NOR: Embrace Your Conjunctions
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 18 compiled by Meah McCallister.
By Gail Mazur
Featured Art: Butterfly by Mary Altha Nims
Believe that even in my deliberateness I was not deliberate
—The end words form this line from Gwendolyn Brooks’
poem, “the mother”
We’d be calm, we’d be serene, as long as we could believe
in the blue dragonflies and balletic monarchs that
hovered near us in a kind of peaceable kingdom even
while my love’s illness menaced the peace in
the summer yard, in the fragile house, in the air I breathed in my
deliberateness. My only stratagem, deliberateness:
to accept our lot in that pathless time. I
thought I’d know what he’d want; what I’d want was-
n’t any different. Wouldn’t it be, wouldn’t it finally be, not
to consider how finite our August? Not to deliberate?
By Gail Mazur
Featured Art: Composition by Otto Freundlich
In your office, you, mastering the art of Photoshop,
scanning a crumpled snapshot, 3 inches square,
of your father, poolside, jaunty in a blue swimsuit,
his straw fedora at a rakish angle,
carrying two splashing cups of bica toward your mother.
Beaming, gallant, tanned, grinning for her camera.
That was in Portugal, in Sintra—
the village Byron called “most beautiful in the world.”
In the old cracked photo,
part of his naked chest had flaked away:
under the glossy surface an ashen patch.
Forty years later at your desk,
filial, in a fantasy of surgery,
you worked your laptop to repair the wound,
dragging pixels of skin tone, of mortal coloration,
from his right side to his left.
A new skill mastered, new language, new tools
that restored but couldn’t save.
I watched you transplant a blush of skin—
a tender ministry, your digital touch
lighter than a kiss—not unlike a kiss—
exactly where his heart four decades
earlier began to falter. As yours, invisibly, did now.
—One of those days we both still thought that somehow
with the proper tools, there was nothing you couldn’t fix.
By Suzanne McConnell
Selected as winner of the 2015 New Ohio Review Fiction Contest by Maud Casey
Featured Art: Gardener’s House at Antibes by Claude Monet
I wake to the phone ringing like an alarm. It’s the middle of the night. I clamber out of bed, hard-won sleep, into the living room, grope for the receiver. “Isabella,” my neighbor Viv says in her throaty, demanding voice. “I’ve lost my keys. I’m at the booth two blocks away. Come downstairs and let me in.” The phone clicks off.
I light a cigarette, and now I hear her raving like a maniac coming down the street. I move to the kitchen window and stand in the dark in my nightgown, trembling with rage, waiting for her figure to catch up with her voice shattering the night, and now I see her at the edge of the streetlight.
By Bruce Bond
Featured Art: The Brook by Paul Cézanne
after Rembrandt
Why they look away is anyone’s guess,
these men apprenticed to the evidence,
gathered at the corpse the dark context
makes bright inside the surgical forum.
Anyone’s guess why, at this instant,
even the teacher looks past his subject,
the harp strings of these extended tendons
raised up from the bed of the open wound.
A spectacle, it seems, for no one there,
for though they lean in, wide-eyed, severe,
they look instead at the anatomy volume
propped up in the center of the room,
or at us, the viewer, the painter, the future
that stares back with the blindness of a mirror.
By Julie Hassett
Featured Art: The Red Kerchief by Claude Monet
after a painting by Winslow Homer, Boston MFA
Blue skirt a bell, percussive
on her calves, basket full of mussels,
unable to quell the surge,
red hair a banner,
she glares at a ship which lifts,
smacks the swell.
Spumes geyser over hull.
Black shoes plant on granite,
root to her core,
a ballast that will not crack
no matter the force
of gusts from the north,
a gush that rushes her sternum,
alone, again, by the ocean.
By Julie Henson
Featured Art: A Fisherman’s Daughter by Winslow Homer
Late in the night after my father’s memorial service, my sisters and I stopped our small caravan at a Speedway in the stretch of US-40 between Greencastle and Indianapolis. It was early November.
“Come with me,” my sister Emily said, leading me to the back of her car and opening the trunk. She pointed to a box in the corner. “You want some?” she asked sounding like a drug dealer, which at one point she had been. I saw her slipping back in easy—my dad’s ashes were valuable and sort of dangerous—I felt like it may have even been against Indiana state law to have them, let alone scatter them, though I never checked. When I said nothing, she prodded, “You want even just a little? There’s so much to go around.” Sarah, our oldest sister, was waiting in the passenger seat—she had already been dealt her ash-inheritance. It was late and it was cold; I wanted to go to sleep. Emily looked at me intently. The way the gas station lights slanted cast a shadow across the top of her face, and I could not make out her expression.
“No,” I finally said. “I’m trying to quit.”
The nozzle on the gas pump clicked, and she sighed, shut the trunk.
By Stephanie Gangi
Featured Art: Dog with pups by India, Rajasthan, Ajmer, probably Sawar school
That damn dog.
Which one, Ma?
The first one.
There is no first one, there was always a dog, Ma.
The shepherd, the one who kept the baby
from rolling in to the road down the hill in front of the house.
That was me, Ma. I was the baby.
I know that. Rex. Rex.
And what about your father’s, who jumped
out the car window at a toll booth, headed for the hills. Skippy,
ungrateful mutt.
Then we got Duchess, because of Lassie on television.
Duchess was weak. Duchess didn’t last.
The toy poodle came in a hat box. She matched the décor!
I swear to god, she did.
Your chateau phase.
What about your dogs?
My dogs? My dogs, Ma?
The fear biter who darted in the dark at the ankles of my bad choices?
The herder who swam himself spent, circling me circling me when I was at sea?
The too-happy dog, who I couldn’t keep, I forget why?
Now this one, the big one, this horse of a dog who braces himself
so I can stand? Who, the slower I go, the stronger he gets?
Who can’t rest until I rest? This dog, Ma?
This last one? Ma?
By Jackie Craven
Featured Art: Edge of the Woods Near L’Hermitage, Pontoise by Camille Pissarro
“We’d invite you in,” my mother said, “but where
would we put you?” I must have seemed enormous
squatting before her door, third drawer from center.
If not for the marble nameplate, I might’ve seen
a diorama of Jacobean chairs, tiny forks and spoons,
and my stepfather’s bonsai.
“There’s barely enough room for the two of us,”
my mother went on. Deep inside the granite walls,
my stepfather growled, “I blame the Realtor.”
Dogwoods fluttered, casting stained blossoms
into the fountain. Down the hill, a procession of bagpipes
let out a skirl. “She promised us a view,” my mother shrilled.
I think my parents imagined themselves still
at the retirement home, rolling along a tulip-edged path
from the Independent Wing, past Assisted Living,
over to Memory Care, where the Admissions Lady
touched my arm and whispered, “Don’t worry.
We’ll help them downsize.”
By Holly Day
Featured Art: A Funeral by Jean-Paul Laurens
When my father was ten, his mother died
and he went outside into the street after her funeral and screamed
at God. He said, “Take me,
you fucker!” to God, and his younger brother, my
uncle, was so scared he ran
into the room they both shared and hid. Later, when
my father came back, my uncle asked him what Hell was like,
why God had let him come back, if he had seen
their mother, what she was wearing.
By Stephen Dunn
Featured Art: Genesis II by Franz Marc
As a child, some of his prayers were answered
because he prayed out loud for a kite or bike,
which his mother would overhear, and pass on
to her husband, his father, the Lord.
Later, he understood that when he prayed
he was mostly talking to himself—albeit a better,
more moral part of himself—which accounted
for why he heard nothing back from the void.
Lord, he’d begin, because he was afraid
to alter the language of prayer, Lord, deliver
me from envy and mean-spiritedness,
allow me to love people as I love animals.
Then his father died, and he became the sad Lord
of himself, praying for pleasures immediate and grantable.
Let me tango the night long with Margot the receptionist,
he’d say to no one. Let me do unto others.
Selected as runner-up for the 2015 New Ohio Review Fiction Contest by Maud Casey
By Susan Finch
Featured Art: Early Morning After a Storm at Sea by Winslow Homer
When Bob Miller slipped and fell from the rooftop deck of his ex-wife’s houseboat into the inky black of Rock Harbor, it almost appeared as if he’d done it on purpose. The fall took him feet over head, his flailing arms tightening into a V like he was performing a cartwheel. His fingers spread open in sunbursts, his legs stretched wide and long like a dancer’s, and his toes tensed into sharp points. As he tumbled the twenty-five feet into the shadowy water, his whole body seemed to expand and explode into a star.
The entire party saw Bob’s fall or, at least, when the police conducted the official investigation, partygoers would claim they had. And in truth, the spinning and twisting of Bob Miller’s body end-over-end was so spectacular that in hearing the story later in whispers passing across the marina from slip to slip, everyone felt they had seen it. Those who knew Bob assumed he’d been dared to do it. He had always been a bit of a showoff and couldn’t say no to a challenge. When he was thirteen, he’d purchased a dirt bike and had performed stunts for his friends on the weekend, vaulting over a campfire, navigating the narrow wall between the cornfield and the river, and once, after a double-dog-dare, he’d launched the bike from the hayloft of his father’s dilapidated barn and taken a nasty spill on the landing, fracturing his femur.
By Sally Bliumis-Dunn
Featured Art: Submarine Series Introductory Lithograph by Eric Ravilious
When they read the metal tag
on her pectoral fin—
a surprise of dark Cyrillic letters
on this Gray Whale
who had swum some fourteen thousand miles,
inter-braiding continent
with continent—
strange that I think of you now, father
though you too had lived
mostly below a surface,
the breadth of which we could not know—
until they read her tag,
the cetologists had thought
the gray whales off the coast of Baja
were of a different species
from the ones in Minsk.
When I found your lacquer boxes,
so small they fit into my hand,
with their depictions of our home,
the pots above the stove,
their odd discolorations,
the cheerful curtained window
that looked out at the pines,
I felt sad I had not known your heart
would swim such distance for us—
you had never shown us one.
And how small you had to make yourself
to see each scene and paint it
like an ant stepping carefully along
one of those dark passages
in its hill of dirt that nobody sees inside.
By Sally Bliumis-Dunn
Featured Art: The Burning of the Houses of Lords and Commons, 16 October 1834 by Joseph Mallord William Turner
“Aesthetics to Change the Way You Live”
—Growth Magazine
For instance wabi sabi,
a Japanese view of life
that celebrates the imperfect,
the light-hearted sound
of the two words
like figures balanced on a seesaw,
behind them, cloudless sky,
and in the spread, the photograph
of nicked and tarnished silver spoons
arranged in rows on lilac velvet—
how perfectly imperfect.
