NOR: Embrace Your Conjunctions
By Christopher Ricks
Featured Image: Sunset, Oxford by George Elbert Burr 1899
Among the judgments of which I repent is the one that I passed, half a century ago, on Patrick Kavanagh (1904-1967). The book: Come Dance with Kitty Stobling. The date: 13 December 1960. The journal: the Oxford Magazine. The brash paragraph by the reviewer:
By Laura Read
You’ll be heavier in the mornings, waterlogged.
Don’t try to put on anything from the upside down
clean clothes basket. Just wear yesterday’s pants.
There’s no need to bring in the paper. Or sweep
the dead bees from the windowseat. When
the doctor asks for your pain number, stick
with 2—it’s best to leave everything as it was.
Wish again that you could live in that prefab
house you tour at the fair. It doesn’t matter
what it’s made of. You love the vacuum stripes
in the carpet, which is taupe, always difficult to
describe. There’s a plasma television,
a microfiber sectional, and in the kitchen plastic
steaks on each plate at the table, covered in fake
hollandaise sauce. After you eat, you’ll still have
dinner for tomorrow, and you can just
go to bed where there’s a book already chosen
for you on the woman’s side. Apparently, you like
romance. And if you’re not tired, the fair’s always
there. You love the ferris wheel, the funnel cakes,
and especially the goldfish man, but you never
thought you’d win one of those bags with the small
fish swimming inside it, his life hanging
in the balance of your hands. And there’s no bowl
back at the house. So you’ll have to stay up all
night holding him, in case he panics.
Laura Read has published poems most recently in The Sow’s Ear, Red Rock Review, Edgz, and Poet Lore, and has work forthcoming in Spoon River Poetry Review and Floating Bridge Review. She teaches writing and literature courses at Spokane Falls Community College.
Originally appeared in NOR 8.
By Karen Brown
Esme told him when she was twelve three things happened of notable significance: her grandfather presented her with a car, and then died in it, her grand- mother had a pool installed in her basement, and her father put on his pale blue pinstripe suit, custom-made for a previous trip to the Bahamas, and left, never to be heard from again. These events meant something, finally, as Dean motored her out among the Thimble Islands. It was April, a day with the unfulfilled promise to be warm. The wind did its own kind of dance with the Sound. Dean wore a straw hat anchored under his chin with rawhide, his hair in a ponytail, and shorts. Esme avoided looking at his knees exposed to the chill. He piloted the boat between the rocks, quiet and purposeful. She almost loved him for his disinterest.
An hour ago they’d sat in the seafood restaurant lounge on Main Street, the only patrons at eleven a.m. The place was dim, the chair she sat in damp and sticky with the sloshed liquor of uncountable drunken mishaps. The light came through the front window and made her feel dissolute and pale, like someone who might, according to her grandmother, have crawled out of the gutter. She wore her mother’s pearl earrings and a too-small T-shirt that her grandfather bought for her in a gift shop in Rio de Janeiro the fall before he died. She’d found it in a drawer in the upstairs bedroom of her grandmother’s house, a shirt she’d worn and abandoned years ago as a teenager. She’d left the house early that morning, and stopped at the bank. In her bag was enough cash to create a stir, to provide five times the yearly salary of the bartender, a girl whose sharp wrist bones made her seem fragile and terrible all at once. Esme could barely look at her lifting the bottle of J&B.
Read MoreBy Lawrence Raab
“People who plan their own memorial services,”
my friend was saying, “don’t get the point of death.”
There’d been songs and prayers and ecumenical readings.
Then one of the children played the trumpet
and the brother told too many stories that weren’t
sad or funny. Now we were headed to the reception
to be sincere about how much he’d have appreciated it.
But I liked thinking you could say of someone,
He didn’t get the point of death, and make it sound
like a brave refusal. As we walked up the hill
on that stubbornly beautiful day, I liked that idea
a lot more than hearing about people battling their illnesses
when all they’re really doing is lying there with a chemo drip
in their arms, then stumbling off to throw up. I know, I
know it’s only a figure of speech, a way of granting
courage to those whose bodies can’t manage it,
but what I want is the strapping on of bright armor,
the hefting of great swords, then striding out
into the blinding plain, massed armies on either side.
Sure, the odds are against us. In fact, we’re doomed,
which is why the clarity of standing here
has become important. Not the battle itself, but these
few minutes of stillness—the ocean in the distance
brandishing its light, and the sea-birds inscribing
their invisible maps across the field of the sky,
and the colorful flags of our armies testing the wind.
Lawrence Raab is the author of seven collections of poetry, most recently The History of Forgetting (Penguin, 2009). His collection What We Don’t Know About Each Other won the National Poetry Series and was a finalist for the 1993 National Book Award. He has received a Guggenheim fellowship, a Junior Fellowship from the University of Michigan Society of Fellows, and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Massachusetts Council on the Arts. He teaches literature and writing at Williams College, where he is the Morris Professor of Rhetoric.
Originally appeared in NOR 8.
By Sydney Lea
John Ore stood up his bass and Frankie Dunlop laid his sticks on the snare.
They walked offstage but Monk stayed on hunch-shouldered and with one finger
hit a note and stared at his keyboard a long long time, then another
and stared and another and stared, not rising to whirl as he often would do
when he played this club or any other. He didn’t smile as usual,
benign, whenever he danced like that. He wore his African beanie—
I mean no disrespect, Lord knows, just don’t know what you’d call it— his
face beneath it both blank and rapt. I was rapt myself as I’d been
for the whole first set and in fact for years even then, but for other reasons.
I believed he was speaking to me somehow, that he knew my inmost sorrows,
my expectations. Of course I guess a lot of people thought so.
I was looking for eloquent mystery in those odd plinkings, which may have
been there,
though if so, it wasn’t for me to fathom. With the noise of chatter and movement, I
couldn’t have heard my heart lubdub but did. The last set ended,
he sat the same way after, playing lone notes as if contemplating
just where each came from. Right there in front of you! I thought. Who knew
that in front of him too lay those interludes of speechlessness,
his piano hushed, till he died like anyone else? I don’t want to riff
on what I dreamed Monk meant to my life, so small and young, comprising
only things that any man that age is bound to go through.
I don’t want a poem all full of lyric triteness, smoke-softened light
that glanced off bottles behind the bar, the sorrowful looks of his sidemen
as they left him—which may have been only quizzical. It was 1963.
I won’t go into history today, or politics,
or whatever else might make something grander than they truly are of my
thoughts.
There was only Monk. There was sound then quiet.
Sydney Lea’s ninth collection of poems, Young of the Year, will appear in 2011. A former Pulitzer Prize finalist, he teaches in the graduate faculty of Dartmouth College.
Originally appeared in NOR 8.
By Natania Rosenfeld
Opera has the power to warn you that you have wasted your life. You haven’t acted on your desires. You’ve suffered a stunted, vicarious existence. You’ve silenced your passions. [Y]ou have used only a fraction of your bodily endowment and your throat is closed.
Wayne Koestenbaum, The Queen’s Throat: Opera, Homosexuality, and the Mystery of Desire
From the time I was twelve, my father, a German professor at a small college, took a group of students to Germany every three years for the spring semester, and my mother and I stayed behind in Ohio. My mother was too big, too inwardly alive and desirous, for our small town, and I was filled with the itchiness of puberty. Two restless females, we entertained ourselves together as best we could. Sometimes we drove out into the country just to get away from home. We’d leave our little town to coast through the landscape of cornstalks and flat brown fields. We talked about life. Sometimes we drove past a collapsing gray barn that said “Ma ouch obacc” in faded letters. On a bright day you could make out the missing “il” and “P” from “Mail Pouch Tobacco.” A boy I was in love with lived on the same road as the Ma ouch barn. His father was an air-traffic controller and his mother was an Asian war bride, and Phil was a pimply beautiful boy with a sad face, who trapped animals on the weekend and shot them. When I gazed at him in the school hallway, I felt he was meant for some other destiny, and I wanted to rescue him from his life of dreariness and violence. The problem was that he ignored me completely, was only dimly aware of my existence, my great longing.
On Saturday afternoons, my mother and I always listened to the live Metropolitan opera broadcast on the radio. We’d turn it on in the car and continue listening when we got home. We hated to miss any parts of the program, and were particularly fond of the quizzes and synopses between acts. “I re- member the opera in Vienna when Papa and I were students,” my mother told me more than once. “He wouldn’t spend a schilling on seats, and we had to stand the whole time. Afterward I wanted to buy marroni—roast chestnuts— from one of the old men selling them in the winter streets, but he always said we couldn’t afford them.” My mother was ashamed of having given in to my father, and couldn’t stop resenting him for making her feel like a beggar. In my mind, I saw him with a long, unhappy face, unable to splurge even a little after watching Mimi die of tuberculosis for two hours. “Let’s try to guess the answers to the quiz,” I said, to cheer her up; and I was amazed at how many of them she got right.
Most of all, I remember the applause at the end of the final act, the continuous shouts of “Bravo!” or “Brava!” with a long, triumphant, trailing emphasis on the second syllable—and the announcer saying, “Now Dame Sutherland has picked up a bouquet of roses. Smiling, she holds her arms out to the adoring audience.” The diva blew kisses, and the applause went on and on like a great dark sea. My mother and I quivered and turned up the radio just for the applause; we were still weeping for the noble, self-sacrificing, gorgeous lady who had just died—who had gone down singing, her very sobs sublime music—and now we wept for the singer, and for the joy of the audience. Singer and audience merged together, their satiety filling our house those gray Ohio Saturdays.
Thirty years later, my mother and I finally attended the Metropolitan Opera in New York City. We were such different people by then! No longer girl and frustrated grown woman, now two women, one elderly, the other verging on middle age. Both of us had brushed against death; we’d been laid open and operated on within six months of one another, each visiting the other’s bedside. We’d traveled to Italy in December of 2001, when no other Americans were traveling, and reveled in the artistic and culinary offerings of Florence. Now we were going to realize a long-held dream. Because my mother’s plane was late—she was coming from Ohio, I from Illinois—we missed the first act of The Marriage of Figaro. We watched what was left of it on the little television downstairs, drank champagne and toasted one another. When we got into the
hall at last, we squeezed hands in frissons of delight. Cherubino singing of his multiple loves—poor polymorphic, adolescent Cherubino, who cannot go near a woman without trembling all over—made us laugh and cry at once. The duchess singing “Dove Sono”: oh, we’d been there! The opera’s triumphant finale, with its reconciliation of all opposing parties, filled us with joy—yes, it can be that simple, joy! Afterward, we walked up Broadway in a light, warm rain, sharing an umbrella, looking up at the lights, gazing at the people who passed us, planning our next days in the city.
Two nights later, we went to see the bizarre French opera La Juive, cited in Proust whenever Marcel encounters his friend Saint-Loup’s mistress, the Jewish prostitute Rachel. Produced by a Viennese company, the piece was staged awkwardly, tendentiously, and rather stupidly. The bizarrerie of that opera and that production deserves its own chapter, which perhaps someone has written elsewhere. My mother and I were a little tired, and I was annoyed by her strong breath and her continual uncomfortable shifting in her seat; it is quite possible she was annoyed by me, as well. I am well past supposing children aren’t as irritating to parents as parents can be to children, and adult love is often an exercise in toleration. In short, it was an unromantic night at the opera. Instead of a sublime eighteenth-century fol-de-rol, we had nineteenth-century Jewish self-hatred in all its knotty mess, and we felt messy ourselves. The audience around us, at least a third Jewish I’m sure, was confounded. As far as we could tell, Vienna’s black-and-white notions about staging the Gentile-Jewish conflict were not appealing to anyone. The music was pretty, but lacked depth. Only one aria bowled us over, the famous “Rachel, quand du seigneur,” in which the father figure, a Barrabas, sings of his mixed feelings toward his daughter: should she die as a Jewish martyr, or should he reveal her true identity as his adopted Gentile daughter and thereby save her from the burning cauldron? Diva-like, Neil Shicoff had let it be known at the start of the performance that he had a slight cold and would not be singing up to par—and succeeded in making the entire audience feel, “If this is singing below par . . . !” We fulfilled our ultimate fantasy then: shouting “Bravo!” with full throats, weeping with excitement, surrounded by a sea of ecstatic listeners. Not cut off, not insulated in a car in the cornfields, or lonely in a Midwestern house; not far, far away from the world, but in the world, at last. Again, we walked home in the rain, talking this time about all the thorny questions the opera had raised—and again, planning the full days and nights in the week that remained to us.
