CVS
By Erin Redfern
Featured Art: by Jordan M. Lomibao
The drugstore on Hamilton and Bascom used to be a Long’s, then a Rite Aid.
Now it’s a CVS. That’s where sadness stays, nestled in packs of Ticonderogas,
hiding behind Jim Beam bottles at closing. While registers spin LED dreams,
sadness settles between Pampers and Depends. Not at home,
but still it’s got everything it needs––sandals, snacks, sewing kits.
Curled into itself, sadness inches forward on the same tear-track it emits,
snags on frayed carpet in the photo album aisle, which is always empty.
Sadness adheres to envelope flaps, tastes of foil torn open with teeth. It naps
amid our unanticipated needs: Ace bandages, B vitamins, vaginal cream.
It permeates the circulated air––the air I breathe in every other CVS.
The one back East where I bought lip gloss that smelled like apricots.
The one in Chicago you found when I got sick.
Even the future one, where you’re not on the mend
and need strange new prescriptions from the pharmacy bins. Dad.
Your body has begun its reluctant fade: you’re on your third left knee,
second right lens, first dental bridge. In the San Jose CVS
I’m not buying anything yet; I’m in the greeting card aisle, reading condolences,
passed by smocked employees with their carts for restocking.
They’ll stop what they’re doing to help someone find cat food or aspirin,
nylons or sunblock or a drying rack. They’re bone-tired and kind. They don’t let on
how these dumb rhymes make me cry, how I’m standing here wiping my nose
with my sleeve. Opening, reading, putting back. Practicing.
Read More
The Wild Barnacle
By Billy Collins
Featured Art: by Karolina Grabowska
“Do not speak, wild barnacle, passing over this mountain.”
— Patrick Pearse
In a lullaby by the Irish poet Patrick Pearse,
a woman of the mountain begins
singing her baby to sleep
by asking Mary to kiss her baby’s mouth
and Christ to touch its cheek,
then she gets busy quieting the world around her.
All the gray mice must be still
as well as the moths fluttering
at the cottage window lit by the child’s golden head.
Then, amazing to me—
one summer night when I first read the poem—
she orders a wild barnacle, of all things,
not to speak as it passes over a mountain.
To me, a barnacle came with a shell,
lived underwater, and stayed put
after silently affixing itself to a rock,
but here in the hands of a poet,
the small creature was miraculously
endowed with the powers of speech and flight.
I could see it now on a mountain top,
its black shell shiny with salt water,
no more than two inches tall,
but dancing and riotous with joy and rage,
shouting the anthem of the barnacle,
loud enough to wake up
every sleeping baby in Connemara and beyond.
But of course, it is the barnacle goose
Pearse had in mind, I later found out,
common in the west of Ireland
and quite capable of flight with a honk
that could possibly wake up a baby.
For a while there, I had my own wild barnacle,
but the barnacle goose is fact,
and so is the fact that Patrick Pearse,
known as the schoolmaster,
was the one who proclaimed the independence of Ireland
from the steps of the General Post Office
and for his troubles was stood up
with the fourteen other insurrectionists—
save Connolly who was seated
due to a recently shattered ankle—
yes, was stood up against the fact of a wall,
in a courtyard of Kilmainham Gaol, Dublin,
and executed by a British firing squad
in his final April in the terrible, beautiful year of 1916.
Read More
When They Were Handing Out Superpowers
By Robert Wood Lynn
Somebody got Super Speed and somebody
got Can Talk To Fish. Somebody else
got Invincibility and Flying both
at the same time which doesn’t seem fair
especially since somebody else got
Motivated By Dead Parents.
But most people just got some combination
of Can Curl Tongue and Double-Jointed.
I didn’t get any of those.
I’m little help in an emergency
even just the kind of hot embarrassment
where people ask you for a party trick.
I did get Impervious To Poison Ivy.
I am mostly happy about it.
I keep the little card they gave me,
the one with nicely embossed letters,
in my wallet and I peek at it
more often than is polite to.
It has come in handy enough times.
Here’s your ball, dear strangers.
It rolled under the fence, worried a path
through the rest of us all the way
into the angriest vines. But here you go.
You’re welcome, citizens, I say as I don’t fly away.
Read More
Final Visitation
By Dan Albergotti
Featured Art: by Paul Gauguin
After talking with him for thirty minutes,
as he lay cocooned in a thin wool blanket,
I told my father I had to head back to Conway.
He turned his ashen head a bit and said, Conway . . .
that’s where my son lives. I met my sister’s eyes
before fixing his in mine to say, Father, I am your son.
His eyes widened in that way that makes
us say, You look like you’ve seen a ghost,
or as if he’d found himself the quarry of a hunt.
I touched his hand before I left to show him
I was real. I think I could have walked through walls
to get to my car, so grateful was I to be that ghost.
Read More
God Is Going to Be Late to the Party
By R. Bratten Weiss
Featured Art: by Taylor Kiser
God is going to be late to the party,
was the message we all got. At first
we were disappointed, then angry:
who does he think he is?
Then someone got the idea of popping
the special bubbly we’d saved for him.
We only live once, but God is living now
and forever, which means his champagne
will never go flat, and will always be
waiting for him. And which also makes
it especially rude for him to show up late.
God’s champagne goes down like you’re
drinking pure reason. Like you’re having
sex in Paris in the afternoon, while outside
bombs are going off, it’s that kind of movie
now. God’s champagne is a memento mori,
which means we might as well be swimming
up into each other’s bones like radiation.
Then we’re all dancing, throwing
confetti. Like the party in The Shining,
the party that never ends. What’s so
terrifying about that?
For a hundred years we go on dancing,
drinking the champagne, throwing confetti.
