that last time they’d talked. And then she was crying
and watching herself cry—as if she was her mother,
and the connection was like a counterweight
she could carry, as though an infinity mirror
had opened inside her. It didn’t matter then,
if she hit the red button that said “End.”
By Nancy Miller Gomez
I used to keep old black-and-white photos in my wallet.
They weren’t people I knew, just snapshots of strangers
fished out of a shoebox at a junk store: dark-eyed men
in bomber jackets leaning against muscle cars, or sitting
astride a tractor wearing khakis and an undershirt, a pencil
of mustache above their lip. Women with cat-eyed glasses,
dressed up in feathered hats for a night of gin rickeys,
arms draped across each other’s shoulders and angling
for the camera. Even in grayscale I could see their cheeks
were rouged and their lips were slick with lipstick.
Sometimes I would take these people out and show them
to someone I’d just met. This is my family, I’d say
and watch as they shuffled through the pile of strangers
politely noting how nice-looking they were.
I don’t know why I did this. But it felt good
that all anyone could ever know of me was what I was
willing to show them. This heavyset blonde posing
on the steps of a California bungalow wearing a fur coat
in the obvious heat of summer. These children splashing
in a kiddie pool on a lawn cluttered with beach balls
and hula hoops, a spray of water suspended mid-air
as the camera clicked on the girl’s congenial scream,
her brother’s swashbuckling grin, while father watches
from a folding chair, a beaming fat baby on his lap.
I keep them ready, these people I don’t know. That’s me
I say, pointing at the fat baby. I was happy then.
By Nancy Miller Gomez
—a mi esposo
I appropriate your tongue,
your lips, your teeth, the smooth
inner skin of your cheek.
I appropriate your rolled r’s,
and soft v’s, the way you say
wolf without the letter L
(the plural of which is wooves).
I claim the patch of hair
in the small of your back,
your brown skin, your mother’s molé.
I appropriate your mother,
rename her La Loca. I appropriate
your appropriators, the conquistadors
who came with their archangels
and saints, Our Lady of Guadalupe
with a chisel of moon
at her feet. I descend the ladder
of your lineage, past missionaries
and rancheros to inhabit your ancestors’
ancestors, the Nuhuatl gods
with feathered names I’ve learned
to pronounce. Coatlicue, the mother
of mortals, Huiztlilopotchli—
the hummingbird patron of War,
Tialoc—he who makes things sprout.
I appropriate sugar skulls and mezcal,
Día de los Muertos. Your pyramids
and painters, your Kahlo and Orozco.
Your poets, Octavio and Carlos.
I take your lowriders
and La Raza, the happy/sad
ting of mariachis singing.
I appropriate each sweet bite
of pan dulce and tres leches
and eat your street tacos
smothered with guac and tapatía.
I’ll take la plaza with its bandstand
and white ibis, the man selling
balloons and churros. And words,
nights filled with appropriated
besitos y sonrisas. Abrazos
and the rest of the Mexican lexicon,
all mine. I’ll take your lime and salt,
your fire and fault lines. And our son,
see where I have appropriated
your blood, your eyes, your love
of basketball, the sport you say
your people created, a game
played by the victors
with the decapitated heads
of their victims.
By Nancy Miller Gomez
A songbird mimicking the sounds
of emergency sirens has been
caught on video . . . —CNN
A starling has taught himself to sing
like an ambulance. Now the air is filled
with emergencies. Whee-o, whee-o, high and low,
a fire truck rides out of a mockingbird’s mouth.
Grackles impersonate police cars. They dive-bomb
the precinct parking lot, bashing their beaks
into the rearview mirrors of their rivals.
The magpie knows a lovely air raid. Now
she trills like a helicopter, next a chain saw,
then an AK-47. The quail stop, drop
and cower. Take-CO-ver they cantillate.
Whee-o, whee-o, high and low. Juncos,
pass to Vireos. Catbirds steal the flow.
The chickadees have gone on lockdown.
They bore like bullets through the bleeding bark
of the cedars. Crows reload from rooftops.