It seems to me that if opera is about anything, it is about longing—longing for the place where life truly happens (“Moscow!”), for the exotic lover, the husband who will bring us the golden fleece, or at least pour marroni in our laps; or for possession of a singular talent. My mother and I are divas disguised as professors at provincial colleges. When we stand—in her case, stood—before the classroom, sometimes an eloquence pours from our mouths that disconcerts the students. They sit in silence, and I can see on their faces, Where did this come from?
Unappeasable longing. And now, these brown fields of Illinois.
Natania Rosenfeld is an associate professor of English at Knox College and the author of Outsiders Together: Virginia and Leonard Woolf (Princeton, 2001). Her poetry, fiction and essays have been published widely in journals, and she is the recipient of an Illinois Arts Council Literary Award for her prose poem, “Bodies,” published in Another Chicago Magazine in 2007.
Originally appeared in NOR 8.
By Natania Rosenfeld
I am a person of excess. When I open my mouth, I say too much, too loudly; I put in too much food, too quickly; I gulp my wine and burn my tongue on coffee. When I eat hard candy, I crunch it all down immediately. I say what I feel at the moment of feeling, and sometimes, because I am a teacher, I say more than what I feel so my meaning will penetrate. You must do this as a teacher and even so, feel sometimes that your mouth has opened and closed for an hour and nothing audible has emerged. So, I am loud; I exaggerate. I am one of those creatures of whom it is said, “She doesn’t know her own strength,” like a lion cub or a small orangutan. The last time I visited my in-laws, I broke their china teapot. I didn’t mean to break it; my big hands dropped it on the floor without volition. It was at a moment when no one was listening to me, and I grew agitated; my hands shook.
My husband is a man of careful, clean movements, an ectomorph with the great, sad eyes of a giraffe. My clumsiness surely pains him, and I am pained by the difference between us. He deserves a daintier sort, a woman named Fiona or Lily who flits through life. I believe I should go away for a while so he can find this Lily or Fiona. I should live with a big man, a loud man, a man who spills on himself and bumps into furniture. With a man like that, I’d be at home. His flesh would deflect my unintended barbs and his noise would drown out mine.
Today a friend told me of just such a man, a friend of hers she says is pining because no one wants him. He is enormous, she said, like a bear or a gorilla, but so deft with his hands that he sculpts tiny figures, figures you can hold in your hand and stroke with one fingertip. These tiny sculptures, my friend said, are world-famous, but the artist is terribly lonely. Year by year, he has become more enormous, and year by year, he has grown less able to part with his tiny figures. He surrounds himself with them, but he is beginning to have financial troubles because he won’t sell them, though buyers beat at his door.
I want to meet him, I told my friend. I was not thinking of his brittle heart, only of resting against that body, being cradled in those paws she described as so deft, though so huge. And of soothing him as I fail to soothe my angular, pensive husband, or all those friends and relatives to whom my every word is like a slap, or at least, the sting of an annoying insect. Lately, there has been a silence between me and my husband, a silence that booms through the house. I must get away and leave him be.
My friend took me to see the man where he lives in a white house by the gray sea. I had never seen so large a man: he towered over both of us, and when he embraced my friend, she was engulfed by his chest and belly. His hair and beard were shaggy and red, his sea-gray eyes were deep and glittering in their casements of craggy flesh. Enclosed in his ursine body, he seemed far away, unreachable. He served us tea at a table by a large window. The cups were porcelain and nearly transparent. How careful I was! And yet still I dropped my cup; it shattered, and splashed tea on my legs. Never mind, he said, it doesn’t matter. I got up to look for a towel, but he waved me back to the chair: Leave it. I watched him drink his own tea from a cup cradled in his paw like an egg.
After tea, we went to his studio.
“Here,” he said, “is my menagerie.”
All over shelves, tables and windowsills were the tiny figures. I cannot describe them, partly because you had to touch them to fully understand. I was terrified when he picked up a sculpture not much larger than a thimble and handed it to me.
“But I already broke your cup!” I said.
He shook his head. “It doesn’t matter.”
For many minutes, he handed me the tiny figures. I held them, looked at them, became lost in the features of their half-animal, half-human faces, and handed them back to him. It was a kind of dance, like the movement of the midwife who takes the baby from its mother’s womb and hands it to the at- tending nurse.
“I have no children,” he said. “They are my real children.”
“I have no children, either,” I answered.
“Then you must find your real children,” he said. “And you mustn’t smother them.”
“Do you smother yours?” I asked.
“Maybe. I can’t give them up. When others come to take them away, I feel as though I’m sending them into exile.”
“But even real children leave eventually,” I said.
“I know,” he said. “If I could part with my children, I’d have real ones. Look,” he said, pointing to his own great bulk. “I’m pregnant all the time. The more I eat, the more children I have inside. They’ll have to remove these with a knife!” He laughed. We all three laughed.
“Come on,” he said, “let’s dance.” He put on wild, whirling gypsy music and reached for a bottle on a high shelf. The bottle had a picture of a plum, and next to it stood a group of tiny, glass carafes.
“Oh no!” I said, when he tried to hand me one. “This I will drop, I’m certain.”
“Ah!” he said, “That’s the beauty of it. When you’ve finished drinking, you throw it over your shoulder. Then you take a new glass. We drink until the corners of the room are filled with shards.”
So we drank, and between the tinkling of tiny breaking bottles, we danced like crazed gypsies. Distantly, at some point, I heard the ringing of my phone; I pretended not to notice, and the other two gave no sign of hearing. I was wild with the excitement of permission to break things.
Suddenly, after about an hour, a terrible thing happened. The sculptor had drunk at least ten of the carafes of plum brandy; he was lurching about. With his enormous hand, he swiped a whole group of his figurines from a shelf onto the floor. “Damn you!” he shouted. “Damn you bloodsuckers, I’m finished!” He started to laugh like a maniac.
“Bernard!” said my friend. “Bernard, stop! You’ll destroy yourself.”
He stared at her like an elephant shot in the knees; then he crumpled to the floor and began to sob. He buried his face in his hands, and the tears flowed through his fingers. My friend went to him, squatted down, patted his shoulders, made soothing sounds. The gypsy music ended suddenly, and in the silence I could hear my telephone. I ran from the room, but before I did so, I swiped two broken figures from the floor and put them deep in my pocket. I kept my hands around them the whole way home to my husband, even though their chipped edges hurt me.
Read MoreBy Campbell McGrath
Let’s get drunk and drive someplace, way too fast and loving it. Let’s get drunk and listen to the radiator hiss. Let’s get drunk and toss important stuff out the window—there goes the toaster, there goes a lamp. Let’s get drunk and go see the Replacements, already on stage and torching the amps with flamethrower guitars and Paul Westerberg’s broken heart, oh gee whiz, worth living and dying for, worth working in salt mines or harvesting asteroids whose metal- lic cores might be smelted into alloys from which to fashion a robot able to invent a language in which we could speak of such music without diminish- ing it. Break. And after intermission they’re so messed up they can hardly play “Unsatisfied” or even their ironically riveting versions of “Angel of the Morning” and TV theme songs and commercial jingles from childhood as we crowd forward on the dancefloor shouting “Free Bird!” but Westerberg won’t sing it, even when fifty people have taken up the chant, even as they’re winding down, discordant, stumbling and complicit, and then a quick encore—“Left of the Dial”—honey-drenched, magnificent—before we’re back out in the cold streets drinking cans of beer ensleeved in paper bags as so many are, were, and ever after shall be.
Surely this is the form and the body of the world I have known,
entirely American,
and surely America’s golden dreams shall yield to the sober and diminished light of dawn, all the bars of the Twin Cities arrayed like Nehi bottlecaps on a checkered tablecloth, bars of the lost or damaged, bars of the utterly glorious in failure, pickled eggs and smeared lipstick, cornsilk and taxi-smoke over- flowing the gutters, the avenues and arteries,
a highway we think of as a river of molten tar,
wanting to get right down and bathe in it, partake of its stench and plenitude, such is the nature of that grief, such the love for its wild aortal rush. And if you could harness all that, if you could mainline it or hook it to a turbine, you could power the world, you could live forever and rule the planet, you could flip the switch on the immensity we’ve created, jack up the volume on the damage we have wrought, blow the amps, fuck them all, every follicle, every corpuscle of their folly. Let the world eat the dust in the wake of our wicked ride, let them beg us for mercy, for succor or salvation, for the cuds of chaw or spent rifle shells we deign to bestow as they chase the shadows of our horses through empty streets, like the dusty Mexican children at the end of the movie, calling out Oye, Caballero, Mr. Cowboy, come back!
Campbell McGrath is the author of many books of poetry, including Shannon, Seven Notebooks, Capitalism, American Noise, and Spring Comes to Chicago. His awards include the Kingsley Tufts Prize and fellowships from the Guggenheim and MacArthur Foundations. He teaches in the Creative Writing Program at Florida International University in Miami.
Originally appeared in NOR 8.
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 6 compiled by Ellery Pollard.
By David Gullette
Featured Art: Reading by James McNeill Whistler
Half asleep he saw clearly his own failures
and by the light of that hideous clarity
made a poem hard sleek and simple.
As he strung the words out from the bobbin
of his waking mind still half dreaming
he knew what he had seen, saw what he had felt
and each word rang a new bell
or bruised an old wound to bleeding
but he pushed on to finish it all the same.
When it was done he held it up and read
the triumphant chronicle of defeat
at his own hands: the craven appeasements
the months of capitulations
the years of friend after friend dying away
and vices equal to his sorrows.
He sent it off, within days came word
they would be glad to print it,
the season shifted and he slept late.
By Ann Keniston
Featured Art: The Letter by Alice Pike Barney
All I could do was think of her face.
Or not think of it, the way
after receiving her letter I felt
relief, gratitude, and then
lost the actual note she wrote,
the tiny, lovely photograph
of her children I’d vowed to cherish.
And then I saw: my grief was
the objective correlative, a hook
on which I could hang all the scraps
of whatever other sadnesses
I was more frightened of. And the grief,
like a person, like her in her solicitude,
almost prevented me from seeing this
By Brenda Miller
Featured Art: Alpine Scene in Thunderstorm by Frederic Edwin Church
You can see storms in the desert from a long way off: dark clouds building, wind picking up, lightning bolts flashing and touching ground. You listen for the thunder growling up behind, wait for the moment when everything will be synchronized—and then you’re in it, in the thick of it, trees bending and shaking, something rattling the roof, the lightning and thunder now one animal trying to get in. The only thing between you and the storm is the sliding glass door, and you see the jackrabbits going for cover, and you know the power will go out, and you know you’ll have to find the flashlight and batteries and candles and matches, and you’ll try to eat all the food in the fridge before it spoils, before your boyfriend gets home and blames you for the storm. You’ll still have to get up at 4 a.m. and drive your truck into town, dash from the cab in the rain and wind, knock at the locked glass door frantically for the baker to let you in, the baker who had looked you up and down, said: why does a college girl like you want a job like this? You had no answer for that question, but you still got the job because you were white and sober and scared, and so now you run inside, put on the big white apron, start pressing fresh donuts into frosting, sprinkling them with chocolate jimmies and coconut, scooping out the powdered sugar and glaze.
