New Year’s Resolution

.Reading time 1 minute.

By R. Bratten Weiss

Featured Art from rawpixel.com

To live decently is to tread lightly, but
here it is a new year and maybe I’m ready
to stop worrying about decency. I’m ready
to stomp around, a ten-ton weight with
elephant legs, shaking the windows.

I’m tired of going gently, water on glass.
Maybe it’s time for the tongues of men and
angels, time to shoot fire from my fingertips.

A fleet of ships on the wine-dark sea would
do nicely to carry what I want to say.
I need to make cities fall.

I need to write the message like a knife to
the throat, like firewater. I need it to crack
like a whip in winter air.

If it does its job, it will lift you on its
burnished horns, trample you, raise
a trumpet to its mythic mouth and blast
Alleluia over the broken cliffs, terrify
the wild turkeys and the grazing deer,
and the red-tailed hawk that will take
to the air crying your name.

Read More

Immediately Following Mandatory Happy Hour with the Boss

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Molly Kirschner

Featured Art: by Odilon Redon

I said to the driver, deliver me
to the nearest beautiful thing.
My name is not ma’am.
Where clouds rallied together like workers
I said let me out here.
Palm trees dusted the sky. No rain.
I called another taxi, I said, take me to
a larch, a church, the awe
in the word autumn.
Take me to dusk.
To a Sikh temple where I can meet the genderless god.
The casino.
Behind the curtain
where we pray our children will fix the world
before we are reborn.

Read More

Saturday

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Veronica Kornberg

Featured Art: by Johan Teyler

Valentine’s Day and I’m at the farmers’ market
with my aquamarine Olivetti, typing poems for
whatever the buyers think they’re worth.

For Annie, the homeless woman who stops by
each week, I pull the sun out of the sky,
let it hover just above her solar plexus
and shoot its rays out of her eyes, superhero style.
She flashes her dimples and takes a dollar
from the jar, pushes on between
the pickler and the flower stall.

I tap away, next to the cheesemaker’s penned-up
petting goat shaking flies off its ears, opposite
the oozing combs of the honey man and a pile of sweet
potatoes, root-hairs whiskering their chins.

My table is usually a drowsy zone, but today
a line of genial men materializes before me,
managing their bouquets while one-hand-texting,
children threading between their legs.
The goat and I are busy.

Some men want their hearts laid raw, beating
on the page. One talks about a fishing trip.
I give them oceans. Powdery stamens
on a daffodil and pillow talk. Black-seamed stockings
in a country inn. I tell them what I wish

someone would say to me this chilly February
afternoon. It’s worth a lot, that little silence
while they read, minds suddenly gone naked,
before we shudder back to our ordinary selves
and they stuff the jar with bills. Which I use to buy turnips.

Read More

Ode to My Pink Bathroom

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Julie Danho

Featured Art: by J.L. Mott Iron Works

How long I’ve tried to love you, the way
you still blush and gleam like a teenager
in a poodle skirt, unblemished as the day

you were pressed against wire and mortar
in the shower, on the walls, even the floor,
its concrete flecked with pink. The Nolans,

who chose you, are long gone, their daughters
now grandmothers in their own houses,
the blueprints they left behind moldering

in the basement. How can I blame them?
I didn’t live through the War, the Boom,
this neighborhood rising up in neat rows

as if each Cape had been pining for sun.
In those years, you were prosperity, pedigree,
First Lady Pink named in honor of Mamie

Eisenhower, her White House bathroom pink
from the walls to the tub to the cotton balls,
so that all over America, millions like me

wake up and stumble into a past that waits
with toothbrush and soap. In you, I saw history
running like a faucet, building to a flood

unless stemmed. But when the contractor
gave me a price, he said you were lead,
and with my daughter . . . it might be better

to let you be. So I’ll own your purr and poison,
though I may dream still of reinvention—
blue trim and Harbor Gray—even as I hang

the pink polka dot shower curtain, lay down
that cranberry rug, act as if I chose you,
as if you were everything I ever wanted.

Read More

Love, Again

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Sarah O. Oso

Featured Art: by Philip Henry Delamotte

When it happens—and it will,
bright as a bed of red tulips
shaking out their flags in rows,

or rising like steam off the top
of a lid—allow it to uncurl.
Stand and stretch. It’ll be the pop

of sockets, of elbow and hip, sighing
into place after waking. Vertebrae aligning
like rhyme beneath the skin.

By noon, it’ll head on over, whistling
with cans of white paint in hand, here
to restore the chipped fence.

Imagine restirring. The heart’s late-night diner
singing to life when someone shoots
a nickel down the juke. Belting a familiar tune,

good and even—the way the radio plays
in Papa’s ’74 Firebird you figured couldn’t run
until that summer it roared

back, and you sat shotgun
against the black leather, windows open
the whole drive home to Florida.

And if it’s anything like the state of sunshine,
then it’s soft and airy and easy.
Like the seat you’ve settled into, just now,

where it nestles once more at the foot
of the chair, dozing, or otherwise
poking its wet nose at your palm.