By Roger Mitchell
Featured Art: Wind by Mikhail Gordeevich Deregus
Lift a small shovelful of snow
without a shovel
off the stubborn blanket of it
in the field
and throw it completely away,
quickly, too,
so quickly you couldn’t find it ever
crawling
on your hands and knees, calling
out its name,
puff of purest cloud, smoke
of frozen fire,
wind’s breath, you,
with no shovel
and a handful of white air.
By Emily Wheeler
A romance developed in my sixtieth year,
which gave me hope, perhaps inane,
surely extreme, especially in my verse,
and affirmed principles of affection and cheer.
My lover was tender, our love serious, useful.
It was as if in the afternoon, gray, crepuscular
an angel had arrived! And we both so secular!
Of course we never spoke of death, its easeful
nest, or the unlikelihood we’d ever alight
together in the tall trees or, quivering,
fly off at the same moment, but that was alright,
because, whenever new or found or at least not lost,
desire adds a drop to the earth’s thousand rivers
and briefly greens the grave, its bed of moss.
By Emily Wheeler
Less a description of a Thanksgiving
I remember than an invitation
to a party that asks many people,
some alive, some dead,
to fill the front hall
of the old house
with such loud joy
at faces long unseen
that few can reach the quieter
fire-lit room at the back
where cheese and bread await,
and raise glasses of the most delicious,
deepest red wine.
No war, no plague, no economic
collapse deflate the mood.
I make a beeline for my favorite aunt
in the corner looking out the window
at the black river. There I join her
bringing the news that the river
doesn’t mean what it used to mean,
now it’s behind her, not ahead.
By Kari Gunter-Seymour
Featured Art: Equinox by Eugene James McFarland
I’ve been thinking about last times
I never knew were the last—
grandma cooing me unconscious,
daddy whistling me home to supper,
my toddler’s toothless grin, tiny fingers
clenching wildflowers, the last time
I prayed, desperate for those departed,
how they flit ahead of us, flying.
Tonight the Big Dipper balances
on its handle. Tepid tree frogs peep
songs of resurrection. One morning soon,
I’ll eat a good breakfast, fill a water bottle,
pack a book, walk the fencerow into the holler,
rest beneath the eagles’ favored perch,
shake off this inexplicable sadness,
two cinderblocks where lungs ought to be,
let spring hold on to me for a while.
New Ohio Review editor, David Wanczyk: I’m speaking today with Kari Gunter-Seymour, a 9th generation Appalachian, and the current Poet Laureate of Ohio. Her new anthology, I Thought I Heard a Cardinal Sing: Ohio’s Appalachian Voices, will be published in March 2022. Kari, welcome. Can you tell us about the project generally and more specifically about your hopes for what it will bring to light about Appalachian poetry?
Kari Gunter-Seymour: I would love to do that, David. My hope is that people will become aware that Ohio is part of Appalachia. Because some people don’t know, and a lot of people forget that a quarter of the state of Ohio rests in Appalachia proper, and there are pockets of Appalachian families throughout Ohio, even in major cities throughout Ohio, that still practice those teachings and learnings from their Appalachian heritage and their culture. And so this book is all about bringing notice to that.
I think of us as being Central Appalachians. With roots deep in South and North. You know we had those who came up during World War II and the Great Depression to find work. To seek out the steel mills. We have to remember there was lots of coal and iron mining in Ohio early on, too. And so this book is specifically my dream of being able to give these voices an opportunity to sing. Because they’re different. We’re a little bit different.
We’re more of a mixing pot, I think, here in Ohio, because we are, as we’re finding out, Central. We’re not necessarily North; we’re not necessarily South, but we’re a really good mix of it all.
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By Morgan Riedl
A body can work and do work in many ways—a body can also not work, or perhaps another way of saying this is a society can make it harder for some bodies to work, in which case a body itself can become work. Our body can be our life’s work—a body of work is the work of our lifetime.
In Melissa Febos’s recent essay collection Body Work: The Radical Power of Personal Narrative, she investigates how bodies and writing intersect, how to tell the stories of our bodies and why we should. By mixing memoir and craft, Febos’s book does exactly the kind of work it argues is important, underscoring the power of the personal. I can’t help but think of the slogan from Second Wave Feminism here, the personal is political, and how today we might consider the personal is professional—that sometimes this binary, like so many others, subjugates certain bodies.