Read More
By Denise Duhamel
Featured Art: Puddles by Sophie Rodionov
My sister, my brother-in-law, and I order Chinese takeout
on New Year’s Eve and my fortune reads
“You have to accept loss to win.” This makes me almost hopeful—
and maybe, for a moment, even gives me a way
to make sense out of 2008. I am going to keep that fortune, I think,
but then promptly, accidentally, I throw it in the trash.
Later my sister says that she thought my fortune might have read,
“Only through learning to lose can you really win.”
Or “Maybe accepting loss makes you a winner.” I can’t search
through the trash because I threw the bag of leftover Chinese
into the condo’s chute which crushes whatever thuds to the bottom.
Yesterday I held my childhood drawings in my hand
except they had been drenched in sewer water, so it’s more accurate to say
that I scooped Crayola pulp in my work gloves. The apartment
my sister and brother-in-law and I bought is gone, except
for the cement floor. Even the moldy walls must come down.
By Heather June Gibbons
Featured Art: The Ouroboros by Theodoros Pelecanos
Regret does not descend in a cinematic miasma.
It hits like nausea, creaks back and forth
on a limited axis like one of those vaguely
eggplant-shaped metal cages you used to see
in fast food playgrounds across America.
Meanwhile, the sky unfurls its violent ribbons
and karate kids spar on the green. I am driving
or rinsing a dish, or picking zucchini, or whatever it is
I do now that I’ve outlived my misspent youth,
confused by the hair-trigger pairing of regret
and nostalgia, the head and tail of a snake stuck
swallowing itself in the relentless ouroboros
of endings that beget other endings, memory
like a waterwheel that we’re tied to, half-drowned
and just trying to make it around one more time.
Grimace, I embrace you from the inside.
The place is empty, let me stay awhile.
By Mark Cox
Featured Art: Leaves by Sophie Rodionov
They bought it early in their courtship, at one of the
estate or moving sales they avidly frequented, piecing
together a life from the treasures and trash of other
couples—young then, oblivious, able to profit from
others’ losses, to foresee utility and beauty in the
discarded and worn. “Contents a mystery,” the
tag said, “Combination unknown.” Even so, it was
a bargain—a sleek, hard-shelled executive model, its four
dials frozen at 0009, the point of boredom at which someone
stopped trying. Even recounting this story, he aches with
methodical sequential labor, feels the idea overcome by
thought, the way her dinged muffin tins and Jell-o molds
signaled an end to each merged ingredient—became, finally,
intractable result, which, like good children, they shut up
and ate, year after year. When it finally clicked open at
9998, all he found within was another tag, one that showed
the combination he now knew, and directions for customizing
that code, making it their own, for which, obviously, it was
too late, there being nothing left of their early hope to
entrust there, that trapped air of possibility belonging,
now, to others—perhaps you, parking on their weed-ravaged
lawn as you have, walking arm in arm up the drive toward
the heaped folding tables and the garage door propped open
with a brand new broom.
By Mark Cox
Featured Art: Portrait of a Lady with a Dog (Anna Baker Weir) by J. Alden Weir
After seventeen years, I return home to my ex-wife,
without the cigarettes and bread,
without the woman and children I left her for,
older, empty-handed, and yet
to the same clothes
still in the same drawers,
as if nothing has changed.
My torn T-shirt is still splotched with paint
across her left breast,
her hair has not gone gray at the temples,
and she does not ask a single question:
not where have you been,
not how could you,
not where were you when I needed you,
just, hey baby and a smile,
the Vermont air cold,
the old mattress flat on the floor,
because the frame and box springs are still in the Ryder truck,
because my first students have not entered the classroom,
I have yet to fall in love with my own bourbon-soaked voice,
our dog has not died arthritic and stroke-plagued,
there is, instead, the kitchen faucet still running,
the beans rinsed and splayed in the colander,
and there isn’t the slightest anger in her voice,
that I have missed a good dinner,
that I will have to warm it up if I want any,
it’s ok, in fact, if I let the dog out
one last time and just come on to bed.
By Nicole Walker
Featured Art: Houses at Murnau by Vasily Kandinsky
We had been in Michigan only five months when we heard the people we sold our house to back in Salt Lake City had decided not just to remodel but to start completely over. They were tearing it down.
Erik had painted every wall of that house. He painted the moldings with enamel paint—hard enough to last forever. That’s the house Zoe was born in. It’s the house where Erik first brought me oysters and the house where I first made him salmon. It’s the house we brought Zoe home to—where I first nursed her and where I first fed her puréed sweet potatoes. That house was where I learned to make cassoulet and where I made my mom her favorite vichyssoise.
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By Stephen Dunn
Featured Art: Luncheon Still Life by John F. Francis
Our good friends are with us, Jack and Jen,
old lefties with whom we now and then share
what we don’t call our wealth. We clink our
wine glasses, and I say, Let’s drink to privilege . . .
the privilege of evenings like this.
All our words have a radical past, and Jack
is famous for wanting the cog to fit the wheel,
and for the wheel to go straight
down some good-cause road. But he says
No, let’s drink to an evening as solemn
as Eugene Debs demanding fair wages—
his smile the bent arrow only the best men
can point at themselves. I serve the salad
Barbara has made with pine nuts, fennel,
and fine, stinky cheese. It’s too beautiful to eat,
Jen says, but means it only as a compliment.
By Gregory Djanikian
Featured Art: The Collector of Prints by Edgar Degas
It was never a question of age, finally.
Time for him had always moved
too slowly, wasn’t he faster than time,
outrunning it whenever he wished?
Even now, he could hear the sound
of every second before it clicked.
Oh, he was powerful enough,
still wildly aerodynamic, able
to leap imagination itself.
But he’d grown weary of it all,
the adoring looks, the caped crusading
in the name of righteousness and truth:
hadn’t it frayed a little, lost
its gleam through the turbulent years?
Nothing had changed really,
annihilation, ruin, the horsemen
of every apocalypse still riding through
like bad cops and pestilence,
knowing where everyone lived.
And his own life, emptier now
with so many friends gone
or on the way, Jimmy, Lois,
doddering in their last stages
in a metropolis of fear.
By Lisa Bellamy
Featured Art: Jonge vrouw met een sigaret by Antonio Zona
The famous poet misheard my name after her reading:
“Lucy?” she asked as I introduced myself.
My ears perked up like an anxious dog off the leash
hearing the Beloved Friend call her name, suddenly alert
in the midst of the city’s distraction and babble:
fragrant pigeons just out of reach, sirens,
couples growling face to face in the street.
There’s nothing soft or vague about “Lucy.”
Lucy’s a dachshund digging under the rosebush
someone’s grandmother planted,
salivating for scraps of tasty mole,
ignoring cries and folded newspaper swatting behind her.
Lucy’s a bookie, porkpie hat on her head,
cigar clamped in her mouth.
She’s running on spit, playing the odds
for more time to make good on her bets.
Lucy is—bucky.
“You’re getting bucky again,” my mother would say.
Snapshot: brown silky hair chopped at the ears,
bangs cut razor-straight. A Buster Brown,
they called it at the beauty salon.
Jaw set, lower lip ready for battle:
I am seven, in a fringed cowgirl suit
I wear even to bed,
cap pistols ready to go, in the holster.
By Charles Harper Webb
Featured Art: The Miser by James McNeill Whistler
The Arabs who invented Algebra can’t have known
Miss Seitz would teach it, any more than Einstein
knew he’d be the Father of Catastrophe.
The Miss which prefaced her name proudly
(would no man have her, or would she have no man?)
brought to mind Mistake, Mischance, Misshapen,
Miserable, Misfit, Missing Link, Lord of Misrule.
Only the fiends who stoked the furnace of 8th grade
were glad to see her hunched at her desk, gutting papers
with her bloody pen. X’s identity was nothing to her,
next to perfect headings: student’s name, class name
and period, her name, and the date in that order,
starting exactly three lines from the top, margins
one inch, paper creased in perfect thirds (no
crooked ends, no refolding), or she would fix you
in a basilisk stare, shove back your work, and snarl,
in a decades-past-post-menopausal croak, Don’ Like.
What math we gained is gone now as Del Shannon’s
“Runaway”—as Billy Tilly’s spit-shined shoes,
and the blade Ray Montez applied to my throat, hissing,
“Gimme all your cash, you little fruit”—gone
as the mush-burgers Ms Hairnet slapped
on our lunchroom trays—as Teddy Jones,
falling between the granite blocks at Freeport Jetty,
crawling back up, extending the glass stump
of his new Pfleuger rod, groaning, Don’ like.
The words remain: an anthem as I near Miss Seitz’s age.
Hip hop and bottles crashing next door after 9:00—
the candidates, woman and man—
the way my clothes fit, and the barber cuts my “hair”—
hot salad and cold soup served by a pretty waitress
who thinks my (old) manhood’s a dirty joke—
Time’s scaly hand, Xing, in red, my dwindling days . . .
By Charles Harper Webb
Featured Art: Trailing Vine by Cooper Hewitt
against our bed. The ship-of-slats that ferried him
through his first years, traps us, tonight,
in its floating cage as my wife and I slip down
sleep’s muddy stream. That crib spent hard time
in the Don’t Wear closet with outmoded pants, shirts, shoes,
while we argued the merits of another child.
When my wife passed her fertile crescent,
and entered the dry scrub-lands, we kept the crib
for sentimental reasons, like a teddy bear in a flash flood.
Change fear’s long e to o, and you have four kids,
the crib’s white gloss four times more
scratched, scraped, chewed, the house swollen
with four times the cacophony, four times the chaos,
four chances for an Einstein, Mozart,
Shakespeare, Ruth, but also a Goebbels, a Night-Stalker,
a bag-man chattering to Martians as he shoves
his shopping cart along—four chances to buy
a small coffin to fill a little grave—four creditors
hammering at our door, garnishing our energy
and self-centeredness, which is why we waited
too long, and the Magic Kingdom closed.
But let’s not talk about that. Let’s talk about the crib
re-built inside another home, a new father
fitting the pieces as I did the day my son was born,
my wife waiting with him for doctors to say, “The tide
has turned. The wind is right as it will ever be.
The ship waits. Take your new life home.”
By C. Wade Bentley
Featured Art: Variations in Violet and Grey—Market Place, Dieppe by James McNeill Whistler
It’s not so much a heaviness,
the oppressive weight of wet wool;
instead, it’s as though my molecules
are moving outward from the center,
mimicking the universal flight
from the Big Bang—though I hear
how grandiose that sounds.
It’s just that the edges become indistinct
and you may begin to see the busy streetlife
right through me, in patches
of color and noise and volition. And soon
I am mixing with the pollen of elms,
the billion billion motes of skin cells
catching fire in the afternoon.
So when I tell you it is almost painful
to see that precariously pregnant young woman
climb the steps to her brownstone, hear
the cans of olives and jars of ragu
clatter and shatter against the wrought iron
because some idiot failed to double-bag,
and that now here I am stooping to help,
here I am cursing bag boys the world round, insisting
that she (Antonia) sit; when I tell you I can actually feel
my joints re-knitting, cells lining up again
with their proper organelles, feel gravity
pulling on these coalescing and corporeal tissues—
you will understand, perhaps, that I am not altogether
happy to be back, but I am here.
