Europeans Wrapping Knickknacks
By David Kirby
Featured Art: by Gustave Caillebotte
They’re so meticulous, aren’t they? They take such care
that I am ashamed for my country, that impatient farm boy,
that factory hand with the sausage fingers. First there’s
the fragile object itself—vase, jewel, ornament—then tissue,
stiff paper, bubble wrap, tissue again, tape, a beautiful bag
made from something more like gift wrap than the stern brown
stuff we use here in the States, then the actual carry bag
that has a little string handle but which is, in many ways,
the loveliest part of the package except for the object
you can barely remember, it’s been so long since
you’ve seen it. In America, we just drop your trinket
in a sack and hand it to you. Oh, that’s right. We have cars
in this country: whereas Stefano or Nathalie has to elbow his
or her way down a crowded street and take the bus or subway,
you get in the car, put the bag on the seat next to you,
and off you go, back to your bungalow in Centralia or Eau Claire.
Of course, this doesn’t mean you’re culturally inferior
to Jacques or Magdalena just because, as Henry James
said in his book-length essay on Hawthorne, we have no sovereign
in our country, no court, no aristocracy, no high church,
no palaces or castles or manors, no thatched cottages,
no ivied ruins. No, we just do things differently here:
whereas Pedro and Ilsa take the tram or trolley,
you have your car, and now you’re on your way home
to Sheboygan or Dearborn, probably daydreaming
as you turn the wheel, no more aware of your surroundings
than 53-year-old Michael Stepien was in 2006 when
he was walking home after work in Pittsburgh, which
is when a teenager robbed him and shot him in the head,
and as Mr. Stepien lay dying, his family decided
“to accept the inevitable,” said his daughter Jeni,
and donate his heart to one Arthur Thomas
of Lawrenceville, NJ, who was within days of dying.
That’s one thing you can say about life in the U.S.:
we have great medicine. Mr. Thomas recovered nicely
after the transplant, and he and the Stepiens
kept in touch, swapping holiday cards and flowers
on birthdays. And then Jeni Stepien gets engaged to be
married and then thinks, Who will walk me down the aisle?
No cathedrals in America, says Henry James,
no abbeys, no little Norman churches, no Oxford nor Eton
nor Harrow, no sporting class, no Epsom nor Ascot.
My Father Visits Not Long After My Mother (His Wife Twenty Years Ago) Dies
By Brock Guthrie
Featured Art: by Paul Gavarni
My father’s in town for a quick couple days
and it’s early morning and not much to do
and he needs some smokes and I need
a few things from Lowe’s. We walk to my car
and he says, “Man, you need a car wash,”
and I say, “Yeah, I’ve just been so busy,”
which isn’t really untrue, but I tell him
there’s a place on the way. We get in my car
and he says, “Go to McDonald’s, I’ll buy,”
and we wait in the drive-thru and he says,
“You need a vacuum too,” and I don’t reply
because the food is ready. I pass him his
Egg McMuffin and drive down the road,
carefully unwrapping my breakfast burrito,
and this commercial I’ve heard a dozen times
comes on the radio, some guy with a nasally
New York accent, but only now do I gather
it’s an advertisement for snoring remedies.
My father says, “If there are two vacuum hoses,
I can do one side and you can do the other.”
We drive past strip malls. I wave vaguely
toward a Mexican restaurant I kind of like
but I can’t think of what I want to say about it,
so I kind of mumble and my father does too
except his is more reply, like, “Is that right?”
The car wash kiosk has eight confusing options.
The Uber Diaries
By Kyle Minor
Indianapolis, Indiana. Somewhere near Keystone Avenue and 62nd Street my iPhone pings. A college student from Hyderabad, India. He is pleased when I tell him he’s my first customer. He tips me two dollars.
*
I pick up my second customer in front of a bar in Broad Ripple. He gets in the front seat. His hair is grown to thigh length, and he is on some kind of party drug that makes him want to touch things.
“Please stop rubbing my arm,” I say.
He apologizes.
Near Rocky Ripple, he takes off his shoes and socks and rubs his bare feet
on the windshield.
His feet leave little rabbit marks. He is a large man with very tiny feet. When
I drop him off at the donut shop, he doesn’t leave a tip.
*
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Leaf Blower
By Alan Shapiro
Featured Art: The Poet’s Garden by Vincent van Gogh
Swept up so suddenly in parabolic
spasms like a starling flock
or curtain swelling, billowing out
while all along the edges
this or that leaf frays
from the pack the force
keeps driving forward
over the courtyard bricks—
while in ear muffs and face
mask he points the havoc
this way and that as if
to see what happens because
he’s in no hurry, he’s peaceful,
calm, Laplace’s Demon
out for a stroll, cool source
of all that whirling, lost in
contemplation of the incalculable
force of every movement from
the greatest body to the smallest
atom, holding it all in mind—
working it out, in ear muffs
and face mask following behind
what whirls before him, fleeing,
which is why he strolls.
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Hole in One
By Alan Shapiro
Since my dad was blind by then,
when David and I led him from his apartment
to the tee of the shrunken one hole
golf course that served as kitschy
courtyard for the complex
of retirees only well-off
enough for this unironic
aping of the rich, it was by habit
only that he looked down
at the ball he couldn’t see,
then up and out into the void
of stunted fairway and green
while first this foot then that
foot patted the fake grass, almost
kneading it cat-like till the tight
swing arced the ball up high
as the second-story windows
and I swear it was like a trick
ball the pin on an invisible line
reeled in straight down
into the hole—his first and only
hole in one, on the last swing
of a club he ever took, though
we didn’t know this then, and how
we whooped my brother and I
as we jumped and capered throwing
the other balls up into the air
while the old man baffled said what?
what happened? what? already wistful
for this best moment of a life it was
his luck the blindness made him miss.
And now it’s my luck, isn’t it just
my luck, to be the last one
remembering, as if I’m not just
there with them but also far
removed above it all and watching
as through the block glass of an upper-story
window high enough for the ruckus
not to reach me but too low
not to see the filmy blur of
bodies hugging one another
pumping fists as arm in arm
the three of them head out across
the fake grass of that single hole.