Read More

Rodeo

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Sunni Brown Wilkinson

Selected as winner of the 2020 NORward Prize by a panel of previous poetry contributors

Featured Art: by 2 Bull Photography

Tonight is a rodeo night, the announcer blaring his bull
and clown doctrine so loud it carries two miles
east to our block, where just now a hummingbird
hawk-moth drinks from the pink phlox
with its long wand
and I’m alone for a moment and the sky
is bleeding itself out over the train tracks and the brick
abandoned factories. The lights
of the carpet store by the mall flicker carpe
and I wonder just what I can seize.
The homeless shelter bearing some saint’s name
fills up every night and spills
downtown next morning,
wings of strange creatures brush our flowers
while we sleep, and a hapless moose wanders
a schoolyard before it’s caught,
tranquilized. Everyone’s looking for it:
a warmth, a softness in the belly, in a bed
of grass. Take it when you can. Seize it.

Lately sleep is a myth and my brain
is so hard-wired for worry my whole body
crackles, then a deep fog rolls in and all day
I’m lost. Unlike this moth, greedy in its guzzling,
drinking sweetness without asking,
and now the buzzer of the bull riding sounds.
I think of the grace of that single man,
one hand on the saddle
and the other a flag waving violently
above him. A wild show of surrender.

Some days it’s like this: one part
anchored while the other begs for mercy.
And some days it’s the other, the posture
he begins with: both hands together, holding tight.
Sometimes you hold your own hand.
That’s all there is to take.

Read More

Palacios

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Mark Alan Williams

Featured Art: by Katie Manning

We buy hot dogs at a gas station
of broken pumps and eat them
on the pier, watching ratty shrimpers
limp in for new bandages,
sit there in the cold for hours,
thinking sunset will fill the bay
with the blood of the Brazos,
do something holy to us.

This is after Ganado,
and Victoria, and Refugio,
and Point Comfort, and Blessing.

We’re newlyweds,
willing to burn fuel on skywriting
if it can make marriage
feel less like living in Houston.

Sunset hangs around
like a towel that won’t dry,
and when we tire of waiting,
we leave the dim, fuming galaxy
of refineries for home,
bright and deadly as a hospital
circled by ambulances, the music off.

Read More

Free Association

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Henrietta Goodman

Featured Art: by Katsushika Hokusai

“Free associating, that is to say, is akin to mourning; it is
a process of detachment that releases hidden energies . . .”
—Adam Phillips

Always the smell of Windex brings me back to Martin Shelton
in first grade, his memory atomized from some forgotten source.

It’s wind and window when I see him late for school through double
doors of tempered glass, then rushing in on the lovely trochaic

feet of his name, shirt buttoned wrong, blond hair blown in a gust
of oak leaves, smoke, and frost that swept away the simmered meat

and rubber smells, the green litter that soaked up accidents. The wind
recorded and erased. I was afraid to sit with him, or speak—

my first crush a boy who packed his own lunch and walked alone
through dark stairwells hung with Bomb Shelter signs, arrows

aimed at the basement lunchroom where we bowed our heads
to wait for fallout’s drift from the split atom, the invisible anvil

that could fall no matter where we hid. Even when the speakers
hummed and Mr. Wells announced that we were safe,

his name said the earth would swallow us. And now I spray
the glass to wipe away the prints, the trace, but traces gone,

the glass I see through stays. How, then, could mourning set me free,
if Windex leads to Martin leads to beauty leads to bomb?

Read More

Donovan

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Susan Browne

Featured Art: by Carol M Highsmith

I walk down my neighborhood street called mountain
although there is no mountain     only rolling hills
although hills don’t really roll        & as I look
at a window display of shoes & pass by the candy store
a gasp happens in my head    a quake in my heart     they aren’t
here      my father who loved sweets
my mother who loved shoes    & the sun shines
on a world of orphans      I quake along mountain street
like a rolling gasp although if someone asked
how are you I’d say fine      like most of us are
& aren’t       I thought sadness was a prison
but it connects us & if a chain it should be
one of tenderness     my father died
two years ago although sometimes I say a year
a way of keeping him closer      can’t do that
anymore with my mother      need math on paper      the ache
woven into each leaf although there are birds & nests
we live in a tsunami     waves of being & non-being
but I’m no philosopher standing at the counter buying
bunion pads     feeling drowned & drying
under fluorescent lights & warmed by the smile
of the clerk who blesses me with have a great day as I go out
to mountainless mountain & remember donovan’s song
playing in my parents’ house in the sixties      first there is
a mountain then there is no mountain then there is

Read More

Late-Season Outdoor Wedding

.Reading time 2 minutes.

by Chelsea B. DesAutels

Featured Art: “Panel No. 1” (Leaning on a Parapet) by Georges Seurat

The night before, we’d eaten fried walleye

with tartar sauce in a big white tent and passed

the quaich filled with Irish whiskey to our loved ones

who sipped and said blessings. There was music.

You played guitar. I went to bed early, happy.