Winner of the 2009 New Ohio Review Prize in Fiction (selected by Peter Ho Davies)
By Christine Nicolai
Featured Art: Paard by Anton Mauve
It was close to midnight when Vic heard a shotgun echoing somewhere nearby. If Sue were still around, he’d have put on his boots and stomped out to the porch in his bathrobe, scanning the front yard and street in the twilight. If she were here, he’d have seen that it was all clear and come back to bed where she’d have been frozen under the blankets, breathing those shallow, rabbitty breaths, like she was flattened in a clump of weeds, waiting for the fox to move on. Without Sue, Vic told himself it wasn’t a shotgun he’d heard, because shots at midnight usually meant someone was doing something they shouldn’t.
This was midsummer, humid and hot. Even though it was long after the fourth, the noise could have been an M-80 or Salute, picked up from the reservation. Every couple of weeks one of the guys at the restaurant complained about kids lobbing cherry bombs into front lawns and tearing off down the street, yelping at the stars. That was an explanation he could almost hold in his hand, except that he knew it was the sharp-edged sound of a shotgun that had crackled through the night. His jeans were on the floor. He put them on in the dark and went to check the doors, sticking his head out the back, trying to make out more than just the outline of the barn against the dark sky. The gate leading to the back pasture appeared to be shut, which meant that Toby, the gelding Sue had left behind, should be all right. He closed the door.
By Clint McCown
Featured Art: Rusty Car by Ellery Pollard
As Reverend Tyree settled himself onto the torn front seat of his rust-spotted DeSoto and turned the ignition, he had a brief moment of hope. The motor sputtered, coughed, and whirred without catching. He turned the key again, with the same result. The old rattletrap was trying to give him a night off, it seemed. One more failed attempt and he would be justified in staying home with Mildred and his mother and listening to the radio for a change. And why shouldn’t he stay at home? The clean-up crews hadn’t fully cleared the streets after the tornado, so driving could be dangerous, especially on the side of town where the county jail was located. The inmates wouldn’t care if he skipped a visit. But when he turned the key a third time, the engine caught, and that was it, he was trapped for yet another Saturday night.
He dreaded the jailhouse even more than the hospital. The hospital was relatively cheerful, especially in the evenings, and he had learned that if he made his rounds about an hour after dinnertime, many of the patients he was supposed to visit would have already drifted off to sleep. Then he could sit by their beds and read magazines. He would always leave evidence of his visit—a printed card with a picture of Jesus on it and a passage from St. Luke: Rejoice, because your names are written in heaven.
By Mark Jarman
Featured Art: Girl With Apple by Ellery Pollard
Instead of casting them out of paradise,
Instead of making them labor in pain and sweat,
Instead of instilling tristesse after coitus,
Instead of giving them fire to burn their house down
And light their way into the outer world,
He could have split them, each with a memory of the other,
And put them each into a separate world.
By A. E. Stallings
Featured Art: Study for “An Aragonese Smuggler” by William Turner Dannat
What else should I do
But cry for what is spilled?
Not for the fresh glass,
Frothy, newly filled,
Safe on the tabletop
Beside the slice of cake,
Still untouched and chilled,
But for this little lake
The cat laps on the floor,
The glass poured for your sake,
That you would have me pour,
Negative of ink
Filling in the blank
Indelible mistake—
Sweet where tears are salt,
White as oblivion
The souls must learn to drink—
To watch it now escape—
With just myself to thank,
Out of the glass’s tall
Pure transparent shape,
What cannot be put back
And what is past recall:
Secret we couldn’t keep,
Hint I had to drop,
Fall turned into fault.
It’s done, but it won’t stop.
What’s there to do but weep?
By Aja Gabel
Featured Art: Paris Bridge by Arthur B. Carles
Six days after my father dies, seven blind masseurs hold hands and leap from the Han River Bridge in downtown Seoul, into the shallow water beneath the lighted apex, their bodies a disruption in a mirror they’d never seen. I read about this in the newspaper I collect from the front of my father’s house, all damp and bleeding ink from the past week’s frost. In my father’s office I spread the papers out on his desk and trace my fingers down the pages, to see if I’ve missed anything. I’m looking for murders, plane crashes, natural disasters, economic collapse, impending apocalypse. I stop at the society pages, the comics, the crosswords. For several minutes I consider an eight-letter word for “felicity.” The only answer I can come up with is, “felicity.” Sometimes it happens that way.
The Korean masseurs’ story catches my eye because they have a large color picture of the bridge. It must be one of those time-lapse photos, where the car lights ghost into a gold blur and the surface of the river is steely and reflective. Four vaulted columns rise from the river and hold a statue of a torch, under which I imagine the masseurs must have jumped. How could they have jumped from anywhere else on that bridge? But then, how would they know? How would they know that that was the center? Did they feel the wind die down under the canopy? Did they hear it slice through the steel cables? Did a sighted woman lead them there and say here, here is where you would jump if you were going to jump, not that you are, and then they laughed, and took off their glasses, wiped their eyes of sleep, or of drink, said thank you, you’re kind, leave us now, we just want for a moment to enjoy the view.
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By Heather McNaugher
Featured Art: Sweet Tooth by Dylan Petrea
I decide this will be it, my last pop-tart, cherry,
as I stand at the circ desk of the college library
and tear up your number
which I had written on a Post-it®, Hello Kitty®,
and then stuck to my ID.
The computer says I love you I owe 29 dollars
for Frank O’Hara and that thesaurus
I borrowed when I taught the class
how to find a synonym. I’m sorry. Hello Kitty’s ears
are burning—so tiny, so pink,
and so I pulverize them.
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By Julie Hanson
Featured Art: The Purple Dress by William Glackens
My sadness has the texture of a dime store balloon;
when I slide my hand across it, I get no pleasure from it.
My sadness has no merit whatsoever.
My sadness is a pose I cannot hold a moment longer, but I must
because I am in yoga class where this pose in particular would be
impossible to do had I understood it in advance,
yet when fed instructions bit by bit while bending back . . .
I can believe I just might get the hands.
My sadness stems from a bottomless blame. It knows
that it doesn’t matter, does it, if the reason is legitimate.
My sadness is lonelier the longer I sit with it.
My sadness comes back to me; it is all my own.
My sadness has three corners, three corners has my hat.
I have chosen this, my sadness, over all available hats.
Firemen hats and nurses’ hats, telephone line
repairmen hats. Military, ski, and Napoleon’s only hat.
By Michael Madonick
Featured Art: Nude Lying On Bed by Anders Zorn
nobody is asking but I’m ready to say there are things we should not speak of the private convoluting movements of embrace that is why there is night for the unspoken the unspeakable the sand lily’s up-turn of its cup in darkness moisture makes much of itself enough said enough unsaid but there cannot be an end to it the need to lose the self find the self escape to matters consequential involving arms legs the mouth attaching in certain and uncertain ways fingertips toes the octopus’ obsession with its den the Egyptian threaded membrane behind the knee a gasp that pleads for god though nobody really wants a god to show recline on the chaise-lounge score such a thing though god knows we do the best we can ducks are different nearly drowning in it the neck bite back-driven furious flurry of it a kind of underwater consecration of a devious sects’ commingling no one should watch such a thing be vigilant in fact to not observe that should be a given that we should close our eyes to it be under the covers lights off candles blown only during an eclipse be the prisoner moving to a courthouse our cuffs shielded by the daily news hide in a raincoat from the paparazzi the fabric of our lust the uncontainable stupor that brings us to our innocence our knees our inexhaustible innocence unknowing in its rhythms over and over again and again
By Julie Hanson
Featured Art: Woman Bathing by Mary Cassatt
Don’t ask what it was all about.
Ask instead how sudden it was, how complete.
One minute I was an ordinary woman
vacuuming, a thing it seemed I had too recently done,
and the next minute sobbing,
emitting sounds loud, rapid, and long.
It was the kind of sobbing that makes you feel five—
five years old, or housing a feeling five people wide.
I was seated, my left elbow on my left knee,
my glasses hanging from my left hand
as if they were the problem,
(no use in wearing them, no use in putting them down)
and the vacuum, part pet, part sculpture,
sprawled awkwardly, still shrieking
on the floor in front of me.
The sorrow seemed pulled from outside, unselectively,
as if I had swallowed a magnet.
Each time I felt that I could silence this,
that something had been spent, something settled,
I opened my eyes to that canister,
attachments on its back, hose, and extension,
reality-piece which had withstood the worst of me,
had witnessed, and was unaffected.
By Leslie Daniels
Featured Art: Cock and Hen by Kawabata Gyokushō
When I was a child of two and my mother was mixing my birthday cake, she let me pull my pants down and sit in a plate of cake flour. I remember the paper plate on the floor, and her pretty ankles going between countertop and stove. She was a child psychologist and she understood that you need to feel things to know them. The bottom test was my own invention. I remember the exquisite sensation, and the hum of the mixer.
Many years later I was the mother making the birthday cake, the oven preheating, mixing with an electric mixer. It was the morning of the party and I was making All-Occasion Downy Yellow Butter Cake from The Cake Bible. It’s the only cookbook I own for which I have too much respect to mess around with the recipes. I don’t care much about cakes, though they are a good meeting place of butter and sugar, but to other people in my life—my daughter who was turning three—cake is important.
By Steven Cramer
Featured Art: Bolete & Bird by Dylan Petrea
It got bad; pretty bad; then not
so bad; very bad; then back to bad.
Jesus, let’s let things not get even worse.
A weird fall. Nearly ninety
one day, leaf mold making our house
all red eyes and throats. Don’t think
about Thanksgiving, but hope
for a decent Halloween. Everywhere
gas-powered leaf-blowers growling—
Christ, let’s let things not get even worse.
By Richard Cecil
Featured Art: Stacks of Wheat (End of Summer) by Claude Monet
November is the time between conviction
and sentencing, when you’re still out on bail.
You’re sort of free, pending the rejection
of your appeal, but you are bound for jail.
There’s no point pleading that your weren’t guilty
of stealing pleasure from warm summer air—
you were caught, grinning, on camera. The penalty
is ninety days in winter’s prison. Unfair!
I only did what everybody does
when tempted irresistibly to strip
wool socks and parkas off and take a dip
in summer heat. You can’t tell bees, “don’t buzz.”
November shrugs in answer to your pleas:
Ninety days for you. Death for the bees.
By Richard Cecil
Featured Art: The Belated Party on Mansfield Mountain by Jerome B. Thompson
I set out from Poor Valley to climb Mt. Rich.
Light’s failing now. I’ll have to stop to rest
somewhere below the summit. But my palms itch
to clutch at higher handholds, though, at best,
I’d claw up to an outcrop of a cave
to hole up in. I’ll never reach the peak.
Why not just plant my flag here, grin and wave
at my camera set on auto-shoot? Why seek
a slightly higher level of success?
I’ll never, never make it to the top.
I’m told the middle of the mountain’s best.
The slope grows steeper past halfway; the drop
precipitous. But oh, to be one of the few!
Although they die and lose their money, too.
By Eric Torgersen
Featured Art: The Enchanted Mesa by William Henry Holmes
a voice I haven’t sung from yet
—Bruce Springsteen
Hang him from a tree he hasn’t hung from yet.
Fling him off a bridge no one’s been flung from yet.
Send succor, in whatever dark disguise:
a hornet’s nest he’s not gone running, stung, from yet.
He’d have it be a tower, not a steeple—
the height in him no bell has rung from yet.
Early fall, and not one branch the wind
has not stripped every leaf that clung from yet.
Recess. Winter. Second or third grade.
A frozen pipe he hasn’t freed his tongue from yet.
The drought seems endless. Spring. No drop of rain.
Just parched soil no shoot has sprung from yet.