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Closer
By Alan Shapiro
Featured Art: by William A. Harper
How the great closer—when the batter lunged
and swung through the curve for strike three—
turned his back to the plate as if there were no batter,
and his one concession to the moment
(that there even was a moment) was
to hitch one shoulder as if to shrug off
a slight annoyance while his face unbothered
by expression measured its mastery by what
it wouldn’t feel, or show, was like and not like us,
our faces, lips, how, when I tried to kiss yours,
they shut tight against what up to then, it seemed,
they’d opened to so eagerly I never thought
they ever wouldn’t or imagined you might ever
turn away not just as if I wasn’t there but
never had been. And weren’t we, maybe, like
the batter too, and not, the way he flipped the bat and
caught it and as he strolled back to the dugout,
holding the bat up, seemed to study it
with such rabbinical amazement
you could almost think he’d failed on purpose
so he could finally see within the bat
whatever lack the bat, not knowing it was lacking,
had hidden in the grain to show him now.
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Bay Sunday
By W.J. Herbert
Featured Art: Boys in a Dory by Winslow Homer
1.
Wind hits the cliff face and climbs the palisade
as three men at a slatted table play cards.
Two wear hats. A third faces the sun and smokes.
All three are gray-haired, but none is my father.
He wouldn’t have played without scotch
on a Sunday or sat on a park bench, anyway.
2.
A man holding a child speaks to her in Mandarin
as he touches a small seat attached to the back of a bike.
He pats handlebars and points to spokes, saying bike
every twenty words or so, then taps the front wheel gently,
the way you would touch the shoulder of an old friend.
3.
Some Sundays even if I’m not near the bay,
I imagine my father playing solitaire at a slatted table
as I lean over the cliff rail, watching waves
that grapple with the beach as they leave it.
On the bike path below, grit spins under a stream of cyclists
as a man wipes a child’s tear with the edge
of his sleeve and speaks to her in a language so soft and low
the bay curves like an ear to hear it.
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Stateline Lake
By Arlyce Menzies
Featured Art: by William Guy Wall
Slipping through the shadow of trees
at dusk to the old strip mine, we took off
our clothes under the wide catalpa’s
strung slender pods. The lake
shone with the last evening light,
cicadas casting their long call over the water.
We both dove and you didn’t come up
for a while. Then, you broke out, fist first,
and shouted for me to come look.
I sheared the dim surface with dark strokes
and found you gripping a watersnake
that curled and whipped your wrist.
You were delighted, and I tried to imagine
the impulse, impossible for me, that made you
grab the slither against your ribs
underwater. And the jolt you rose with,
the triumph of your quick hands,
and the body with which you felt the world.
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Real Things
By Nicole Hebdon
Lorna tells her fiancé that we met in the cemetery. “Chloe was writing a paper on the War of 1812 graves,” she says. “And I was taking photos for my photography class. It’s a haunted site. Paranormal investigators have looked into it and everything.” This is partially true.
The Riverside Cemetery is known for disappearing children and hovering orbs, but I wasn’t writing a paper. I was writing an article for the supernatural edition of the school magazine.
And we didn’t meet there.
Lorna’s fiancé, Caleb, tells us how he and Lorna met, and she folds her hands in her lap, like a child at Sunday school. Whenever one of Lorna’s roommates stands to get a wine cooler, or giggles purposelessly, he starts his sentence over, so I’ve heard his story approximately three-and-a-half times when he finally lets someone else talk.
They met in high school. They met in high school. They met in high school. They met . . . Lorna and I met at an abandoned mini-golf course. The castle’s peak looked like a crumbling monument, and I was sure it would lead me to another gravesite for my article, but past the thick cattails, there were toppled bridges, a sputtering stream that emptied into a square-shaped pond and Lorna wearing a university T-shirt.
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The Petrified Man
By Pamela Davis
Featured Art: by William Trost Richards
It’s dead August, a go nowhere night, and I take
Mom’s Chevy Monza, pick up a girlfriend,
head down to the Nu-Pike amusement park
at the shore. We’re sixteen and sunburnt,
peasant blouses, short-shorts, ready.
Dad taught me to swim in the park’s domed pool,
ankles glitter-kicking past mosaic tile,
but only the Cyclone Racer’s left now,
a tattoo booth, dime-toss swindles, some freak shows.
Mary Lee says the senior boys hang out by the roller coaster
and heads that way. A hand holds me back by the arm,
hoarse voice coaxes
Hey girlie, wanna see a man hard as a rock?
Shoved from behind—I stumble—almost fall
onto a body, ageless, naked, diapered like a baby
on a table. It’s airless as a crypt. His face narrow.
Is he real? The barker’s dank breath, a nudge
toward the table,
Touch him.
I reach my finger to the dry, shinydrab thigh.
Nothing moves but a black electric clock jerking
second-to-second, hands vacuuming time
from the room. The carny demands a dollar, I pull
a crumpled one from my pocket,
back out like a low-slung cat.
The Bearded Woman leans
against a wall, cigarillo loose
on her bottom lip. She spits,
Look, it’s the girl who touched the Petrified Man.
I’m sixteen, sunburned, picking my way
along the gritty beach, screams falling
from the shuddering coaster. The moon
stares me down, the sand swallows
my steps, and the tide rushes forward,
slick with neon.
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Ode on a Midlife VW
By Craig van Rooyen
Featured Art: by Edouard Baldus
—After Matthew Dickman
Parked next to its German cousins,
the van’s a message to the office bourgeoisie:
Hey look, not me. I’ve got a 4-cylinder pop-top
escape pod back to 1983 with a picnic table in back,
motherfuckers. I could be a tortoise, tent in shell,
ambling away from a mortgage.
The kind of tortoise that shows up in Tallahassee
after ten years of grazing on roadside dandelions.
Driving home, I keep an eye out for Gandalf
like maybe he’ll have his thumb out at the city limit sign.
If I saw him I would stop like it’s no big deal
and tell him to throw his staff in back.
I need to believe there’s still time for me
to take a bro trip in a van with a wizard.
No questing anymore. No destination.
Mount Doom’s done its thing. Sauron’s dead.
Just a sort-of-old guy and a wizard in a VW van,
sharing a bag of Cheetos and a Dos Equis six-pack.
Maybe we’d drive back East where
things are still green this time of year.
It could be a little like rewinding time,
headlights unwinding the two lanes up ahead,
“The Grey One” pointing out a barn owl
flashing through the highbeams.