But separate from the printed page,
the air around me darkens—
and then the sound
like thunder pressing closer
as I think of my own flaws—
and then they all
come charging toward me
like a herd of bison,
so dense it’s hard to see
from all the kicked-up dust.
So loud I cannot think.
How much easier to be won over
by a living room’s worn rug,
the reds and blues, faded,
even threadbare in those places
I have most often stood.
By Christopher Flannery
Featured Art: Reading by Berthe Morisot
I was reading Plato
and thinking about you.
So I wasn’t really reading.
I was thinking.
And I wasn’t thinking about reading,
if you get the idea.
And that’s the thing.
With Plato,
it’s all about the idea.
By Kyle Norwood
Featured Art: Crescent Moon from Album of Paintings by the Venerable Zeshin by Shibata Zeshin 柴田 是真
“This contract,” this machine with knobs
to be pulled, buttons to be pushed, inexorable gears
leading from A to B, but so easily sabotaged,
mucked up by a fallen coin or shirtsleeve or
dangled lock of hair caught in the works—
“is complete,” encompasses entirely the world
of its transaction, has an inside but no outside,
everything else is forever foreign and beneath notice
in the penumbra of this dazzling light,
“and all promises, representations, understandings,
and agreements,” theories, whispered assurances,
messages in code, three-martini lunchtime conversations,
husky-voiced proposals to meet in back of the bank by moonlight,
“have been expressed herein, and all prior negotiations
and agreements are merged herein,” forgotten, a haze,
only this document remembers, everything else is indistinct.
Nonetheless, “no change, modification, or assignment hereof”
shall surprise the sociologists, or Erda the earth-spirit
who knows how all things end,
and no contract, no music or poem worth the paper,
no valedictory address or deathbed testament,
no blood sacrifices, voodoo rituals, fire sales,
or promises spoken out of a burning bush,
no house finch spilling its enthusiasm into the gutters,
no final snow covering the earth like a last sigh,
“shall be binding against the Company unless in writing
and signed by one of its officers.”
By Bryan Owens
Featured Art: Ananas (Pineapples) by Charles Martin
Is it against school dress code for a student to wear sweatpants
that say PINK across the rear? I have CC’d the school director.
Please advise.
Though it is not stated explicitly in the student handbook,
I think it is safe to say this article of clothing
is not school appropriate.
If we do not adhere to the dress code policy
as it is stated explicitly, we are doing these kids
a tragic disservice in their preparation for the real world.
I agree, given the suggestiveness of the images it raises
& its placement in relative context with that which
it is alluding to, this article of clothing should not be tolerated at school.
Well, to what extent do we implement
school policy based on our individual theories of how one article,
not explicitly referred to in the handbook, defies or complies
with the fundamental principles of the guidelines?
So does that mean we let slide what is merely not stated
in the handbook?
How is PINK suggestive it’s just a brand name
I have my own pair at home super comfortable
Of course we don’t merely let it slide!!! but if every member
of the faculty is meant to uphold the dress code policy
through individual subjectivity, how can we have any consistency
throughout the faculty? The student has gone the whole morning
with no faculty sending her to the office!!!
PINK is suggestive as sexual innuendo or metonym
for female reproductive parts. Our dress code is in place
to protect our female students from themselves,
thinking it is good to provoke what teenage boys are already thinking.
Comfortable??? I’m so glad for you, but would you wear them to school???
I would if I could! : )
By Samuel Ligon
Featured Art: The Large Plane Trees (Road Menders at Saint-Rémy) by Vincent van Gogh
We killed Kitty’s husband with a harpoon her grandfather had given her, but it could have been a skillet or the steel ashtray from her kitchen table. The band would sit around that table at night, smoking and drinking and filling the house with music, and as it got late, Billy Wayne would make Kitty feel bad about who she was and what was best in her, calling her ignorant hillbilly trash and blaming her for everything that was small in him. He married her when she was fifteen, two months after he discovered her in Spokane, though everybody knew she didn’t need to be discovered. She only needed to sing the sweet, sad songs we wrote, and America’s heart would melt.
Our first single, “A Stone of Ice,” told the story of Billy Wayne trampling Kitty’s love with whiskey and womanizing, leaching all the goodness from her once pure soul. Every song we sang was about him. We wrote “This Bed You’ve Made” a month before he died, with the chorus that would make Kitty famous:
This bed you’ve made of cheating nights
This bed you’ve made of sin
This bed you’ve made of drunken lies
Is the bed I’m in with him
By Jesse Wallis
Featured Art: Dancers by Edgar Degas
I don’t know how, but I knew as soon as he said it, he would get lost
after the bridge. “I’m still working on this one,” he began, tightening
the strings. “Hope I make it through.” It was the third song the young
man played. He was really quite good, if new. His tenor voice earnest,
fingers deliberate in finding the chords along the neck of the acoustic.
But exactly where I had thought, he forgot the lyrics, shook his head
while he strummed on in circles. Until he whispered under his breath,
“I’m sorry,” and I called out, Muriel plays piano. With a broad smile,
he nodded, “Very good. Thank you.” Then picked it up, Muriel plays
piano every Friday at The Hollywood, and brought it home as strong
as he’d started. This was at a small coffee shop in Carefree, Arizona.
On the patio strung with white lights, maybe a dozen people, a night
in November cold enough to recollect. My wife and I had separated
recently. A friend was trying to get me out in the world, to keep me
busy. And at least for that moment, I felt like I belonged someplace
again. I had something someone needed. Realized anyone could get
lost, even in Carefree. Yet every now and then, the invisible chords
connecting us—even with a complete stranger—sway in the breeze
like silk filaments of a web and catch the light. And you can follow
that flashing back, the path familiar as a song. You know the words.
By Laura Read
Featured Art: Seated Man and Woman by Célestin François Nanteuil
At the middle school meeting for parents of children
in Accelerated Learning, I sit at a lunch table across
the cafeteria from him. At first he is just
part of the scene, like the board listing prices
for soda and chips, or the English teacher addressing us,
famous for tearing up a kid’s paper if it wasn’t
double-spaced. She is talking about the importance
of Latin roots, this new language made from taking apart
what they already know. On the first day of school,
my son recited them to me from the back seat,
wearing his new cool sweatshirt and no longer carrying
a lunchbox, his lunch jammed instead into a plastic
bag like the ones he told me the other kids would have.
Port. Carry. Co com con. With. The man’s face
is starting to look like two faces, like that optical
illusion of an old woman and a young woman,
the same line for the chin and the nose.
The teacher tells us, They’re going to struggle.
They’re going to fail. They’re twelve. Let’s face it—
no one here wants to go back to seventh grade.
By Fleda Brown
Featured Art: Swan by Mary Altha Nims
1
I am full of irritation this morning
which makes folding the fitted sheet
a disaster, wrinkles smashed inside.
Down at the dock, the swan hissed
at me and I thought, good for you,
swan, what business do we have
in your life, anyway, making up myths
in which you rape, or die?
Beautiful things often hiss if you get
too close. Or if you try to neaten them up
like clothes. A swan’s neck is tough
enough to twist you into knots.
Beauty, I don’t know how to feed it
without getting bitten.
2
Swan’s wings are heavy enough to kill you.
Eleven swans at once have traveled our lake
in perfect synchrony in the boat wakes,
their heads so far from the wild bucking,
they seem to have forgotten their bodies.
Terrible flowerings, they are going
somewhere else, to do what they do.
3
A male swan is a cob, the female a pen.
Who thought those up? They make a kind
of sense, though, the same kind of sense
that turns a swan’s neck plus its reflection
into an ice-hook.
4
If a challenger comes too near the nest
the cob climbs on him and shoves
his head down until he drowns. Not shoves.
He rests his beak quietly, relentlessly
on the neck as if it were the challenger’s
decision to bow under, and he were
helping him stay there. His big body
covers the other, except for one wingtip.
There’s a leisurely quality, like love.
When swans mate, their heads and necks
form a perfect valentine. Or, they intertwine
necks. Last night I wanted to watch
the movie unencumbered by your hand
on my breast. I was touchy. You were all
winding; I, all hiss.
By Maxine Scates
Featured Art: Star Flower by Mary Altha Nims
“It’s only a matter of time before eternity,”
reads a sign in front of a church, turning the day
epigrammatic. But rather than think of the time I have left,
I think about all that goes wrong. For instance,
how did that cow, an Angus, red tag in its ear, die
by the side of the road? Did someone shoot it
because it stood as still as the time I’ve already spent
does not? Its coat was still shining, sleek as that coat
I’d only dreamed of buying all those years ago
until a boy asked me out on a date and I finally
had somewhere to go. I’d already saved the money,
and did not consider whether or not such a coat
was too hot for L.A. I thought instead of the stars
I ushered to their courtside seats in my hip-length toga
at the Fabulous Forum, the stars who followed the ass
I’d only gradually understood I’d been hired for,
the stars who wore leather coats, shiny and supple
as their skin when they stepped from the lengthening dusk
of fall days like the gods they were without ever
breaking a sweat. So on my day off I opened the door
to Discount Leathers, which smelled of barnyards
and fields I had never seen though now I think
of that smell as more like the roadside of lingering death
where I hope the cow’s carcass has mercifully
been picked clean by vultures leaving nothing behind
but bones and a dull hide. I picked my coat
quickly, laid my cash on the counter and got out, but
not before I saw the smirk on the salesman’s face,
not before he saw how I believed that cloaked
in my coat my skin would be soft, my hair glossy,
saw how I knew nothing about anything, all of it
a mystery in whose maze I was certain I wandered
alone. I don’t remember the boy or how the date went.
The coat was too hot. It was heavy and felt like the hide
that it was, stiff and unyielding. I took it to the cleaners
up by Sears Liquors and whatever they did turned it
whitish, marbled as a slab of meat. I stood at the counter
and paid for it and never asked what had gone wrong.
