If Only I’d Met You Earlier

November 27, 2012.Reading time 1 minute.

By Adrienne Su

Featured Art: A Vase of Flowers by Margareta Haverman

We’re at it again. It’s hard not to rewrite
the years, though we couldn’t have known
they were wrong, if they were. Life
isn’t longer than it is, so off we go,

picturing how it might have happened,
though one of us would have been taken,
or both, and one of us lived up north, one
by the warmest sea. We had no common

travel destinations, we rarely read
the same books, there wasn’t one same
friend, and either might have fled
if it started to matter. Apologies, if made,

might not have been accepted. In truth
we could only have met on the street,
on one of your trips to the city. We’d both
have held back. The courage to speak

would’ve yielded “Excuse me,” no more,
all vision cordoned off by the sun.
So we might as well indulge in the words
for their sound: You would’ve been the one.

In the Second Month of Parched Land

November 26, 2012.Reading time 16 minutes.

By Daiva Markelis

Featured Art: Stroll with Balloons by Hughie Lee Smith

We came across the camels every time we picnicked that merciless autumn, huge herds grazing on sparse vegetation. Camel comes from jamal, the Arabic root word for beauty. From a distance they did look lovely, their curvy silhouettes mimicking the contours of the dunes. Up close, however, they seemed slightly ridiculous, like bad female impersonators, batting their Scarlett O’Hara lashes to keep the sand out of their eyes, their long necks sloping toward us, then coyly withdrawing.

That we saw them so near the city surprised us. We’d heard stories of naive Westerners who’d driven for hours looking for adventure—for camels—and then stopped to explore the landscape with their pitifully small water bottles, supplemented, in some cases, by flasks of 100-proof siddiqi. Some were lost in the Empty Quarter, the largest desert in the world, never to be heard from again. I wrote a friend: If I were to start a literary journal here, I’d call it The Empty Quarterly.

Sometimes we’d see a row of black tents with goats tethered to a nearby post. Once, an old Bedouin waved a gnarled hand back and forth like a weathered stick. I thought we were in trouble, trespassing on his property, but as he ambled closer all he said, in a slow, proud English, was “See my camels.” He invited my husband into the largest of the tents. I waited in the air-conditioned Mazda, fiddling with the radio. Masculine voices jabbered in endless variations of the little Arabic I knew: Assalamu alaikum wa rahmatullah, Allah akbar, Inshalla. The sounds seemed to emanate from deep down the throat, a rush of rough and phlegmy h’s, a conspiracy of k’s.

The Circus Lion’s Lament

November 25, 2012.Reading time 1 minute.

By Michael Derrick Hudson

Featured Art: Circus Clown and Dancer by Marc Chagall

So what happened? I used to be a lion, crashing
the herd and yanking down stampeding

zebras on the hoof. Days spent pissing hot gold

across the Serengeti! The ground gone tawny
with my scat! Those long afternoons

of fly-blown torpor, those gristly jawfuls of prey

and those after-fuck yawns. At night, snoozing
into my paws, I’d twitch and thump

the muscular scourge of my dreaming tail . . .

But Emily the Elephant jerks my chain, suggests
my ferocious howls lack plausibility

or conviction. O how I howl! I can rend the air

with lost prerogatives! Demolish the audience
with has-been imperium! I worry

and tooth the Ringmaster’s splintery stool. Dolts

applaud. Clowns in a jalopy lampoon
terror, hitched to their posse of sidekick knuckle-

draggers waddling away in diapers and tuxedos . . .

Come night, I’ll sniff the corners for what’s left
of my petrified stink, the proof

I somehow still exist. Breakfast’s tossed in at six.

Animals

November 24, 2012.Reading time 5 minutes.