You joined me later, happy. The next morning,

we woke to snow and gray skies. All morning long,

I cried and heaved and my mother and bridesmaids

whispered, afraid I was having my doubts. I wasn’t.

I was rupturing—a violent fissure between

my wanting to be good at loving and wanting

everything, like a river island suddenly shorn

from the bank and flooded by ice melt. Over my dress,

I wore a fur stole that I’d found two summers earlier

in a roadside antique store. We’d been road-tripping

through the northwoods, you behind the wheel,

me gazing out the window at Lake Superior, a body

displaced by thousands of shipwrecks.

Read More

If French Kissing Was As Good As Promised, Shouldn’t I Be Happy By Now?

.Reading time 1 minute.

by Emmy Newman

Featured Art: Southern France by Simona Aizicovici

 

I am accidentally thinking

about snail sex when we start. Mouths open.

Tongues. When snails have sex

there is a slightly gruesome amount of suction.

First, a tingling graze of eye stalk on eye stalk.

Then a lack of movement. Wet flesh. Fireworks. Read More

The Art of Longing

.Reading time 37 minutes.

by Emily Sinclair

Featured Art: Pandora by Odilon Redon

We knew that we wanted a change, my husband and I, although we were unclear about how—or, more accurately, where we’d make it happen. The change was coming because I had, once again, a feeling of anxiety and inauthenticity. It comes on periodically and when it comes, I think that I am not living the life I was meant to lead—that, in fact, I am leading the wrong life, and I start fantasizing about the right one. So in the spring of 2017, we cleaned out our basement, fixed what was broken, touched up the paint, and put our Denver house on the market. We were leaving.

Read More

“Metaphor Offers the Promise to Move Us”: A Conversation with Nicole Walker, Author of Sustainability: A Love Story

.Reading time 12 minutes.

by Kay Keegan

KK: In your essay “On Beauty,” the narrator observes that Michel de Montaigne inadvertently uses the concept of beauty to stitch together his vast collection of essays. When you were writing Sustainability: A Love Story, when did you discover that love would be one of the most prevalent themes in your braided collection and how did that influence your writing on the environment and sustainability as a result? (Or, was love a constraint you gave yourself at the beginning of the drafting process? Why?)

NW: I have to admit, I mean “love story” almost as tongue-in-cheekily as I mean Sustainability. Read More

Couples

.Reading time 2 minutes.

by Kenneth Hart

Featured Art: The Bathers by Roger de La Fresnaye 

 

 

Couples who fight in front of you. Couples

who call each other every hour. Couples

who show up early.

Couples who are business partners.

 

Couples who say “Absolutely.”

Couples who met in rehab.

Couples who sleep with other couples.

Couples who make out in front of you. Read More

Love You Excavation Work

.Reading time 11 minutes.

by Donald Platt

Featured Art: Stained Glass by Simona Aizicovici

                               I am texting you
some trivial message like “Am at grocery. Where are you?”
                               using Siri,

the intelligent personal assistant and knowledge navigator,
                               oracle inside
my iPhone. But when I sign off, saying “Love you

                               exclamation point,”
Siri translates it as “Love you excavation work.” I send the message
                               anyway.

Siri’s right. Loving you for the last twenty-seven years has been
                               excavation
work. It has been like discovering El Mirador, the “Lookout,”

                               lost city
of the Maya, three thousand years old, overgrown with jungle, once home
                               to 200,000 people,

now the residence of poisonous fer-de-lance snakes, ocellated
                               turkeys with iridescent
green wings, blue necks and heads barnacled with orange and red

                               wart-like nodules,
spider monkeys, white-nosed coatis with barred tails, spectacled owls, toucans,
                               red-eyed tree frogs,

jaguars, great curassow birds, and howler monkeys whose aspirated roars,
                               says Chip Brown,
adventurer, author, and journalist extraordinaire, “cross the basso

                               profundo of an African
lion with the sound of metal grinding on a lathe.”
                               In El Mirador

they raised pyramids to you—the Tigre Pyramid, the Jaguar Paw Temple,
                               and La Danta
Pyramid, rising over 230 feet from the jungle floor.

Read More
.Reading time less than 1 minute.

neanderthals

All That Shimmers and Settles Along the Roads of Our Passage

.Reading time 4 minutes.

by Mark Cox

Featured Art: Still Life by Ben Benn

 

After seventeen years, I return home to my ex-wife,

without the cigarettes and bread,

without the woman and children I left her for,

older, empty-handed, and yet

to the same clothes

still in the same drawers,

as if nothing has changed. Read More

Entropy

.Reading time 3 minutes.

by Tracey Knapp

Featured Art: Life by Simona Aizicovici

 

All those times I crossed the bridge to see you

and not one lap dance. We haven’t held hands

since that time in the rain forest, chanting Lord

knows what in Sanskrit. I saw my first wild boar there but

even he took off for the brush. Someone always ends the

moment. Another call dropped on your iPhone,

the cosmic forces at work. My dog sighs and stares

at my flip-flop from his pillow. At work, the office is

separated into orderly earth-toned cubes. Read More

Look

.Reading time 2 minutes.

by James Lineberger

 

Look at this, this

petri dish. Here are stem cells

replicated

as heart cells. Look. The heart cells

are beating. The cells do not

know the difference. They think they are hearts. Read More

Why Men Don’t Write About Their Wives

.Reading time 2 minutes.