Maybe after three beers and a full moon
I’d finally see the really big picture—
how we’re all just hydrogen
squashed into other stuff by stars.
It could be the KLUV-in-the-desert-
Jesus-is-your-friend-drive-until-dawn road trip.
All my life I’ve tied my ties,
polished my shoes, said my vows,
then let my people down.
But Gandalf doesn’t care. The road trip
would be all honesty and wonder:
The you’ve-made-your-bed-and-slept-in-it-for-too-long-
now-drive-away-with-it-in-a-van road trip.
Road trip of acceptance. My arches
have collapsed and occasionally I shave my ears.
Who cares? No one’s coming to rescue us
because we’re way past rescuing. I loved you.
I hurt you. I changed the tire and drove away
in a VW van. And maybe just before dawn,
the wizard would elbow me and point with a shrug
to a Waffle House like why the hell not?
Inside, the night-shift waitress would be taking off
her apron and moving to a window
to watch the sun come up.
Maybe she’d call me Love and serve me bad coffee
in a chipped mug. Maybe her name would be Grace.
And maybe she’d pull off her hairnet and take out
the bobby pins one by one, shaking her head,
letting her long hair down at last.
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Interstate 5 Ode
By Craig van Rooyen
To adopt a highway, say
between Kettleman City and Coalinga,
you don’t need to love
the shorn stockyards or the Holsteins
drowsing in the haze of their own stink. But it helps.
You don’t have to sing
to the rows of uprooted almond trees
next to the angry sign about the “Dust Bowl”
Congress has created.
You don’t even have to believe
“Jesus Saves.”
To adopt a highway, you need
only walk its shoulder, bending from time
to time for a plastic lid
skewered by its straw, a pair
of pantyhose with reinforced toes
and a crotch thicket of goat head thorns.
When you come upon
a ruptured suitcase at the center of its galaxy
of intimates sprayed across two lanes,
look both ways before stepping
onto the scarred asphalt to harvest
the cloth pieces, worn soft on a stranger’s skin.
To adopt a highway, say
between Avenal and Chowchilla,
you don’t have to listen for the inmates
on their side of the gun towers or
even remember their names, the ones
whose sins you spoke aloud to cover your own.
If you walk the shoulder long enough,
stepping over roadkill gore and
tire carcasses, your face may dry up
and Haggard may rise from the heat shimmer
to sing his creosote songs; and still
you need not let the lonely in.
But it helps. To adopt
a highway you must walk
through the fumes of a spent afternoon
looking for its leavings. And if you’re lucky
a red-tail will swoop ahead of you in the dusk,
a hawk-flame lighting post after post.
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Ode to My Backyard Gopher
By Craig van Rooyen
Featured Art: by Thomas Cole
Oh blind digger, furred borer,
miner of nothing at the end of a tunnel
to nowhere. My nocturnal brother,
I can report up top
the screech owl sounds like
he’s ripping holes in a paper sky.
Tonight’s scent salad:
honeysuckle-jasmine served under
a thin glaze of starlight. Nothing
between me and Venus
but goosebumps. What gets you
through the long hours down there?
Now and then when I go inside
to pour coffee or smash graham crackers
in warm milk, I read a few lines
of William Carlos Williams
who can get high on open scissors, or
a waste of cinders sloping down
to the railroad. I’m looking
for things to tie myself to. Maybe
the chain-link backstop that, right now,
is making diamonds of the backlit clouds,
or the trembling peppercorn tree.
Anything to stay topsoil-side
for a few more decades. Do you fear
the sky as much as I fear the press of earth?
Do you stay awake imagining
the unbearable lightness of air?
The imagination, intoxicated by prohibitions,
rises to drunken heights, says Williams,
and I walk outside again. Everywhere
new leaves, so thin the moon
shines through. My neighbors cling
to each other in their sleep.
A three-legged stray totters out from shadow
to beg with a lopsided wag. Dig
oh warm-blooded rodent.
Bore your tunnels though no one sees
their dark patterns. Come morning,
the three-legged dog will hobble
from fresh mound to fresh mound,
quivering at the scent of your passage.
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Costco Ode
By Craig van Rooyen
Featured Art: by Joachim Beuckelaer
—After Marie Howe’s “The Star Market”
And they did all eat,
and were filled: and they took
up the fragments that remained,
twelve baskets full.
—Matthew 14:20
Today, my people—the people Jesus loves—
are shopping at Costco.
Membership checked, we’ve entered
the light-drenched Kingdom of More.
We’re sampling Finger Lake
Champaign Cheddar morsels nested
in tiny paper cups. We’re watching golden
chicken carcasses ride a Ferris wheel to nowhere.
Our carts are full to overflowing
with applesauce squeezes and shrink-wrapped
Siamese twin Nutella jars. Take. Eat.
Take some more. But it’s not enough.
Here you can buy a theme park
for your master bath, on credit.
You can buy buckets of pain
killers, boxed sets of princesses, a
Rebel 4-Pack of Star Wars Bobbleheads.
The crushed-ice battlements of the seafood kiosk
frame Wild Cooked Red King Crab Legs so big
it looks as if a dragon has been dismembered
by retirees in hairnets and aprons.
Though abundance assumes satisfaction,
maybe this is a place of famine.
But why shouldn’t a miracle happen
at Costco? Up the frozen-food aisle now
comes a woman on her electric “Amigo Value Shopper”
with a cow-catcher-sized basket up front and
an orange safety flag in back.
Weanie Tender, PO
By Jennifer Christman
Like the dry, hot winds of Santa Ana itself, the sound came in waves. Pop-pop- pop-pop-pop. Weanie Tender didn’t know from where. Weanie Tender didn’t know from what. Staccato bursts of varying lengths and speed, then brief respites. Now, however, is a different story. There’s a constant vibrato. Take any moment—take this moment—Weanie can hear it, by God. Pop-pop-pop-pop- pop. He can feel it. He need only focus his mind to detect what’s on the order of a cosmic palpitation. Pop-pop-pop-pop-pop. Weanie is a low-level PO. He wants to be a detective someday.
“Force’s under attack,” says his partner, Dom, wolfing Chick-n-Minis from his own private 20-tray, steaming up the cruiser. Bag-of-bones Weanie is crumpled in the passenger seat.