By Brock Guthrie

Featured Art: Leg in Hammock by Edward Weston

One is what one looks at—well, at least partially. —Joseph Brodsky

All morning in my hammock burning
a tight one, poised with pencil and notebook
and seven-week beard, I look to the pines
outside my cabin, seeking inspiration
from the birds and the squirrels
whose singing and foraging, whose
exclamations, no, arguments, reflect
my inner my inner my inner . . .
and every so often my cousin Ricky returns
from hunting rabbits on my four-wheeler
to tell me he’s thought of a new way
to beat off: Anywhere around here to buy
watermelons? Even his camo flannel
can’t conceal that Superdome belly
and I hate to think how long
since anyone’s seen his diminutive dangle
so I tell him in all seriousness, my sympathy
sincere, You might be on to something,
but after he tokes and rides away
I get inspired, realize I should’ve said
Go drive around these country roads, man,
look for signs! and even Ricky would’ve
nodded with a look of feigned profundity
like he’s posing for an author photo
but I let that moment go

Appropriate Interjection

November 23, 2012.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Brock Guthrie

Featured Art: Painting with Troika by Wassily Kandinsky

Seven in the morning laying insulation
and wiring electric with a friend and his friend
who make money building houses.
Laying insulation at seven on Saturday
because of a promise made the night before
at the bar, where the ambition to learn
something about house circuitry
appeared like a blown fuse. This pink shit
makes you itch. Not so with my friend here—
he’s worked with this stuff so long
he sleeps on it, wakes up
throws a piece in the toaster, eats it slowly
with cream cheese and coffee. Shouldn’t we
be wearing respirators or something?
How the hell should I know?
But this is good. This kind of work
is good for me—re-callous these grandma hands
I’ve grown. Like back in those summers
when I tar-sealed blacktop
on ninety-five-degree early mornings. “And then
in the afternoons,” I tell them. On break
we smoke a joint in front of the site, drink
water, sit there in silence. Silent like that
until I start to count breaths. And wonder
what happened to last night’s beer brotherhood.
But then I recognize the similarity
between our collective awareness
and the object of our unfocused gazes:
Margaret’s Creek, running muddy and a little high
along the other side of the road.
I could try to articulate this thought—
it might break the silence. Then again it might
make more, and I want to work with these guys
on future jobs, so instead I tell them how
I once caught a five-pound largemouth
a quarter-mile up this creek
that jerked so hard in my grip
she stuck two of the treble hook barbs
from the top-water Rapala I caught her with
into my thumb, how I tried for an hour
to loosen them from the nerve, feeling it
in my front teeth, fish in the water, gone,
how I had to push the points
clear through the side of my thumb
and clip the barbs with rusty wire cutters.
“Sure,” I add, “there’s good fishing in this creek
if you know the good holes.”
Then my friend’s friend holds out his left thumb,
a nubby little thing, tells us about an accident
he had with a circular saw.

Play it by Ear

November 22, 2012.Reading time 59 minutes.

By Claudia Peirce

Featured Art: The Big Red Ball by Ellen Lanyon

Recently I’ve become a “regular” at an especially sub-standard diner called Sam’s World. Although I have no special fondness for the soggy potatoes, greasy burgers or limp lettuce leaves they dish up, Sam’s World is within walking distance. This is important because I have no car and my apartment has no kitchen. There is an old, barely functioning refrigerator in the narrow hallway between the bathroom and the only other room. I don’t hold out much hope for this refrigerator since I can’t bring myself to defrost it. A solid block of ice has formed over the opening to the freezer, and at some point I expect the whole thing will just blow up.

One day I might be out of debt and able to afford an apartment larger than one hundred and fifty square feet. Then again, I may not. When I consider the size of my indebtedness I realize I could quite easily be dead before I pay it off.

Anyway, it’s Tuesday evening at Sam’s World; I’m not very hungry but am in need of comfort so I decide to skip actual food and have ice cream and coffee.

BUM fired me today but then he changed his mind. He said I didn’t really have to leave but if I wanted to it would be all right. Then he went back to our mail-sorting session as if nothing unusual had occurred. I would guess an episode like that does not bode well for job security.

Fidelity

November 22, 2012.Reading time 8 minutes.

By William Lychack

Sent to visit one summer, Charlie and me, eight or nine years old, our mother putting us on a train in Providence, our father waiting on a platform in Detroit, pigeon murmur of loudspeakers in the station, man carrying our bags out into late afternoon light, click of boot heels across the concrete of parking garage, three of us riding out of the city in that old Impala of his, car floating big and
loose as a motorboat in the dusk, radial drone of road and traffic under everything, burgers and fries in Flint, gas station in Saginaw, another hour to Grayling, Portage Lake, and the fishing cabin with our father at last.

Return of the Media Five

November 21, 2012.Reading time 50 minutes.