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

Read More

Solo in the Skeleton Key

.Reading time 1 minute.

by Elton Glaser

Who would plant, in this stony ground, narcissus and love-lies-bleeding?

It’s too late to be young among the primitives. Winter withers the stalks.

The air reeks of it, decay and the odor of innocence gone to seed.

The time for riots and tattoos is over. Who dances the Dazzle now, or the Swerve?

Long before the armada and the asp, Antony must have tired of Cleopatra,

Those heavy breasts, that midnight skin, a name that thickened in his throat.

In the heat from eating an incandescent pepper, there’s neither passion

Nor apocalypse, just tongues in hell, just retching and the runs.

What honey comes from old drones? Forget the hoodoo and the holy water.

Pray only in Jerusalem, at the Church of Our Lady of the Spasm.

Love’s no trick of ecstasy, no lightning strike in the mind. Each new child

Struggles out, bloody and stunned, one more last chance to get it right.

Read More

“Endangered Hawaiian monk seals keep getting eels stuck up their noses and scientists want them to stop”

.Reading time 1 minute.

–title of an article published in the Sante Fe New Mexican, Dec. 8, 2018

by Emmy Newman

Featured Art: White Lines by Irene Rice Pereira

 

All teenage seals, the foolhardy lummoxes

of their families, the ones with belly rings and chokers,

vanilla frosting flavored lip gloss and no car payments.

Four seals with eels up there, the scientists write, so far.

 

She looks unconcerned: blissful, the snapshot seal,

her eyes shut tight, the supple buttery wrinkles

of her neck skin folding over like a pair of winter socks

and two visible inches of eel dangling from her left nostril. Read More

Marriage at 17 Years

.Reading time 2 minutes.

by Gary Dop

Featured Art: Proposed House, Coral Gables, Florida, Interior Perspective by Stuart Earl Cohen



“Come here—quick!” You know it, her serious, nearly

whispered call. She says, “I think it’s a squirrel.”

Brown bulb of fur, it’s tucked behind an old chair.

The kids sleep upstairs; you have both abandoned

your evening’s screens. You are here,

a step away from a baby flying squirrel. You grab

the wicker hamper. She says, “Don’t scare it.”

Hamper in one hand, towel in the other, you wonder

how to catch it without scaring it. The big-eyed squirrel

knows you’re there. “Be careful,” you hear as you swipe at

the squirrel who scampers, fast as life,

into the wicker trap you lift and close. Read More

Coyotes

.Reading time 60 minutes.

By Terri Leker
Winner of the 2019 New Ohio Review Fiction Contest, selected by Claire Vaye Watkins

The coyotes moved into the woods behind my house just after I learned I was pregnant. On a quiet June morning, while my husband slept, I pulled on my running shoes and grabbed a leash from a hook at the back door. Jute danced around my feet on her pipe-cleaner legs, whining with impatience. It would have taken more than this to wake Matt, but I hushed her complaints with a raised finger and we slipped outside. A light breeze blew the native grasses into brown and golden waves as we wandered, camouflaging Jute’s compact frame. She sniffed the dirt, ears telescoping as though she were asking a question. When we reached a shady thicket of red madrones and live oaks, I unclipped the leash and wound it around my wrist.

It was over with Richard, had been since I’d found out about the baby. Anyway, I had come to believe that adultery sounded more illicit than it actually was. Between managing my schedule with Matt and making time to rendezvous with Richard, an affair often seemed more about time management than sexual gratification. I was meticulous with the calendar, but I would have known that the baby was Matt’s regardless, because Richard’s sperm could not locomote. He had told me so early on, while showing me the master bedroom of his faithfully restored North Oakland Victorian. His unexpected disclosure had interrupted my admiration of the exposed brick walls, so unusual for the earthquake-conscious Bay Area. Matt was having dinner just then with friends, thinking I was helping my mother set up her new television (she would be dead within a few months, but we all pretended to be optimists then), so he was eating eggplant parmesan at the Saturn Café as I lay with Richard on his king-sized bed, hearing words like motility and capacitation. Richard’s sober tone had suggested that I might comfort him in his sterility, which I did, if the definition of comfort was a passionate encounter that lasted as long as one might spend unboxing a 48-inch HDTV and connecting it to both Netflix and Hulu. But Matt and I had tried to have a baby for three years, so I took the pregnancy as a sign to recommit myself to my husband, who, predictably, jumped up and down on our unmade bed when I shared the news, attempting, in his white-socked excitement, to pull me up with him, not realizing that doing so might judder the bundle of cells loose, delivering me back to Richard and a childless but aesthetically pleasing life.