By Vincent Poturica
Featured Art: View of the City and London Bridge
About nine or ten years ago when I was not yet twenty, my friend Carlos asked me if he should sell his soul to the Devil’s best friend in exchange for a better world—I am not kidding, son. I told Carlos that selling his soul sounded a little hardcore, even for him, and that he should probably meditate on the potential consequences for at least a week. I also suggested that he contemplate his motives, i.e. whether or not he was really doing it for a good cause—though I confessed that I distrusted anyone who thought they knew what was best—or because he felt desperate regarding the recent death of our dear friend Ivan. I then told him—and he agreed—that he also probably needed to consider whether the Devil’s best friend was the best person or demon to sell his soul to, whether the Devil’s best friend was even certified to buy his soul—I admitted that I had never heard of someone selling their soul to the Devil’s best friend, but I was, of course, ignorant of many things. I then questioned the extreme subjectivity of better world, encouraging Carlos to make sure to specify as much as possible the criteria for what made this world better, for instance its natural resources, its climate, its historical record of oppression, among other factors, before he signed any contracts with his blood or whatever you did these days to officially seal transactions involving that most precious and contested conception of the self.
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Selected as winner of the 2015 New Ohio Review Poetry Contest by Robert Pinsky
By Keith Kopka
Featured Art: Spring Flowers by Claude Monet
Knowledge of crime is a crime
even if one is not committed
by participation. At this cookout,
in a parallel universe, a version
of me lifts the gun, considers
its weight a handful of peanuts.
Another variant lets off a shot
into Godless sky, a traditional
celebration of manhood, in
the dimension of Texas oil barons.
I have a self who understands
breech-bolt action, another
who can separate grip cap
and butt stock, put them back
blindfolded, turn shotgun into
sawed off. In our current rotation
of speed and light, his pump
action is between us on the table.
The cookout has been great,
and I’m glad his sister, my date,
invited me. His mother is grilling
cow tongue. The whole gang’s
here to celebrate Marshmallow’s
release after three years in prison,
he’s at the grill asking for a fourth
helping. The word Rascal carved
in his chest like a pacemaker scar.
In the universe of wooden nickels,
I am best friends with this blunt
instrument. Of course, this isn’t
the universe where we live. My date’s
brother is asking if I’m interested
in a job, simple robbery, I get a part
of the product, but he needs me
because I’m white, because it won’t
get back to his gang, or the black
gangs, if a white man robs a white
man of some drugs. I’ve noticed
I’m the only guy at the cookout
wearing a shirt. Her brother
has a tattoo of two devils balanced
on the top of a mountain range.
It covers his whole stomach.
He tells me if I shoot the guy,
when I rob him, it’s okay, but if I kill
there’s nothing in this world
he can do to help me. Marshmallow
settles himself in a deck chair,
eyes closed, the meat on the grill
smells like warm wood. Hungry
is the only word I can think of.
By Keith Kopka
Selected as winner of the 2015 New Ohio Review Poetry Contest by Robert Pinsky
Featured Art: The Race Track (Death on a Pale Horse) by Albert Pinkham Ryder
Young John Wayne leaps, without effort,
onto the back of a Palomino, and I know
he’ll catch the leader of the Taylor Gang
for what he’s done to his woman. He’ll swing
for this one. Wayne is ruthless, but it’s hard
to forget him cut open for cancer research,
the forty pounds of meat wadding through
his colon like a saddle strap. You and Wayne
have a lot in common: doctor’s hands
searched the mineshaft of your stomach,
catalogued what they took, then fastened
you with a wandering stitch. Still, nothing
extracted from anyone can explain why
the body takes revenge on the body.
***
Hanging is the ninth most popular
suicide method behind gunshot to chest;
it has an almost seventy-eight percent
success rate, and takes seven minutes.
In the west, thousands gathered
to watch hanging judges size bight
and neck, and after the bags dropped
some took pieces of the scaffold or rope
as keepsakes. You hung, too.
I still have the pair of shoes you loaned
me in gym class on a nail hook
in the back of my closet.
By Darrell Spencer
Featured Art: Twilight in the Wilderness by Frederic Edwin Church
Our joke was either Molly sells a kidney—under the radar, off the books, $40,000 cash up front in England we discovered online, no questions asked, wink-wink, and also, I came to this understanding in my bones, not really all that funny as an option—or reality was we hock our gold.
We hocked it.
Okay, Molly did. Her gold. Every last effing piece of it Molly’s. Earrings. Necklaces, long and dangly and three-tiered, one of them leaf-like, all the chains intertwined and hard to separate. You know how they get twisted up in their boxes like they have a secret life. None of the jewelry rolled or washed gold. Molly did her online research at the library. Brooches, one an open hand, palm out, standing for generosity and giving, one a butterfly whose catch was missing. It had been her mother’s. There was a heart Molly liked to wear on her sleeve. Only one ring. Her grandfather’s on her father’s side. It had a pair of serpents circling an in-set ruby. Brewster was his name, and he had been an M.D. The kind of G.P. parents named their newborns after. The man part of a long line of doctors stretching back to the Civil War. Molly had photos back home in Ohio. The old-timers a bunch of bearded hacksaws, grim butchers.
By James Lineberger
Featured Art: Card Rack with a Jack of Hearts by Jack F. Peto
I’d never seen her before that day when
she came knocking on the door and I thought at first
I must owe postage on the package in her hand
but no, she said, this was an official visit to advise me
that unless I stopped parking the Malibu in our circular drive,
I would have to mount a new mailbox out on the street
rather than the one by the door that we’ve been using since
the house was built back in the Fifties.
“Say what?” I said,
“excuse me lady but that is my drive not yours.”
But she was not to be dissuaded,
advising me that new regs from the Postmaster General
would not permit her to put her Jeep in reverse
and turn around in the drive,
and she only shook her head no when I said,
“Look, okay, if we mounted it out there on this dead-end street
you would still have to back up
when you get to my neighbor’s house next door
because hers is on the front porch too same as this one
and you have to pull in her driveway to get there, and tell me
how you’re going to get out, and besides,
the reason we park the car out front here is because
my wife broke her hip and had to have screws put in it
and she’s still not too certain on her feet, not to mention
she’s got Alzheimer’s, unless you’ve got regs about that too
but the regular carrier never told us anything like this
and he doesn’t seem to mind backing up at all.”
“Well, sir,” she said, “that is him, this is me,
besides which where is your handicap placard?”
and walked away even as I was saying
“Just you wait lady, we’ll see about this.”
By Z.Z. Boone
Featured Art: Vase of Flowers by Odilon Redon
Nobody was really surprised when Rosemary Villano turned up pregnant. It was like my dad said at dinner the night Bernadette Fischer, a receptionist at Staten Island Physician Practice, walked across the street and dropped the news.
“The girl had it coming,” he said.
This was in August 1995, when Rosemary was eighteen. She was my buddy Chegg’s sister, and had quit high school in January in order to work full-time at Frosty’s Italian Ice Creamery in the mall. Some genius had stuck her in this short, skin-tight beige uniform, and it seemed the area’s male populace—my dad included—had all of a sudden developed this insatiable craving for spumoni.
Rosemary had been dating this oversized pinhead named Eddie Dowd ever since her freshman year, another dropout who thought nothing of punching a kid like me in the stomach, or shoplifting liquid Tylenol from CVS, or talking about Rosemary with his fellow goons and saying stuff like, “This girl could suck the bark off a maple tree.” He drove around in a white van that had an amateurish painting of Daffy Duck saluting the American flag painted on the side, under which the words, “Where the Women At?” were printed.
Read More
By Scott Brennan
Featured Art: The Rose Cloud by Henri-Edmond Cross
A Barbie with gum in her hair, a Lite-Brite that may or may not turn on,
and Monopoly played once or twice then stowed, the Chance cards
missing, the Scottie dog lost, the dice gone. Here, the Boggle bubble,
cracked. In a milk crate beside the games, we have the tools: a hacksaw,
a cordless Black and Decker drill, a Stanley hammer, a rat-tail file,
a Phillips screwdriver. Here’s a Schwinn bicycle with dry-rot tires, and,
By Michael Cooper
Featured Art: Murol in the Snow by Victor Charreton
The new girl from Vermont said that a woman lived in her shed. The new girl from Vermont brought in a pair of boots to prove it. The boots looked ancient, green suede in a previous incarnation, full suede probably before any of the children in Ms. Gwynn’s class had been born. Now the boots were gray and stiff with duct tape layered up to the edges, leaving only the mossy-looking tips exposed. Terry Wilkins, whom the other children called Terry the Terrible, said it looked as though Sally, the new girl from Vermont, was holding a pair of elf shoes from Middle-earth. The entire class erupted in laughter. Before the show-and-tell session could regress entirely, Ms. Gwynn told the children to quiet down. She told them that they should respect Sally and her story.
The last of the laughter subsided and Sally continued speaking, the shoes nestled in a forearm like pets.
“My father keeps a woman in our shed and these are her shoes.”
By Andrea Hollander
Featured Art: L’Heure du silence by Henri Georges J. I. Meunier
After I confessed, all I’d hear
was the scratch of my father’s ballpoint
against his prescription pad
as I stood before him at his office desk
on the first floor of our house. Yes,
I’d say, I did it, I left the mower out
all night, forgot
to turn the sprinkler off, lied
about the party,
the pack of cigarettes,
the exact hour I got home.
His hours or sometimes days
of silence entered our house
like an unwelcome guest,
an intruder we agreed
to treat with kindness,
each of us saying Sit here
when we didn’t want him
to sit anywhere.
After I apologized and promised
never to do it again, whatever it was,
after I made his coffee
in the morning, served it
with two Lorna Doones on the saucer
beside the china cup, sometimes
he would thank me.
But even then I didn’t know
if it would take one more
silent dinner or two
before I’d hear forgiveness
in his voice, that other guest
who arrived unpredictably
while I wept myself to sleep,
that guest whose safe return
I prayed for, the one
my mother prayed for, too,
she told me later, that guest
she thought she’d married
in the first place.
By Martha Silano
Featured Art: Mount Sainte-Victoire by Paul Cézanne
the Bible’s a Mount Everest of metaphor—
the seventh day more likely the seven
trillionth, the Holy Spirit about as real
as Casper the Friendly Ghost. My mother
who never once definitively sang
in the tune of Judgment, the lexicon
of flames. My equivocating, not-sure-he’s
the-Savior mother, who calls with an urgent
message: Billy Graham’s 95th birthday special.
Mother of Peace, mother who sanctioned
my Sunday school exodus when my teacher
refused to define adultery, who rolled her eyes
at shiny offering plates, who yadda yadda’d
the Lord’s Prayer, mother too busy browsing
The Female Eunuch to read to us from the book
of Jonah, to reason a man could live three days
in the belly of a whale, mother lacking sufficient
conviction to share the story of the loaves and fishes,
inciting me to fall to my knees as I did one day in 1974,
the man on the screen having told me I must.