God is stuck in traffic or a snowdrift,
but he’ll be here soon enough, and we’ll
need to tidy up, smooth our hair, put our
best faces and our figleaves on. We’ll need
to try to explain.
Read More
New Year’s Resolution
By R. Bratten Weiss
Featured Art from rawpixel.com
To live decently is to tread lightly, but
here it is a new year and maybe I’m ready
to stop worrying about decency. I’m ready
to stomp around, a ten-ton weight with
elephant legs, shaking the windows.
I’m tired of going gently, water on glass.
Maybe it’s time for the tongues of men and
angels, time to shoot fire from my fingertips.
A fleet of ships on the wine-dark sea would
do nicely to carry what I want to say.
I need to make cities fall.
I need to write the message like a knife to
the throat, like firewater. I need it to crack
like a whip in winter air.
If it does its job, it will lift you on its
burnished horns, trample you, raise
a trumpet to its mythic mouth and blast
Alleluia over the broken cliffs, terrify
the wild turkeys and the grazing deer,
and the red-tailed hawk that will take
to the air crying your name.
Read More
Immediately Following Mandatory Happy Hour with the Boss
By Molly Kirschner
Featured Art: by Odilon Redon
I said to the driver, deliver me
to the nearest beautiful thing.
My name is not ma’am.
Where clouds rallied together like workers
I said let me out here.
Palm trees dusted the sky. No rain.
I called another taxi, I said, take me to
a larch, a church, the awe
in the word autumn.
Take me to dusk.
To a Sikh temple where I can meet the genderless god.
The casino.
Behind the curtain
where we pray our children will fix the world
before we are reborn.
Read More
Saturday
By Veronica Kornberg
Featured Art: by Johan Teyler
Valentine’s Day and I’m at the farmers’ market
with my aquamarine Olivetti, typing poems for
whatever the buyers think they’re worth.
For Annie, the homeless woman who stops by
each week, I pull the sun out of the sky,
let it hover just above her solar plexus
and shoot its rays out of her eyes, superhero style.
She flashes her dimples and takes a dollar
from the jar, pushes on between
the pickler and the flower stall.
I tap away, next to the cheesemaker’s penned-up
petting goat shaking flies off its ears, opposite
the oozing combs of the honey man and a pile of sweet
potatoes, root-hairs whiskering their chins.
My table is usually a drowsy zone, but today
a line of genial men materializes before me,
managing their bouquets while one-hand-texting,
children threading between their legs.
The goat and I are busy.
Some men want their hearts laid raw, beating
on the page. One talks about a fishing trip.
I give them oceans. Powdery stamens
on a daffodil and pillow talk. Black-seamed stockings
in a country inn. I tell them what I wish
someone would say to me this chilly February
afternoon. It’s worth a lot, that little silence
while they read, minds suddenly gone naked,
before we shudder back to our ordinary selves
and they stuff the jar with bills. Which I use to buy turnips.
Read More
Ode to My Pink Bathroom
By Julie Danho
Featured Art: by J.L. Mott Iron Works
How long I’ve tried to love you, the way
you still blush and gleam like a teenager
in a poodle skirt, unblemished as the day
you were pressed against wire and mortar
in the shower, on the walls, even the floor,
its concrete flecked with pink. The Nolans,
who chose you, are long gone, their daughters
now grandmothers in their own houses,
the blueprints they left behind moldering
in the basement. How can I blame them?
I didn’t live through the War, the Boom,
this neighborhood rising up in neat rows
as if each Cape had been pining for sun.
In those years, you were prosperity, pedigree,
First Lady Pink named in honor of Mamie
Eisenhower, her White House bathroom pink
from the walls to the tub to the cotton balls,
so that all over America, millions like me
wake up and stumble into a past that waits
with toothbrush and soap. In you, I saw history
running like a faucet, building to a flood
unless stemmed. But when the contractor
gave me a price, he said you were lead,
and with my daughter . . . it might be better
to let you be. So I’ll own your purr and poison,
though I may dream still of reinvention—
blue trim and Harbor Gray—even as I hang
the pink polka dot shower curtain, lay down
that cranberry rug, act as if I chose you,
as if you were everything I ever wanted.
Read More
Love, Again
By Sarah O. Oso
Featured Art: by Philip Henry Delamotte
When it happens—and it will,
bright as a bed of red tulips
shaking out their flags in rows,
or rising like steam off the top
of a lid—allow it to uncurl.
Stand and stretch. It’ll be the pop
of sockets, of elbow and hip, sighing
into place after waking. Vertebrae aligning
like rhyme beneath the skin.
By noon, it’ll head on over, whistling
with cans of white paint in hand, here
to restore the chipped fence.
Imagine restirring. The heart’s late-night diner
singing to life when someone shoots
a nickel down the juke. Belting a familiar tune,
good and even—the way the radio plays
in Papa’s ’74 Firebird you figured couldn’t run
until that summer it roared
back, and you sat shotgun
against the black leather, windows open
the whole drive home to Florida.
And if it’s anything like the state of sunshine,
then it’s soft and airy and easy.
Like the seat you’ve settled into, just now,
where it nestles once more at the foot
of the chair, dozing, or otherwise
poking its wet nose at your palm.
Read More
Rodeo
By Sunni Brown Wilkinson
Selected as winner of the 2020 NORward Prize by a panel of previous poetry contributors
Featured Art: by 2 Bull Photography
Tonight is a rodeo night, the announcer blaring his bull
and clown doctrine so loud it carries two miles
east to our block, where just now a hummingbird
hawk-moth drinks from the pink phlox
with its long wand
and I’m alone for a moment and the sky
is bleeding itself out over the train tracks and the brick
abandoned factories. The lights
of the carpet store by the mall flicker carpe
and I wonder just what I can seize.
