By Bryan Owens

Featured Art: Ananas (Pineapples) by Charles Martin

Is it against school dress code for a student to wear sweatpants
that say PINK across the rear? I have CC’d the school director.
Please advise.

Though it is not stated explicitly in the student handbook,
I think it is safe to say this article of clothing
is not school appropriate.

If we do not adhere to the dress code policy
as it is stated explicitly, we are doing these kids
a tragic disservice in their preparation for the real world.

I agree, given the suggestiveness of the images it raises
& its placement in relative context with that which
it is alluding to, this article of clothing should not be tolerated at school.

Well, to what extent do we implement
school policy based on our individual theories of how one article,
not explicitly referred to in the handbook, defies or complies
with the fundamental principles of the guidelines?

So does that mean we let slide what is merely not stated
in the handbook?

How is PINK suggestive it’s just a brand name
I have my own pair at home super comfortable

Of course we don’t merely let it slide!!! but if every member
of the faculty is meant to uphold the dress code policy
through individual subjectivity, how can we have any consistency
throughout the faculty? The student has gone the whole morning
with no faculty sending her to the office!!!

PINK is suggestive as sexual innuendo or metonym
for female reproductive parts. Our dress code is in place
to protect our female students from themselves,
thinking it is good to provoke what teenage boys are already thinking.

Comfortable??? I’m so glad for you, but would you wear them to school???

I would if I could! : )

By Maxine Scates

Featured Art: Star Flower by Mary Altha Nims

“It’s only a matter of time before eternity,”
reads a sign in front of a church, turning the day
epigrammatic. But rather than think of the time I have left,
I think about all that goes wrong. For instance,
how did that cow, an Angus, red tag in its ear, die
by the side of the road? Did someone shoot it
because it stood as still as the time I’ve already spent
does not? Its coat was still shining, sleek as that coat
I’d only dreamed of buying all those years ago
until a boy asked me out on a date and I finally
had somewhere to go. I’d already saved the money,
and did not consider whether or not such a coat
was too hot for L.A. I thought instead of the stars
I ushered to their courtside seats in my hip-length toga
at the Fabulous Forum, the stars who followed the ass
I’d only gradually understood I’d been hired for,
the stars who wore leather coats, shiny and supple
as their skin when they stepped from the lengthening dusk
of fall days like the gods they were without ever
breaking a sweat. So on my day off I opened the door
to Discount Leathers, which smelled of barnyards
and fields I had never seen though now I think
of that smell as more like the roadside of lingering death
where I hope the cow’s carcass has mercifully
been picked clean by vultures leaving nothing behind
but bones and a dull hide. I picked my coat
quickly, laid my cash on the counter and got out, but
not before I saw the smirk on the salesman’s face,
not before he saw how I believed that cloaked
in my coat my skin would be soft, my hair glossy,
saw how I knew nothing about anything, all of it
a mystery in whose maze I was certain I wandered
alone. I don’t remember the boy or how the date went.
The coat was too hot. It was heavy and felt like the hide
that it was, stiff and unyielding. I took it to the cleaners
up by Sears Liquors and whatever they did turned it
whitish, marbled as a slab of meat. I stood at the counter
and paid for it and never asked what had gone wrong.

By Craig van Rooyen

Featured Art: Flowers of a Hundred Worlds (Momoyogusa): Wisteria (Fuji) by Kamisaka Sekka 神坂 雪佳

In a strange city this afternoon, I looked for myself
on a cart of bargain books. I recognized
my mother’s faith and thrift in “Macrame for Dummies,”
and bought the book for 50 cents.
I recognized my father’s dark devotion
in a tattered copy of “My Utmost For His Highest.”
I fanned the pages with a thumb, felt
the dank breath of the Holy Ghost,
and put it down. I was not there. Not in
“Seven Habits Of Ecstatic Gurus.” Not in
“How To Pick Up Pretty Women With An Ugly Dog”
or “Twitterpated: An Instruction Manual
For Self-Discovery In 140 Characters Or Less.”
On the corner, a quartet of starving students played
“Let’s Get Lost,” faking it in the way of the talented young
winking with their instruments at the business casuals
waiting for a bus. Art is about loss,
they seemed to play. Can you dig it, man?
And I can—suddenly 47 and away from familiar signs,
too old to be discovered; too young to be invisible,
sitting in Union Square under
the lifted tail and muscular haunches of
George Washington’s horse—its neck arched under rein,
fighting to cross East 17th to Forever 21.
Valley Forge behind, knowing not
where he’s going next, our country’s father
(in this bronzed moment) is surely unable to predict
his journey’s end: in bed with a cold, bled to death
by four doctors earnestly trying to save him.
I’m happy to sit in his moon-shadow for now,
park lamps blinking on, smell of goat cheese and ganja
finding my nose, trying not to listen to the soft clicking
next to me as two young people introduce
their oral piercings in the dark. Across the way,
the girl with the Mohawk stops playing her bongo drum
to tell a friend about a rainbow brother who saved her
in the Bronx. Took me in and we smoked a bowl—
no questions asked, no strings attached. On the corner,
a street preacher finds his voice, improvising his holy rant
on a theme of goats and sheep, dividing us into lost and saved.
We’re all both, I want to tell him, cycling through a life-long
game of hide and seek. Even me—sitting under Washington’s
horse’s ass, smoking the flare of my guilty Marlboro
to the filter and feeling the city turn on around me—
a lost coin burning to be found.

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 17 compiled by Benjamin Ervin. 

By Donald Platt

Featured Image: Diana and Actaeon (Diana Surprised in her Bath) by Camille Corot, 1836

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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