“You hear it now?” says Weanie, drawing in a sharp, short breath.
He and Dom are on break outside the Chick-fil-A on Bristol. Weanie can’t sit still lately. He jiggles his legs and wrings his hands, listening, deeply, to what he’s now thinking must be an engine running—that’s it, an engine running rough, like an outboard motor, and snappy, pop-pop-pop-pop-pop. But that would require a boat, and water. And the city, the entire county, is landlocked. And the seismic index is low. Weanie checks daily.
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Naked, Fierce, Yelling Stone Age Grannies
By Lisa Bellamy
Featured Art: by Evelyn De Morgan
I shudder when I think of the giant beavers—
tiny-brained, squinting Pleistocene thugs—
they bared rotting incisors longer than a human arm,
they infested ponds and rivers, smothered
gasping sh with their acid-spiked, toxic urine,
they slapped their murderous tails—bleating,
they dragged themselves up the riverbank,
spied sweetgrass; they charged the crawling babies,
the tiny baby bones, trampling, they didn’t care—
hurray for the naked, fierce, yelling Stone Age grannies—
they dropped their hammer stones, they grabbed
sharp sticks. Who can forget their skinny, bouncing breasts?
They beat the giant beavers, they speared; they smeared
hot, thick beaver blood over each other’s faces,
their bony, serviceable buttocks—who can forget the grannies—
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Our Fathers
By Lisa Bellamy
Our fathers never spoke to us of their wars.
Each morning, they girded their loins with tool belt
and slide rule, according to their appointed trades.
In the summer, as they backed out
our driveways, we ran after them. In the winter,
they left, whistling, as we slept.
They created Japanese–style goldfish ponds,
built backyard gazebos, sang barbershop harmony
and strummed the ukulele, but they refused
to call themselves makers of beauty.
They woke us at midnight to see
the Aurora Borealis, carried us out
to the rose and white light-waves streaming,
named for the goddess of dawn who brings life,
and the god of the north wind who brings death.
Our fathers grew restless. They started to pace,
walked outside to gawk at the stars.
When we asked, Can we come, they said, No.
When we asked Why, they said, Hush.
Our fathers stopped kissing our mothers.
They came home midday: red, laid-off, warned
for swearing at the foreman, said they were sick
unto death. They slammed screen doors, bedroom doors,
storage shed doors. They started to drink. They stood up
from couches, pushed dogs that nosed them, stumbled
outside, yodeling. Said they felt bigger
than the sky. They drank in bomb shelters,
at the Legion Post, watching TV. They drank
driving us to Scouts, bottles between their knees.
They drank when we begged them not to and when
we tried to ignore them. Sometimes
they slammed us against walls, sometimes
said they were sorry. One by one, they left:
in their sedans, vans, the pick-up, walking to the bus stop.
They left in the morning as we sat, silent,
at the kitchen table, eating cereal before school.
We watched them leave with their suitcases.
They left a goodbye note for us to find
after track practice. They left at night after fights.
Some stayed, but stopped talking, or faded
fast, eyes rolled back, clutching their heart.
Others left over time, from their wasting diseases.
They said they would never forget us.
Our fathers said they loved us, and we believed them.
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Moo
By Chrys Tobey
Featured Art: by Vincent van Gogh
Woman is not yet capable of friendship: women
are still cats and birds. Or, at best, cows.
—Nietzsche
Love, I’m sorry for the time we were walking home with groceries in our
arms—you carried the chicken and potatoes and I held the chocolate. As we
laughed about something I can’t remember, our dog barked
at someone, and I just bolted, ran off. Also, love, there were all
those mornings you’d wrap your arm around me—your hand
spread across my spotted stomach. Good morning, you’d whisper
and I’d reply, Moo. I’m sorry for that. I also hope you’ll one day
forgive me for the time you were weeping, your mom had just died,
and I charged as though you were red. Love, I regret
all the evenings I’d drive home from work and open the door to smell
roasting squash and garlic. We’d sit at our tiny kitchen table, and you’d
say I love you, but then I’d regurgitate the ratatouille. I’m sorry about that, too.
Love, I apologize for my aversion to leather and how we’d snuggle on
the sofa, my nose in your neck, but then you’d cry, Ah, my back
because unfortunately, I weighed 1,000 pounds. And Love, what remorse
I have for leaving you, for wandering away to graze in another pasture.
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Cockadoodledoo
By Chrys Tobey
Our parson to the old women’s faces
That are cold and folded, like plucked dead hens’ arses.
—Ted Hughes
An old woman thought her face was a dead
hen’s arse. Maybe it was all the years
of plucking and waxing. The woman had no idea
what would make her think her face
was a dead hen’s arse and not a live hen’s
arse, and why the arse and not the beak, but
she did. It couldn’t be my age, the woman thought.
It couldn’t be the men, not when everyone knows men
love older women, especially much older, especially
with all the grandma porn, all the old women sex
costumes, all the men who ogle elderly women in walkers.
She had read so many books where men longed
for older women, where old women seduced helpless
wide-eyed men. She saw billboards where old women
modeled teenage clothing, modeled Brazilian
bathing suit bottoms. And she knew the trend: folding
wrinkles into one’s face using a Dumpling Dough Press.
People would stop her and take selfies. You look
like a movie star, they’d say. They wouldn’t leave her alone.
She’d shrug. Maybe it was the way she’d sometimes cluck
when she made love to her husband? This could be the reason
he’d whisper, One day I may trade you in for an older model.
Or maybe it was all the eggs she ate. Or her penchant for feathers.
Or how her mother used to call her my little chickadee. The woman
was unsure why she thought her face was a dead fowl’s
feces-extruding cloaca. She only knew she was tired
of seeing twenty-year-old men with women who could
be their grandmothers, old women who treated the men
like so many dimpled birds.
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Coach O
By Robert Hinderliter
Featured Art: by Owen Jones
Coach Oberman watched from his office window as a group of students prepared the bonfire by the south end zone. Two kids stacked tinder while another knelt beside a papier-mâché buffalo they would throw on the fire at the end of the pep rally. Oberman couldn’t wait to watch it burn.