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By Caro Claire Burke
Featured Image: Shadows II by Sam Warren
It had been the loneliest summer of my life, which is maybe why I was so looking forward to seeing Beth.
I’d been living in the city for about four months by then. I still wasn’t quite used to the foul-smelling puddles, the fire escapes that blotted out the sky, the way the subway would be whispering along then suddenly scream to a stop, forever lurching me into the lap of some nameless and scowling person. And Beth was nice, I remembered: she’d been the type of girl in college who was always the first to laugh, the first to dance; the type of girl who never complained when we ran out of cold beer and had to switch to room temperature. She was a good sport, I remember a buddy saying once, and I’d agreed.
It was a clear Friday afternoon. I was headed to my mother’s house for the weekend, and the idea of leaving the city for a full two days had left me feeling light. I decided to throw my weekend bag over my shoulder and walk the fifteen blocks to the coffee shop Beth had suggested.
Read MoreBy Louise Robertson
Sometimes I,
I mean you,
I mean I,
are
like an advil stuck
in a pocket of my/your throat
and I/you wonder if I,
I mean you,
I mean I,
am dissolving there—
easing the ligaments,
except the body
isn’t eased, nor ligaments
hushed and I can still feel you,
I mean me,
I mean you
there in the neck
waiting, in fact,
hard as a choke.
By Louise Robertson
Featured Image: Knowledge 2 by Sam Warren
I regret my good decisions while
staring at digital timestamps within
the carpeted walls
of my assigned cubicle as November
darkens to evening right after lunch.
I regret them as I climb
into the hybrid and track its mileage.
On an after-work walk,
plastic bags, candy wrappers, and
beer cans sprawl.
I decide to corral
strips of wild sheeting
massed into a wig of see-through hair.
A slippery ooze
crawls onto my hands.
I should have fucked that guy.
I should have broken my heart
over him and kept breaking those gears
—a clockwork that spends almost
all of its time junked
just for those
two moments everyday,
when it is exactly right.
By Louise Robertson
The Prius should make a noise
as it creeps behind school children
scattering across the road,
sunlight and leaf shadows waving
around them.
It should be, as one petition
suggested to Toyota,
the sound of the Jetson car,
a whirr and a dapple of a sound.
But Toyota has done nothing — nothing.
The cars glide out each year,
shark silent.
When I was 11, at the school trip to Kings Dominion,
standing next to a plastic statue of George,
Maria Framingham declared she
had lost a $10 bill and so of course I checked my back pocket
and of course my $10 bill slipped out. Maria
picked it up and said she found her
$10 and I made no sound
and slunk away, my inner petitioner
demanding, “Hey, make a noise!”
And my inner Toyota doing nothing — nothing.
By Melissa Bowers
5.
I am in a restaurant when I learn Rob has a wife. It shouldn’t matter, since I’m already a wife, too—Timothy sits across from me, cutting a chicken strip into toddler-sized bites between swigs of his craft beer—but something catches in my chest at the sound of Rob’s name. Maybe it’s because Timothy and I are hardly speaking at the moment, or maybe it’s because of the person delivering the news.
Amaya is supposed to be a ghost from the past. She is not meant to materialize inside the life I have now, this many years after college, as she exits Timothy’s favorite burger place. I don’t notice her until she sidles over and leans against the edge of our table, runs an invasive finger around its glossy tiles, slowly, as if she’s trying to seduce them one by one. We exchange pleasantries: Nice to see you. Yes, it’s been forever. What are you up to these days?
“By the way, Rob got married,” Amaya tells me. “She looks a lot like you, actually—brown hair, kind of wavy. They have a daughter.”
She winces a little when she says it, in sympathy or solidarity, as though we both have the right to feel jealous. Then she tsk-tsks and sets her lips in a thin, apologetic line, flutters her fingers over her shoulder: “‘Bye, honey.” The finality of her hips swaying toward the door.
“That was the Amaya?” Timothy asks through a mouthful of ground meat.
I raise my eyebrows.
“Oh yeah,” he says. “We’re fighting.”
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By Emily Kingery
Featured Image: Ghost Crossing by Ellery Pollard
The Ghost buys me a cocktail
the color of Barbie’s dream house,
the taste of the well. He shrieks
and stakes a tiara in my hair.