Read More

Revising Bosch’s Hell Panel for the 21st Century

.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Kelly Michels

“Hundreds of couples toting AR-15 rifles packed a Unification church in Pennsylvania on Wednesday to have their marriages blessed and their weapons celebrated as ‘rods of iron’ that could have saved lives in a recent Florida school shooting.” Reuters, Feb. 28th 2018

They come wearing crowns of gold bullets in their hair, bodies drenched

in white satin, white lace, tulle, lining the pews on a weekday morning,

AR-15s in their hands, calling on god to save them. There is no

such thing as salvation, only the chosen and too few are chosen.

Children are told to stay inside, schools locked shut, swings hushed,

even the wind says, quiet, as the guns are blessed, dark O of mouths

waiting to exhale a ribbon of smoke. The children are told to crouch

in the closet, to stay still as butterflies on butcher knives

while the men take their brides and iron rods, saluting the book

of revelation, its scribbled last words, the coming of a new kingdom.

Don’t speak. Don’t breathe. Pretend you are an astronaut gathering wisteria

twigs in a crater of the moon. Pretend the twigs are the arm of a broken mandolin.

Someday, it will speak. Someday it will sing. Dear God, bless the self in the age

of the self, bless this bracelet of rifle shells, bless our god-given individual

right. I know you want to sing. You want to sing like blackbirds escaping

from the mouth of a grasshopper. But remember, we are only here

for a little while, so for now, keep quiet, pretend we are somewhere else.

Pretend we’re practicing our handwriting, the lollipop of a lowercase i,

the uppercase A, a triangle in an orchestra, the different sounds it makes

if you strike it the right way. Practice the slow arch of a R. Now—

form the words. Scribble run, scribble come, scribble mom, scribble when

will this be over? But for god’s sake, be quiet. Don’t cry. Just write. Scribble

on the walls, on your arms, scribble as if it’s the last thing you will ever say.

Pretend it sounds like music. And if the devil comes through that door, remember

to go limp, lie on the floor like a tumble of legos. Don’t move. Don’t speak.

Don’t breathe. Pretend you’re already dead. Remember, this is how you live.

Read More

American Bachelor Party

.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Conor Bracken

Featured Art: Star and Flag Design Quilt by Fred Hassebrock

Here I am inside a firing range.

Loading and holding and aiming a pistol

the way America has taught me.

Hitting the paper target in

the neck the mullet the arm the arm.

The old-growth pines inside me

do not burst into orange choruses of flame.

I am disappointed I’m not making

a tidy cluster center mass.

Around me fathers and offspring

as plain as stop signs give

each other tips while they reload.

A man one stall over cycles between a revolver and a rifle

while another draws a Glock

from a hidden waistband holster

over and over again, calibrating

his shift from civilian to combat stance

with the dead-eyed focus of a Christmas shopper.

These could be my people.

If I never talked

about the stolid forest inside me

planted by those I do and do not know

who died because America allows you

however many guns and rounds you can afford—

if I never talked about my manliness

that runs cockeyed through the forest

trying to evolve into an ax or flame or bulldozer

so it can be the tallest, most elaborate apparatus

taming local wind into breath,

they might give me a nickname.

I could practice training my fear with them

like ivy across a soot-blacked brick façade

and they might call me The Ruminator.

Virginia Slim.

Spider, even.

We’d grow so close that they would call me late at night

asking for an alibi again

and if I asked groggily ‘who’s this’

they’d say ‘you know who’

and I would.

Their name blooming from my mouth

like a bubble or a muzzle flash.

A flower

fooled out of the ground

by the gaps in winter’s final gasps.

Read More

Red Flags

.Reading time 19 minutes.

By Whitney Collins

Featured Art: The Kiss by Max Ernst

The first thing Ilona saw when she got to the beach was the man, bleeding from his leg with a crowd of people around him. She was far up and away in Bill’s condominium, looking down at him from the master bedroom window with her two suitcases in her hands. The man held out his bleeding leg for everyone to admire. Half of the crowd looked down at the leg, half looked out at the ocean. After a minute, the man spread his arms out wide as if to show everyone how much he loved them. Thissssss much.

“It faces the beach, see? Just like I promised.” Bill came up behind Ilona and palmed her breasts. “What a view, huh?” But Bill wasn’t looking at the view. He had his short face in Ilona’s long neck and was missing out on the man and the leg and the crowd, which was just fine by Ilona. When Bill went out into the condominium’s kitchen, to show her sons some sort of fishing contraption, Ilona went right up to the window, still holding her luggage, and kissed the glass. She had been darkly depressed about herself and her life the whole trip down, and then the man with the bleeding leg appeared and something lightened in her. There was still some good in the world.

*

The first night, Ilona pretended to sleep in the guest room, to set a good example, but when she could hear her sons breathing deeply from the adjacent room and knew they were asleep, she went into the master bedroom and got into bed with Bill. She had accepted Bill’s proposal mostly—no, entirely—because she was penniless. Her husband had drunk himself to death because of the debt, and all she was was a speech therapist. How was she to pay for her youngest’s lung medication, much less electricity and soup? It only made sense to sleep with someone like Bill, even if the new ring lay on her finger like a lead bullet.