He’d just gotten off the phone with Mike Treadwell—coach of the Ashland Buffaloes—who’d called to wish him luck in tomorrow’s game. Mike had been Oberman’s assistant for three years before taking the job at Ashland High. And now, after back-to-back state titles in his first two years, he’d been offered the defensive coordinator position at Emporia State University. This would be the last time they’d face off.
“I’ll miss seeing you across the field,” Mike had said. “Although I sure won’t miss trying to stop that Oberman offense.”
This was pandering bullshit. In their two head-to-head contests, Mike’s Buffaloes had routed Oberman’s Hornets by at least four touchdowns.
“I just wanted to say thanks,” Mike had said. “I couldn’t have gotten this far without you.”
He’d said it like he meant it, with no hint of sarcasm, but Oberman knew there was venom behind those words. In Mike’s two years as assistant, Oberman had treated him badly. Mike had a good mind for the game, there was no denying that, but he was a scrawny wuss with thick glasses and a girlish laugh. He didn’t belong on a football field. Oberman had banished him to working with the punter and made him the butt of jokes in front of the players. When Mike’s brother-in-law became superintendent at Ashland and handed Mike the coaching job, Oberman had scoffed. And now Mike was moving on to a Division II college while he was stuck muddling through another losing season with an eight-man team in Haskerville. He knew the irony wasn’t lost on either of them.
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Women in Treatment
By Theresa Burns
Featured Art by Dante Gabriel Rossetti
Why had I not noticed them
before? The women in treatment
on every block, it seems, leaving
the library, walking their dogs.
Once they hid themselves
beneath wigs, fashionable hats
in the city, or entered softly
in Birkenstocks and baseball caps,
stayed out of the way. Now they
show up, unannounced.
In offices, in waiting rooms,
in aisle seats with legs outstretched,
the women in treatment
flip the pages, reach the end,
bald, emboldened. One
outside a florist today arranges
lantana in time for evening
rush. A bright silk scarf
around her pale round head
calls attention to her Supermoon.
And one woman my own age,
in my own town, takes up a table
right in front. She nurses a chai latte
in a purple jacket, her hair
making its gentle comeback.
What she pens in a small
leather notebook: a grocery list?
Ode to her half-finished
French toast? The kind of poem
living people write.
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My Babysitter Karen B Who Was Sent to Willard Asylum
Winner, New Ohio Review Poetry Contest
selected by Kevin Prufer
By Jessica Cuello
There are only two photos of me as a child.
She took them, she had no child.
She had Kool Cigarettes and a job at the drugstore.
She gave me the Crayola box with the built-in sharpener.
Four hundred suitcases were stored in the attic
of Willard Asylum for the Chronic Insane.
She joined her twin brother there.
She wore her black hair down.
A child could admire it.
She bought me an Easter basket,
a stuffed rabbit whose fur rubbed off.
She walked everywhere.
She painted circles of blush on her cheeks.
Loony, people said so,
I mean grown-ups who saw signs
who passed her on our street before she
started to call and say Remember,
on the phone she said Remember,
Remember the date we killed her brother,
forgetting he’d been committed.
I took her hand and tagged along like an animal.
She was perfect to a child.
Calculations
By Linda Hillringhouse
Featured Art: by Julia Margaret Cameron
We’re waiting for our copying jobs
at Staples, so she starts chatting me up,
says she’s a retired math teacher.
When I tell her I taught English,
she says that English teachers
are the worst and she always kept
her mouth shut at the book club
because they always wanted
evidence and she just wanted
to talk, have a cup of tea,
what’s the big deal?
And I’m being too nice as usual
making it clear to her I’m not
one of those book bitches.
Now I’m hearing about the math museum
in New York and I can tell she wants someone
to go with. I’m brainstorming excuses
but it’s my turn to say something so I say
how much I like zeros and that I even
tried to read a book about them.
Now she’s telling me how she used to prove
to her students that she can get 2 to equal 1
and keeps saying, Let A=B and it’s like
God’s saying it, but now she’s saying, Anything
can be anything and this is starting to sound
like patent bullshit and she’s droning on
and I’m so glazed out I can only nod and say hmmm
like I’m Bertrand Russell finally grasping the true nature
of mathematics when all she wants is some tea and company
and it’s her bad luck that it had to be me she ran into,
the Queen of Zero.
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An Education
By Molly Minturn
Featured Art: Still Life with Cake by Raphaelle Peale
It was spring and I walked
the streets in the late afternoon
with the best poet I knew.
She was tall with a severe face
like an early New Englander.
Her ancestors survived genocide.
We didn’t discuss our work, only
the weather, how the blossoms
were upsetting. The war was on.
We bought a hefty slice of cake
and walked slowly under a murder
of crows back to my apartment.
This seemed too evocative,
almost to the point of embarrassment.
The cake was coconut. We split
the slice, sitting at the small
table in my living room, away
from the sun. At the time,
it was the present. Here
in the future, I sometimes forget
to breathe, waiting
for the next catastrophe. That cake
was pure in its sweetness, the poet
alive with me, her eyes scanning
my face, both of our histories
neatly bound in our throats.
I wanted to ask if she was frightened
by living, by the change
in the light. Instead, she slid the plate
across to me, a Ouija planchette,
insisting I take the last bite.
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Here Comes Happy
By Shauna Mackay
So, as I understand it, none of your children have died?
They die all the time, she says. Over and over.
The doctor, young as ever-dying sons, suggests a short course of medication and refers her to someone who might help her to change her thoughts.
On the way home her walk’s different: rocking, dodgy. This is how the embarrassed go. Shanks’s pony won’t trot nice: one two, onetwo, no, one, two, for God’s sake. She keeps a Bonaparte hand to pat the phone in the pocket of her shirt, there, there; can’t let it lie at the bottom of her bag, roofed over by crap and the birthday card for Lance. Her middle lad hasn’t answered the text she sent from the doctor’s reception area: he’s got an away game today, rugby, that bloody rugby; he must be injured, quadriplegic, on a ventilator, brain dead. How can she go on? She smoothes out the prescription in her hand, crosses the road to the chemist.
A text comes as she waits for the tablets to be dispensed. Her son is fine, all good, they won. She pictures him downing celebration pints, shots, being a daft sod, succumbing to fatal blood alcohol levels. She makes the pharmacist bide there for payment, stood like a plum, while she texts back. Well done son but mind you go canny x. As soon as the first text has gone she sends another to say on the coach journey home he should sit in a middle aisle seat opposite the driver’s side for she’s heard it’s the safest place in the event of a crash.