I am laden in plastic and ask
where he came from. He says
Barbie’s dream house. It’s time
for karaoke. Do you remember
high school, the back of the car
and your aching lips, rewinding
the tapes? He tucks my loose hair
and his laugh is my favorite
from the dead. Ghost, I tell him,
let’s smoke. He slides two cigarettes
from his sleeve. I laugh like a rabbit
By Allie Hoback
Featured Image: Untitled by Tanner Pearson
I can’t stop listening to your dumb wonderwall cover
that I asked for as a joke. I don’t know what you did
to make it sound all distant and a little haunted
but I want to projectile vomit when you giggle through the reverb
miss a chord and sing alltheroadsanananasomething.
Why do people hate this song and why do people only
ever play it on acoustic, it’s so good on electric or maybe
I just like you—oh fuck, do I like you? During sex I asked
how long you had wanted to do this for and you said
within the first ten minutes of meeting you and I said same
if not even longer, maybe before I met you, does that make sense?
Am I making sense? Should I seek professional help
if a fucking joke cover of wonderwall makes me want to grin
at every blank-faced stranger in a gas station, makes me want to stitch
your name into my underwear, makes me want to backflip
into the Atlantic Ocean where you are treading water—
and I don’t think that anybody feels the way I do about you now.
By Erika Warmbrunn
A dark shadow lifted off the sand and floated forward.
“Sting-ray!” she thought, and reached up to pull her goggles down over her eyes. They had seen several rays during their dives that week. She hoped this would be a spotted eagle ray. Velvety black beneath an ebullience of crisp white dots, the spotted eagle rays had been her favorites. She ducked below the surface.
And saw that it was not a spotted eagle ray.
It was not a ray of any kind.
It was a shark.
She had never seen a shark before. Of course she’d seen a shark before: in a movie, in an aquarium. But that was the sensation: I’ve never seen a shark before, but I know one when I see one, and that shape swaying through the not quite crystal-clear water, that is a shark. It felt primal: ancient, encoded, instinctive recognition of predator.
Read MoreBy Matthew Tuckner
What Sappho calls
the desiremind or the couragesoul
I call the swirling Chesapeake Bay
of my brain and sure
you could call the tugboat
trawling through the brackish waters
desire and yes
you could call the striped bass
sourcing speed from the tugboat’s wake
courage and sure
you could call the crushed beer can
scything the surf the mind and yes
the soul looks like a blue crab
when I close my eyes to picture it
aquamarine claw olive-green shell
I can’t quite place
the bird tipping its beak into the bay
to capture an absent worm
absent because fields
of eelgrass are emptied daily
by giant pesticidal blooms
heaps of dead fish
falling upwards
towards the surface
but in placing the bird
a red knot a piping plover
one could easily mistake it for
the faculties of the soul
particularly the appetites
so many Plato doesn’t even bother
to tally them though he does
warn of their penchant for battle
the appetites who are hard to see
when they stand still
like the piping plover for whom
they are often mistaken
yes I’ve been out combing
the waters for a new bird
one whose bright rusty throat
and striped back better represent
those flightier emotions
not even Sappho
has the words for
is it the tundra swan
with ass upended and neck submerged
searching for the eelgrass
that isn’t there
the tundra swan that birdwatchers
who don’t know better
call suicidal ideation
maybe the tawny-throated dotterel
is the one for me
if I cover my left eye
and squint my right the bird looks like
the dysmorphia that keeps me
out of the view of most mirrors
just look at this dotterel
can’t you see the pointed beak
that just screams
I want to be your worst best friend
a voice that sings
come breach that little bay
of yours come tie the sky together with
us birds a pointed beak that’s just dying
to be the Orpheus
to your Eurydice the kind of bird
that wants to kickstart
your katabasis a word
that if I’m reading the Greek correctly
can be widely defined as a descent
of any kind such as moving downhill
the sinking of the sun
a military retreat
clinical depression
a trip to the underworld
or a journey to the coast
By Zuzanna Ginczanka
Translated from the Polish by Joanna Trzeciak Huss
Featured Image: Untitled by Tanner Pearson
We…
A frenzy of hazel trees, disheveled by rain,
a scented nutty buttery crush.