The homeless shelter bearing some saint’s name
fills up every night and spills
downtown next morning,
wings of strange creatures brush our flowers
while we sleep, and a hapless moose wanders
a schoolyard before it’s caught,
tranquilized. Everyone’s looking for it:
a warmth, a softness in the belly, in a bed
of grass. Take it when you can. Seize it.
Lately sleep is a myth and my brain
is so hard-wired for worry my whole body
crackles, then a deep fog rolls in and all day
I’m lost. Unlike this moth, greedy in its guzzling,
drinking sweetness without asking,
and now the buzzer of the bull riding sounds.
I think of the grace of that single man,
one hand on the saddle
and the other a flag waving violently
above him. A wild show of surrender.
Some days it’s like this: one part
anchored while the other begs for mercy.
And some days it’s the other, the posture
he begins with: both hands together, holding tight.
Sometimes you hold your own hand.
That’s all there is to take.
Read More
Palacios
By Mark Alan Williams
Featured Art: by Katie Manning
We buy hot dogs at a gas station
of broken pumps and eat them
on the pier, watching ratty shrimpers
limp in for new bandages,
sit there in the cold for hours,
thinking sunset will fill the bay
with the blood of the Brazos,
do something holy to us.
This is after Ganado,
and Victoria, and Refugio,
and Point Comfort, and Blessing.
We’re newlyweds,
willing to burn fuel on skywriting
if it can make marriage
feel less like living in Houston.
Sunset hangs around
like a towel that won’t dry,
and when we tire of waiting,
we leave the dim, fuming galaxy
of refineries for home,
bright and deadly as a hospital
circled by ambulances, the music off.
Read More
Free Association
By Henrietta Goodman
Featured Art: by Katsushika Hokusai
“Free associating, that is to say, is akin to mourning; it is
a process of detachment that releases hidden energies . . .”
—Adam Phillips
Always the smell of Windex brings me back to Martin Shelton
in first grade, his memory atomized from some forgotten source.
It’s wind and window when I see him late for school through double
doors of tempered glass, then rushing in on the lovely trochaic
feet of his name, shirt buttoned wrong, blond hair blown in a gust
of oak leaves, smoke, and frost that swept away the simmered meat
and rubber smells, the green litter that soaked up accidents. The wind
recorded and erased. I was afraid to sit with him, or speak—
my first crush a boy who packed his own lunch and walked alone
through dark stairwells hung with Bomb Shelter signs, arrows
aimed at the basement lunchroom where we bowed our heads
to wait for fallout’s drift from the split atom, the invisible anvil
that could fall no matter where we hid. Even when the speakers
hummed and Mr. Wells announced that we were safe,
his name said the earth would swallow us. And now I spray
the glass to wipe away the prints, the trace, but traces gone,
the glass I see through stays. How, then, could mourning set me free,
if Windex leads to Martin leads to beauty leads to bomb?
Read More
Donovan
By Susan Browne
Featured Art: by Carol M Highsmith
I walk down my neighborhood street called mountain
although there is no mountain only rolling hills
although hills don’t really roll & as I look
at a window display of shoes & pass by the candy store
a gasp happens in my head a quake in my heart they aren’t
here my father who loved sweets
my mother who loved shoes & the sun shines
on a world of orphans I quake along mountain street
like a rolling gasp although if someone asked
how are you I’d say fine like most of us are
& aren’t I thought sadness was a prison
but it connects us & if a chain it should be
one of tenderness my father died
two years ago although sometimes I say a year
a way of keeping him closer can’t do that
anymore with my mother need math on paper the ache
woven into each leaf although there are birds & nests
we live in a tsunami waves of being & non-being
but I’m no philosopher standing at the counter buying
bunion pads feeling drowned & drying
under fluorescent lights & warmed by the smile
of the clerk who blesses me with have a great day as I go out
to mountainless mountain & remember donovan’s song
playing in my parents’ house in the sixties first there is
a mountain then there is no mountain then there is
Read More
Late-Season Outdoor Wedding
by Chelsea B. DesAutels
Featured Art: “Panel No. 1” (Leaning on a Parapet) by Georges Seurat
The night before, we’d eaten fried walleye
with tartar sauce in a big white tent and passed
the quaich filled with Irish whiskey to our loved ones
who sipped and said blessings. There was music.
You played guitar. I went to bed early, happy.
You joined me later, happy. The next morning,
we woke to snow and gray skies. All morning long,
I cried and heaved and my mother and bridesmaids
whispered, afraid I was having my doubts. I wasn’t.
I was rupturing—a violent fissure between
my wanting to be good at loving and wanting
everything, like a river island suddenly shorn
from the bank and flooded by ice melt. Over my dress,
I wore a fur stole that I’d found two summers earlier
in a roadside antique store. We’d been road-tripping
through the northwoods, you behind the wheel,
me gazing out the window at Lake Superior, a body
displaced by thousands of shipwrecks.
Read More
If French Kissing Was As Good As Promised, Shouldn’t I Be Happy By Now?
by Emmy Newman
Featured Art: Southern France by Simona Aizicovici
I am accidentally thinking
about snail sex when we start. Mouths open.
Tongues. When snails have sex
there is a slightly gruesome amount of suction.
First, a tingling graze of eye stalk on eye stalk.
Then a lack of movement. Wet flesh. Fireworks. Read More
The Art of Longing
by Emily Sinclair
Featured Art: Pandora by Odilon Redon
We knew that we wanted a change, my husband and I, although we were unclear about how—or, more accurately, where we’d make it happen. The change was coming because I had, once again, a feeling of anxiety and inauthenticity. It comes on periodically and when it comes, I think that I am not living the life I was meant to lead—that, in fact, I am leading the wrong life, and I start fantasizing about the right one. So in the spring of 2017, we cleaned out our basement, fixed what was broken, touched up the paint, and put our Denver house on the market. We were leaving.