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Wex in Totus Taggle
By Owen Doyle
Featured Art by James McNeill Whistler
Words in an old notebook
prove (I was twenty-ish, then)
that mind-mud and dismally
tangled brain material
have causes other than old age
or illness. At the time,
they might have been explained
by the rum or beer in mind-
blowing excess the night before.
I don’t remember.
But surely those episodes
of binge and babble
are far outnumbered
by drier spells of helplessness:
me, frozen
over the neat rectangular form
of a blank page, compelled
to write totus to avoid
writing nothing.
It’s reason enough for terror
or self-pity, the thought
that those very things—the booze-
blasts and blackouts—were then
and are now the efficient
cause of wex and taggle:
furrows of gray matter, tilled
for art and wisdom, laid
waste, and the flood of those young
insults cascading still. But no,
I’ve heard that it’s very common:
this empty gaze, the pen loose
between a finger and a thumb,
its tip hovering
over absolutely nothing. And so,
as tragic as it all may be, finally,
I won’t let it bother me too
too much. Why taggle over wex
totus? I’ll pour myself a glass
of wine and see
what comes spilling out.
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At the Wives’ Coffee
By Abby E. Murray
Featured Art: A Rose by Thomas Anshutz
You should know
there is no coffee
at the Wives’ Coffee
There’s prosciutto
and cream puffs
and conversation starters
printed on glossy paper
And here’s a tip
from the commander’s wife:
Wives who forget
to wear the crest pin
will be fined a dollar
because these pins
aren’t free ladies
and immediately
I’m a stump
rolled into the river
before a flood
I am uncooperative
a hollow log sheltering rebel fish
a disruption of roots
But the conversation starters
are required and my question is
What discussion topic bores you to sleep every time?
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Language Immersion
By Jeff Walker
Featured Art: by Martin Johnson Heade
Nobody, speaking of fluency, would remember
that party where I told the young woman
seated on the floor: this food tastes good. Nothing untoward.
She surprised me by crawling on all fours, her blouse fairly open
at the top by way of happy gravity, to gently
take the food from my hand with her teeth; alarmed me
because I was not young and
what could she be thinking by doing that?
Around us on sofas and out under the trees hummed
the language I would not understand after years of trying
and also of trying to understand why I couldn’t,
an easy-to-employ tongue with few options and simple
structure but when they speak to each other it’s unintelligible,
a giggle-babble, a bubbly stream of what I guess are words,
vain emptying of thought from one head to another,
like all language, really.
Why not give it up and run silent miles
through the mud and rice paddies with my jogging buddies,
or ride miles on a motorbike alongside a mute, jiggling citizenry,
my face contained and content behind its polycarbonate shield,
my mouth behind its filter mask, and who on the back
not speaking, only chewing?
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Return
Winner, New Ohio Review Fiction Contest
selected by Mary Gaitskill
By Analía Villagra
He was gone for eleven years, and Jackie is still getting used to the idea that Victor is out. Exonerated. His release had warranted a few sentences on the local NPR station, so Jackie knows that he has been at his mother’s place, three blocks away, for a week. She has not yet run into him on the street. Each time she leaves her apartment she scans the sidewalks, and when he does not materialize she feels equal parts relief and disappointment. Thursday afternoon she goes out of her way to walk past his building, willing him to be on the front steps or looking out the window. She slows down. Would he even recognize her now? Her hair is short, with a few stray glints of gray, no longer halfway to her waist and shimmering black. Her eyes have shadows beneath them. Her hips have spread. She’s thirty years old, in good shape she thinks, unless you’ve spent a decade fantasizing about a nineteen-year-old body. Jackie blushes. This is the first time she’s admitted to herself that she wondered—hoped? assumed?—that Victor thought about her while he was away. Eleven years. Maybe he’ll recognize her, maybe he won’t. She can’t decide which is worse, so she stares down at the sidewalk and hurries past the building.
She goes to the Y to pick her daughter up from camp. Graciela is running around the outdoor play area with a group of other kids, their hair wild, their clothes and faces filthy.
“Mama!” Grace shrieks when she sees her.
Jackie waves. She locates the teenagers wearing staff T-shirts, and they hand her the sign-out sheet without pausing their conversation. Jackie half-listens to the latest counselor drama while Grace gathers her things.
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The Blackbird Whistling
By Linda Bamber
Featured Art: by John Frederick Kensett
I do not know which to prefer,
The beauty of inflections
Or the beauty of innuendoes,
The blackbird whistling
Or just after.
—Wallace Stevens
1. The Beauty of Innuendoes
Meaning in poems comes and goes
like a car speeding down a tree-lined road
sun-shade-sun-shade-sun-shade . . .
Poems’ secret places:
fleeting, hidden, close.
Closer yet I approach you, Whitman warmly says;
and then,
We understand, then, do we not?—never saying
what it is
we understand. As I understand a poem
by my friend
but mustn’t tell him
what about the poem makes me feel so
not alone.
2. The Beauty of Inflections
Yesterday I called my friend.
He was in a peaceful mood
(which he would be the first to say is kind of rare).
As if bubbles of CO2 some clams or scallops had exhaled
were calmly rising
in a steady/wavering
surface-seeking
kind of way
up through his contentment
effortlessly rose some words of praise for me. Plain
and unadorned; clear; direct.
The blackbird whistling,
you might say.
In fact,
if my friends didn’t tell me plainly that they
love me
sometimes,
I wouldn’t understand a single thing
I try to read at all.
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Trees in March
By Linda Bamber
We were seated near the back of the Chinese restaurant, and waiters were
rushing in and out of the swinging doors to the kitchen. At the time we had
not as yet so much as brushed shoulders. Resting on the formica table top, my
hand began to feel odd. Not bad-odd; but most unusual. Trees in early March,
aroused, their branches slightly reddened by the slightly stronger sun, may feel
something similar. They have a new sense of their importance in the scheme of
things; they remember (if I may say so) they are divine. He was looking at my
face, not my hand, so I don’t know how my hand, resting near the remains of
the General Gau’s chicken, intuited its sudden access of significance; but it did.
It had aura you could cut with a knife.