By Maya Sonenburg

Second Prize, New Ohio Review Fiction Contest
selected by Charles Baxter

Featured Art: The Eventuality of Destiny by Giorgio de Chirico

I am this heart, this brain, only these, right now—no other. This is what Susan (that’s her name now) tells herself every morning upon waking. She opens her eyes and sees the flaking ceiling above her, sees the wash of sunlight coming through leaves. She touches her chest, feels her heart beating steadily—no rush of fear—and exhales. She’s alone. She touches her head, hair just starting to gray and she’s not bothering to color it. “This can be my new disguise,” she thinks, “my new self.” One of the million selves she’s been in the last twenty-odd years. She rubs her eyes and before she can silence herself again, she remembers days when she thought more, remembered more: a million legs all running toward the Pentagon or induction center or federal courthouse. Flowers in the barrel of a gun. A Viet Cong flag. Giant puppets of Kissinger, Nixon, McNamara. Or their heads atop the bodies of gigantic hawks, perched among the blackened trees of a burned landscape. Bring the war home. A placard of a napalmed child. If people see, they will join us and this atrocity will have to stop. A million hands waving. A million arms, fists raised in salute. They were the million legs and hands of her—her legs and hands—the million-limbed body of resistance, then revolution. Why does she allow these things to come back to her today? Because it’s spring and her curtains are the color of a daffodil she handed to a child once at a demonstration? She remembers when the remembered voices were always with her, singing off-key but loudly together. She never felt alone. But then suddenly she was alone, amputated from everyone and everything she knew. Most mornings she silences these memories of memories, she manages to.

Timeline

November 20, 2012.Reading time 5 minutes.

By Amy Pickworth

Featured Art: Chrysanthemums by Pierre-Auguste Renoir

1880: John Stine proposes to his dead wife’s sister, Eliza. He is a farmer, about forty, she is a spinster midwife. She accepts, telling him, “I will marry you for the sake of the children, but I will never sleep with you.”

This sounds strange—would she have said sleep with in the nineteenth century?—but these are my grandmother’s words. It is 1993 and we are sitting in her house, which smells like cigarettes and meat. The curtains are drawn. Her second husband has been dead for fifteen years. She hasn’t gone blind yet.

1962: The Orlons sing Baby baby when you do the Twist, never never do you get yourself kissed.

Teenagers everywhere Watusi in response.

The Hittite

November 19, 2012.Reading time 53 minutes.

By Alex Myers

Featured Art: Trees Against the Sky by Alfred Hutty

In the spring of the year, the time when kings go out to battle, David sent Joab with
his officers and all Israel with him; they ravaged the Ammonites, and besieged Rabbah. But David remained at Jerusalem. (2 Samuel 11:1)

11:6

He was halfway to Ramstein, the dust of Afghanistan still on his boots, when it finally hit him: home. In April no less. The cherry blossoms would be spinning down from their trees, sweet, light, floating. It was a military jet—noisy, hard, and sidewise—that took him to Germany, him in his camis, sand still hidden in the folds, hardly believing he was out of the desert. Four months into his first deployment to Afghanistan and, after the training and orientation at central command near Kabul, he’d spent his months out in the mountains, riding Humvees along what they called the main corridor, though it was pockmarked and potholed and barely paved, and humping alongside mules to little villages. Escorting the arrival of humanitarian aid, waiting while some brain from intel, some secret squirrel, interrogated the village elder.

The Down

November 18, 2012.Reading time 39 minutes.

By Molly Ficek

Featured Art: Bath of Venus by Sir Edward Burne-Jones

My mother is immersed in membrane when I find her. Eggs cover her body, some cracked and spilling their spoils, some whole, resting on her belly, her breasts. White flecks of eggshells gravel her skin and the runnings of yellow yolks have dried, look like the peelings of a summer burn. Her head is underneath this mess when I look over the side of the tub.

“Mom?”

She surfaces, wipes film back into her hair, the glossy middle of the egg from her cheek. She blinks.

“What are you doing?” I ask.

She looks at me as if it’s quite obvious, which I guess it is. She is taking a bath in chicken eggs, dozens and dozens of them.

“I heard it’s good for your skin,” she says.

“Um…for your hair, maybe. Egg whites are supposed to be good for your hair.”

“Hmm,” she says, inhales a big gulp of air, and sloshes down under the eggs, the water beneath them. She waves her hand up at me. Eggs spill over the sides of the tub and drop onto the bathroom floor, cracking open.