Read More“Metaphor Offers the Promise to Move Us”: A Conversation with Nicole Walker, Author of Sustainability: A Love Story
by Kay Keegan
KK: In your essay “On Beauty,” the narrator observes that Michel de Montaigne inadvertently uses the concept of beauty to stitch together his vast collection of essays. When you were writing Sustainability: A Love Story, when did you discover that love would be one of the most prevalent themes in your braided collection and how did that influence your writing on the environment and sustainability as a result? (Or, was love a constraint you gave yourself at the beginning of the drafting process? Why?)
NW: I have to admit, I mean “love story” almost as tongue-in-cheekily as I mean Sustainability. Read More
Couples
by Kenneth Hart
Featured Art: The Bathers by Roger de La Fresnaye
Couples who fight in front of you. Couples
who call each other every hour. Couples
who show up early.
Couples who are business partners.
Couples who say “Absolutely.”
Couples who met in rehab.
Couples who sleep with other couples.
Couples who make out in front of you. Read More
Love You Excavation Work
by Donald Platt
Featured Art: Stained Glass by Simona Aizicovici
I am texting you
some trivial message like “Am at grocery. Where are you?”
using Siri,
the intelligent personal assistant and knowledge navigator,
oracle inside
my iPhone. But when I sign off, saying “Love you
exclamation point,”
Siri translates it as “Love you excavation work.” I send the message
anyway.
Siri’s right. Loving you for the last twenty-seven years has been
excavation
work. It has been like discovering El Mirador, the “Lookout,”
lost city
of the Maya, three thousand years old, overgrown with jungle, once home
to 200,000 people,
now the residence of poisonous fer-de-lance snakes, ocellated
turkeys with iridescent
green wings, blue necks and heads barnacled with orange and red
wart-like nodules,
spider monkeys, white-nosed coatis with barred tails, spectacled owls, toucans,
red-eyed tree frogs,
jaguars, great curassow birds, and howler monkeys whose aspirated roars,
says Chip Brown,
adventurer, author, and journalist extraordinaire, “cross the basso
profundo of an African
lion with the sound of metal grinding on a lathe.”
In El Mirador
they raised pyramids to you—the Tigre Pyramid, the Jaguar Paw Temple,
and La Danta
Pyramid, rising over 230 feet from the jungle floor.
All That Shimmers and Settles Along the Roads of Our Passage
by Mark Cox
Featured Art: Still Life by Ben Benn
After seventeen years, I return home to my ex-wife,
without the cigarettes and bread,
without the woman and children I left her for,
older, empty-handed, and yet
to the same clothes
still in the same drawers,
as if nothing has changed. Read More
Entropy
by Tracey Knapp
Featured Art: Life by Simona Aizicovici
All those times I crossed the bridge to see you
and not one lap dance. We haven’t held hands
since that time in the rain forest, chanting Lord
knows what in Sanskrit. I saw my first wild boar there but
even he took off for the brush. Someone always ends the
moment. Another call dropped on your iPhone,
the cosmic forces at work. My dog sighs and stares
at my flip-flop from his pillow. At work, the office is
separated into orderly earth-toned cubes. Read More
Why Men Don’t Write About Their Wives
by Dennis Sampson
Featured Art: Crouching Nude in Shoes and Black Stockings, Back View by Egon Schiele
It took him a lifetime to figure out
he hadn’t the slightest idea
who she was. Rereading
Milton’s Paradise Lost one night,
he elected to set things right. He would recall
what had never dawned on him
in an epithalamion of all their vows,
her face as gray and drawn and haunted now
as that which miraculously appeared
to Milton in his sonnet “Methought I Saw.”
He’d been blind
Solo in the Skeleton Key
by Elton Glaser
Who would plant, in this stony ground, narcissus and love-lies-bleeding?
It’s too late to be young among the primitives. Winter withers the stalks.
The air reeks of it, decay and the odor of innocence gone to seed.
The time for riots and tattoos is over. Who dances the Dazzle now, or the Swerve?
Long before the armada and the asp, Antony must have tired of Cleopatra,
Those heavy breasts, that midnight skin, a name that thickened in his throat.
In the heat from eating an incandescent pepper, there’s neither passion
Nor apocalypse, just tongues in hell, just retching and the runs.
What honey comes from old drones? Forget the hoodoo and the holy water.
Pray only in Jerusalem, at the Church of Our Lady of the Spasm.
Love’s no trick of ecstasy, no lightning strike in the mind. Each new child
Struggles out, bloody and stunned, one more last chance to get it right.
“Endangered Hawaiian monk seals keep getting eels stuck up their noses and scientists want them to stop”
–title of an article published in the Sante Fe New Mexican, Dec. 8, 2018
by Emmy Newman
Featured Art: White Lines by Irene Rice Pereira
All teenage seals, the foolhardy lummoxes
of their families, the ones with belly rings and chokers,
vanilla frosting flavored lip gloss and no car payments.
Four seals with eels up there, the scientists write, so far.
She looks unconcerned: blissful, the snapshot seal,
her eyes shut tight, the supple buttery wrinkles
of her neck skin folding over like a pair of winter socks
and two visible inches of eel dangling from her left nostril. Read More
Marriage at 17 Years
by Gary Dop
Featured Art: Proposed House, Coral Gables, Florida, Interior Perspective by Stuart Earl Cohen
“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. Read More
Coyotes
By Terri Leker
Winner of the 2019 New Ohio Review Fiction Contest, selected by Claire Vaye Watkins
The coyotes moved into the woods behind my house just after I learned I was pregnant. On a quiet June morning, while my husband slept, I pulled on my running shoes and grabbed a leash from a hook at the back door. Jute danced around my feet on her pipe-cleaner legs, whining with impatience. It would have taken more than this to wake Matt, but I hushed her complaints with a raised finger and we slipped outside. A light breeze blew the native grasses into brown and golden waves as we wandered, camouflaging Jute’s compact frame. She sniffed the dirt, ears telescoping as though she were asking a question. When we reached a shady thicket of red madrones and live oaks, I unclipped the leash and wound it around my wrist.