Cows give birth in the humid air
in barns, blazing like stars.
O, ripe currants and lush grains
Sapid to overbrimming.
O, she-wolves feeding their young,
their eyes sweet like lilies.
Sap drips like apiary honey.
Goat udders sag like pumpkins.
The white milk flows like eternity
in the temples of maternal bosoms.
And we…
…in cubes of peach wallpaper
like steel thermoses
hermetic beyond contemplation
entangled up to our necks in dresses
conduct
proper
conversations.
By Joanna Trzeciak Huss
Any biography of Zuzanna Ginczanka (1917-1944), however short, should attempt to speak to her desire to define herself and her refusal to be defined by others. For her, social and artistic identity was something to be chosen and cultivated, but in the times in which she lived, identity ascribed by others was a matter of life and death. Born Zuzanna Polina Gincburg in Kiev in 1917, she fled shortly after the Russian Revolution with her family to the border town of Równe in Volhynia (present day Rivne, Ukraine), which was at one point part of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and was about to become Polish again in 1920. The destination was not accidental: it was the town where her Russian-speaking maternal grandparents were well-ensconced. Yet this provincial capital proved too confining for her parents, who abandoned her to the care of her grandmother: her father leaving for Berlin when Ginczanka was three and her mother for Pamplona, Spain after she remarried. Równe, a multi-ethnic city, was Ginczanka’s childhood home and it was there she attended a French pre-school and Polish elementary school and high school. She adopted the name Ginczanka, and though Russian was her native tongue, chose Polish as her language of poetic expression. Yet she was never able to obtain Polish citizenship and remained stateless throughout her life.
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By Zuzanna Ginczanka
Translated from the Polish by Joanna Trzeciak Huss
Featured Image: Untitled by Tanner Pearson
1
In the beginning was heaven and earth:
black tallow and blue oxygen—
and fawns
beside nimble stags
and God, soft, white as linen.
2
Cretaceous
Jurassic
Triassic
The earth layers in strata—
The Miocene advances by tank — a majestic conquest.
There is a separation between water
and the land of ferns and birches
—and God sees that it is good when Genesis dawns.
Nitrogen brews in magma,
magma congeals into rock
mountain
thrusts
upon mountain
in a thunderous, cosmic mounting
The Carboniferous enriches the earth with bituminous pulp.
—and He sees that it is good
for moist amphibians and stars.
Iron pulses like blood
Phosphorus hardens into tibia——
— and with singing air, God whistles into pipes of crater.
3
In the beginning was heaven and earth:
and fawn
and tawny stags
but then things took a different course:
and
flesh
was made
word.
4
Back then, a lone rhododendron trembled before a fragrant angel,
horsetails tall as New York creaked and clattered.
Now daisies wilt
in town squares
in Konin, Brest, and Równe
and at night
policemen
and their spouses
make love.
By Maud Welch
Featured Image: Before I Leave by Tanner Pearson
There’s a split down the center
of your upper lip, like the crack
of a window on that first warm-
blooded day of spring, when
cherry blossoms sprinkle back
broken pavement and we feel
able bodied to birth sticky children
of our own on training wheels –
By Kelly Rowe
In the study that a child playing hide and seek
once called the messy room,
in a drawer, in a manila envelope, still sealed,
I’ve filed the police report on how you died.
It will stay put: it will age, though you don’t.
I’ll open it today.
I’ll never open it.
Here, photographs spill out of boxes, and you
return, a small boy perched on a stoop
in tiger pajamas. You grin, flashing
little white cub teeth; you claw at the blue sky
beyond a black and white world.
You are about to climb a tree, to grow
feathers, to rise, to become cloud.
By Christina Simon
Featured Image: Untitled by Tanner Pearson
We were staring at a snake eating a rat.
At my son Kyle’s 12th birthday party, about fifteen boys in the pool stopped swimming long enough to look up. Ten feet away, up on the hill, a brown snake’s mouth was wide open, and a large rat looked like it had been stuffed head-first down the snake’s throat. Its pale pink legs and tail hung out of the snake’s jaw, which was clamped firmly on the rat’s plump midsection. The rat was not moving.