Craigslist

November 17, 2012.Reading time 4 minutes.

By Maya Jewell Zeller

Selected as winner of the 2012 New Ohio Review Poetry Contest by Billy Collins

Featured art: Morning, Interior by Maximilien Luce

It’s all there—the stuff
no one wants to say is theirs anymore,
the single-slate pool table, the six-person
tent, a complete professional tattoo set
complete with analog power supply.

And my father’s 1988 Corvette.
He is no longer sad
to see it go, though he does lament,
my mother tells me, that young people
these days no longer want something like it.
They want a car with good
mileage, something they can take
a child to preschool in, cart around
the six-person tent.

Answer Me by Anri Sala

November 16, 2012.Reading time less than 1 minute.

Let Me Bore You With My PowerPoint

November 16, 2012.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Lee Upton

Featured Art: Answer Me by Anri Sala

—after Peter Porter’s “Let Me Bore You With My Slides”

I’ll say it and I’ll say it and I’ll say it again
and here it’s said for us, illuminated. Do you like my wave effects?
The technology will be bypassed any day now. I know. So?
How did that get in? That’s my kid.
Ha ha. That’s a goat Brenda and I saw blocking the road in Brixton.
Look at the head on that.
Oh—Brenda. Sorry. There goes my job. Just kidding.
That’s not really Brenda. That’s her best friend. No, just kidding.
We were on a wildflower walk, you know? Walking by a stream and
they had these
statues that look amazingly real? I don’t know how they do it.
Carve mushrooms or something and magnify them into these enormous—
we’re moving on. Oh, here we go, our Venn diagram—
why is Brenda wearing antlers?
Okay. On track.
You know, I say something and then what I say is right up here.
I might as well just give away handouts and leave the class.
Tempting. I mean I could go home right about now.
Right when it’s least expected.
Except I’m a professional. I meant to crop that.
That shouldn’t be embedded.
Nice 3-D effects, if I do say so myself.

Animal Science

November 15, 2012.Reading time 33 minutes.

By Michael Davis

Featured Art: Calf Startena by Robert Rauschenberg

It was hot. That was foremost in my thoughts. A sheer, raw, violating hotness that wobbled on the cement quad and in the still dry air above it. I focused on getting across without fainting. I fixed it in my mind. I didn’t have to ask why there weren’t any birds in the Flushing sky. I knew they all had heatstroke, carpets of passed-out sparrows under the campus trees. Even the shade pulsed with heat. I’d accepted the hottest day in Michigan history the way one accepts an incurable disease or a prison term or a bad marriage. I stopped fighting. I let it own me.

As I reached the rusted double doors of Animal Science, the world seemed to tilt. Darkness rushed into the edges of my vision, and the numbness of heat prostration began to twist through my skin. Panting, I sat down on one of the benches in the building atrium, wondering if my three-mile hike from the adjunct lot was destined to put me in the hospital. The central A/C was broken, but there were box fans every thirty yards, and I felt truly grateful to the Animal Science secretaries for providing the hot air current. Hot air that moved felt better than hot air that didn’t.

From The Secret Correspondence: A Novel of Novels

November 14, 2012.Reading time 15 minutes.

By Tom Whalen

Featured Art: Nan and Brian in bed, New York City by Nan Goldin

The Solution

For the life of me, I can’t understand why The Solution has been marketed as a crime novel rather than simply one of a failed marriage; not a single head is severed from its body, not one of the novel’s protagonists dies. He loved her, it seems, and she loved him and then didn’t, while his love lingered like a bad dream. She worked in the business sector of a nameless city in southern Germany, he spent his days writing a treatise on Hegel’s early years and thought. When they met by chance in Vienna seventeen years earlier coming out of a revival of In the Realm of the Senses, she was studying Wittgenstein in Munich, he finishing an MBA in Bern. As he remade his life to accommodate hers, she remade hers to accommodate his. But where is the crime in that? I find here no commission of an act forbidden by public law. Neither she nor he stole one another’s innocence, as far as I can tell, much less raided each other’s savings. Pages of meticulous detail about the German financial industry, reams of notes about Hegel and Napoleon, Napoleon and Hegel, first a paragraph about Napoleon, then a paragraph about Hegel, then a paragraph on both. Once, yes, at a company party, he believes he sees her flirting with her manager, her hand remaining perhaps a bit too long on his shoulder, his eyes glittering with a sort of bemused rapture, and then his hand on her shoulder, followed by the tilt downward of her head, quickly upraised. Had she only been steadying herself, having drunk too much champagne? The husband doesn’t seem to know any more than I do. And how pitiful the novel’s climax! He returns without any advanced warning to an apartment vacant of all her things, including the furniture she had inherited from her grandmother. Room after room, closet after closet, cabinet after cabinet, drawer after drawer emptied of all that once was hers, no farewell note on the kitchen table or left on a pillow, only the stale, sour scent of an emptiness grown suddenly emptier. Good God, what unfathomable creatures we are. Why do we even bother to marry?