It was over with Richard, had been since I’d found out about the baby. Anyway, I had come to believe that adultery sounded more illicit than it actually was. Between managing my schedule with Matt and making time to rendezvous with Richard, an affair often seemed more about time management than sexual gratification. I was meticulous with the calendar, but I would have known that the baby was Matt’s regardless, because Richard’s sperm could not locomote. He had told me so early on, while showing me the master bedroom of his faithfully restored North Oakland Victorian. His unexpected disclosure had interrupted my admiration of the exposed brick walls, so unusual for the earthquake-conscious Bay Area. Matt was having dinner just then with friends, thinking I was helping my mother set up her new television (she would be dead within a few months, but we all pretended to be optimists then), so he was eating eggplant parmesan at the Saturn Café as I lay with Richard on his king-sized bed, hearing words like motility and capacitation. Richard’s sober tone had suggested that I might comfort him in his sterility, which I did, if the definition of comfort was a passionate encounter that lasted as long as one might spend unboxing a 48-inch HDTV and connecting it to both Netflix and Hulu. But Matt and I had tried to have a baby for three years, so I took the pregnancy as a sign to recommit myself to my husband, who, predictably, jumped up and down on our unmade bed when I shared the news, attempting, in his white-socked excitement, to pull me up with him, not realizing that doing so might judder the bundle of cells loose, delivering me back to Richard and a childless but aesthetically pleasing life.
Read MoreRevising Bosch’s Hell Panel for the 21st Century
By Kelly Michels
“Hundreds of couples toting AR-15 rifles packed a Unification church in Pennsylvania on Wednesday to have their marriages blessed and their weapons celebrated as ‘rods of iron’ that could have saved lives in a recent Florida school shooting.” Reuters, Feb. 28th 2018
They come wearing crowns of gold bullets in their hair, bodies drenched
in white satin, white lace, tulle, lining the pews on a weekday morning,
AR-15s in their hands, calling on god to save them. There is no
such thing as salvation, only the chosen and too few are chosen.
Children are told to stay inside, schools locked shut, swings hushed,
even the wind says, quiet, as the guns are blessed, dark O of mouths
waiting to exhale a ribbon of smoke. The children are told to crouch
in the closet, to stay still as butterflies on butcher knives
while the men take their brides and iron rods, saluting the book
of revelation, its scribbled last words, the coming of a new kingdom.
Don’t speak. Don’t breathe. Pretend you are an astronaut gathering wisteria
twigs in a crater of the moon. Pretend the twigs are the arm of a broken mandolin.
Someday, it will speak. Someday it will sing. Dear God, bless the self in the age
of the self, bless this bracelet of rifle shells, bless our god-given individual
right. I know you want to sing. You want to sing like blackbirds escaping
from the mouth of a grasshopper. But remember, we are only here
for a little while, so for now, keep quiet, pretend we are somewhere else.
Pretend we’re practicing our handwriting, the lollipop of a lowercase i,
the uppercase A, a triangle in an orchestra, the different sounds it makes
if you strike it the right way. Practice the slow arch of a R. Now—
form the words. Scribble run, scribble come, scribble mom, scribble when
will this be over? But for god’s sake, be quiet. Don’t cry. Just write. Scribble
on the walls, on your arms, scribble as if it’s the last thing you will ever say.
Pretend it sounds like music. And if the devil comes through that door, remember
to go limp, lie on the floor like a tumble of legos. Don’t move. Don’t speak.
Don’t breathe. Pretend you’re already dead. Remember, this is how you live.
Read More
American Bachelor Party
By Conor Bracken
Featured Art: Star and Flag Design Quilt by Fred Hassebrock
Here I am inside a firing range.
Loading and holding and aiming a pistol
the way America has taught me.
Hitting the paper target in
the neck the mullet the arm the arm.
The old-growth pines inside me
do not burst into orange choruses of flame.
I am disappointed I’m not making
a tidy cluster center mass.
Around me fathers and offspring
as plain as stop signs give
each other tips while they reload.
A man one stall over cycles between a revolver and a rifle
while another draws a Glock
from a hidden waistband holster
over and over again, calibrating
his shift from civilian to combat stance
with the dead-eyed focus of a Christmas shopper.
These could be my people.
If I never talked
about the stolid forest inside me
planted by those I do and do not know
who died because America allows you
however many guns and rounds you can afford—
if I never talked about my manliness
that runs cockeyed through the forest
trying to evolve into an ax or flame or bulldozer
so it can be the tallest, most elaborate apparatus
taming local wind into breath,
they might give me a nickname.
I could practice training my fear with them
like ivy across a soot-blacked brick façade
and they might call me The Ruminator.
Virginia Slim.
Spider, even.
We’d grow so close that they would call me late at night
asking for an alibi again
and if I asked groggily ‘who’s this’
they’d say ‘you know who’
and I would.
Their name blooming from my mouth
like a bubble or a muzzle flash.
A flower
fooled out of the ground
by the gaps in winter’s final gasps.