By Billy Collins
Featured Art: A Caravan in the Desert by Narcisse Berchère
The camel felt nothing
as it stood outside the encampment,
its nose lifted in the thin desert air.
And no one in the caravan
even noticed the straw,
or if they did, no mention was made of it
that evening as they sat in a circle
inside a colorful tent
talking quietly under the numerous stars.
By Christopher Kempf
Selected as runner-up for the 2015 New Ohio Review Poetry Contest by Robert Pinsky
Featured Art: Ruins of an Ancient City by John Martin
At mile twenty, roughly, the muscles
of the legs will collapse. Calves
twitching at random. The hamstrings’
sacked meat seizing. Scarry,
in The Body in Pain, explains
that language too, tasked
with conveying affliction, fails. That pain,
she argues, obliterates
discourse. I limped
past the drunk undergrads
of Boston College, my body’s stock-
pile of glycogen finally
exhausted. The wall, runners
call it. The bonk. The blowing
up. & after,
the body in pain will make
of its own fat fuel. I followed
the shimmering column of runners right
onto Boylston Street. In three
hours two
coinciding explosions would themselves
leave the city—except
for its sirens—speechless. The limes, Latin
for boundary line, signified
to ancient Romans the most remote
walls of the sacred Empire. Lie-
meez Arabicus for instance.
Limit.
The legions
Caesar trusted most though & therefore
dreaded, he kept
stationed on the Plain of Mars a mile only
west from the city walls. He watched
from the seventh hill the drilling
columns, consulted
each morning in the sky above him
the wheeling birds. A body,
he knew well, will
at sometime or other, hungry
for blood, break
in on itself & eat.
By Christopher Kempf
Selected as runner-up in the 2015 New Ohio Review Poetry Contest by Robert Pinsky
Featured Art: Interior of the Pantheon, Rome by Giovanni Paolo Panini
So too on Troy’s final afternoon
the doomed children of the city sang. Such
was their joy, Virgil tells us, such
was their simple awestruck wonder
at the great beast even
the Achaeans, cramped, standing
on each other’s shoulders inside
the close wood, wept. What
he means, of course, is that inside
of the other’s suffering, one
can imagine always aspects
of a wild beauty refusing
negation. Or no. Not
that it exists, this
beauty, but that
it can be made so. Rome
Virgil says, springing
from Ilion’s ashes. Elsewhere
Orpheus. This
is not my home. Here
for the weekend only, I float
out into the hot tub’s bubbling, bleach-
& salt-scoured water. I watch
the few stars the city permits
still flicker on, the long
avenues of light below them—Cienaga
& Sunset, Ventura—burn
& spangle in the mountains’ dark bowl. The bottle
of La Marca prosecco sweats. To secure
for their desert metropolis water
enough to nourish all this, city
developers—circa
the arrival, reports suggest, of something
By Christopher Kempf
Selected as runner-up for the 2015 New Ohio Review Poetry Contest by Robert Pinsky
Featured Art: Storm Clouds by John Henry Twachtman
Birds fled. The city fell
quiet. Across
the night the neighbors raised
their glasses & together, gathered
on our porches, forms
in a Japanese landscape, we stared
up. Or was it
Turner the sky resembled? How every
late seascape became
for him, given
to opium & with his father’s
death, depression, a tempest
of motion & color. Clouds
roiling. The oils
of his tiny boats bleeding
out. Only,
he knew, the frame’s gilt edge
splits beauty from terror. Airplanes,
that night, climbed
from the city & steeply, fleeing
too the ruinous
wall of rain, banked
south. Schools, a step
ahead of the looming cataclysm,
closed. Newscasters
leaned forward into the wind & we, raising
our own glasses to the neighbors
drank. Dark
& Stormies. Sazeracs. We imagined
the city flooding. Mudslides
on Foothill Parkway. Prospero, fallen
from his dukedom, does it
all for pleasure he says, every
shipwrecked Milanese aristocrat, every
extravagant clipper cast
up in the pitch & tumult his rough
magic fashioned. That,
we know, is mostly
what the groundlings came for. To fancy
a world they would never see struck
low, & so
close, sometimes, as to feel even
on their faces the great
king’s spit. There is,
in catastrophe, a satisfaction
exceeding sex, psychologists
believe. Before
the storm the city
bristled. Bells
tolled. Before
the last helicopters cleared
Saigon, operatives
burned in a rooftop incinerator
the state’s documents. We watched
from our porches the planes
shudder & mount. On Merritt
Lake, the pelicans, frenzied,
fed.
By Mary Angelino
Featured Art: Japanese Iris (Large Blue Iris) by John Edwards
His dad did coke. His mom died young.
We watched porn so I could learn—
he was my first. I didn’t know enough
to do things right like other girls.
We watched porn so I could learn
to say what I did and didn’t want,
to do things right like other girls.
He filmed me almost naked once.
To say what I did and didn’t want
was a trap, an argument that didn’t stop.
He filmed me almost naked once—
he lost the tape when we broke up.
A trap, an argument that didn’t stop:
he was my first, I didn’t know enough,
he lost the tape when we broke up,
his dad did coke, his mom died young.
By Ryan Ruff Smith
Featured Art: The Blue Passion-flower by Robert John Thornton
Laura’s brother has been crashing on my couch. He’s an addict—a recovering one. The hardest part of recovering is to keep doing it. Laura’s brother recovers for a while, and then he stops recovering, and then he runs out of money and picks it back up again. As of today, he’s been recovering for two months straight, which is a big milestone. Laura’s really proud of him. I’m proud, too, but I’d never say it, because I’m afraid that it would sound condescending and weird. I’m afraid that I would say something like: I’m really proud of you, Jim, and I believe in you, and I wouldn’t be surprised at all if you kept this up and, one day, maybe you’ll even find your way off my couch.
Don’t get me wrong. I am proud of him. Because I know that it’s really hard for him not to slip up. I mean, it’s hard for one. For anyone who is struggling with addiction. Which is what he has. Which is hard.
I get that.
The thing is, there’s this smell. I would never say this to him, but my whole apartment smells a bit funky. Not because he’s an addict—a recovering addict— it’s just a person smell, but since he’s on my couch every night, and most of the day, it accumulates, and it’s not the most pleasant. He bathes and everything, maybe not as often as he could, and usually pretty late in the day, but it’s not like he’s trying to smell. He makes an effort, but I do wonder what kind of soap he uses. Here, I have mixed feelings, because I don’t necessarily want him using my soap—not that I’m stingy, if you come for the weekend, go nuts, use all the soap you want, it’s just that he’s been here for two months—but at the same time, I’m afraid that he’s not using any soap at all, in which case, maybe I’d rather have him use my stuff than have this stench in my apartment all the time.
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By Shane Lake
Featured Art: Fifth Avenue Nocturne by Childe Hassam
A Red Cross bus gets hit by a truck
and lands on its side, the driver unconscious.
Blood spills from the broken glass,
coats the pavement in bubbling rust.
It is 1977 and the theme for summer is .44 caliber.
It is one hundred fifteen degrees.
A crowd forms in the contagious heat,
pulls back as the red pool expands.
I watch from the ailing shade of a palm tree,
the sweet taste of blood in the air, on my tongue.
Someone tries to rescue the driver
but the mix is slippery. He lands on his back.
His impact speckles the closest few,
who scream and cover their mouths with their hands.
Sirens sound, and soon the fire trucks are here,
hosing donations into the street drain.
Secretly, we all enjoy this,
being here at the scene of the crash
where news vans make stars of us all.
We want our trauma to trump everyone else’s.
We want to be able to say:
“You weren’t there. You wouldn’t understand.”
By Tamie Parker Song
Featured Art: Flowers of a Hundred Worlds (Momoyogusa): Ivy (Tsuta) by Kamisaka Sekka 神坂 雪佳
Our house is a toilet full of shit and fistfuls of toilet paper, long past flushing. It is the bones of kitchen cups smashed with cigarettes. It is the way we don’t turn on the lights anymore. The way we do not light the fire. It is dead flies in the windows; a pantry with food cans several years old. The house used to be Mom, music on the record player; hair cuts in the kitchen, blueberry pancakes for breakfast, light. Now it is cupboards we keep opening, hoping. Then fishing grabs for us, pulls us under, and we stop even opening the cupboards.
We are commercial salmon fishermen on an island in Alaska seventy miles by plane or boat from the nearest town. Only our family lives on this island, and the crew who works for us, and even though everyone is watching me no one is watching out for me. I have been fishing my whole life, the only girl on an all-male crew. I am fifteen.
Dad eats tubs of frosting and bowls of raw cake batter. He wears the same clothes for six weeks at a time and does not bathe. Mom has stopped coming to the island, and Dad can’t or won’t cook, so I start eating with the crew. DeWitt eats with us sometimes, and sometimes with Dad. DeWitt fishes almost exclusively with Dad, while I trade around and fish with different crew. I try not to think about leaving DeWitt at home. He is only thirteen. But something in my body is trying to pull itself away.
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By Devon J. Moore
Featured Art: Miss Loïe Fuller by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec
Gwyneth Paltrow is on the air again
saying something about the difficulty of being
a mother on set is more difficult than being
a mother in an office, on a train, commuting
to those 9 to 5s. She says you have it easier
when your life is synchronized to the needs of mouths
that are not your mouth, to the needs of bosses
that don’t know your name. You have it easier when
you’re alone in a room with a baby,
when the sun hasn’t risen and your chest is dripping milk
and you wonder if today is the day the paycheck
or the 7 o’clock bus or the sun won’t come.
Gwyneth, I don’t have a baby,
but my dread is bigger than your dread,
my breasts are bigger, heavier, than your breasts.
Do you still feel the need to compare?
How about this? My cat would be cuter than your cat
if it hadn’t been for that sick neighbor and his box cutters.
My lover left and his back got smaller,
more quickly, than your lover’s back.
My dad dying sucked more than your dad dying sucked.
I could do this ridiculousness all day. But, Gwyneth,
the memory of my mother needs me
to say, that novel she always wanted to write
never got written. I was a needy daughter,
maybe even needier than your daughter.
I demanded
she look at me instead
of a book or the movie on the TV,
and maybe, Gwyneth, you were
in it, being thinner than my mother
but not prettier. There were days
my pretty mother didn’t look at me
because she couldn’t see past the dark
space in herself and I hated her.