The Girl with the Green Face by Alexei Jawlensky

November 13, 2012.Reading time less than 1 minute.

On a passage from Alice Munro’s Lives of Girls and Women

November 13, 2012.Reading time 7 minutes.

By Ann Harleman

Featured Art: The Girl with the Green Face by Alexei Jawlensky

             Since our arrival at my house had not been signaled by the noise of the
             truck we were able to go around to the side and crush up against the wall,
             kissing and loving. I had always thought that our eventual union would
             have some sort of special pause before it, a ceremonial beginning, like a
             curtain going up on the last act of a play. But there was nothing of the
             kind. By the time I realized he was really going ahead with it I wanted
             to lie down on the ground, I wanted to get rid of my panties which were
             around my feet, I wanted to take off the belt of my dress because he was
             pressing the buckle painfully into my stomach. However there was no
             time. I pushed my legs as far apart as I could with those pants tangling
             my feet and heaved myself up against the house wall trying to keep my
             balance. Unlike our previous intimacies, this required effort and attention.
             It also hurt me, though his fingers had stretched me before this time.
             With everything else, I had to hold his pants up, afraid that the white
             gleam of his buttocks might give us away, to anybody passing on the
             street. I developed an unbearable pain in the arches of my feet. Just when I
             thought I would have to ask him to stop, wait, at least till I put my heels to
             the ground for a second, he groaned and pushed violently and collapsed
             against me, his heart pounding. I was not balanced to receive his weight
             and we both crashed down, coming unstuck somehow, into the peony
             border. I put my hand to my wet leg and it came away dark. Blood. When
             I saw the blood the glory of the whole episode became clear to me.
                                         —Alice Munro, Lives of Girls and Women

Last Night Ferguson’s Caught Fire

November 11, 2012.Reading time 3 minutes.

By. Laura Read

In the paper you can see the red booths

turned on their sides, their stuffing

leaking out. The fire spread next door

to the Milk Bottle, which is shaped like one

so you think of the bottles that clinked

on the porch in the first blue light

of morning, at the end of milkmen,

at the beginning of your life.

I went there once with a boy too sweet

for desire, after the Ferris Wheel

and The Octopus and trying not

to throw up on the grass and trying

to be sweet too, the kind of girl

you want to win a stuffed bear for,

one of the big ones that she’ll have trouble

carrying, so you keep handing

the skinny man your dollars and his eyes

glint and you wonder what he’s thinking

when he folds them in his pocket,

where he’s going when he gets off,

not the Milk Bottle for scoops of vanilla

in small glass bowls. His heart is a book

of matches, his mind clear as the sky

in the morning when it’s covered its stars

with light. In the winter, he’ll hang

a ragged coat from his collarbone.

He’ll think only of this year, this cup

of coffee, as he sits alone in his red booth.

If he walks along a bridge,

he might jump. And the river will feel

cold at first but then like kindness.

Last night a boy named Travis

killed himself

like young people sometimes do.

He told people he would do it.

They tried to stop him.

Now he’ll have a full page in the yearbook,

his senior picture where he’s wearing

his dark blue jeans and sweater vest,

leaned up against the trunk of a tree.

I wonder if he felt the bark

pressed against him

when he had to keep staring into the lens,

his cheeks taut from trying.

I wonder if he thought about the tree,

how could it keep standing there

without speaking,

storing all those years in its core.