Read More
Red Flags
By Whitney Collins
Featured Art: The Kiss by Max Ernst
The first thing Ilona saw when she got to the beach was the man, bleeding from his leg with a crowd of people around him. She was far up and away in Bill’s condominium, looking down at him from the master bedroom window with her two suitcases in her hands. The man held out his bleeding leg for everyone to admire. Half of the crowd looked down at the leg, half looked out at the ocean. After a minute, the man spread his arms out wide as if to show everyone how much he loved them. Thissssss much.
“It faces the beach, see? Just like I promised.” Bill came up behind Ilona and palmed her breasts. “What a view, huh?” But Bill wasn’t looking at the view. He had his short face in Ilona’s long neck and was missing out on the man and the leg and the crowd, which was just fine by Ilona. When Bill went out into the condominium’s kitchen, to show her sons some sort of fishing contraption, Ilona went right up to the window, still holding her luggage, and kissed the glass. She had been darkly depressed about herself and her life the whole trip down, and then the man with the bleeding leg appeared and something lightened in her. There was still some good in the world.
*
The first night, Ilona pretended to sleep in the guest room, to set a good example, but when she could hear her sons breathing deeply from the adjacent room and knew they were asleep, she went into the master bedroom and got into bed with Bill. She had accepted Bill’s proposal mostly—no, entirely—because she was penniless. Her husband had drunk himself to death because of the debt, and all she was was a speech therapist. How was she to pay for her youngest’s lung medication, much less electricity and soup? It only made sense to sleep with someone like Bill, even if the new ring lay on her finger like a lead bullet.
Read MoreThe Dock Hand
By Kathryn Merwin
this is a poem about losing things.
not a poem
for the boys who barreled their broken
bodies into the lightningwalls
of my body. for the knife
of let me
in, baby, the trigger-finger
of let’s
go back to my place, just one drink.
you, draining the blue
from my veins, dyeing
empty sheets of skin,
blue again, purple,
blue. the color
of healing of bloodpool
beneath skin. for the crushed
powder in my jack & coke of
no one will ever believe you.
you’ll spend the summer in alaska
and we’ll both pretend
like we’re not losing
something.
you have no idea
what i’m gonna do to you.
yes, I do.
Read More
A Cure for Grief
By Emily Franklin
Featured Art: Still Life With Apples and Pears by Paul Cézanne
There isn’t one. But here is a pot of jam,
apricots plumped with booze, lemon rind, sugar—
the stuff of August evenings,
of dirt roads trimmed both sides
with heavy woods that narrow and finally
funnel to the ocean. To the house
on Buzzard’s Bay—deck built, rebuilt,
expanded and rotted, built again, everyone
toe to thigh on chairs, neither comfortable
nor attractive, scattered each afternoon
as we scrubbed clams collected in low tide
or painted rocks or read the paper
or stared out as though we knew it was always
on the verge of ending. Those nights,
jackknifed open with wind and visitors,
dinner not yet cooked, someone asking
someone else what was ready to be picked;
green beans knocking like wind chimes,
nubby new potatoes, the summer’s experiment
with asparagus that we wouldn’t trim—
each stalk pushing and protruding until it appeared
a new creature had clawed its way up from the earth.
Now I offer this: apricot jam from last summer
that we did not know was last. Your instructions:
unscrew the Mason jar, cribbed from the Cape pantry.
Each morning you will awake alone. This is when
you dip your teaspoon or knife into the jam
or even your piece of actual bread. No one is judging—
insert crust directly into jar. Taste the apricots.
For this moment have summer—
and him—back. The jar is large. So is grief.
This is what you’ll sample each day,
fruit slipping against lemon, and sugar, and time.
When the jar is empty, days will have been
gotten through, too.
The porch is rotting now, joists breaking loose,
everything undone as though he—and the rest of us—
are already gone, but let us be suspended
right there at 5pm, drinks in hand,
sun still up, children barely grown.
Eat the jam. This is all we have to offer.
Read More
Thresher Derby
By Patrick Bernhard
Featured Art: Daemonie 39 by Paul Klee
The undertow had carried Daisy far enough out to sea that her bullseye swim cap probably looked like a floating pastry to the judges, even with their binoculars. She hoped that rest of her looked similarly delectable to the Medium-Class blues that the scouting report had placed a reasonable 19% of hunting in the Frontier Belt; nobody had caught anything elsewhere, outside of a zebra shark that wandered into the Sandbar Belt that the chatterbox from Bethany Beach managed to cosh, catch, and drag. Not that she was worried by that bag; Chatterbox’s zebra had the telltale torpor of a bad fungal infection, so it barely put up a fight, and she’d repeatedly coshed more dorsal than skull and in shallower water, too, losing major accuracy marks that she couldn’t afford to have subtracted.
Daisy’s choice of enticement pattern – tread for ten seconds, followed by a burst of strategic thrashing – was fairly exhausting, with the current more active than the lifeguards’ flags were indicating, but the rumor was that deep-water endurance played up heavily with the judges at this particular beach, mostly due to sentimental reasons. It was apparently at this depth that the woman that this derby was named after, Betsey Gulliver, managed to drag in a four-foot thresher even after a whip from the tail of the shark in question had lacerated her left eye and given her ear a flat top. Thus, the parameters for this derby’s Spontaneous Technical Victory – cosh, catch, and drag a Medium-Class thresher – were established. The banner reading “Betsey Gulliver’s Thresher Derby” was stretched above the stands like a giant volleyball net, painted in garish lettering whose crooked slant was evident even from where Daisy was, as if the banner had been made in a group effort by the local middle school.
Read MoreLunch Duty
By Barry Peters
What I know of her
cackling in the back row,
sassing the boy next to her,
absent, tardy, bathroom pass,
not doing any goddam work
and this is the easiest
history class in the history
of American education:
what I know of her
is that for one moment
each day, after escaping
the apartment,
the bus fights,
first-period algebra,
second-period biology,
third-period gym
she hunkers down alone
in a corner of the cafeteria
communing with some
XXtra Flamin’ Hot Cheetos,
oblivious to the orange
residue on her teeth,
smiling as she offers me
the open cellophane bag.