There was a day my mother cried in the laundromat
when a woman, another mother, asked her what she did
for a living, and when my mother said she was a home
health care aide, the woman said that meant
my mother was nothing
but a maid.
The color of blood is more vivid and harder to clean
in my daydreams than in your daydreams,
and a powerless life is harder to describe to the powerful
than the sound of my mother crying on the rug.
But I’ll try.
By Craig van Rooyen
Featured Art: Pine Tree by Giovanni Segantini
The History Channel’s playing “The Gold Rush” again.
All those bearded men looking at reflections
of themselves on the surfaces of creeks and rivers and lakes.
They’re so beautiful coming out of ramshackle cabins,
thumbs tucked into suspenders, wading into streams
the color of cheap whiskey. That golden light
on their shoulders, in their beards, dripping
from the brims of their hats, high on
“howdy” and “rough and ready,”
around every bend in the river, expecting
life to begin. The flash of light in a silver pan
full and overflowing. All that hope. Out of
the river, there’s always more earth.
There’s always the scooping and sifting and
throwing away. Everything left behind—out of
frame: The women in their calico, waving goodbye.
The steaming cows in their barns. Now just
the sloshing desire of this moment and the next.
Sure, you have to be willing to kill a few Indians.
But as long as you’ve got a pan and a river
to dip it in, you can forget the rest.
At least that’s what I tell myself before the first
commercial break. Before those attractive
late-middle-aged people clutch each other
in honey light and the baritone voice-over tells me
to go to the emergency room if I experience
an erection that lasts more than four hours. I wonder
if anyone ever panned for gold in terrycloth—
my fabric of choice for watching “The Gold Rush”
in bed at 10 a.m. on a Wednesday. I wonder
if any of those bearded men had a bottle of
Prozac back in the cabin next to the straight-blade
razor underneath the cracked mirror—something
to take the edge off all that failure, something
to dull the regret of walking out on their women
and cows. Of course they’d have another name
for Prozac, like maybe “nerve pills,” as in:
“Durn near forgot to take my nerve pills this morning, Jake.
Christing Jesus, sure don’t want to start sawing
at my wrists again, now do I?” I love the way
there’s no word for shame in the language
of gold miners. All that hope is contagious.
In fact, I believe if I really tried, I could get up
and shuffle to the bathroom and brush my teeth
during the next commercial break. I love
the History Channel! It’s so inspirational.
Right now, the sad banjo music is playing—
the plinking of catgut string over doe-skin,
a sound so Californian it makes you weep for
the all-night diner in Auburn where it’s 6 a.m.
and the sun is lighting up the foothills and
the American River is still frothing to get wherever
it’s been trying to go all night long. All the gold’s dug out
of the hills but the waitress is calling you “love” as she
puts down a cup of awful coffee and sits in your booth—
night shift done. It’s as if she knows you. As if she’s
made the same mistakes and she’s telling you it’s okay.
Now she’s taking out a bobby pin.
Now she’s letting down all that golden hair.
By Craig van Rooyen
Featured Art: Flowers of a Hundred Worlds (Momoyogusa): Wisteria (Fuji) by Kamisaka Sekka 神坂 雪佳
In a strange city this afternoon, I looked for myself
on a cart of bargain books. I recognized
my mother’s faith and thrift in “Macrame for Dummies,”
and bought the book for 50 cents.
I recognized my father’s dark devotion
in a tattered copy of “My Utmost For His Highest.”
I fanned the pages with a thumb, felt
the dank breath of the Holy Ghost,
and put it down. I was not there. Not in
“Seven Habits Of Ecstatic Gurus.” Not in
“How To Pick Up Pretty Women With An Ugly Dog”
or “Twitterpated: An Instruction Manual
For Self-Discovery In 140 Characters Or Less.”
On the corner, a quartet of starving students played
“Let’s Get Lost,” faking it in the way of the talented young
winking with their instruments at the business casuals
waiting for a bus. Art is about loss,
they seemed to play. Can you dig it, man?
And I can—suddenly 47 and away from familiar signs,
too old to be discovered; too young to be invisible,
sitting in Union Square under
the lifted tail and muscular haunches of
George Washington’s horse—its neck arched under rein,
fighting to cross East 17th to Forever 21.
Valley Forge behind, knowing not
where he’s going next, our country’s father
(in this bronzed moment) is surely unable to predict
his journey’s end: in bed with a cold, bled to death
by four doctors earnestly trying to save him.
I’m happy to sit in his moon-shadow for now,
park lamps blinking on, smell of goat cheese and ganja
finding my nose, trying not to listen to the soft clicking
next to me as two young people introduce
their oral piercings in the dark. Across the way,
the girl with the Mohawk stops playing her bongo drum
to tell a friend about a rainbow brother who saved her
in the Bronx. Took me in and we smoked a bowl—
no questions asked, no strings attached. On the corner,
a street preacher finds his voice, improvising his holy rant
on a theme of goats and sheep, dividing us into lost and saved.
We’re all both, I want to tell him, cycling through a life-long
game of hide and seek. Even me—sitting under Washington’s
horse’s ass, smoking the flare of my guilty Marlboro
to the filter and feeling the city turn on around me—
a lost coin burning to be found.
By James Miranda
JM: One of the things I’ve always admired in your fiction is the way you’re able to use taboo and transgression so deftly and intelligently as a source of narrative tension. From your earliest stories in Come to Me (such as the much anthologized “Silver Water” and the gutsy “Sleepwalking”) right up through your complicated protagonist Lillian in Away, or Iris and Rose in your newest book Lucky Us, you seem to have an intense interest in characters that push the bounds of what is socially acceptable. Yet their acting out never feels contrived or overdone. The prohibited takes on a sacredness that’s always palpable and quite beautiful in your writing. Are you conscious of the place that taboo and transgression have in your fiction? Do you find such socially constructed forces to be great fodder for compelling narrative?
AB: I don’t really ever think of myself as breaking taboos and transgressing. It’s also true that although good manners matter to me a lot social norms do not. Good behavior is not usually a subject that fascinates me.
Read MoreBy Brad Aaron Modlin
Brad Aaron Modlin: In the past, you have written in the persona of both Eve and Mary the Mother of Jesus. While Eve speaks anachronistically—of driving a car on ice, for example—Mother Mary does not clearly do so. In the new poetry, Mary Magdalene does. When you (re)write a pre-existing character, how do you know when to stick to what we’ve already heard and when to change it? What do you hope to add to these characters?
Marie Howe: Midrash is a form of rabbinic literature, a storytelling that fills in the gaps in stories from the Torah. I always wished that Christian literature encouraged that kind of imagining. Growing up with the characters of Eve, Mary, and Mary Magdalene, I was moved by the deep silences within their stories. These are women in extremity, and also women who go on living, through those extreme states, into days and months and years—as we all do. What is their experience? And what is it the day after? And the day after that?
Many others have written through these voices—Rilke in his “Life of Mary,” W.H. Auden in his Christmas Oratorio called “For The Time Being,” Eliot, and recently so many women have brought their consciousness to these stories: Lucille Clifton, Jorie Graham, Brenda Hillman, many women writers. Each writer receives the poems according to her sensibility.
Read MoreNewohioreview.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 17 compiled by Benjamin Ervin.
By Kevin Prufer
Feature Image: First Snow at Veneux-Nadon by Alfred Sisley, 1878
Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington
When I was twenty years old
and desperate and broke,
I worked part-time in a used bookstore
in Middletown, CT.
I hated my job, hated the cramped store,
hated the paperbacks
that came there as if to die
+
and more than anything,
I wanted to write something lasting,
a novel I scrawled in notebooks
called “Black Wing”
about a dark-haired girl,
prized during the day for her beauty and intellect,
who by night
killed off poseurs, the ill-read, the clumsy-of-mind,
the bombastic, thick-fingered, and mean.
By Kevin Prufer
Just a glass of water for me, thank you.
One ice cube. Thanks. Just one.
But you should order what you want. Don’t be shy.
And don’t worry about me. Water is all I eat.
That ribeye looks promising, doesn’t it?
The charcuterie platter? The bay shrimp in a nest of deconstructed kale,
drizzled with truffle oil?
Get what you want and I’ll watch you eat, sipping from my glass of water
like a brilliant bird whose plumage once adorned ladies’ hats, but is now
available only on the black market,
please don’t mind me.
Did you read about how they beheaded another captured soldier?
Cut his head right off, clean as you like. I know, it’s
terrible. Awful, really. It ought to be a crime,
but the water flushes me out, gives me an inner clean. A kind of peace.
All this war must have been hard on you, the bodies and IEDs and the
threatening
music. It certainly was hard on our nation, and we weren’t even
there. Broccolini, yes. That’s for him. And the foie gras on toast with foraged
mushroom and lemon foam,
he’ll take that. I love the look of those cauliflower florets, like petite puffs of
smoke!
The raviolini afloat in broth like misfired paratroopers!
You’re sweet, but much too thin. You should eat.
They’ll send you back and you’ll be nothing but bones
beneath skin. Did you see how they sliced his head right off?
What do you think of my hat?
By Donald Platt
Featured Image: Diana and Actaeon (Diana Surprised in her Bath) by Camille Corot, 1836
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.
By Lloyd Schwartz
Featured Image: Haystack [colon] Autumn by Jean-François Millet 1874
“Did you hear what I was playing, Lane?”
“I didn’t think it polite to listen, sir.”
—The Importance of Being Earnest
A big, hefty guy next to me, an even bigger guy
already squeezed into the window seat. Big, pleasant
fellows. Strangers before this three-hour non-stop
domestic flight. But they’ve been talking away non-stop
since before take-off. Talking business. Talking sports.
China. India (my next-seat neighbor might have been
from India). Talking Cubs and Red Sox (they both love
them both). Google. The Euro. Leverage. Banks. Bailouts.
Masters of Money (“It will change the way you think”).
By Corrie Lynn White
Featured Image: Madison Square, Snow by Allen Tucker, 1904
Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington
I lay the sweet potatoes on
the roasting pan on their backs
or bellies—I can’t tell. The oven
is heating and the cat box
needs cleaning so I dip the plastic
shovel into the litter and grieve
that Frankie doesn’t go outside—
sit high in a tree or roll in
a lush patch of clover. I stare
out the window at the neighbor’s
raised beds and convince myself
he’d eat all their basil, puncture
the flesh of their first red tomato,
then run far away. What keeps us
where we are? I throw the plastic
bag of clumped urine into the bin
by the road and look down a few
blocks for a sunset. The sky is pink
past the stoplights. Nothing in nature
is as sudden as turning off the lamp
at night. Inside, I push the pan
into the oven and remember the guy
in my class today who said:
People don’t feel strongly anymore.