“Get my phone, I need a photo,” shouted Kyle, scrambling out of the pool. The rest of the boys followed him. Within seconds, they were watching the snake, snapping photos, mesmerized by the surreal scene. My husband joined them, along with a few of the boys’ parents.
“Can anybody save the rat?” I yelled frantically. I stood by the pool, looking up at the snake but I wouldn’t get closer. The snake was perfectly still, its mouth stretched wide open to hold onto the rat which dangled out of its mouth, limp. The snake looked about 5 feet long, with a thick body, teeth bared and eyes deadly.
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By Hannah Marshall
Featured Image: Randy Gals by Ellery Pollard
The world is a broken thing, a paper doll from my grandmother’s childhood. On the farm in Wisconsin, she cut
the world carefully from a magazine. On the back of
the world was a recipe for drop biscuits. Men in New York City streets planned
the world for this girl to cut into shape,
this world which she dressed up in a red dress, in a white apron and little blue pumps,
this world which is brittle now to crumbling, and torn.
The world was designed to be temporary.
The world was made of dead trees and smeary ink. My daughter sets
the world and its old clothes in a line across whitish carpet. She props
the world against bent tin furniture the size of my thumb.
The world is a broken thing, and so she handles it carefully.
The world opens from its paper breast. We try to become what
this world has made us to be. We carry
the world with us in the bottom of a purse, scribble notes about
the world and carry them tucked up our sleeves, like used tissues.
By Hannah Marshall
The lives of the briefly famous, the fortunes
sunk into places rich people call home.
What they might tear down,
what they deem worth standing.
Perhaps it is their need for comfort
which makes these calls.
The dumpster departs,
and they are clean.
For me on Tuesday night,
it’s all hypothetical; I owned a house once
for a year, fixed it up, decided to sell.
I rent now, happy
to call the landlord when the shower handle breaks
or a tree falls on the telephone line.
Through all the places I’ve lived as an adult—four rentals
and that one home I briefly owned—
By Claire Robbins
Featured Image: Untitled by Tanner Pearson
The first package contained a light blue pair of Nike Huaraches, size 8. I took this as a sign that I should keep stealing packages: my son laced them up, and they fit perfect. He started jumping around, walking on air. We both laughed until our sides hurt, and then I cooked a box of macaroni for dinner, made with water and oil instead of milk and butter, But who cares, my son said, lifting up his feet to admire his shoes.
I only took packages from the porches of nice houses, but not nice houses with fancy doorbells. Some of the doorbells had cameras and attached to smartphones. I could see the older style cameras, so I avoided those packages as well. Everything had to line up perfectly for me to steal a package.
I drove a Ford transit van delivering flowers for a flower shop, which is how I came to realize that there were neighborhoods in my town that I never even knew about, full of nice houses with packages on porches. Some of these neighborhoods were gated, to keep people out unless they belonged.
I also delivered flowers to neighborhoods like my own with old houses falling into disrepair or bought up and cheaply brought to code by slum lords. There were widening gaps between the houses where condemned houses had been demolished by the city. Every once in a while, Habitat for Humanity would slap a cute little bungalow in one of the empty lots. But I never took a package from neighborhoods like my own. It didn’t seem right.
In the mornings, I clocked in to work and looked at the flower arrangements that were going out for delivery that morning. They stood in the cooler in the flower shop, and I read each tag before deciding on my route. Then I loaded the vases into the back of the van and drove off. Sometimes I had to gas up the van or air the tires or stop at the grocery store to pick up fruit for a fruit basket. Then after my deliveries, I helped process the flowers in the shop, while the designers put together bouquets for the next day. That was it, the entire job. Sneaking the packages from the van to my car was easy. I never took anything larger than a shoebox, and I slipped it into the backpack I kept on the passenger seat.
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By Rachel A. Hicks
Featured Image: Untitled by Tanner Pearson
“I don’t want to be cured of beautiful sounds,” insisted Milo.
—The Phantom Tollbooth
Must I implore you for more of what I want?
A clanging of fine china, symphonies of wet
spoons, clattering of forks falling from the violent
sky, a click-clack-click of yellow teeth
saying not much of worth in the night.
If trash can be treasure then I can be sound.
I can be the scream rising like steam
from the red kettle sitting on your mother’s stove.