Read More
Lucy’s
By T.J. Sandella
Featured Art: Actor’s Mask by Paul Klee
I confused guacamole
with guano
until I was seventeen
when my girlfriend’s mom
patiently explained the difference
plopping a dollop onto my plate
next to the Spanish rice
catapulting me
on the long flight
from meat and potatoes
to masala and paneer
for the first time
as a freshman in college
tartare and foie gras
as a grad student
and so it goes
the older I get
the farther I travel
with my tongue
curries and compotes
caraway and cardamom
ginger and jasmine
and planes and trains
to aromatic rooms
in cities I can taste
better than I can pronounce
which have all led me here
Read More
Deluge
By Rachel Eve Moulton
Sara doesn’t sleep anymore. Not for more than an hour at a time. Her body feels sore, her joints loose, as if a leg could slip free if she isn’t careful. It’s May, her first spring in the house, and the rain has been falling steadily since early April. The Mad River jumped its banks some weeks before, and, in a gesture of solidarity, Sara’s body has ballooned at the ankles, the thighs. She’s 38 weeks pregnant with twin girls, and even her fingers have grown thick, her wedding ring now worn on a chain around her neck.
Sara is beginning to think she’s made a mistake.
Her friends told her that from the start. Who gives up their whole life for a man they barely know? They took bets on how long she’d stay, calling up to see if he’d turned out to be a serial killer. But, when she announced the pregnancy, the jokes stopped. Phone calls stopped too, as if no one knew what to say to her anymore. The only bright spots were the times she allowed herself to dream about her past selves, a hundred different versions—waiting tables in the little black apron at 16, skin smelling of bacon grease; the summer she was so poor that she only ate peanut butter; reading in the gaudy canopy bed she’d had as a child; and the graffitied bathroom of the club where they’d danced to 80s music in college. Although it scares her, if the babies weren’t an actual part of her physical self, she would flee. Leave this sudden husband in search of Louisville or any one of her past selves, because this one. This one. This one would not do.
Read MoreHeartbeat Hypothesis
By Robert Wood Lynn
As it turns out there is this silly trick to knowing how long you,
no anybody, no any creature will live:
divide the average lifespan of an animal by its metabolic rate
and you will get a number that is about one billion. That’s what we get,
about one billion heartbeats on this planet
one billion, a magic enough number and even though physics has struggled,
struggles and in all likelihood will continue to struggle forever to find
its unifying equation, here is biology’s, the kind
of surprise you trip over because it has just been sitting there all along,
like a golden retriever on shag carpeting, one already most of the way
through her billion and where she is joined by
the field mouse and the blue whale each getting one billion beats on Earth
unless someone or something intervenes and quiet now you can hear it
tick ticking away, your billion ticking like the kind
of clock they mostly don’t make anymore and once I believed that
in every clock there were tiny creatures moving the parts and now
I cannot help but know inside of these creatures
there are more parts marching even faster to the same number
onebillion onebillion onebillion and it can drive you mad even
billionaires go mad cartoonishly mad with the one
thing they cannot buy more heartbeats and they sit in a tube someplace
air-conditioned in Arizona their rhythm frozen while animated mice
power the clocks and calculators that keep this math
like a metronome: terrible, free.
Read More
Somewhere Outside of Loveland
By Amy Bee
Featured Art: “Design for 4-seat Phaeton,” by Brewster & Co.
My mom kicked me out this morning. If you’re still here by the time Doug gets home, I’m having you committed, she said, so I put on some jeans and ran to my old elementary school across the street. I headed toward the two tubes next to the monkey bars. I’d spent a lot of recesses in those coveted tubes. Now that I was in 8th grade, the whole playground appeared fake somehow, like a toy model version of itself.
I ducked into one tube and lay so my body conformed to the cool, smooth curvature of cement. Wrapping my arms around my knees, I pressed toward my chin, and wished myself as small as possible; maybe I could also be a toy model version of myself. Phantom spasms of her anger coursed through me like a second heartbeat. The way she’d sat on my back and pulled me up by my hair to hit my face. How no one loved me, she’d yelled, no one except her. How she was the only one who wanted me in the first place.
I gazed at the graffiti inked in marker crisscrossing the ceiling above me. It read like a map of the universe conceived by grade school astrologers. Terry eats poop! Stay 2 cool 4 school xoxo! Jenni wuz here! I brushed a finger along the faded words, and carefully traced the scribbles one by one; mouthing each word in quiet incantation over and over until eventually, my tears dried out and the only heart left beating was my own.
Outside, the weekend janitor mowed away at a stubbly soccer field. Birds chirped. Kids played foursquare on the blacktop. My stomach rumbled. I checked my jean pockets and found 50₵. Enough for two Little Debbie Rolls from the gas station.
Read More
Kept in the Dark: Poetry, Collaboration, and Collapse in “Pandaemonium” and “Tom and Viv”
by Matthew VanWinkle
Featured art: View from Mount Holyoke, Northampton, Massachusetts, after a Thunderstorm—The Oxbow by Thomas Cole
In a sheepish prefatory note to the belatedly published “Kubla Khan,” Coleridge recalls a felicitous if ultimately frustrated exception to his usual habits of poetic composition. He writes that “all the images [in “Kubla Khan”] rose up before him as things, with a parallel production of the correspondent expressions, without any sensation or consciousness of effort.” Coleridge identifies his usual artistic challenge, here overcome with miraculous ease, as finding words for images. Those who seek to bring poets, and poetry, to life on film are confronted with the counter-difficulty of finding images for words. Or, more precisely, filmmakers face the daunting task of rendering the wrangling of words visually compelling. (The footage of Coleridge reciting “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison” to delirious crowds at Wembley Stadium has been lost, regrettably.) So how do filmmakers inject motion and volume to a creative process that is presumably usually so still, so muted?