By Patrick Ryan Frank
Featured Image: Merrymakers at Shrovetide by Frans Hals, 1616-7
Tumbling down that wide Niagara of laughter,
the blonde girls and the gray-haired men beside them
swirl away through picture after picture.
If there’s champagne, there’ll be a waiter’s smirk.
If there’s an ice sculpture, it will be a swan
weeping for its flaws. If there’s a pool,
a horrible beautiful woman will end up pushed
and the garden will quiet just to hear her thrash
within the weird slick of her ruined silk—
and then the jokes and it all begins again.
Oh vanity, why won’t you leave me home?
Why must you pull me by the elbow down
that crowded hallway then leave me by the wall,
awkward as an interrupted joke,
adrift in the back of half the photographs:
a face turned too far left, mouth spread too wide
to grin, gaping as if to gulp back breath?
By David Yezzi
Featured Image: The Battle of Love by Paul Cézanne, 1880
Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington
She’s a friend I take some nights for pain.
Dosage is an issue. We maintain
an equilibrium, but it is hard:
the IV drip of texts, the memory card
of photos we filled one fall by the sea.
What’s good for her is mostly good for me,
but pressure-points that ease her nerves today
may frazzle them tomorrow. Tough to say;
tough, too, to get just right, or right at all.
Every step’s the first part of a fall.
What is this bloodless tie sustaining us,
thumb-pal, app-gal, cyber-glamorous,
cobble of connections wormed through space,
which might dissolve if we came face to face,
in the flesh, as they say. Now more than ever
this boudoir of electrons echoes: never.
Should I take thought and lap my gruel of chat?
Or find another drug, if it comes to that?
The Central Casting of the pharmacy
is full of characters who’ll happily
help to wipe the vestiges of her.
Missing her is strictly de rigueur,
a touchless ache while it still keeps its feel
that might have ended worse had it been real.
By David Yezzi
Featured Image: Pink Roses by Fidelia Bridges, 1875
Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington
Across the net,
she wilts and falls
behind, so I let
a few balls
slide by
in the midgy air
and drawn sky
of late summer.
Is this
letting her win
a Judas kiss,
the warm sin
of fooling too
far a daughter
who,
slow to laughter,
stakes all in all
on a game?
She’s tall.
I call her name,
to snap her
back from the place
she goes, blur-
ring the odds: ace,
game, set.
Her stride returns,
as I abet
her. She learns
no lesson, nor
do I hint
at helping. After,
we sprint
on the road
home, our run
hung with gold
silk spun
by spiders in
patchy pines.
The threads glint
in sidewise lines,
cinches borne
by the air,
so loosely worn
they’re hardly there.
By Chaitali Sen
Featured Image: [Landscape with Cottage] by Marie-Charles-Isidore Choiselat, 1844
The husband is still explaining it on the day of the parent-teacher conference, and the wife still carries on as if she doesn’t understand. The twins will be home early, their school day shortened so their teacher can meet with parents all afternoon.
“Is the school too difficult?” she asks.
“How do I know? That’s why we talk to the teacher.”
Their appointment is at three o’clock, and it will take almost an hour to get there. He will be away from the shop too long. When is she supposed to start dinner? She can carry on for as long as she wants, he says, but on this he has to be insistent. This reversal of roles must reverse back. She is the mother, the one who should know the details of her children’s schooling.
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By Mark Belair
Featured Image: Interior of the Colosseum by Ippolito Caffi
Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington
A little boy
in superhero underpants
is made to change clothes
by the open door
of a battered family car
parked on a busy street, his gaunt
mom managing the maneuver
though not quite bothering
to block him from view,
the rest of the family
milling about, each glancing over
impatiently, the scruffy siblings
finally pulling each other’s hair
out of boredom, prompting
a scolding from their pot-bellied dad,
the escalating family tussles
drawing dark scowls
from the overstretched mother,
the little boy’s sense of privacy
seeming oddly
complete
despite the utter lack of it
for they all do
wait and no one, tellingly,
has a taunting word
for the exposed, vulnerable boy,
making his family, while fractious,
seem set on spinning him
in a cocoon
of protective, enduring
force meant to stay—
as he launches into the world—
secret and powerful
as superhero underpants.
By Brooke Champagne
Featured Image: The Dogana and Santa Maria della Salute, Venice by Joseph Mallord William Turner, 1843; Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington
The Eucharist, although it is the fullness of sac-
ramental life, is not a prize for the perfect but
a powerful medicine and nourishment for the
weak . . . Frequently, we act as arbiters of grace
rather than its facilitators. But the Church is not
a tollhouse; it is the house of the Father, where
there is a place for everyone, with all their prob-
lems.
—Pope Francis, “The Joy of the Gospel”
The true vision and knowledge of what we seek
consists precisely in not seeing, in an awareness
that our goal transcends all knowledge and is
everywhere cut from us by the darkness of in-
comprehensibility.
—Gregory of Nyssa, Life of Moses
I’m nine years old the day my mother dies and comes back to life and, if I ever believed at all, it’s the day I give up on Christ.
The reverse might be expected—miracles, the power of prayer—but when I make my final judgment, I don’t know yet, won’t know for a long time that she has died and returned. At that point, I’m only told she is pregnant and there are complications. The baby, my would-be half-sister, is gestating at twenty-three weeks and because my mother is sick, must be delivered. Everyone waits and prays. Doctors work and pray. At school, my teacher’s hand on my shoulder a few seconds too long in that comforting way, her eyes say: I’ll pray for you. Before bed I press my hands into a teepee and try earnestly at first, then only pretend to pray.
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By Meredith Davies Hadaway
Featured Image: The Gulf Stream by Winslow Homer, 1899
Now, when even midday sun holds shadows,
and only the wooden boats are left, bless
scarred hulls and splintered pilings.
Bless the hands that still twist eel into lines
of hard commerce. Bless the motor’s stutter
declaring, yes, we will go out. Bless the foul
mud that peppers the gunnel, the ascent
of the bait, its twitch as it goes over the roller.
Bless the slow crab, too greedy for stink to see
the net coming and the basket, slats leaking
a scrabble of claws. Wanda J, Alice Rose,
Edna—grubby river angels, decks swollen
with rain, smelling of brine and rot, all divot
and slop—bless your deadrise, your hard
chine, your rudder. In the morning, all will
blur into mist. Crabs will begin their exodus
to deeper waters. We tell ourselves they will
be back. May this, too, be true.
By Betsy Sholl
Featured Image: A Farm in the Sunlight by Meindert Hobbema, 1668
Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington
Ideas are one thing and what happens is another.
—John Cage
Weather or axe—who neglected or hacked
to make this bag of piano keys, this
clatter of loose scales in a paper sack,
fifty-two whites, the yellow of stained teeth,
a few of them chipped: some upright or grand,
its music collapsed in a racket of chainsaws
cutting up belly and legs for scrap.
Warped wood, the thunk of stuck notes—
By Suzanne Carey
Featured Image: Jetty and Wharf at Trouville by Eugène Boudin, 1863
Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington
Teen boys shoot hoops
a few yards from my open door.
The night’s nearly moonless,
yet they persist,
thunka-thunka of ball on blacktop
driving me to the verge of complaint,
like some old woman caught
in a numbing net of loneliness,
the old woman I suddenly am.
Today, the man I love told me
how he happened to leave Michigan
and mused how different
his life would have been if he’d stayed—
no degrees;
running a string of burger stops
or clocking in as a machinist like his dad;
never meeting his wife—
this last said with a shaky smile,
like someone who, by turning back
to retrieve a forgotten umbrella,
dodged death, and I realize finding her
is something he will never regret.
No matter how much he loves me
or how many cracks in his soul I caulk,
she is the rock he’s built his life on.
Summer fades like worn denim,
yellowing leaves grow frail.
I close my door.
Outside the boys ceaselessly aim
at shadowy baskets
that cannot hold a thing.
By Susan Blackwell Ramsey
Featured Image: Giant Magnolias on a Blue Velvet Cloth by Martin Johnson Heade, 1890
Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington
We praised the gray car for being a good little mule
the day before it roared demands. The labs
for my sister’s knee surgery came back showing dual
heart chambers out of whack. And right-left jabs
of exploding joints and breast removal for me
came one year after both my husband’s eyes
lost cataracts, gained corneas. The knee
still needs to be replaced, of course. So why
not buy a new car? Certainly we could
transport our patchwork selves in our patchwork car,
all very apt, and prudently get the good
of what’s left. Or, while granting how things are,
we could fling cash, climb in with gleeful smiles,
and ride shiny the remaining miles.
By Nathan Anderson
Featured Image: Summer Morning by David Lucas, 1830
Nah, it’s not that, I wouldn’t call it that, I mean molested
that’s like TV stuff, and Brenna
she’d be real nice sometimes like flesh and blood should.
Bring me back a chocolate frosty just because.
Anyway, I’d just as soon say we’re done,
or you want I should go through it all like I did in June
with the last one? Twice now—and this just goes to show
the system’s jacked—twice I’ve waited, asked the front desk ladies
and waited, I said people I need a little help and you’re telling me two hours?
In all this hospital you’re telling me there’s no one I can talk to now?
I said what about the dude mopping floors? Is he around?
Can I talk to him? Or do I go ahead and slit my wrists right here?
So they hauled me up to you, another white coat
working the psych ward. A woman. What’s up with that?
No offense or nothing. That’s just how they do me
down on first-floor, where everyone else on earth is. You ever one of those
ER docs I see running around? The way I figure it, a woman like you
doesn’t need to run. You’re all put together—you know, like a car
that’s just come off the line . . . . But okay, this isn’t about you.
By Mark Kraushaar
Featured Image: Mountain Landscape with Bridge by Thomas Gainsborough, 1783/1784
Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington
Intellectual: Anyone who can listen to Gio-
achino Rossini’s William Tell Overture with-
out thinking of the Lone Ranger.
—Laurie Taylor, sociologist
Sometimes I picture that foppish, fat Gioachino Rossini—
with his brocade shoes, his velvet-collared jacket and his satin vest.
But mostly I think of him stepping over the ocean, smiling
and rubbing his chubby palms and then, inexplicably,
standing on the porch of a modest family farm
and looking out at Bald Rock Dome or Sugar Pine Peak.