Shortly thereafter he took my hand.
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Mango Languages
By Linda Bamber
Featured Art: by Winslow Homer
—For Chris Bullock (in memoriam) and Carolyn Bernstein
In that world people are not discussing The End of the American Experiment.
Yo soy de los Estados Unidos. ¿De dónde es usted?
(I am from the United States. Where are you from?)
In that world people are not in a rage at their relatives for voting wrong and
sticking to it.
¡Tu hermano se parece más a tu abuelito que a ti!
(Your brother looks more like your grandpa than you!)
People there are not tortured by thoughts of what they should have done to
prevent this; they do not endlessly analyze the causes of the disaster; or notice
how many of their friends are independently coming up with the metaphor of
a tsunami wiping away what is precious from the past and has been defended
by their devoted work.
No llame a la policía. No es una emergencia.
(Do not call the police. It’s not an emergency.)
In that world they do not sit glumly when friends excitedly tell of recent
protest marches; they are not thinking, “Great, feel inspired; meanwhile,
they’ve got all three branches of government.”
¡Me encantaría que me dejaras accompañarte a la esta de Pablo!
(I would love it if you would let me accompany you to Pablo’s party!)
People there are not suddenly crossing the border into Canada in the snow
with children in their arms; or trooping out of Jewish Community Centers on
a Tuesday because of death threats; or writing emergency numbers on their
children’s forearms in indelible ink in case Mamacita doesn’t come home from
work that day.
Every morning I cross the border into Mango Languages, my ticket to
oblivion. “Loading your adventure,” says my computer when I boot it up.
Every ten minutes a woman’s joyful voice says, “Isn’t this easy?” to encourage
me, and I admit I feel encouraged.
Córtalos en pedacitos y échalos al agua que está hirviendo.
(Cut them in little pieces and throw them in boiling water.)
They are speaking of nothing more precious than carrots and onions; not,
for example, the Constitution or the Bill of Rights. We are learning to use the
imperative mood, that’s all; and today we are making soup.
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Near the Campo Aponal, on My Father’s Birthday
By David Brendan Hopes
Featured Art: A Rocky Coast by William Trost Richards
De Sandro’s café with the orange tablecloths
wades into the one stone street
without tourists, all the Venetians pushing
their big delivery carts at first of morning.
From what I understand of it,
the shouting is voluble,
happy, glad to be alive, almost never
without reference to anatomy.
Nine years after your death it is still your birthday.
I’m treating you to cappuccino and showing off
my lacework of Italian.
Ecco, I cry, pointing to the beautiful faces,
the beautiful things.
Everything was outlandish to you. Nothing is to me.
In that way balance is achieved across the long years.
But I think you would like these people.
They would pull out the orange chairs, sit down,
listen to what you have to say. You would be old
and wise in a city old and wise, and that would be
enough.
I’d better think of something else before the mood
turns heavy and hard to carry over the Rialto Bridge
with the shops just opening.
All those selfie-taking children,
all that brightness bearing down.
Happy birthday, I want to say,
from the last place on earth, where the earth dissolves
and the crazy towers lean out over
watching for what comes—sinuous, flowing,
unexpected—next.
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Of Seeing, the Unseen, and the Unseeable: Technology, Poetry, and “When It Rains in Gaza”
by: Philip Metres
1. I Tap My Cell to See
In the beginning, I did not see but heard: news over the radio about the bombing of Gaza in 2014, triggered by a whole series of events—we say “triggered,” as if history itself were a weapon ready to be fired. Voices untranslated, the tone of panic rising, sometimes breaking into anguished cries, the wail of air raid sirens, and the smooth voiceover of journalists, trying to tuck the adrenaline beneath the language, trying to strike a tone that seems fair and balanced.
On Language, Bombs, and Other Things That Exist
by: Kimberly Grey
As poets, we often assemble language to disassemble meaning—or we disassemble language to assemble meaning—and this is all an effort to translate the ordinary (a pair of socks, the name of that place, subway car, chair versus shadow, the front of a sparrow, something afloat like a naked rock) into an extraordinary textual or speech act. The result, we hope, is something new and transformative.
The Technology of the American Sonnet
by: Brian Brodeur
If a poem, as William Carlos Williams claimed, is a machine made out of words, the sonnet can be viewed as a particularly compressed, dynamic, and efficient little gizmo, one that poets have been tinkering with since the 12th century. These tinkerers, of course, have included some of the most foundational poets of Western literature—from Dante and Petrarch through Hopkins and Frost—all of whom have used one variation or another to perform what Phillis Levin classifies as “a mode of introspection, a crystallization of the process of thought.”
The Transitional Voice: Exploring Susan Blackwell Ramsey’s “Ode to Texting”
by: Claire Bateman
There are currently three kinds of human in the world: the non-digital; digital natives; and adapters who have learned to communicate digitally but still remember an analog society though they cannot fully access that prior consciousness, just as no adult can fully access their sense of self prior to their awareness of death and sex. Susan Blackwell Ramsey’s “Ode to Texting” speaks in the voice of the third kind of human, a member of this historically unique transitional species, embodying a before-and-after in our culture in which babies swipe insouciantly on screens almost before they can sit up on their own. Interestingly, rather than relegating texting to the status of object, Ramsey personifies it as a shapeshifting subject she addresses in order to explore the range and complexity of an adapter’s experience. Consider how she opens the poem:
Machines, Mortality, and the Lyric Poem
by: Bethany Schultz Hurst
After my mother died, I kept reaching for my phone. I’d talked to her almost daily during the last years of her illness, when she’d been mostly housebound, watching Hallmark movies and BBC mysteries alongside my patient father and an ever-present small plate of toast she couldn’t bring herself to eat. Because I couldn’t reach her now, I found myself instead playing the matching game I’d downloaded in case I needed to occupy my young son on the flight back to Denver for the funeral. For brief periods, the game let me put my grief in the background and focus on the simple task of matching little clusters of fruit or flowers to earn points toward restoring a cartoon estate garden that had fallen into disrepair. The game offered order and arrangement, a small sense of accomplishment when other tasks (or even former pleasures, like reading) seemed to demand too much concentration.