Read More

The Dock Hand

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Kathryn Merwin

this is a poem about losing things.

not a poem

for the boys who barreled their broken

bodies into the lightningwalls

of my body. for the knife

of let me       

in, baby, the trigger-finger

of let’s

go back to my place, just one drink.    

you, draining the blue

from my veins, dyeing

empty sheets of skin,

blue again, purple,

blue. the color

of healing of bloodpool

       beneath skin.  for the crushed

       powder in my jack & coke of

no one will ever believe you.

you’ll spend the summer in alaska

and we’ll both pretend

like we’re not losing

something.

you have no idea

       what i’m gonna do       to you.

yes,            I do.

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A Cure for Grief

.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Emily Franklin

Featured Art: Still Life With Apples and Pears by Paul Cézanne

There isn’t one. But here is a pot of jam,

apricots plumped with booze, lemon rind, sugar—

the stuff of August evenings,

of dirt roads trimmed both sides

with heavy woods that narrow and finally

funnel to the ocean. To the house

on Buzzard’s Bay—deck built, rebuilt,

expanded and rotted, built again, everyone

toe to thigh on chairs, neither comfortable

nor attractive, scattered each afternoon

as we scrubbed clams collected in low tide

or painted rocks or read the paper

or stared out as though we knew it was always

on the verge of ending. Those nights,

jackknifed open with wind and visitors,

dinner not yet cooked, someone asking

someone else what was ready to be picked;

green beans knocking like wind chimes,

nubby new potatoes, the summer’s experiment

with asparagus that we wouldn’t trim—

each stalk pushing and protruding until it appeared

a new creature had clawed its way up from the earth.

Now I offer this: apricot jam from last summer

that we did not know was last. Your instructions:

unscrew the Mason jar, cribbed from the Cape pantry.

Each morning you will awake alone. This is when

you dip your teaspoon or knife into the jam

or even your piece of actual bread. No one is judging—

insert crust directly into jar. Taste the apricots.

For this moment have summer—

and him—back. The jar is large. So is grief.

This is what you’ll sample each day,

fruit slipping against lemon, and sugar, and time.

When the jar is empty, days will have been

gotten through, too.

The porch is rotting now, joists breaking loose,

everything undone as though he—and the rest of us—

are already gone, but let us be suspended

right there at 5pm, drinks in hand,

sun still up, children barely grown.

Eat the jam. This is all we have to offer.

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Thresher Derby

.Reading time 32 minutes.

By Patrick Bernhard

Featured Art: Daemonie 39 by Paul Klee

The undertow had carried Daisy far enough out to sea that her bullseye swim cap probably looked like a floating pastry to the judges, even with their binoculars. She hoped that rest of her looked similarly delectable to the Medium-Class blues that the scouting report had placed a reasonable 19% of hunting in the Frontier Belt; nobody had caught anything elsewhere, outside of a zebra shark that wandered into the Sandbar Belt that the chatterbox from Bethany Beach managed to cosh, catch, and drag. Not that she was worried by that bag; Chatterbox’s zebra had the telltale torpor of a bad fungal infection, so it barely put up a fight, and she’d repeatedly coshed more dorsal than skull and in shallower water, too, losing major accuracy marks that she couldn’t afford to have subtracted.

Daisy’s choice of enticement pattern – tread for ten seconds, followed by a burst of strategic thrashing – was fairly exhausting, with the current more active than the lifeguards’ flags were indicating, but the rumor was that deep-water endurance played up heavily with the judges at this particular beach, mostly due to sentimental reasons. It was apparently at this depth that the woman that this derby was named after, Betsey Gulliver, managed to drag in a four-foot thresher even after a whip from the tail of the shark in question had lacerated her left eye and given her ear a flat top. Thus, the parameters for this derby’s Spontaneous Technical Victory – cosh, catch, and drag a Medium-Class thresher – were established. The banner reading “Betsey Gulliver’s Thresher Derby” was stretched above the stands like a giant volleyball net, painted in garish lettering whose crooked slant was evident even from where Daisy was, as if the banner had been made in a group effort by the local middle school.

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Lunch Duty

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Barry Peters

What I know of her

cackling in the back row,

sassing the boy next to her,

absent, tardy, bathroom pass,

not doing any goddam work

and this is the easiest

history class in the history

of American education:

     

what I know of her

is that for one moment

each day, after escaping

the apartment,

the bus fights,

first-period algebra,

second-period biology,

third-period gym

               

she hunkers down alone

in a corner of the cafeteria

communing with some

XXtra Flamin’ Hot Cheetos,

oblivious to the orange

residue on her teeth,

smiling as she offers me

the open cellophane bag.

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Lucy’s

.Reading time 4 minutes.

By T.J. Sandella

Featured Art: Actor’s Mask by Paul Klee

I confused guacamole

with guano

until I was seventeen

when my girlfriend’s mom

patiently explained the difference

plopping a dollop onto my plate

next to the Spanish rice

catapulting me

on the long flight

from meat and potatoes

to masala and paneer

for the first time

as a freshman in college

tartare and foie gras

as a grad student

and so it goes

the older I get

the farther I travel

with my tongue

curries and compotes

caraway and cardamom

ginger and jasmine

and planes and trains

to aromatic rooms

in cities I can taste

better than I can pronounce

which have all led me here

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Deluge

.Reading time 43 minutes.