Laura Read has published poems in a variety of journals, most recently in Rattle, Mississippi Review, and Bellingham Review. Her chapbook, The Chewbacca on Hollywood Boulevard Reminds Me of You, was the 2010 winner of the Floating Bridge Chapbook Award, and her collection, Instructions for My Mother’s Funeral, was the 2011 winner of the AWP Donald Hall Prize for Poetry and will be published this fall by the University of Pittsburgh Press.

Originally appeared in NOR 12.

Man Lighting a Girl’s Cigarette by Irving Penn

November 6, 2012.Reading time less than 1 minute.

On a passage from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby

November 6, 2012.Reading time 10 minutes.

By Ralph Lombreglia

Featured Art: Man Lighting a Girl’s Cigarette by Irving Penn

                [Tom Buchanan] “…Daisy loved me when she married me and she
        loves me now.”

                “No,” said Gatsby, shaking his head.

                “She does, though. The trouble is that sometimes she gets foolish
        ideas in her head and doesn’t know what she’s doing.” He nodded sagely.
        “And what’s more I love Daisy too. Once in a while I go off on a spree
        and make a fool of myself, but I always come back, and in my heart I love
        her all the time.”

                “You’re revolting,” said Daisy. She turned to me, and her voice,
        dropping an octave lower, filled the room with thrilling scorn: “Do you
        know why we left Chicago? I’m surprised that they didn’t treat you to the
        story of that little spree.”

                Gatsby walked over and stood beside her.

                “Daisy, that’s all over now,” he said earnestly. “It doesn’t matter
        any more. Just tell him the truth—that you never loved him—and it’s all
        wiped out forever.”

                She looked at him blindly. “Why—how could I love him—possibly?”

                “You never loved him.”

                She hesitated. Her eyes fell on Jordan and me with a sort of appeal,
        as though she realized at last what she was doing—and as though she had
        never, all along, intended doing anything at all. But it was done now. It
        was too late.

                “I never loved him,” she said, with perceptible reluctance.

                “Not at Kapiolani?” demanded Tom suddenly.

                “No.”

                From the ballroom beneath, muffled and suffocating chords were
        drifting up on hot waves of air.

                “Not that day I carried you down from the Punch Bowl to keep your
        shoes dry?” There was a husky tenderness in his tone . . . . “Daisy?”

                “Please don’t.” Her voice was cold, but the rancor was gone from
        it. “There, Jay,” she said—but her hand as she tried to light a cigarette
        was trembling. Suddenly she threw the cigarette and the burning match
        on the carpet.

                “Oh, you want too much!” she cried to Gatsby. “I love you now—
        isn’t that enough? I can’t help what’s past.” She began to sob helplessly. “I
        did love him once—but I loved you too.”

                Gatsby’s eyes opened and closed.

                “You loved me too?” he repeated.

—F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

On a passage from Raymond Carver’s “Chef’s House”

November 3, 2012.Reading time 9 minutes.

By Bret Lott

Featured art: The Farm at Les Collettes, Cagnes by Auguste Renoir

Wes, it’s all right, I said. I brought his hand to my cheek. Then, I don’t know, I remembered how he was when he was nineteen, the way he looked running across this field to where his dad sat on a tractor, hand over his eyes, watching Wes run toward him. We’d just driven up from California. I got out with Cheryl and Bobby and said, There’s Grandpa. But they were just babies.

Raymond Carver, “Chef’s House”

I remember vividly the day I first read a story by Raymond Carver. I was standing in the front room of a minuscule apartment in Northampton, Massachusetts reading “Chef’s House” in The New Yorker—only two pages in the magazine. I then looked up and out the window at the bare trees there, full of wonder and awe at discovering that what mattered in a story was not, as I had thought it to be, the writer of the story and how wonderfully he performed his magic tricks. Rather, what mattered in a story were the lives of the people involved.

New Ohio Review Issue 11 (Originally printed Spring 2012)

June 30, 2012.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 11 compiled by Peter Russ.

Unicom

June 29, 2012.Reading time 34 minutes.

By Tony Hoagland

Featured Image: Deer from Momoyogusa-Flowers of a Hundred Generations (1909) by Kamisaka Sekka

Set in the large public hallway and various spaces of a courtroom building. Drinking fountain, a pay phone on the wall, various benches where people eat their lunch or sit, and a few nooks and crannies where they stand and speak. The play is a sequence of monologues from alternate sides of the stage. All the speakers are connected to the trial, but nothing of the trial itself is ever shown.