Find it in some corner of the workshop,
some damp rag no last drop has been wrung from yet?
Probe the dank recesses of the cellar—
not one cask he hasn’t yanked the bung from yet.
Not by wit or rhetoric alone
will Eric find a voice he hasn’t sung from yet.
By Eric Torgersen
Featured Art: Elk and Buffalo Making Acquaintance, Texas by George Catlin
Had enough of the old lonesome-and-blue scenario?
Up for a shot at the old I-love-you scenario?
Man enough to leave your comfort zone
in the good old get-drunk-and-screw scenario?
Let’s be real. Love hurts. Even you, you stud, you.
Sure you can handle the old boo-hoo scenario?
Don’t even try to guess what she really wants;
be ready for the old you-don’t-have-a-clue scenario.
Tell her, “I’ll always honor your personhood.”
What’s more of a drag than the old I’m-a-person-too scenario?
It’s never not a good time to say, “My bad.”
Don’t lean too hard on the old I-never-knew scenario.
By David Wojahn
Featured Art: The Great Pyramid, Giza by Adrien Dauzats
We had eaten the placenta in a soup that someone based on a family recipe
for menudo, though someone else—
it was Bill, I think—joked that it tasted just like chicken. This Year’s Model
was brand new & the needle stuck
on “Lipstick Vogue,” Costello snarling not just another mouth, not just
another mouth, until Joe
set down the bong & flicked the tone arm forward from the scratch.
& anyway, by this time
Amy was shouting from the bedroom that she’d finally gotten Star to sleep,
that the music should be
Mozart or something. I’ve forgotten the midwife’s name, but she sat
sprawled on a patio lawn chair,
the distant blink of Tucson down the mountainside. She held an iced Corona
& told us she was too worn out
to drive the snaking foothill two-lanes home. Good dope, cheap champagne,
a soup of afterbirth:
everybody but the midwife garrulous & now Pappagino was flapping
birdman wings in his mating dance
around fair Pappagina. So the talk turned to duets—scholastic in the way
that stoner conversations go.
Whose placenta was it we slurped down with cilantro & a dash of cumin,
telling ourselves the taste
was not half bad—Amy’s or Star’s? & what about Derek, who now
had moved to Mykonos,
leaving his storied seed behind: what portion of the recipe was owed
to him? Now came the tricky part—
where did the soul inhere? The midwife rimmed her longneck with
a lemon slice & allowed
that we’d ingested perfection, the body’s all-in-one: liver, kidney,
blood supply,
By Michelle Herman
Featured Art: The Last Dance by Mackenzie Siler
It wasn’t that I didn’t like her. I liked her fine—that’s what I would have said if anyone had asked me. But I knew better than to get too attached to the women who dated my next-door neighbor, John. Women cycled through his life pretty quickly, and so far all the ones I’d met had been crazy, anyway—too crazy for me, if not for him. John pursued crazy; he thought crazy was charming. And while she didn’t necessarily seem crazy, I’d learned that you couldn’t always tell at first (that actually you could hardly ever tell at first).
Did she like me? It was impossible to judge. She was friendly enough, always polite if not warm. Certainly she was more guarded than I (but then just about everyone I have ever met is more guarded than I). I could not have read her even if I’d tried. But I didn’t try, because we weren’t friends.
And then she cracked her skull—she almost died—and suddenly we were.
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By Dennis Sampson
Featured Art: Crouching Nude in Shoes and Black Stockings, Back View by Egon Schiele
It took him a lifetime to figure out
he hadn’t the slightest idea
who she was. Rereading
Milton’s Paradise Lost one night,
he elected to set things right. He would recall
what had never dawned on him
in an epithalamion of all their vows,
her face as gray and drawn and haunted now
as that which miraculously appeared
to Milton in his sonnet “Methought I Saw.”
He’d been blind
and completely missed what she’d put up with for so long,
his cigar smoke stinking up the whole house
composing his small diatribes,
his holding court on everything
from Boccaccio to the state of the art.
Hadn’t she once confessed to him
when they were courting,
cuddled in his loft with the fire down to a hush,
she had waited all of her life
to be touched like this? What was that called?
Three days he labored over his encomium
—a litany of his own faux pas—
until he had to admit he could not get it right,
this catalogue which kept coming up
against forgetting absolutely everything from the start.
By Keith Taylor
Featured Art: The Public Viewing David’s “Coronation” at the Louvre by Louis Léopold Boilly
Before we received the official
diagnosis, we loved to recount
her sleep episodes. My favorite:
the Louvre, in front of those gigantic
paintings David made celebrating
the coronation of Josephine
and Napoleon before the French
nobles. My daughter drooled on the bench.
By Robert Wrigley
Featured Art: A Green-winged Teal by Jagdish Mittal
Every morning, the solitary blue-winged teal drake
swam the east-to-west length of the high mountain lake
in silence. Every evening he’d fly back
uttering on his way a single sad quack.
What we wondered, my sons and I, was why.
Why here, an otherwise duckless nowhere? The sky
was wide and blue above him; surely the flyways beckoned.
Though we also knew we had no way of reckoning
what kind of inner life he might have possessed,
if inner life is what instinct is, or if he was lost,
or if—and this, we understood, was as much about ourselves—
there was something he himself had lost. Was our blue wing
blue because, like certain geese, his kind mates for life?
This was how we came to refer to her as his wife,
as Mrs. Teal, the missing one, for whom he mourned,
whose absence had led him, with the terrible wound
of his grief, to come to this place of refuge and learn
—well, what? To be a duck again, since our theory’d turned
him into something else? The last morning, my sons climbed
a nearby peak on their own, and I passed the time
alone and was, after an hour that way, so lonely
I could find no escape. I wanted nothing, except to have them
back with me, and then I saw Mr. Teal on his morning swim.
He was stopped not far from camp. I could tell who it was
though he was ass-up among some reeds
in the shallows. I watched him feed
for a long time, just the two of us, until I was hungry
and ceased for a little while to worry.
And later, when the boys came back, he took again to the sky,
uttering as he did his single inconsolable cry.
By Joyce Peseroff
Featured Art: Prancing Horse by Jean Louis André Théodore Géricault
She’s teaching him
no harm will slither up his legs
like chilly steam above a pond at night,
or plummet from almost leafless trees
when she saddles his pasture-mate
and they swish between the pointed firs
into spectral woods. Left behind,
alone, he paces the golden perimeter
of fence post and electric wire,
a fragment of eternity falling
red on his rolling shoulder
when he jars the ground beneath
the gnomon in a field
a single maple makes.
By Sydney Lea
Featured Art: Canal Scene Near Bruges, Belgium by William Stanley Haseltine
Flat on their tapestry, hawks and hounds
and a corps of horsemen showed that much flatter
for the sleeted windows. All of Manhattan
seemed a great gray museum.
Our words went blurry. It was never romance.
Or do you insist?
I thought how mountains sag into deltas
with time. From a sill outside drab pigeons
flushed into haze—and were erased.
The horsemen’s woven reins went slack.
In a hotel bed
later that night, even sleep turned gray:
in my dream, a train
huffed till the station misted like glass;
in yours, you reported, fogged coastal Maine.
To me your report proved unintriguing,
I knew you’d never seen that shore.
Our breakfast eggs
looked hueless, yolkless. Attempted speech
bleared in our mouths
and the morning newspaper faded, smearing
the sodden pulp it faded into.
I haven’t thought in years of that day,
so little to draw me back to then.
You wouldn’t know me,
grown vivid, colorful! And you?
You’ve leached away.
So what, you might ask, is bringing this on?
But how could you ask? What would I say?
We asked 15 writers to reflect on under-appreciated contemporary short stories. Their responses follow.
Lydia Davis
Stuart Dybek
Carol Anshaw
Max Apple
Alan Cheuse
Erin McGraw
Robert Cohen
Nicholas Delbanco
Lynne Sharon Schwartz
Tracy Daugherty
Steven Schwartz
Andrea Barrett
Francine Prose
Jim Shepard
Rosellen Brown
By Carol Anshaw
Featured Art: Little Girl and Dog by Hablot Knight Browne
I could have chosen this story for its first line alone:
“Every so often that dead dog dreams me up again.”
But much more awaits the reader in this tightly controlled yet seemingly casual narrative. Gemma, the story’s protagonist, goes on to say, “It’s twenty-five years later, I’m walking along 42nd Street in Manhattan, the sounds of the city crashing beside me—horns, gearshifts, insults—somebody’s chewing gum holding my foot to the pavement, when that dog wakes from his long sleep and imagines me.
“I’m sweet again. I’m sweet-breathed and flat-limbed. Our family is stationed at Fort Niagara, and the dog swims his red heavy fur into the black Niagara River.” [all Sweet Talk, 176]
Read More
By Robert Cohen
Featured Art: Monk Meditating near a Ruin by Moonlight by Frederik Marinus Kruseman
I first came upon “The Moon In Its Flight” as a graduate student in my mid- twenties, in a book called Many Windows, a now long out of print anthology put together by Ted Solotaroff from his seminal literary magazine of the seventies, New American Review. It’s fair to say it blew my mind. This was not entirely unusual. I had my mind blown pretty regularly at that time: the rest of me wasn’t getting much, and I was nothing if not impressionable. But twenty-odd years later, having reread the story for teaching and other purposes, oh, about a hundred times now, it still blows my mind—if anything more so than before. What this says about me I’m not sure I even want to think about. But what it says about “The Moon In Its Flight” I do want to think about, if not emulate, if not imitate, if not crassly and slavishly steal.
Read More
By Nicholas Delbanco
Featured Art: Sunset Over Tower and River by Arnold William Brunner
Post-mortems in prose fiction are risky to pronounce; the dead do have a way of quickening again. This week’s much-celebrated text will be, in thirty years, forgotten; what’s lost may reappear. And in this particular instance I’m not rescuing arcana; Sir Laurence Olivier played the protagonist of John Fowles’s “The Ebony Tower” for a television film. Too, the short story collection of which this is the title piece lodged comfortably on the New York Times Best Seller List for six full months in 1974-75.
It’s possible, however, that Fowles’s reputation as a “serious” author has been undermined by commercial success; in England particularly, it would seem—though I have only anecdotal evidence for this—he was thought of as a popular and therefore unimportant writer. “If you’re so smart, why ain’t you rich?” gets transformed, in critical discourse, to, “If you’re so wealthy, how could you be smart?” and Fowles has been devalued in part because of fame.
By Lynne Sharon Schwartz
Featured Art: Female performer with tanpura by Unknown
For a short story to linger in the mind as long and as tenaciously as “The Accompanist” has in mine, it must hit a sensitive nerve. So in revisiting the story, which I first came upon years ago in Anita Desai’s early collection, Games at Twilight, I looked for what had struck me so keenly in this first-person account of an Indian musician from a poor background who dedicates his life to the most humble of accompanying instruments, the tanpura.
The narrator’s father makes musical instruments and music is “the chief household deity.” Soon after Bhaiyya’s lessons begin at the age of four, his talent is obvious: “My father could see it clearly—I was a musician . . ., a performer of music, that is what he saw. He taught me all the ragas, the raginis, and tested my knowledge with rapid, persistent questioning in his unmusical, grating voice.” The father is stern and rough, never offering praise or encouragement, only calling his son a “stupid, backward boy.”
By Tracy Daugherty
Featured Art: Wild Femininity Series: Giraffe by Mackenzie Siler
It is always fascinating when a novelist tries her hand at short fiction. If the endeavor succeeds, it is because the novelist’s expansiveness finds expression in its opposite: intense compression. On April 10, 2000, Alice McDermott, best known for such novels as The Bigamist’s Daughter, That Night, At Weddings and Wakes, and Charming Billy, published a short story called “Enough” in the New Yorker. In nineteen carefully-orchestrated paragraphs, the story traces the life of a middle-class American woman, from childhood to old age, using such rich domestic imagery, the reader feels as if an entire era has been fitted into a neat container, like a child’s shoebox full of keepsakes.