By Rachel Eve Moulton

Sara doesn’t sleep anymore. Not for more than an hour at a time. Her body feels sore, her joints loose, as if a leg could slip free if she isn’t careful. It’s May, her first spring in the house, and the rain has been falling steadily since early April. The Mad River jumped its banks some weeks before, and, in a gesture of solidarity, Sara’s body has ballooned at the ankles, the thighs. She’s 38 weeks pregnant with twin girls, and even her fingers have grown thick, her wedding ring now worn on a chain around her neck.

Sara is beginning to think she’s made a mistake.

Her friends told her that from the start. Who gives up their whole life for a man they barely know? They took bets on how long she’d stay, calling up to see if he’d turned out to be a serial killer. But, when she announced the pregnancy, the jokes stopped. Phone calls stopped too, as if no one knew what to say to her anymore. The only bright spots were the times she allowed herself to dream about her past selves, a hundred different versions—waiting tables in the little black apron at 16, skin smelling of bacon grease; the summer she was so poor that she only ate peanut butter; reading in the gaudy canopy bed she’d had as a child; and the graffitied bathroom of the club where they’d danced to 80s music in college. Although it scares her, if the babies weren’t an actual part of her physical self, she would flee. Leave this sudden husband in search of Louisville or any one of her past selves, because this one. This one. This one would not do.

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Heartbeat Hypothesis

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Robert Wood Lynn

As it turns out there is this silly trick to knowing how long you,

no anybody, no any creature will live:

divide the average lifespan of an animal by its metabolic rate

and you will get a number that is about one billion. That’s what we get,

about one billion heartbeats on this planet

one billion, a magic enough number and even though physics has struggled,

struggles and in all likelihood will continue to struggle forever to find

its unifying equation, here is biology’s, the kind

of surprise you trip over because it has just been sitting there all along,

like a golden retriever on shag carpeting, one already most of the way

through her billion and where she is joined by

the field mouse and the blue whale each getting one billion beats on Earth

unless someone or something intervenes and quiet now you can hear it

tick ticking away, your billion ticking like the kind

of clock they mostly don’t make anymore and once I believed that

in every clock there were tiny creatures moving the parts and now

I cannot help but know inside of these creatures

there are more parts marching even faster to the same number

onebillion onebillion onebillion and it can drive you mad even

billionaires go mad cartoonishly mad with the one

thing they cannot buy more heartbeats and they sit in a tube someplace

air-conditioned in Arizona their rhythm frozen while animated mice

power the clocks and calculators that keep this math

like a metronome:       terrible, free.

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Somewhere Outside of Loveland

.Reading time 40 minutes.

By Amy Bee

Featured Art: “Design for 4-seat Phaeton,” by Brewster & Co.

My mom kicked me out this morning. If you’re still here by the time Doug gets home, I’m having you committed, she said, so I put on some jeans and ran to my old elementary school across the street. I headed toward the two tubes next to the monkey bars. I’d spent a lot of recesses in those coveted tubes. Now that I was in 8th grade, the whole playground appeared fake somehow, like a toy model version of itself.

I ducked into one tube and lay so my body conformed to the cool, smooth curvature of cement. Wrapping my arms around my knees, I pressed toward my chin, and wished myself as small as possible; maybe I could also be a toy model version of myself. Phantom spasms of her anger coursed through me like a second heartbeat. The way she’d sat on my back and pulled me up by my hair to hit my face. How no one loved me, she’d yelled, no one except her. How she was the only one who wanted me in the first place.

I gazed at the graffiti inked in marker crisscrossing the ceiling above me. It read like a map of the universe conceived by grade school astrologers. Terry eats poop! Stay 2 cool 4 school xoxo! Jenni wuz here! I brushed a finger along the faded words, and carefully traced the scribbles one by one; mouthing each word in quiet incantation over and over until eventually, my tears dried out and the only heart left beating was my own.

Outside, the weekend janitor mowed away at a stubbly soccer field. Birds chirped. Kids played foursquare on the blacktop. My stomach rumbled. I checked my jean pockets and found 50₵. Enough for two Little Debbie Rolls from the gas station.

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Kept in the Dark: Poetry, Collaboration, and Collapse in “Pandaemonium” and “Tom and Viv”

.Reading time 18 minutes.
by Matthew VanWinkle
Featured art: View from Mount Holyoke, Northampton, Massachusetts, after a Thunderstorm—The Oxbow by Thomas Cole

In a sheepish prefatory note to the belatedly published “Kubla Khan,” Coleridge recalls a felicitous if ultimately frustrated exception to his usual habits of poetic composition. He writes that “all the images [in “Kubla Khan”] rose up before him as things, with a parallel production of the correspondent expressions, without any sensation or consciousness of effort.” Coleridge identifies his usual artistic challenge, here overcome with miraculous ease, as finding words for images. Those who seek to bring poets, and poetry, to life on film are confronted with the counter-difficulty of finding images for words. Or, more precisely, filmmakers face the daunting task of rendering the wrangling of words visually compelling. (The footage of Coleridge reciting “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison” to delirious crowds at Wembley Stadium has been lost, regrettably.) So how do filmmakers inject motion and volume to a creative process that is presumably usually so still, so muted?