PROLOGUE

(professional woman wearing glasses, reading from a clipboard, her voice bu- reaucratic and oracular)

Unicom officials denied knowledge of the events of June ’95. Somehow an entire forest had disappeared.

2nd PROLOGUE

Those erasures were committed, they said, by an irresponsible subsidiary

who didn’t know the right way to make a jungle disappear.

Beach Towel

June 29, 2012.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Alan Shapiro

Imagine sitting on some towels on a beach, and

suddenly it’s raining, and you scramble up,

hurrying over the sand with all the towels

to a stall inside the bathhouse where

the towel you choose to dry yourself off with

is only a little dryer than you are,

and then, as you continue drying, isn’t,

it’s wet too, too wet, wetting as much as drying.

You pick another towel up but it’s damp

too, in fact they all are, every one as wet

as you are, towel and skin exchanging

the same dampness—

if the sun were shining you could run outside

and dry yourself, or find another towel

and pass the wetness on

in a one-way tradeoff of damp for dry.

But now imagine that the doors are locked,

the stall door and the bathhouse door, and you,

you can’t get out, you have only these towels,

you can’t escape these towels, you can’t get new ones,

there’s no way to make one thing go one way or

another: imagine energy as dampness,

the jiggling accidents of energy

spread out like dampness over everything

so evenly that there is nothing left

of any kind of more of this for less of

that to balance or redress, no one

to help or call to, nobody else to touch:

Now picture everyone locked up with you,

each in his own stall, having waited there

so long inside that chilly damp enclosure

that the world beyond it may as well not exist,

or ever have existed, and you’re all shivering in

the cold air, but since no warmth remains,

there is no shivering, nobody is there.

Alan Shapiro will publish two books in 2012: Broadway Baby, a novel from Algonquin Books, and Night of the Republic, a book of poems, from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

Originally appeared in NOR 11.

“Rozen” by Margaretha Roosenboom

June 28, 2012.Reading time less than 1 minute.

Old Love Poems

June 28, 2012.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Denise Duhamel

Featured Image: “Rozen” by Margaretha Roosenboom

I can burn the pictures, but not the poems
since I published them in books, which are on shelves
in libraries and in people’s homes. Once my cousin told me
not to write anything down because the words would be there forever
to remind me of the fool I once was. My cousin
was the little dog on the Tarot card, barking at the Fool’s heels
as I headed right toward the cliff.
                                                             When James Taylor and Carly Simon
broke up, I was shocked. Taylor’s drug use or not,
couldn’t they work it out? I was in college
and, though I didn’t really believe in marriage,
I believed in them. How could they part
having written those love songs? And how could they go on
singing those love songs after the divorce?
                                                             But now, I know.
After time, when they reached for those notes,
there wasn’t really a beloved there anymore,
just a strand of hair each left behind
on the other’s scarf or pillow, a cologne trigger that transcended
into something more real than they were,
the lovers themselves ephemeral muses.
                                                             It’s still hard
for me to accept the notion of love outliving the lovers—
a notion so romantic, it’s unromantic. Hard to accept
that those big lumps of affection
would find alternate places to stick,
that Simon and Taylor would be swept away and marry
others. That need is not so much a deficit
                                                             as an asset,
like a wallet that keeps manufacturing its own dollar bills even after it’s been robbed of everything.
Or to say it another way: the plant that will bloom
despite being uprooted. The new seedling that will pop up.
It’s hard to believe when you are down to your last penny,
when the soil is dry and rocky and full of weeds,
                                                             when your love
is freeze-dried into a metallic pouch and you are full of snarky rage.
You look back at a love poem you wrote and ask:
did I really feel this way? Even if you no longer remember tenderness,
even if the verse was simply artifice, your idea of love, a subspecies
you made up to tag and define that one poor sap, you read the poem
again, grateful, holding the words in your hands like a bunch of flowers.

Clear and Cold

June 27, 2012.Reading time 1 minute.

By Lisa Ampleman

Featured Image: “The Red Kerchief” by Claude Monet

Though already setting,
the sun in late afternoon

in late December revels
in its power—how it,

though meager, can set
red-brick façades ablaze,

glorify an oak’s moss—
the only green thing—

and later sear far clouds
deep purple, more sky

exposed because the trees
are bare. Meager, too,

what you could give
me, what you called fondness—

but I let it dazzle me for a time.
And, though the room

is darkening, the last light
brightens the metallic edge

of the window screen
before it goes.