Beside him a poorish, but kindly, but cowardly widower
explains that just that morning a band of filthy varmints
burned his barn and shook him down for the last of his cash
and his only cow. Rossini listens but begins to hum
and just as he turns from the farmer to gaze back at the mountains
two handsome men gallop up and dismount.
The first, the one with the matching six-guns,
and black mask and elegant horse,
hands the farmer his recovered money.
The second man, his sidekick, a quiet Indian
dressed in buckskin and moccasins says:
Bad men go jail.
We ride kemo sabe?
Yes, Tonto, says the mysterious rider
and pausing only to wave
the two men speed away in a cloud of dust.
Once again the Italian Mozart looks out at the mountains
and begins to hum. Who was that stranger with the mask?
he asks, I wanted to thank him.
By Elton Glaser
Featured Image: The Parthenon by Frederic Edwin church, 1871
The day warms up fast,
Like leftovers in a microwave, odors of dawn
Still rising from the dead lilies,
From dry grass bleached to blonde and now
Heading toward platinum.
In the slow burn of midsummer,
The nose takes you where the mind won’t go.
There’s bad juju all over the place.
Light clings like cellophane
To the limp leaves. Nothing will budge
That carpet of shadows on the back porch.
I’m watching a spider
Rappel from the blades of a broken fan.
Somebody needs to fix it soon,
Somebody who knows how to work a miracle
With Juicy Fruit and a steak knife.
By Lois Taylor
Featured Image: Young Ladies of the Village by Gustave Courbet, 1851-2
The last thing May B ever wanted was to be stuck with Tweety, who is standing there in her halter top and shorts, frowning at the yowling cat.
“Run that by me again, where you got her?” says Tweety.
May B explains how the stray came to the door just before her mom got sick and the aid car had to take her away again, and her mom said the cat was pregnant but way too young to have kittens.
Now the cat begins to twitch. “She’s going to die,” says May B. “She doesn’t even have a name.”
“Who’s talking about dying,” says Tweety. “Help me get that baby ready.”
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By Shakira Croce
Featured Image: Charlotte, Lady Watkin Williams-Wynne by Daniel Gardner, 1775
Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington
Yes, you may buy me
A drink
It has been a long week for me too
At work trading, you said?
No, you haven’t had much?
Experience in social enterprise
Isn’t it great we live in a country
Where you and your partners can pull such fine bootstraps
One of the brightest, yes
I’ve been told I have a nice smile among other things
Your lines show in a few more years
Your advances will be harmless, cute even
Thank you for the champagne
What did you say your name was?
By Denise Duhamel
Featured Image: The Valley of the Seine, from the Hills of Giverny by Theodore Robinson, 1892
When the interviewer mishears “tenets”
I know my gals are not in a villa,
never mind the United States Senate.
My heroines crowd in drab tenements,
their image scaring even Attila
the Hun. The interviewer hears “tenants”—
bad asses, public housing. Bob Bennett
wakes sweaty from a nightmare, Guerrilla
Girls rushing the United States Senate;
Gloria Steinem, bell hooks, and Joan Jett
stuffing manifestos in manila
mailers. The interviewer hears “tenants,”
sees kitchens where women cook venomous
dishes. His lady smells of vanilla,
minding their house, not the U.S. Senate.
My principles are not set in cement,
nor are they adrift on a flotilla.
I call upon all feminist “tenants”—
Steer your U-Hauls to the U.S. Senate.
By Jill Kato
Featured Image: Breezing Up (A Fair Wind) by Winslw Homer, 1876
Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington
I like to get to the ship early. You’ll usually find a couple of old-timers waiting by the bar, itching to sip a Tom Collins or a whiskey sour on the rocks and get their vacation started right. This is the best time to build rapport and I’m their gal. At this point, they’re still excited about their trip and have a thick wad of cash in their billfolds. Their wives are in their cabins getting settled or making appointments at the spa or booking excursions for when we dock. The bar is quiet and they have me all to themselves. They can pour out all their troubles, and I can pour them all the liquor they need, at heavily marked-up prices. I haven’t even finished restocking the tabasco and maraschino cherries when a salty dog of a guy walks in. His name is Jerry and he’s on board to celebrate his wife’s sixty-fifth birthday. I ask him what he does, and he says he used to own a manufacturing company in the fashion district but now he’s retired. Left the business to his son. He says he built his company from scratch. Even though his shirt is ugly and has hula girls on it, I tell him I like it. I tell all men I like their shirts. I garnish his glass with an orange slice and tell him I admire men like him, self-made men who do things like run their own companies. And I do.
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By Billy Collins
Featured Image: Lumber Schooners at Evening on Penobscot Bay by Fitz Henry Lane, 1863
Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington
As usual, it was easy to accept the lake
and its surroundings,
to take at face value the colonies of reeds
along the shore, a little platoon of ducks,
a turtle sunning itself on a limb half submerged,
and the big surface of the lake itself,
the water sometimes glassy, other times ruffled.
Why, Henry David Thoreau or anyone
even vaguely familiar with the role
of the picturesque in American
landscape painting of the 19th century
would feel perfectly at home in its presence.
And that is why I felt so relieved
to discover in the midst of all this
a note of skepticism,
a touch of whimsy,
or call it a bit of Dadaist playfulness;
and if not a remark worthy of Oscar Wilde
then surely a sign of the human was apparent
in the casual fuck-you attitude
so perfectly expressed by the anhinga
that was drying its extended wings
in the morning breeze
while perched on a decoy of a Canada goose.
By Tom Whalen
Featured Image: The Unicorn Rests in a Garden (from the Unicorn Tapestries), 1495-1505
Yesterday as I reread Hubert Hoskin’s translation of C. A. van Peursen’s Leibniz (1966/69), I couldn’t help but think of Isabelle Huppert. As with Leibniz, experience alone cannot account for her performances, but I don’t think, regarding Isabelle Huppert, I need concern myself with eternal truths residing in the mind of God. Judge advocate, nun, prostitute, mother, dressmaker, postal clerk, piano teacher, scientist, abortionist, war bride, writer, hostage, thief—whatever the role or source (Euripides, Diderot, Goethe, Dostoyevsky, Flaubert, Maupassant, Conrad, James, Zamyatin, Crnjanski, Genet, Bataille, Duras, Highsmith, Bachmann, Rendell, Jim Thompson), energies feed the performances of Isabelle Huppert from without and within.
Have you seen many of her over one hundred films? Retour à la bien-aimée, for example, or Eaux profondes, Pas de scandale, Sans queue ni tête, La séparation? Are you older or younger than Isabelle Huppert?
At the door to the house of Isabelle Huppert one stands as if before a tabernacle of dreams. Have you, too, stood before the tabernacle of Isabelle Huppert, or perhaps even entered its elegant chambers, which others before and after you have also entered? I confess I have not, though I am convinced I can say without equivocation that the house of Isabelle Huppert is capacious, albeit modestly so.
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By Dennis Sampson
Featured Image: The Lackawanna Valley by George Iness, 1856, Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington
He was a person. He put
one foot in front of the other and often
thought of himself before thinking of others,
tried at times to ask a woman whom he loved
what he had done wrong and sobbed
during a counseling session in a back room of
a Catholic church when his wife made it clear she
did not want him to touch her. He smoked,
wrote in enclosures that were cold, that were sweltering,
and celebrated his modest accomplishments
by drinking alone in a bar in Cleveland,
infuriating those who did not like his kind
of frankness. When his mother
died slowly after a stroke he felt nothing. The singularly
vivid iridescent streak of sunlight in late afternoon in October
inspired him to write. He never forgot
the aroma of Mennen after-shave permeating the hallway
when his father left the bathroom, or the sweet fragrance
of lilacs growing in all corners of their yard. A person.
And he once held a leopard frog in his palms and was
startled by how desperately it wanted to get out.
By Rodney Jones
Featured Images: Rouen Cathedral, West Façade by Claude Monet, 1894, Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington
1974
At last they have him in church, a short service and the family silent, but the moments after the funeral are like a test.
True: The new base-tube press at Lockland Copper weighed sixty-seven tons. When they had completed the building and brought it in the door, six engineers agreed they would have to lift the roof to get the crane in and lower it into the pit. He heard from Tip Smith, a drinking buddy, a welder on the job, and wrote the board, saying he would do it for 10,000. Went to the ice plant, ordered eigh- teen blocks, filled the pit, rolled the press onto the ice; then, as the ice melted, pumped out the water.
True: Drunk every day for sixteen years. False: Mostly homebrew or moon- shine.
True: Every morning Maurice Orr’s rooster pissed him off. False: He caught the rooster in a sack, dug a hole behind the house, buried it with just the neck and head sticking out, cranked the mower, and mowed the lawn.
False: The story that besotted on the back lawn he ordered Jawaharal to dance and choreographed the steps with a Colt revolver. (Gunsmoke.)
True: Jawaharal inherited his logic gene and argued when he called him “Jerry.”
False: He never hit a lick at a snake. Once he pruned the grapevine. Twice, after midnight, he picked roasting ears from Leldon Spence’s garden.
True: When the money from the press job ran out, he wrote bad checks until his name was published on the glass doors of every business from Cold Springs to Decatur. It hit him then one day: go from store to store, copy all the names, print the list of deadbeats twice a year and sell subscriptions to each store for fifty dollars.
True: His Deadbeat Protection Flier taking off before the Credit Protection Act: drinking Jim Beam in the air over Georgia and Louisiana, he was a sloppy man who made a million dollars.
True: The gay son home from Palo Alto. The wife, a holy roller in a sari. His brilliant, inebriated redneck math, marks in the chicken yard. The liver. The heart—details of the unannotated life: grease-prints on Erdös in Combinator- ics, unused tickets to see Conway Twitty—Cliffs Notes for Abyss Studies—
His mind at the end like a hand reaching for a pocket when he wasn’t wearing a shirt.
“I would kill myself if there were anyone better.”
By Karen Loeb
Featured Image: Soir d’hiver à Montmartre (Winter Evening in Montmartre) by Jean-Alexis-Joseph Morin-Jean, 1910; Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington
At the finish of the meal, your father left. And that was that.
I led a reckless life, but when the accident happened, I reformed.
So I discovered that the bananas had to be really ripe.
The bouquet was a wet bathing suit moldering in a gym bag
tossed in the corner last month.