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Jean Cocteau and “Orpheus”: The Poet as Filmmaker

.Reading time 16 minutes.
by Steve Vineberg
Featured Art: Valley with Fir (Shade on the Mountain) by Henri-Edmond Cross

Jean Cocteau recognized no boundaries between forms of art. He was a poet, a novelist, a playwright, and a visual artist, and each of these media also functioned as a bridge that led him into filmmaking—not just conceptually, since movies are a hybrid of all of these other forms, but often literally. He filmed two of his plays, Les parents terribles and The Eagle Has Two Heads, and wrote the screenplay for Jean-Pierre Melville’s adaptation of his novel Les enfants terribles, and his great 1950 movie Orpheus reimagines his 1926 play of the same name. Read More

Keep Me In By Keeping Me Out: Poetry On Screen

.Reading time 22 minutes.
by Carrie Oeding
Featured Art: Viennese Café: The Man of Letters by Moriz Jung

In the late Nineties I repeatedly watched Hal Hartley’s Henry Fool (1997), not really certain why. I had first rented it only because Parker Posey was in it, but the cult film stayed with me like the Sylvia Plath poems I fanatically read as a teen in my small county library in rural Minnesota. Both seemed like mostly impenetrable, but meaningful code. Both were transgressive.

The big difference between these obsessions was that I trusted what Plath was doing and didn’t trust Hartley. Or, I didn’t trust my obsession with the film, which follows the lives of two aspiring writers. What I find compelling twenty years later is that I have the same response. Henry Fool is funny, repulsive, wildly off the mark about the process of writing, and wildly provocative; and I now think that it’s something this otherwise explicit film withholds—the book-length, controversial poem which the plot is built on—that continues to fascinate and repel. Read More

A Personal Affair: The Making of a Poetry Film

.Reading time 22 minutes.
by Michele Poulos
Featured Art: The Chariot of Apollo by Odilon Redon

In my twenties, I moved around a lot. I spent much of the first half of that decade in New York City where I changed apartments at least once, and sometimes two or three times, each year. At twenty-seven I moved to New Orleans. At twenty-eight I ended up in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. At twenty-nine I was back in New Orleans, then at thirty I was in Richmond, Virginia, where I’ve lived, off and on, since 2000. With each relocation, one DVD moved with me every time: Poetry in Motion. Read More

Against Literary Biopics Generally, Unless, Maybe—But Definitely and Especially Against “The End of the Tour”

.Reading time 21 minutes.
by Kathryn Nuernberger
Featured Art: Study of Arms for “The Cadence of Autumn” by Evelyn De Morgan

When I walked out on A Quiet Passion, the 2016 Emily Dickinson biopic, I decided I was walking out on all biopics about writers forever. 1 The genre has built-in structural problems that seem almost insurmountable. For one thing, a writer’s work is neither their life nor their personality. For another, staring out a window or at a blank page cannot be sustained on screen for longer than a single montage. Moreover, a life well-lived2 seldom has a coherent narrative arc.

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Beautiful, Brilliant, and Dead: Portraits of the Female Poet in Film

.Reading time 19 minutes.
by Danusha Laméris
Featured Art: Standing Girl, Back View by Egon Schiele

The film Maya Dardel, a 2017 American-Polish drama, written and directed by Zachary Cotler and Magdalena Zyzak, opens with a famous, gravellyvoiced, fictional poet, played by the mysterious Lena Olin, contemplating her demise. Sequestered at her hideaway in the mountains of Santa Cruz, California, overlooking the redwood forest (around the bend from where I happen to live) she’s decided to kill herself. But not before choosing a young, male heir, whom she will select by way of a contest, through a sort of Atalanta-esque maneuver. Only, instead of a race, she will subject her suitors to feats of sexual and psychological endurance. All of which she has announced on NPR.

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Dispatches From the Near Future

.Reading time less than 1 minute.

Featuring poems by Ruth Bardon and Jiordan Castle and a new story by Joseph Rakowski, as well as a variety of timely pieces from previous print issues of NOR: poems by Tanya Grae, Okla Elliot, Emily Sernaker, and Emily Mohn-Slate; a story by Max Bell; and an essay by Kyle Minor. 

Each piece is accompanied by beautiful artwork, some by contemporary artists Corran Brownlee and Barbara Pierson, and others courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Open Access collection.

New Ohio Review Issue 26 (Originally printed Fall 2019)

.Reading time less than 1 minute.

Newohioreview.org is archiving previous editions as they originally appeared. We are pairing the pieces with curated art work, as well as select audio recordings. In collaboration with our past contributors, we are happy to (re)-present this outstanding work.

Issue 26 compiled by Julia Smarelli