Of the People, for the People, by the Robots
by Christopher A. Sims
American fiction has its small share of memorable politician characters—Willie Stark in Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men and Robert Leffingwell in Allen Drury’s Advise and Consent to name a pair—but there’s a strand of this tradition that is becoming more relevant in 2016: Artificial Intelligence politician figures in the work of two of our most prominent science-fiction writers, Isaac Asimov and Philip K. Dick.
Take Me to Your Lady Leader
by Kristen Lillvis
Contact, Carl Sagan’s best-selling 1985 science-fiction novel, tells of alien shape-shifters, wormhole-traveling spacecraft, and—perhaps the most fantastical element of the bunch—a female president. Yet Contact’s protagonist, Eleanor “Ellie” Arroway, compares President Lasker to her predecessors with no acknowledgment of their gender difference, noting that Ms. President demonstrates an appreciation for science seen in “few previous American leaders since James Madison and John Quincy Adams.” Despite her tie to the presidential establishment—and regardless of Sagan’s attempt to make her gender unremarkable—President Lasker still fulfills the function particular to women world leaders in literature. Whether she erodes or extends existing gender stereotypes, the female president operates as a sign of the apocalypse or, at least, a harbinger of the unfamiliar, a reminder to readers that they have entered a world drastically different from their own.
"This Time I'm Going to Fool Somebody": Willie Stark and the Politics of Humiliation
by Dustin Faulstick
“Folks,” roars Willie Stark on the eve of his impeachment trial, “there’s going to be a leetle mite of trouble back in town. Between me and that Legislature-ful of hyena-headed, feist-faced, belly-dragging sons of slack-gutted she-wolves. If you know what I mean. Well, I been looking at them and their kind so long, I just figured I’d take me a little trip and see what human folks looked like in the face before I clean forgot. Well, you all look human. More or less. And sensible. In spite of what they’re saying back in that Legislature and getting paid five dollars a day of your tax money for saying it. They’re saying you didn’t have bat sense or goose gumption when you cast your sacred ballot to elect me Governor of this state.” From his colloquial diction and insults to his collegial banter with his own supporters, from his invocation of corruptly used tax money to his reference to the sacredness of the ballot, Stark identifies himself as one of the people. Before neurosurgeon Ben Carson or business moguls Carly Fiorina and Donald Trump, farm-boy-turned-lawyer Willie Stark was the ultimate political outsider.
Villainous Villanelle
by: Denise Duhamel
My id spits and licks his lips, trips my conscience,
my ego, Miss Goody Two Shoes.
Her neon pink laces make him nauseous.
On Being Asked to Contribute to the Villains Feature
by: Richard Cecil
I searched ten years of word files
looking for titles with names of politicians who
enrich the rich while trampling down the poor
and corporate criminal CEOs who screw
employees out of wages, rape the Earth,
and hide their stolen billions far offshore,
and drew a blank. I also found a dearth
of killer clowns and warlords steeped in gore,
religious rabble rousers, nasty nuns,
child-abusing Catholic priests—zero.
No bought congressmen who vote pro-gun;
no homicidal patriotic heroes.
What’s blinded me to monsters all those years?
The Frankenstein inside. It’s him I fear.
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Designs Less Palpable: Emotional Manipulation and Even-Handedness in Keats
by: Matthew VanWinkle
In a February 3, 1818 letter to his friend Reynolds, Keats rejects a reading experience that he associates primarily with Wordsworth: “We hate poetry that has a palpable design upon us—and if we do not agree, seems to put its hand in its breeches pocket.” The reproach is so scathing because it acutely observes how rapidly the poetry’s interest in its audience cools, from the importunate heat of the design to the indifferent withdrawal to the pocket. Keats is fuming primarily at Wordsworth’s dogmatism and propensity for self-congratulation, as we hear earlier in the letter, where Keats complains of being “bullied into a certain Philosophy engendered in the whims of an Egotist.”
Yeats and Heaney: The Poetry Without the Pity
by: C.L. Dallat
When W.B. Yeats dismissed Wilfred Owen’s World War I poetry as “all blood, dirt & sucked sugar stick” (and omitted Owen, Sassoon, and Rosenberg from his 1936 anthology), he was making a powerful statement, not just about distaste for sentimental language and the role of pity in poetry, but about the poet’s duties and limits. He had already excluded writing war poetry from his own list of obligations in 1915’s “On Being Asked for a War Poem,” but only later became more coherent on the abjuration of pity as an unfit subject.
Tell It Cool: On Writing with Restraint
By: Debra Marquart
For years, I’ve encouraged students to “tell it cool” when narrating a tale that is harrowing or emotional. A cool narrator can be a buoy in rough waters. I’ve always thought this advice came from Hemingway, but at this moment as I search my bookshelves for the place where Hemingway said it, I can’t put my finger on the quote. I know it’s in there somewhere, likely in one of the letters (bossy letters full of unsolicited advice and signed “Papa” when friends were just writing to ask for money).
In A Moveable Feast, Hemingway famously wrote about knowing what to leave out. In his discussion of the short story, “Out of Season,” for example, he remarks that he left out a key event connected to the real story: “I had omitted the real end of it which was that the old man hanged himself.” According to a letter that Hemingway wrote to F. Scott Fitzgerald in 1925, the story was “an almost literal transcription” of an experience he’d had while traveling in Europe with his first wife, Hadley.
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I Second That Emotion
by: Rebecca McClanahan
A few years ago, I attended a literary gathering and heard four poets and memoirists read from their work. They were all accomplished writers, varied enough in their approaches to evoke laughter, sighs, nods of acknowledgment, a collective gasp at one point, and, toward the end of the evening, some tears as well. Tears are not uncommon at readings, of course—I have cried at several—but in this case the tears came not from audience members but rather from one of the readers, who had warned us that she might “choke up” because of the emotional content of the autobiographical piece she was about to read. Her introduction, followed by a tearful presentation, suggested either that the work was too new to share publicly or that she had planned her reaction and was intentionally manipulating us. As she spoke, I sensed listeners growing more and more uncomfortable, as I was. Some leaned back into their chairs, some crossed their arms. The more emotional the reader’s performance became, the less effect it seemed to have, an unfortunate outcome, especially given that the work was potentially moving in and of itself. But it was as if the writer did not trust the work, or perhaps did not trust us to do our job as listeners: to bring our own emotional response to the work.
New Ohio Review 