The lost earring with the green stone turned up years later
when they moved the dresser. She’d thrown out the matching one
a decade earlier.
The smell was a casserole forgotten on the counter. Something with tuna
and onions. It greeted them when they returned from vacation.
I plan to beat the odds and live forever, he declared.
The cat was hiding in the top drawer of the bureau, flattened
as thin as a comic book, eyes peering up, blinking, when we
finally found him.
Turned out it was a moth as big as a bat making those shadows
on the cabin wall.
She went shopping for a jacket covered in feathers, just as it had
appeared in her dream.
By Mike Wright
Featured Image: View of Toledo by El Greco, 1599-1600
I leave the World Service
on at night, snoozing through
the British iteration of gang rape
and kidnapping. I’ll stir sometimes
to hear a few moments of economic
collapse, but it’s really white noise,
blanching the laughter of drunks outside.
Sleeping to tragedy helps tamp down
my father’s last days, his morphine speech,
how my mother sent me to Kentucky
Fried Chicken with a coupon
for his last meal, and how shame
drove me to throw the coupon out.
If his death were broadcast in the night,
his of thousands of dying fathers,
and you slept well, how could
I begrudge you a night of rest?
By Sandy Gingras
Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington
When the funeral director hands my father’s ashes to my mother, she puts the little cardboard box into her pocketbook—the one with all the zippers and buckles. My mother says she’ll hold off on scattering the ashes until maybe the next time my brother comes down from his farm and we’re all together. Maybe we’ll scatter them in the ocean.
“But, for now,” I ask, “Where are you going to put him?”
“In my bedroom closet,” she says.
My parents never shared a bedroom. My father’s room was the converted attic, my mother’s, the converted garage. As far away as they could get from each other within the same house. Putting him in her bedroom closet seems, at once, too remote and too intimate, but I don’t say anything.
Two years pass.
My brother only visits on Christmas and Thanksgiving, which is not the right time to scatter the ashes. It’s never the right time to scatter the ashes.
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By Sandy Gingras
Featured Image: Roses by Vincent Van Gogh, 1890
Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington
When my mother was dying, we started calling her “Grammy” as if she’d become someone else. She was eighty-five pounds. She looked like a shrinkydink of herself. She wore a diaper and a hospital gown. The diaper looked enormous on her. It was one of those pull-up ones. If you yanked up her diaper when she was trying to stand, you could lift her right off her feet. “Whoa,” she’d say to you. “Whoa there.” Grammy was a good sport. She was nothing like my mother.
She was on morphine, so a lot of the time, she made no sense. “You know,” she’d tell me earnestly, “I gotta get me a Louie-Louie.”
“Okay,” I’d tell her, but I didn’t have a clue what she meant. “I’ll buy you one.”
“Don’t get it too small,” she’d say. “Oooh,” she’d kind of shiver with excitement, “That will be lovely.” Lovely. As if my mother would ever say a word like that.
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By Sally Bliumis-Dunn
Featured Image: Green Plums by Joseph Decker, 1885
Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington
We leave the dining room and she remains
alone at the table; the plates need washing,
we prepare dessert. I still wait for her
questions, half-buried in dish-clatter,
her broken tones in the hot kitchen air,
though these days she sits mostly silent.
And larger than the room and yellow walls, her silence—
as though it were strung to the sky,
to the air that too has been washed and washed
like a bed sheet in the relentless sun,
colors and patterns mostly faded
like all the meals enjoyed then washed
from these brown earthenware plates.
By Brandon Amico
Featured Image: Corridor in the Asylum by Vincent Van Gogh, 1889
Three rabbits walk into a bar. The third rabbit carries a shotgun.
Three rabbits walk into a bar. The third rabbit carries a shotgun and the first
rabbit a vase of imported flowers.
One of the rabbits is already drunk.
Three rabbits walk into an orgy but only for the pre-orgy hors d’oeuvres.
Three rabbits walk into a bar with masks on but their ears give them away.
Knock-knock. (Who’s there?) No one, it’s just the second rabbit, the one with a
free hand, rapping his knuckle on the bartop.
By Gregory Djanikian
Featured Image: Tullichewan Castle, Vale of Leven, Scotland by Sir James Campbell of Strathro, 1855
Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington
There’s something to be said for banality,
the way it keeps everything on a level plane,
one cliché blithely following another
like cows heading toward the pasture.
How lovely sometimes not to think
about Russian Futurism, or the second law
of thermodynamics, or how thinking itself
requires some thoughtfulness.
I’d like to ask if Machiavelli
ever owned a dog named “Prince.”
I’d like to imagine Rosalind Franklin
lounging pleasantly by a wood stove.
Let the mind take a holiday,
the body put its slippers on.
It’s a beautiful day, says the banal,
and today, I’m happy to agree
with its genial locutions.
By Judy Rowe Michaels
Featured Image: A Basket of Clams by Winslow Homer, 1873
And is that everything
since you? Since meaning
posthumous.
Here melancholy’s
interrupted by brief flirt
with dictionary: originally
postumas, no hint
of burial in living earth.
Dicking around again with
missing you, post this and that—
coital, colonial, menopausal,
Mesozoic, coitus interruptus . . .
Nowadays sex is catch-all for
almost anything, god, war,
cupcakes, abs and apps, the boat
is listing.
Poet Gilbert, Jack, said
“the erotic matters not as pleasure
but a way to get to something
darker.” He’s restless
when people laugh a lot,
he prefers Greek fishermen,
who “do not play on the beach.”
Is it so wrong to heft
an inflatable ball, twirl it
on a finger, think circus seals?
Wasn’t sex mostly three-ring
circus—three or more, given
the presence of memory, fantasy,
irony, flattery, usury, syzygy—
that’s sun, moon, earth aligned,
and then there’s the all-but-impossible
synergy, two becoming a
greater third,
yes, Nowadays
is everything since that.
By Judy Rowe Michaels
Featured Image: Cattleya Orchid and Three Hummingbirds by Martin Johnson Heade, 1871
Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington
While most of us are grieving
something—cold spring lost child dead-end
lyrics that won’t resolve,
the spadefoot toad, who bears
a gold lyre-mark on her back,
is crazy-busy with what science calls
explosive breeding. Rain says Go,
and up from culvert cistern over porch and patio across roads
the fraught migration of spadefeet slowly breaches
our borders to breed in our ponds.
Flood of toadlets in just three weeks, pop pop,
with tiny golden harps, how will this
end? We run them down
coming or going, then pronounce them
rare, so we
love them, make posters, poems—
(Old moss-grown pond—a
toad jumps in to breed pop pop
poppoppoppoppop)
We can’t say they’re unnatural, or blame
the job rate bad schools gang wars (unprotected
sex?), but tiny golden harps
seem suspect artsy irresponsible un-American.
All night trill thrills,
while most of us are grieving.
The following is a collection of essays and writings on the subject of dialogue within fiction. Including an essay from author Rebecca Makkai (Music for Wartime, The Hundred-Year House) about a college assignment of eavesdropping to craft realistic dialogue. As well, audio of Robert Anthony Siegel reading “I Deserve Two Firing Squads: Dialogue and Conflict in Fiction.”
By J. Robert Lennon
Featured Image: Lady Lilith by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, 1867
The key to writing realistic dialogue in fiction is to abandon all presumption of authenticity and acknowledge the necessity of total fakeness in achieving the illusion of truth.
Human speech is not simple. The words we say in conversation convey, at best, 25% of what we mean,1 with the remaining 75% taken up by body language, volume and tone, facial expression, and prior understanding between parties. The fiction writer has access to these conversational elements, of course, and may fill in back story, provide stage direction, and apply (judiciously, lord help us) descriptive dialogue tags to convey the intended meaning. But a good writer can evoke the character of a speaker, his or her intended and actual meaning, and even very subtle contextual clues, using only the words within quotation marks.
Among the tools the writer has at her disposal when writing dialogue: Sentence length. Punctuation. Rhythm (along an axis of consistency, from entirely smooth to completely broken). Syntax and diction (specifically, its breadth, expressive sophistication, and degree of formal correctness). The reader should be able to understand who is speaking in the same way that he requires no assistance to identify, by sound alone, the voices of his friends in a crowded room.
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By Leslie Daniels
Featured Image: Still Life by Henri Fantin-Latour, 1866, Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington
The setting in George Saunders’ story “Pastoralia” is a theme park where two characters—the narrator and Janet—live and work in a simulated cave. Their job is to perform for the occasional tourist the skinning and roasting of a goat. Theme park rules dictate that employees must not speak English at any time so as not to destroy the illusion of being cave people. The narrator abides by the rule, but Janet flouts it, which is a major concern of the narrator’s. On this occasion the freshly dead goat has not been delivered. There are no tourists present.
Janet comes in from her Separate Area and her eyebrows go up.
“No freaking goat?” she says.
I make some guttural sounds and some motions meaning: Big
rain come down, and boom, make goats run, goats now away, away
in high hills, and as my fear was great, I did not follow.
Janet scratches under her armpit and makes a sound like a mon-
key, then lights a cigarette.
“What a bunch of shit,” she says. “Why do you insist, I’ll never
know. Who’s here? Do you see anyone here but us?”
I gesture to her to put out the cigarette and make the fire. She
gestures to me to kiss her butt.
“Why am I making a fire?” she says. “A fire in advance of a goat.
Is this like a wishful fire? Like a hopeful fire? No, sorry, I’ve had it.
What would I do in the real world if there was thunder and so on and
our goats actually ran away? Maybe I’d mourn, like cut myself with
that flint, or maybe I’d kick your ass for being so stupid as to leave the
goats out in the rain.”
By Robert Anthony Siegel
Featured Image: Landscape with Trees and Water by James Bulwer
Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington
The world I grew up in was full of hyper-verbal people for whom talk was the medium of both ambition and feeling, the tool they used to try to shape the world around their desires. For that reason, when I began writing fiction, I found that characters were never completely real to me until they spoke: when they started talking I finally knew what they wanted. So I started writing the dialogue first. I would get two characters talking to each other and then build the scene out from their conversation. The dialogue was the trunk, and everything else branched out from it: thought, feeling, memory, sense perception, action.
In those days, when a scene worked, I thought it was because the dialogue was good. It took years for me to realize that it was the other way around, that dialogue was just helping me to uncover the underlying conflict that actually drove the story. What I know now is that dialogue doesn’t have to be fancy or quirky or unusual in order to do its job effectively. It just has to arise freely and naturally from the characters’ experience of conflict.
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