I am the thumping & cheering & crying
of every bum, junkie, bride & boy in town.
By Rachel A. Hicks
I’m an Appalachian beauty queen,
a capable kitten with smooth birthing hips.
Applaud the cinema kitty cat caught in the smoke ring.
I rule over Kentucky junkyards, zoom in as I sit on refrigerator thrones,
play pianos by the highway, cigarette-thin fingers give a tinkle tankle of a tune
perking ears that belong to someone twenty years ago.
The honeysuckle sweetness of my fingertips, syrupy sweet on the dirt keys,
greasing up the notes, F, E, B & so on.
Underneath the toasters & the books from all those rummage sales
sits some hot ghost of a memory. Smitten kitten, the smell of trash
makes me think of our place & the breeze outside is the same one
I feel at night when trains go by.
Stack the broken binds of hymnals for a stage, wrap, rip, some leaves, some dirt,
pack, perch, pack it all in, real tight, until the only clumps to fall
from my deciduous crown are intentional. A tap dance for you, a finale
with hula-hooping hubcaps & juggling light bulbs. I sing in a rusty tune,
decaying notes in the keys of D, C, G & so on.
By Rachel A. Hicks
Featured Image: Pride by Ellery Pollard
When I die, no fly will buzz,
no bird will crow, no man
will cry. Or maybe when I die,
every man will cry
and say, “There goes the love
of my life—a beauty—if only
she had known.” Women
will hate me stealing
their men’s hearts even in death,
for taking over their dinner conversations
after they’ve carefully prepared
the pink-orange ham loaf.
Forks & spoons—the men will swear
to see my eyes—my teeth will show
up in all the fine china. My legs prance
through the women’s heads
as they look at the octopus waving
its arms, wrapping its tentacles
around another. Dirty salt water
will turn red with their fury
as their husbands say, “She was such a beauty.
If only she had had eight arms.” A constellation
will form in the shape of my face & planets with
my thumbprints will be discovered.
When I die, don’t send me roses
because I am now the dirt, I am the plant,
I am the seed that sits in the crook of your skull, always
reminding you what it’s like to call a place home.
By Danie Shokoohi
When the doctor found the tumor in his brain, when the surgery was first scheduled but not yet scalpeled, before the poorly fitted tracheostomy tube which introduced the sepsis, your father forbade you from coming to Connecticut. He didn’t want you to see him like that, he said. That when your grandfather died, your father could only picture him ill and threadbare in a hospital bed. He did not want that for you, if he didn’t make it.
“No.” You lifted your laptop from the coffee table and clicked your internet browser. “Absolutely not. I’m pulling up Delta.” The ticket would be expensive from Iowa City, but you would pay anything to be there.
He told you that you could visit when he was well again, for Thanksgiving, maybe. “Look, Kimmy,” he said. “I got some bad apples, but we can still make applesauce out of them. It’ll be okay. The surgeon’s good. I’ll have to do some PT, but I won’t lose any cognitive function. That’s pretty good applesauce.”
You wanted to tell him there was nothing applesauce about a brain tumor. That you didn’t care how small, or how easy the recovery, or how experienced the doctor. You wanted to tell him that twenty-two was too young to be fatherless. If it was your Iranian mother, you would have had permission to scream and rip hair from your scalp and weep. But he wasn’t one for big sentiments, your father. He was American. So you laughed because you knew he wanted you to laugh.
After the phone call, you drove to the grocery store and picked out a jar of applesauce. It sat in your cupboard through his entire sickness, and you ate a spoonful a day as if it could keep him safe.
Read MoreBy: Mary Ardery
Driving the group back after a wet July week in the woods,
a week with a bulimia watch for a woman who’d trained herself
to purge so quickly, so quietly, she did it between numbers
when she counted aloud as she peed, we came across
a raccoon in the center of our lane. Run over, still alive.
I stopped the van. I knew the worst injuries are internal.
The raccoon’s eyes were moving toward glassy. Slow blinks.
Someone said, Mary, you have to put it out of its misery.
I considered the tires, my hands, the knife in my backpack,
then I gripped the wheel and guided us, slowly,
onto the shoulder instead. A wide, weak berth.