Every Sunday after dinner, a Catholic girl, the youngest child in a family of six, is tasked by her mother with cleaning the ice cream bowls, a “good set” of bowls, “cabbage roses with gold trim.” Her mother has taught her that a lady, when eating ice cream, always “takes a small spoonful, swallows it, and then takes another.” Her own habit, to “load the spoon up,” run it in and out of her mouth, and study the shape “her lips have made” with the stuff that remains on the spoon, is strongly discouraged. “A lady doesn’t want to show her tongue at the dinner table,” her mother tells her.
Read More
By Steven Schwartz
Featured Art: Untitled (Seascape with Houses on Beach) by Unknown
I was worried. Thirty years had passed since I looked at the story. Every writer has a list of stories he carries around in his head, if only he were to put together that anthology of personally selected hits. To go back and pick one . . . well, a lot rested on it.
“In Miami, Last Winter,” by James Kaplan, was first published in Esquire in 1977. I came across it then—at twenty-six years old—and then again the following year when it was anthologized in Best American Short Stories 1978. The second—and last time—I read it I admired it even more, a sure test of a story’s staying power. You know the plot, you know the characters’ dilemmas, you know the story’s stakes, yet you’re still dazzled by its force to catch you up in its immediacy. Indeed every story works toward establishing a renewable present: the ability to make the reader experience its effects anew. In short, you fall helplessly under its spell once more.
By Andrea Barrett
Featured Art: The Funeral by Edouard Manet
One of my favorite stories is Mavis’ Gallant’s “The Remission,” which is set in the early 1950s but was written in the late 1970s. Superficially straightforward, it reveals its virtuosity slowly and deviously, stating its premise outright in the first line:
When it became clear that Alec Webb was far more ill than anyone had cared to tell him, he tore up his English life and came down to die on the Riviera.
By Francine Prose
Featured Art: Vegetarian Appetizer by Ellery Pollard
To my mind, Mavis Gallant’s “Mlle Dias de Corta” is the most brilliant example of a story that focuses on a protagonist who might seem initially “unsympathetic” or at least problematic—in this case, an elderly French woman, the story’s narrator—and performs the magic trick of making the reader’s heart just break and break for her. It’s written in the second person, the potentially trashiest point of view, yet manages to persuade us that no other choice of perspective would have been appropriate or even possible. It’s framed as an unsent—and unsendable—letter from the unnamed narrator to the eponymous former boarder in the narrator’s Paris apartment and (incidentally, though of course not incidentally at all) the former lover of the narrator’s son. It’s a family drama, of course, but also a thrilling examination of xenophobia and nationalism; our narrator is always accusing Mlle Dias de Corta of pretending to be French—that is, of claiming to belong to that most favored and elite breed of human, at the very apex of culture and civilization—and not really being French, but rather Portuguese or something equally inferior and suspect. By the end of the story, we understand the insecurity and terror, the loneliness and disappointment, all the painful emotions that translate into suspicion of, and prejudice against, the other, the outsider—indeed, into fear of change of any sort. It moves effortlessly across decades and through time, and addresses large societal and political issues (from abortion to racism) without ever venturing very far from the narrator’s claustrophobia-inducing flat. Its rhetoric is vertiginously passive-aggressive (though it does make you wonder what exactly is the passive part of that equation) and consequently hilarious. There’s a family dinner in front of the TV (French TV at its most pompous and absurd) that makes one’s blood run cold. Finally, it rewards close reading and rereading, since there’s so much subtext that can be missed—the narrator’s anxiety about her son and his sexuality, to take just one example—unless you pay the story the patient, exacting attention that it earns and deserves. It’s one of my very favorite stories to teach; you can watch the light blink on and come up in your students’ eyes.
By Rosellen Brown
Featured Art: Winterlandschap by Jan Daniël Cornelis Carel Willem baron de Constant Rebecque
Charles Baxter’s “Fenstad’s Mother” has all the earmarks of its author’s easygoing style: it is beguiling in its light-footed and non-judgmental way with serious subjects, and dead-on accurate in its understanding of the contradictory and contrarian.
The first paragraph lays out a family dichotomy succinctly, in a neutral third person. Although Fenstad and his aged mother are very different, from the first we see them trying for a respectful relationship. For one thing, though Fenstad is a church-goer, his mother was “a lifelong social progressive . . . She had spent her life in the company of rebels and deviationists.” She is an unrepentant critic of things—many things—as they are; even the smell of her apartment, which “smelled of soap and Lysol,” hints of “an old woman who wouldn’t tolerate nonsense.” Fenstad’s effortful goodness, she clearly believes, is suspect.
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 5 compiled by Logan Weyland and Jade Braden.
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 5 compiled by Logan Weyland.
By Maura Stanton
Under the rusting red metal lid we’re waiting for you—your father’s tools.
We always knew you weren’t going to build a doghouse or repair the stairs or
tighten a bibcock faucet, but we wanted to be of use as in the old days. Ah, the
old days! When we heard your father’s tread on the basement steps, we were
thrilled. The hammer clenched its head, the bubble trembled in the level, the
pliers stretched its jaws. But after your father died it was worse than we ex-
pected. You carted us out to your car, left us for months in the trunk, and then
stuck us on the floor of this hall closet next to the vacuum cleaner. Now the
hacksaw’s teeth are rusting, the file’s worn down, and the measuring tape sags
beside the plane. The poor jackscrew, no longer attached to a work bench, has
grown forgetful, and thinks it’s really a micrometer caliper. All you care about
is duct tape these days, tearing off flashy shreds to cover your botched work
while the tough little nails languish. So watch out! All of us in here are fed up
with your disregard for some of mankind’s oldest inventions, so if you ever do
open this lid you’re going to get hurt.
By Maura Stanton
6 a.m. It’s cold and raining and you don’t want to get out of bed. It’s one of
those days when you’d like to stay home from work, curled up somewhere
comfortable and nice with your knees against your chest. Why not inside a for-
tune cookie? And at once you imagine yourself inside the sweet crispy shell, the
paper fortune wrapped around your body like a sheet. You’re about to close
your eyes and go back to sleep when you start to worry about the fortune. Is
this one of those really good fortunes like the one you’ve kept in your wallet
for years, You will never need to worry about a steady income? Or is it more
sinister like the one you pulled out last month, Idleness is the holiday of fools?
You want to read your fortune but you’ve got to break out of the cookie shell.
Only you can’t. You’re paralyzed. This is someone else’s fortune cookie, and you’ve got to wait patiently until they pour the tea, and crack it open. Then
they’ll laugh and read your fortune out loud for everyone to hear, Your prob-
lem lies not in a lack of ability but in a lack of ambition.
By Maura Stanton
Art Attribution: “Untitled (Hourglass)” by Mary Vaux Walcott
I found a cancelled English penny stamp
Stuck in a library book, and pinched it up,
1909, October 8, 6:50 p.m.
Somebody must have licked it right before
They posted a letter, and left their DNA
Stuck to the glue, and somebody else
Unpeeled it, saved it, stuck it between the pages
Of a book that later got shipped abroad. Read More
By Carl Dennis
Art attribution: “Study of clouds” by William Stanley Haseltine
It’s only sensible for me to want to flourish
In mind and heart and body, but why
Should I want you to flourish as well
Unless I believe it’s in my interest?
Why should I put myself out for your sake
When I’m not in the mood, when my body
Wants to sleep in, my heart
Isn’t moved by the thought of your company,
And my mind considers your mind conventional? Read More
By Carl Dennis
Art attribution: “Lear and Cordelia” by Richard Hatfield
Gone now the young professor
Who took pleasure in hauling Lear
Before the court of a sophomore classroom
And pronouncing the old king headstrong,
Hungry for praise, intemperate,
And flagrantly ignorant of the world,
Confident he can cede his kingdom
And still retain his kingly authority.
By Nina Corwin
Dear Maestro, Dear Gustav, Dear Dear—
I must speak to you not as a pillar to a post if I am to give any figment of
the scurvy beast your symphony unleashed in me: I can speak only as one
emboldened avocado to another. For I saw the gritty foreskin of your soul,
fileted and in flagrante. It was unveiled before me as a sumptuous centerpiece
overrun with willful and tawdry tourism, a sprawling frontier of ruby-throated
gauntlets and savage cul-de-sacs scattered on a ravishing trash heap. I savored
in your symphony the soul of an exotic prophet who, after fleecing us with
digital adroitness, paints lipstick on the shattered mist. I shared in your sea-
son of strychnine; suffered a crucible of peeled fruit: a glorious hornets’ nest
of history subsumed by the bonfires of conquerors. I saw a man in traction
straggling toward inner uprightness; I divined a full-frontal mugshot, a flying
buttress, a blue-eyed lampoon. Oh yes, the most impetuous lampoon! I had
to let my gargoyles go! Forgive me: I cannot feel by halves. With me it is one
thing or the other.
In all devotion,
Arnold
By Christine Sneed
Featured Art: Self-Portrait in the Artist’s Studio by Emile Masson
Antonio Martedi, a painter and sculptor who had sold what he sometimes boasted were his least interesting works to American museums, told his granddaughter, April Walsh, on what turned out to be the day before his death, that he had not lived in fear of mediocrity so much as the disdain of beautiful women. He had made art because he wanted to be loved, preferably by many beautiful women in a slow but uninterrupted progression, women who would remember him fondly after their affair had ended and keep whatever sketches or canvases he had given them in an honored place in their homes. “But if after a while they sold my work for a good price to someone who knew how to appreciate it, I wouldn’t have held it against them. The money would be another way for me to keep my place in their hot little hearts.” This was the first time April had heard any of this, and she had no idea what had prompted it. Her grandfather had a reserve of stories that he repeated with depressing regularity for a man widely known for his flamboyance. She assumed that she had heard all he was willing to tell by the time she had graduated from film school and was failing to sell her scripts or to get hired as the production assistant’s own scorned assistant.
Read More
By Mary Ann Samyn
It was raining on the other mountain
like a preview of a movie I’d watch soon.
The clouds smudged, like mascara.
The wind grew very important. The day
had not yet been assigned a permanent value
and I meant to offer some resistance.
By Ashley Cowger
On Friday, November 30th, 2007, at precisely 7:48 in the morning, Eastern Standard Time, Anna Kelsey McMillan became, for the duration of 5.3 minutes, the number 1 most beautiful woman in the world. 3 of those 5 minutes Anna spent in her car, alone, where nobody saw her in all of her splendor. But Anna spent 2 of those glorious minutes traversing the parking lot of the large business complex where she was expected, at 8 o’clock, to commence her presentation on farmed salmon.
Read MoreBy William Olsen
Everything I’ve always wanted, want me was the haiku I was working on when I thought I heard the mail come, some metallic hello of the mailbox lid creaking open and slamming shut, but I think it must have been my heart instead because there wasn’t any mail at all inside there, not even a bill, not a cancelled stamp. And there was nothing but emptiness in saying it was empty. Just thinking of saying so was heartless. So now in place of my heart was a deep well, a well that didn’t end well, a well that didn’t end at all. Meaning, what I was was what I saw, and what I saw was, and is, a seesaw down there in my deep well looking back at the seesaw I saw in the mirror at the bottom, O. Or was it, because it was a reflection, a sawsee? Yup, and after that mental yelp what should I see but a hummingbird, just a glimpse, rare occasion, first edition, last run, print on demand. I saw it! Here in Kalamazoo, particularly in the last three letters of this place name, having left the mailbox and halfway up the stairs to the front door and half done eating this banana like, well, a stir-crazy monkey! Read More
By William Olsen
The earth is the subconscious of the subconscious.