Read More
Jean Cocteau and “Orpheus”: The Poet as Filmmaker
by Steve Vineberg
Featured Art: Valley with Fir (Shade on the Mountain) by Henri-Edmond Cross
Jean Cocteau recognized no boundaries between forms of art. He was a poet, a novelist, a playwright, and a visual artist, and each of these media also functioned as a bridge that led him into filmmaking—not just conceptually, since movies are a hybrid of all of these other forms, but often literally. He filmed two of his plays, Les parents terribles and The Eagle Has Two Heads, and wrote the screenplay for Jean-Pierre Melville’s adaptation of his novel Les enfants terribles, and his great 1950 movie Orpheus reimagines his 1926 play of the same name. Read More
Keep Me In By Keeping Me Out: Poetry On Screen
by Carrie Oeding
Featured Art: Viennese Café: The Man of Letters by Moriz Jung
In the late Nineties I repeatedly watched Hal Hartley’s Henry Fool (1997), not really certain why. I had first rented it only because Parker Posey was in it, but the cult film stayed with me like the Sylvia Plath poems I fanatically read as a teen in my small county library in rural Minnesota. Both seemed like mostly impenetrable, but meaningful code. Both were transgressive.
The big difference between these obsessions was that I trusted what Plath was doing and didn’t trust Hartley. Or, I didn’t trust my obsession with the film, which follows the lives of two aspiring writers. What I find compelling twenty years later is that I have the same response. Henry Fool is funny, repulsive, wildly off the mark about the process of writing, and wildly provocative; and I now think that it’s something this otherwise explicit film withholds—the book-length, controversial poem which the plot is built on—that continues to fascinate and repel. Read More
A Personal Affair: The Making of a Poetry Film
by Michele Poulos
Featured Art: The Chariot of Apollo by Odilon Redon
In my twenties, I moved around a lot. I spent much of the first half of that decade in New York City where I changed apartments at least once, and sometimes two or three times, each year. At twenty-seven I moved to New Orleans. At twenty-eight I ended up in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. At twenty-nine I was back in New Orleans, then at thirty I was in Richmond, Virginia, where I’ve lived, off and on, since 2000. With each relocation, one DVD moved with me every time: Poetry in Motion. Read More
Against Literary Biopics Generally, Unless, Maybe—But Definitely and Especially Against “The End of the Tour”
by Kathryn Nuernberger
Featured Art: Study of Arms for “The Cadence of Autumn” by Evelyn De Morgan
When I walked out on A Quiet Passion, the 2016 Emily Dickinson biopic, I decided I was walking out on all biopics about writers forever. 1 The genre has built-in structural problems that seem almost insurmountable. For one thing, a writer’s work is neither their life nor their personality. For another, staring out a window or at a blank page cannot be sustained on screen for longer than a single montage. Moreover, a life well-lived2 seldom has a coherent narrative arc.
Read More
Beautiful, Brilliant, and Dead: Portraits of the Female Poet in Film
by Danusha Laméris
Featured Art: Standing Girl, Back View by Egon Schiele
The film Maya Dardel, a 2017 American-Polish drama, written and directed by Zachary Cotler and Magdalena Zyzak, opens with a famous, gravellyvoiced, fictional poet, played by the mysterious Lena Olin, contemplating her demise. Sequestered at her hideaway in the mountains of Santa Cruz, California, overlooking the redwood forest (around the bend from where I happen to live) she’s decided to kill herself. But not before choosing a young, male heir, whom she will select by way of a contest, through a sort of Atalanta-esque maneuver. Only, instead of a race, she will subject her suitors to feats of sexual and psychological endurance. All of which she has announced on NPR.
Read MoreDispatches From the Near Future
Featuring poems by Ruth Bardon and Jiordan Castle and a new story by Joseph Rakowski, as well as a variety of timely pieces from previous print issues of NOR: poems by Tanya Grae, Okla Elliot, Emily Sernaker, and Emily Mohn-Slate; a story by Max Bell; and an essay by Kyle Minor.
Each piece is accompanied by beautiful artwork, some by contemporary artists Corran Brownlee and Barbara Pierson, and others courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Open Access collection.
New Ohio Review Issue 26 (Originally printed Fall 2019)
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 26 compiled by Julia Smarelli
Sad Rollercoaster
By Jared Harél
Featured Art: The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed with the Sun, c. 1805 by William Blake
My daughter’s in the kitchen, working out death.
She wants to get it. How it tastes and feels.
Her teacher talks like it’s some great, golden sticker.
Her classmates hear rumors, launch it as a curse
when toys aren’t shared. Between bites of cantaloupe,
she considers what she knows: her friend’s grandpa lives only
in her iPad. Dr. Seuss passed, but keeps speaking
in rhyme. We go to the Queens Zoo and spot the beakish skull
of a white-tailed deer tucked between rocks
in the puma’s enclosure. It’s just for show, I explain,
explaining nothing. That night, and the one after,
my daughter dreams of bones, how they lift
out of her skin and try on her dresses. So silly! she laughs,
when I ask if she’s okay. Then later, toward the back-end
of summer, we head to Coney Island to catch
a Cyclones game. We buy hot dogs and fries. A pop fly arcs
over checkerboard grass, when flush against the horizon
she sees a giant wooden spine, a dark blossom,
this brownish-red maze all traced in decay. She calls it
Sad Rollercoaster, then begs to be taken home.
Read More
New Ohio Review 