No one said a word. I glanced at the fading raccoon
in the rearview mirror. My worn-out body—
its overripe smell seemed suddenly sharper.
That night I dreamt a flood. A torrent of water, the street
a river. A child’s empty car seat rushed by on its side
while I stood at my window just watching. Countless times,
women asked me simple enough questions, but I was winding
through mountain roads. I was treading water. I was barely
afloat. I told them not now and I turned up the music,
spinning the volume knob like a planet about to break orbit.
By James Lineberger
Featured Image: Sun by Sam Warren
On the hayride night
our senior year in high school
we lay side by side
holding hands under the stars
trying to figure out how we could remain together
because back then
to a couple of cotton mill kids in the 50’s
what else did our first-time kisses and hugs mean
except true love
but after graduation she made a sudden decision to attend
the Richmond Professional Institute in Virginia
and learn commercial art
to get prepared to paint advertising pictures
for newspapers and magazines she said maybe even like
a cover for The Saturday Evening Post
and how was I to manage
a long distance relationship across the state line
when I didn’t even have a car which
I tried to tell myself was the problem but the real difficulty
was Jenny seemed like
some kind of pioneer woman to me
and already out of reach
a person who knew exactly what she wanted and wouldn’t
let anything or anyone stand in her way
while all I could come up with was maybe I would join
the army and get to see
the world myself someday – Hollywood or Africa maybe even what we did
to Hiroshima – some place
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By Leila Mohr
We are walking along the dunes at Corn Hill Beach with my grandfather, Baba. The sun is broiling our backs, and there aren’t any clouds. We smell like suntan lotion and laundered clothes. Baba breathes heavily as he walks. He wears clean sneakers with white socks pulled halfway up his calves. I have a new pair of flip-flops in one hand, my toes seeping into the sand. My brother runs ahead, an inflatable red lobster tucked under his arm.
We were supposed to leave the Cape a week ago to go back home to our mother, but we are still here. At night, after we’ve been bathed and fed, my grandparents fight about what to do with us. The day camp with the dreadlocked artist has ended; neither of us did well with tennis.
Wyatt is eight, and I am ten. We sleep in bunk beds in my grandparents’ renovated wing. When I close my eyes, I hear large ice cubes fill my grandmother’s glass, the freezer open and close. We have a whole dresser of new clothes they’ve bought us, some colorful toys in a wicker basket. If they yell at each other loudly enough, Wyatt sniffles and cries. “Be quiet,” I try to tell him, but he doesn’t understand. On my back, I lie as still as I can be in the top bunk, pretending I’m frozen in glass. If my grandmother hears my brother cry and peeks into the room, she’ll think that I’m asleep.
“Over here,” Baba says, and we move toward the water. He’s packed a cooler with Goldfish and Milano cookies, juice boxes, and cans of Coke. His white hair sneaks out the back of his baseball cap. Wyatt throws his shirt off and runs into the water, thrashing wildly in the waves. Baba takes off his shoes and socks carefully. He looks far out into the ocean, his soft skin glistening in the sun. The waves crash onto the sand, and the wind twirls through my hair.
Last week, when I asked my grandmother why we weren’t going back home to our mother, she wouldn’t give me a straight answer. “Your mother is busy,” she said. She was staring at herself in the mirror of her bathroom, fluffing her hair. “She’s writing a paper for her Statistics class.” My grandmother sprayed perfume on her wrists and then rubbed them together. Her gold bracelets slid down her arm. “She needs more time.”
“Don’t you want to go in the water?” Baba says.
The truth is I am afraid of swimming, but I get up and walk slowly through the thick sand, sitting down at the water’s edge. Wyatt is pretending to be a shark, flapping his hands like fins and growling. We are two different islands; we almost can’t see each other.
* * *
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By Adam Grabowski
Featured Image: Rush by Sam Warren
-Ludlow, Ma. May 1970
Let the sunshine
Let the sunshine in…
Smoking against the façade of a moon-
bleached gas station she listens
with a waitress’s patience to the local boy’s prattle
—her senior year of high school
& already the air stinks of coveralls.
Her hair is black. Brushed out long. Flyaways.
The occasional breeze & his good blue eyes.
A mile from here the highway shakes.
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