—Bachelard
1.
Half a block inland and safe from genius gulls
local and alone in their dishwater droves,
up out of reach from beach inland-eaten
by gutless waves,
opposite the passage from two fresh green-furred
ursine islands, one lighthouse-flicker lit, one not,
safe from shark-toothed sails and trolling trolls,
unseen by one old crow
patrolling a fire-log-charcoal-pitted shore,
innocent, green, unschooled, dimwitted, featureless,
foregrounded by the imponderable plumpness
of the crimson motherships, summer’s end’s tomatoes,
encephalitic, all intelligence,
stupidly, yet astonishingly so,
By Alan Shapiro
The circulating disinfectants
make it an unearthly blue
or earth’s blue seen from space,
or what pooled from the steaming
of the planet’s first condensing.
In which case the pumps
and filters could be thermal
vents, and the tiny comet trail
of bubbles rising from the vents
could hold within it—if it isn’t it
already—the first blind chance,
if not the promise of
the hint of the beginning
of what at long last would
emerge into the eye which
being mostly water sees
only water signaling to itself
beyond itself in accidental
wormy quiverings over
the sea floor of the ceiling.
By Alan Shapiro
Its night is all day long;
the neon GIRLS out front go dark in sunlight,
while inside the cruciform stage
has stripped down to blackness,
in which the vertical
poles at the end of each transverse arm
stand naked and lonely.
Cold here is the cold on the faces of the presidents
on bills the absent hands
have pushed toward each body bending over
in a gown of brightness;
cold is the heat of the shadowless
shadow play of hands and legs
up and down along the poles,
and the hands retreating from the money,
and the hands in pockets dreaming,
or dreaming later on another body;
the heart of the cold is the opposite of what it is,
cold as the fire
through the day of its night
in the firing line of bottles
waiting for orders
on the shelf above the bar.
By George David Clark
Years ago my father and I smuggled Mandarin
Gospel tracts and Jesus videos through customs in
Beijing, that labyrinth of marble lions and silk,
of pearl hawkers, of the Muslim Quarter’s narrow walks
confused with fruit and butchers’ racks in the open air.
At the night market I watched two geese dangling by their
necks in a darkened window while Father disappeared
into the neon dazzle of bald rabbit heads smeared
with candy glaze, scorpions and black locusts by
the shish kabob. A woman touched my arm. “You want I
give you bath?” she asked. Her eyes were the wet jade someone
lost off a bridge. Wry smile half-disguising her rotten
teeth, she whispered, “You like warm bath?” again in my ear,
branding the taste of fried starfish on my fifteenth year.
Often now, in the hotel of bad sleep, she leads me
down a hallway to a room with a golden tub. We
slip into the bath together. Her small breasts are white
as fresh apple flesh. First I kiss them, then take a bite. Read More
By Kim Addonizio
Bone-stick
partially stripped
I hang you upside down
with your sisters
above my mirror—
all drooping heads all trophies of desire
O rose thou art past-tense
Even your brother the worm
has shriveled and gone
Your silks are best
like this unkiss-
able
and therefore bearable
By Kim Addonizio
Do you sometimes drink alone?
Have you ever woken up the next morning
after a night of heavy drinking?
Does your cat wander through the house
meowing inconsolably,
despite having fresh food and water?
Hunger, thirst, friendship, love.
Green Bee, Russian Quaalude, Redheaded Slut:
IEDs on the supply route to pleasure.
There’s a gala in your hypothalamus,
helium balloons rising to the rafters,
the fizzy ricochet of laughter.
There’s a stumblebum in your cerebellum.
That empty feeling crawling toward you—
should you kill it with a wadded paper towel
or trap it in a jar and shake it out
and send it flying into the grass?
Is your head full of frozen tamales
and a vodka bottle curled on its side?
How do you get through the interminable evenings?
Are they really interminable?
Have you considered the alternative?
Now get out of your car,
stand by the side of the road
and take a step. Now recite
The Waste Land, backwards,
beginning with that sexy Sanskrit word.
By David Gewanter
Like backtalking teenagers sent to their rooms,
__the boyhoods
of husbands dangle in closets, or bulge a locker,
__ancient toys
awaiting the senile hand—here inside the trunk,
__the Furry Freak Brothers
rub the benighted sovereignty of
__Big Ass Comix
or nuzzle the Up Against the Wall
__Street Journal, where
a sweaty financier is pictured with a purpley,
__squash-sized penis—
Why grow up? The basement monarch
__palms his relics:
the crumbled essay on pacifism, scrawled
__to the Draft Board’s
faustian query, Let’s say you see your mother
__being raped.
What would you do? The brochure, “Amputating
__Your Small Toe Safely.”
By Teddy Macker
Summer after high school I lived alone on my family’s farm in Carpinteria,
California.
I didn’t know a hoe from a spade but still reveled in the new role, begging my
mother to send money so I could rent a tractor and disc the field.
I disced the field, had my neighbor take pictures of me discing the field, then
sent those pictures to my ex-girlfriend.
Right before the photo I mashed hay into my hair.
At night I put on my Walkman and drove the tractor up and down the
lightless street, the speed of the machine shocking, the sycamore branches
raining down their sweet womanish incense. . . . I’d listen to Emmylou Harris
sing, You think you’re a cowboy but you’re only a kid, never once thinking I
was a kid.
During the day I spent hours not working but prayerfully wandering the
barn trying to be spellbound by every mote in every last shaft of light, then
scrawling T. S. Eliot on the walls of the hayloft.
Once I found a dead owl and for some reason washed it with a hose.
And late at night, lying on my back, the sounds of the coyotes pinned me to
my bed till I became an infinitely petalling blossom of strange clear dread.
By Harrison Candelaria Fletcher
I inherit the sword. Before my father dies, he decides that I, not my big brother, will receive the ceremonial blade from the secretive Masonic Order, to which the men in his family belonged. My brother will get the gold ring stamped with the family coat of arms—a broad gray shield emblazoned with a black cross, four white shells, and four silver arrowheads.
I’m proud of my heirloom. I sneak into the hallway storage closet to play with it while my mother prunes her rose bushes. I slip the dull-edged weapon from its tarnished brass sheath, grip the chipped black wooden handle with the knight’s helmet hilt, and run my finger along the clouded chrome surface etched with vines. My brother slides beside me into the cool darkness.
Read More
By Jerry Williams
When I was twelve years old, during the summer months when I was off from school, my father used to get me to ride around in his truck with him. The truck was a hospital-gown blue, three-quarter-ton Ford automatic with a wide bench seat, heaping ashtray, and a loaded .38 Smith & Wesson in the glove box. I guess he had a permit for the gun, but if it ever looked like the police might pull us over, he made me transfer it from the glove box to the seat between us, and with one hand he emptied the bullets onto the cracked vinyl and laid the gun across his thigh, evidently trying to impress me with his intricate knowledge of Ohio gun laws.
Read More
By David Rivard
Well, you know how it is
when you’re thirteen, & deep
in the factory bosses’ graveyard—your hair
damp, atmospherically
violet in the August dusk—the children
you run with calling back
over gravestones & wrought-iron Grand
Army of the Republic
picket fences—in this cemetery
catty-corner
from the China Inn (Catholic chow mein
sandwiches
served there Fridays,
Wayne Yee’s family cooks them)—
you know all those
grassy family plots you walk over, strongholds
By David Rivard
The brain bounces forward too, right?
so why return to what yesterday seemed to be becoming
before it became today?—
there’s no need for meanness or envy
when waking in the morning, no reasons for fear—
just an unlikely Rose of Sharon blooming by the branch library
and the balanced light of a warming
late October as it shines on a sheet of week-old social studies homework only recently
dropped from the book bag of a wandering Violet Neff
(5 points extra credit—according to Ms. DiNardo, a “nice job”):
nice job say the Tibetans by lugging the rolled-up rugs to air
in front of Yala Carpets mostly the smaller
prayer mats that are colored with clairvoyant vegetable dyes,
nice job says the scent of heavenly inventions like the breakfast plantains frying,
well done says the toddler with the jelly-fish haircut,
all answers perfect say the hedgerows of boxwood left
untrimmed by the vestry at St. Augustine’s
(a coven of swallows with attention deficit disorder muttering one-liners within),
perfect say the chicken legs in the freezer case at Fresh Killed Poultry,
while you wait for the 91 to the Green Line at Lechmere,
a vaguely Wordsworthian subway stop you think
(because the brain knows it’s well within its rights to do so)
a second or two before it occurs to you
to wonder if Ms. DiNardo’s grading is strict—
so what if it is? thinks the brain,
I can still imagine her first name is Julie whenever
I need to.
By David Yezzi
___Outside study hall,
it’s me, my girlfriend, and a guy
named Rob—bony kid, klutzy
at games, fluent in French.
___He’s behind her;
___I’m asleep or half-
asleep (it’s morning), and, as I
squint into the trapezoid of light
breaking on the bench and me,
___I see him raise
___his hand to her head
from the back, so gently
she doesn’t notice
him at first, but stands there,
___carved in ebony
___and beaten gold:
Stacey’s straight black hair
falling in shafts of sun.
He smoothes it down,
___firmly now,
By Sydney Lea
to do sweet Jeanne with you this wild urge to leave behind
all that I treasure by zooming away on my old silver Norton
road bike with clip handlebars and mean engine never mind
that the two of us did that so often and country towns’ small winking
street lamps briefly lit us as we rumbled and roared below them
though we were lit up already by our idiot epical thinking
that we’d be the first ones ever to outspeed what kept on chasing us
which I suddenly ache to race from again as though we hadn’t
learned this was hogwash because even we in our garish glamorous
leathers could see how we played a script that in fact was an old one
familiar to lord knows how many people before us who’d enacted
their own absurd escapist narratives complete with explosive
trappings like the famous instance of the late Jimmy Dean who’d run
his fantasy Porsche right into something that turned out to be
much bigger than he of course and that’s not to mention my drunk
unfamous friends Mike Knott and Harry Robichaud
but wait I meant to be saying that this had nothing really
to do with you since just now I wish I could ride out solo
By Sydney Lea
All the pastor’s years of serving God
and humankind—they’re nothing now.
His congregation has long resigned itself
to anecdotal, meandering sermons.
But how forgive his mixing the liturgy
of welcome to a new church member
with the ceremony—however it may be related—
of baptism? The poor young parents
blush and fidget while veteran members feel
something between impatience and rage.
The minister and infant, robed and sleeping,
appear serene, above it all,
the one too young, even awake, to know
what’s going on and the other unable
to keep intact his thinking. Painful pauses.
Autumn rain on the roof like gunfire.
By Joe Bonomo
Recently I looked at newspaper coverage of the 1969 Apollo 11 lunar mission: front page after front page of banner headlines, screaming two-inch type, giddy editorial cartoons, all reported manner of visionary enthusiasm and tearful astonishment for a new future where moon creatures have been disproved and NASA will rescue us all. Writer and sci-fi visionary Ray Bradbury wanted to create a new calendar, beginning with “Year One of the New Era.”
In Section One, on page two of the July 20, 1969 edition of the Chicago Tribune—barely noticeable in the lower-left corner, the insubstantial pica-width dwarfed to near extinction by the booster power of Apollo media coverage—ran a small item:
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By David Baker
—Yellow gingkoes, awash on the sidewalks.
But we can’t have them. Blue sky like a just-
thrown vase. Bright plain blue side still glowing.
Autumn air. Warm as a bath. We can’t say so.
We did not see the horses nuzzling
in the field, in the muddy pen, in the big acres
hidden by trees in the middle of the financial city,
nor whisper through a night in a booth. In
a room. In no hurry atop sheets of many gone loves.
This was not us, nor will be, nor ever will I
forget you when the broken histories are
told. Expenditure and loss. Collateral and gift.
. . . no where shall Wee Be known. How
many leaves. How much wind in the new world—.
By Mary Biddinger
At school they were too polite to call it hell, though she heard the word on her
mother’s eight-tracks, seeping between damp towels in the bathroom, hover-
ing in the silver of the old hall mirror. Monica knew who went there and why,
regardless of time spent fluffing the chrysanthemums outside the rectory. She’d
go to the Devil’s Place herself if it meant one hour alone with Kevin McMillan
in the falling-down barn. Sister Rita said it was hot, but Monica could live
with that. Mrs. Dettweiler next door crushed cigarettes out on her daughter’s
back. She was on her way to the Devil’s Place, along with the Simmons twins,
and Monica’s uncle who thought he could piss out an electrical fire, ended
up burning down the Kroger instead. There were, of course, exceptions. If he
was mean enough you could take a cinderblock to your husband’s head in the
middle of the night, as long as you called the police afterwards, produced the
notebook of grievances when officers arrived. You could sign your husband up
for a war, then dash your face with mauve lipstick on the night they handed
him a gun. If you were married to one of the Simmons twins you could toss
the car keys down a sewer grate, sprint to JC Penney for a white sale bonanza
with the charge card, knowing you’d be safe until Randy or Ricky made it
out of the sludge. Monica would not go to the Devil’s Place over shoplifted
Raisinets or hair gel, but she would sign away her soul for an afternoon swim-
ming with Kevin McMillan in the pond at Raccoon Park, as long as they could
both be naked and the water above fifty-five degrees. Perhaps there was hope
for Monica’s uncle, provided he sold the Firebird, wheeled the recliner to the
curb and found a job. If they ever married, Monica would never torch Kevin
McMillan while he read the newspaper in his slippers and flannel boxers, or
dig a six-foot three-and-a-half-inch hole in the backyard while the children
planted daffodil bulbs. She would not include the Devil’s Place on her college
application list, as Rhonda Phillips did the day she broke her sister’s arm play-
ing darts. When the Simmons twins winked at her, Monica looked away. When
Kevin McMillan winked at her, Monica unbuttoned her shirt, showed the hot
pink swimsuit underneath.
By Roberta Allen
If I were to write a story about a barbeque in Stone Ridge, would I change the location to Willow? To Olive? Would I change the number of guests from six to five or maybe seven? Would I add another female? Would I exclude the odd-numbered male? Would I change the profession of the annoying architect swatting big fat flies at the table while we were eating to lawyer? Or pilot? Or yoga instructor? Did the architect swat flies while we were eating? Or was it later, after we had finished and taken the dishes and burnt buns back inside the house? Were the uneaten buns “burnt”? Or do I just like the sound of the words “burnt buns”?
By Richard Robbins
For a long time, I never understood how fish could live in that creek in the first place. It measured barely six feet across in most spots, and except for the rare place where a pool had developed, it never seemed deeper than a half-foot. My grandfather first stood me on the sandy bank across from our cabin when I was five. He put a salmon egg on my hook, locked a lead shot into place with his teeth a short way up the line, and showed me how to drop the bait gently into the flow and allow it to sink partway to the creek bed. The speed of the water would keep it from snagging in the rocks below. I should hold a small slack of line with my left hand between my thumb and index finger, waiting for the slightest nibbling of a trout to let it be pulled away and, as the slack tightened, set the hook in the fish’s mouth. I should not cast—high grass and sage and willow branches waited eagerly to snag my hook. I should not jerk the end of my rod if I felt a strike. If I did everything right, the trout would nibble, the slack would set the hook, I would keep the tip of the rod slightly in the water as it bent and danced and I reeled in my line slowly and evenly, and then before the lead shot reached the first eyelet I would carefully lift the rod-tip while backing away from the bank so that the fish would, in a swinging motion, be brought over dry earth, where it was free to flop off the hook and flail in the dirt until I pinned it down with foot or hand. These were my instructions every spring we returned to Rock Creek. Each spring the routine felt more familiar, something a long winter could never wipe away.
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By George Bilgere
On the bricks of the patio
A sparrow is struggling with a used tampon
It half-flew, half-dragged here
From a dumpster across the street.
The tampon resembles a wounded rat.
Those of us enjoying our coffee
And New York Times in the spring morning
Pretend to ignore it.
But all the suns in all the galaxies,
And all the planets around our own paltry star,
Are turning on the same invisible pulleys
That drive the sparrow
To build a cozy little crib
In the eaves under somebody’s gutters,
And to find, sooner the better,
Another sparrow who hears
The same music of the spheres.
You can’t argue with that.
And though some of us on the patio might believe
That what the sparrow is wrestling with
Is the blight man was born for,
The curse Adam fell for,
For the bird
It’s an engineering problem: the tampon’s
Too stubbornly stitched together
For a tiny beak to tear apart,
And too heavy
With human blood to carry off
Into the blue air of the future.
By George Bilgere
In the morning, after much delay,
I finally go down to the basement
To replace the broken dryer belt.
First, I unbolt the panels
And sweep up the dust mice and crumbling spiders.
I listen to the sounds of the furnace
Thinking things over
At the beginning of winter.
Then I stretch out on the concrete floor
With a flashlight in my mouth
To contemplate the mystery
Of the tensioner-pulley assembly.
And finally, with a small, keen pleasure,
I slip the new belt over the spindle, rise,
And screw everything back together.
Later, we have Thanksgiving dinner
With my wife’s grandmother, who is dying
Of bone cancer. Maybe,
If they dial up the chemo, fine-tune the meds,
We’ll do this again next year.
But she’s old, and the cancer
Seems to know what it’s doing.
Everyone loves her broccoli casserole.
As for the turkey, it sits on the table,
A small, brown mountain we can’t see beyond.
That night I empty the washer,
Throw the damp clothes into the dryer.
For half an hour my wife’s blouses
Wrestle with my shirts
In a hot and whirling ecstasy,
Because I replaced an ancient belt
And adjusted the tensioner-pulley assembly.
By George Bilgere
There’s my friend Miles, reading the paper.
Looking at him, you’d never guess
He’s a world-class ichthyologist.
And there’s Graciella, still attractive,
Letting herself go gray. I remember
All the fuss about her groundbreaking treatise
On neutrinos created back in the early nineties.
She’s reading a book entitled, simply, Neutrinos.
And there, of course, is Marty. He’s always here,
With his flip-flops and his laptop.
His cappuccino and his shorts.
He’s the number one guy,
In this hemisphere, anyway,
In antimatter. What Marty doesn’t know
About antimatter isn’t worth knowing.
He’s talking with Lewis
Who is sweeping the floor.
Lewis knows his back hurts
When it’s going to storm. He knows
We don’t have any pitching this year,
And he’s right about that
And Marty knows he’s right
And there’s no point arguing about it.
By Tom Whalen
One rumor had it that Leslie was working from home for NorSpek, commuting occasionally from Mannheim to Erlangen, another that she was in a clinic in Cologne. But on IDS I couldn’t afford to over-empathize, though I well understood the risk in not empathizing. I knew my business. I told the PM at BodKom (a new kid assigned to IDS only a month ago) he had no reason to worry. The metadata had been restored. Everything was go. The project would meet its deadlines, including the supersedes. Team’s, more or less, intact.
Leslie’s failure (ostensible failure) to produce an accurate SOW (statement of work) was neither my nor BodKom’s fault, nobody was responsible for that unfortunate fiasco, the time-on-task as lost as Leslie herself now to the project. Let’s forget about it, I said. But BodKom’s outrage at the SOW mishap (twice escalated to Maidenhead where issues resolve themselves by means beyond my ken) still haunted me. Always, I knew, they could keep throwing the SOW issue back in my face, no matter how many times I insisted the past was past, SOW a memory not worth remembering. . . . We’re not sure who to hold accountable, I told them. No one, really. But we did, after all, let an employee go and at the moment we’re a little shorthanded. What else could I say?
Read MoreBy Catie Rosemurgy
They were deep in it and about to vote on what it was.
The leaves above them began to drip and blur
the proceedings. Thumper, Miss Peach, the yellow pile of wax
that was the Candlestick Maker, all of them
batted whatever lashes they had at the middle distance and recited
possible recipes for what was leaking out of their eyes.
The Black Coat read from The Official Complaint:
for years everything has been about itself, the music
about music, the light about light. In the small patch of woods
on the south end of town, someone played with a rock and a feather
and was never seen or heard from again.
3 parts: dirt thrown at the moon___1 part: other people’s bodies
Miss Peach straightened her lichen vest, lay down,
and pretended she was dead. Thumper sang a cappella about berries
and knowing what to do, the Black Coat swatted patchy bluebirds
from Miss Peach’s eyes. Everyone’s mouth craved the irritation of dirt,
but their faces, all mere surface damage and glow,
spoke of more. Of a time when things happened
and led quickly to other things. Of a place beyond the trunks of trees.
Soon they would lose the light filtering in from the big game down the road.
No matter. They could feel their faces
beginning to cave in and didn’t need to see.
3 parts: footsteps approaching your nest
1 part: your head held above the crowd on a satin pillow
1 part: wild mint___2 parts: your mother seeing you walk into a clearing
after you’ve been dead for so many years
By April Lindner
Featured Art: Drawing – Collage by Joan Miró
Slowly at first, the arteries
in the brain’s finely spun net
narrow one by one
_____________to dead ends;
like the hand’s delicate motion,
__________a series of strokes
erase what took decades to write.
Difficult tasks forgotten first:
_______________how to merge onto a highway,
___________________knit a sweater,
_______________________buy a stamp.
Then the simpler ones,
___________________how to turn on an oven,
_______________________what goes in a cup.
By Wisława Szymborska
Translated from the Polish by Joanna Trzeciak
I’m walking on the slope of a hill newly green.
Grass, small flowers in the grass,
just as in a children’s book.
Hazy sky, already turning blue.
A view of other hills spreads out in silence.
As if there had been no Cambrians or Siluries here,
rocks growling at one another,
upthrust abysses, no fiery nights
nor days in clouds of darkness.
As if no plains had moved through here
in feverish delirium,
in icy shivers.
As if only elsewhere had the seas been churning,
tearing apart the edges of the horizon.
It is nine-thirty local time.
Everything is in its place and in genial accord.
In the valley, the small stream as a small stream.
The path as a path from always to ever.
Woods in the guise of woods world without end amen,
and on high, birds in flight as birds in flight.
As far as the eye can see a moment reigns here.
One of those earthly moments
implored to linger.
By Wisława Szymborska
Translated from the Polish by Joanna Trzeciak
When I utter the word Future,
the first syllable is already headed for the past.
When I utter the word Silence,
I destroy it.
When I utter the word Nothing,
I create something no non-existence can contain.
By Wisława Szymborska
Translated from the Polish by Joanna Trzeciak
She’s been in this world for over a year,
but not everything in this world has been examined
and brought under control.
Now being probed are things
that cannot move on their own.
They need to be nudged,
slid, shoved,
moved from one place to another.
Not all of them want it: not the wardrobe,
the cupboard, the unyielding walls, the table.
But already the cloth on the stubborn table
—when firmly grasped by the hem—
reveals an urge to roam.
On the tablecloth, glasses, plates,
a creamer, spoons, a bowl
all quiver in anticipation.
It’s interesting,
what move will they make,
as they teeter on the edge:
a journey across the ceiling?
a flight around the lamp?
a leap to the windowsill, and from there to the tree?