The Muse of Work

June 26, 2012.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Ellen Bass

Featured Image: “Portrait of Mrs Marie Jeanette de Lange” (1900) by Jan Toorop

If I could choose my muse,
she’d have red hair, short, spikey,
and green cateye glasses with rhinestones at the tips.
She’d wear a sleeveless white blouse, ruffled
over shallow scallop-shell breasts.
Can you see how young she is?
I think she’s the girl Sappho loved,
the one with violets in her lap.
When she opens the door, a flurry of spring,
apple blossoms and plum, sweeps in.
But I’ve been assigned the Muse of Work.
It turns out she’s a dead ringer for my mother
as she scrambles the eggs, sips black coffee,
a Marlboro burning in a cut-glass ashtray.
Then she opens the store. The wooden shelves shine
with amber whiskeys and clear vodkas,
bruise-dark wine rising in the slender necks.

What You Find, If You Find It

June 25, 2012.Reading time 7 minutes.

By Jeff P. Jones

Featured Image: “Paris Map in Dutch” by Guillaume Delisle

As a letter carrier, she delivered non-urgent messages to people’s houses. Her work brought her past gates, across yards, onto porches, into foyers. She never looked in windows or rang doorbells but on request would hand mail to a resident encountered outside as she exchanged small talk. She would then move on, readying the next house’s letters and advertisements, imagining fingertips releasing sealed flaps, creases tearing, messages sliding into waiting hands.

Each week her teenaged son caused some new havoc. One night he stole her car and was stopped by police forty miles away, coursing a college town’s streets with three friends and a bottle of vodka. The four boys cleaned her gutters the next weekend as she grilled hamburgers and made jokes about her prematurely gray hair.

She sipped her morning coffee and pretended to read the paper as she watched him eat toast.

In his last year of high school he had to transfer schools because of attendance problems. He brought home a stray mutt that he forgot to feed. He began to take phone calls from a man with a comically gravelly voice named Staff Sergeant Thigpen. The son carried the receiver into his room and shut the door. Posters of grimfaced warriors appeared on his walls. He exterminated the squirrels and birds from the backyard with an air rifle. He rarely answered her in a full sentence. In the summer she drove him to the airport. He wore a new pair of running shoes and carried no suitcase.

Dispatches From the Interior

June 24, 2012.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Geoffrey Brock

Featured Image: “A Lone Child Walking Down the Street at Night“, Unknown Artist

Like the one where you stumble along happily drunk
after closing a bar and reach your car only to find it
surrounded by militia who take you in to question you
about why you left your son alone in the car so long
and you say I lost track of time though that’s not true
and Can I see him and they refuse and Is he okay and
you’re panicking and thinking What if he died in there
or the one the very next night when you find yourself
atop some posh hotel listening to some poet speaking
and realize you haven’t seen your son since morning
when you let him go down to the lobby alone to play
despite the warnings you now recall about the natives
and you race for the elevator but there is no elevator
and so you find the stairs and descend floor by floor
and each landing is a shabby apartment living room
and though you can sometimes tell someone is home
water running for instance or light under a shut door
you never see anyone or gain any real insight into this
country of ancient dearth and modern resentment
what country is this anyway? and after the gauntlet of
these empty private foreign lives you emerge at last
into a brightly lit and darkly paneled colonial lobby
and scramble frantic now through the patrician crowd
looking for help but when you ask a giant suited man
if he speaks English he replies in the plummiest nasals
I don’t just speak it I am it and merely cocks one brow
about your son so you race outside where a boy squats
alone in the penumbra by a bush and you tilt his face
to the light but he isn’t yours too small and dark and
you keep looking and see others and scream one name
and then oh god you see his hunched familiar shape
rise out of the pile of dead leaves he had hidden under
and stumble toward you arms extended the pajamas
he was wearing this morning now tattered and filthy
and when you scoop him up you discover obscenities
and anti-American slogans scrawled in black marker
on his face and blood or something caking his nostrils
and he doesn’t speak or cry and nothing shines forth
from those eyes and you carry him cradle him through
this endless third-world night trying to comfort him
but knowing you will never be able to comfort him but
cooing You’re safe now Daddy’s here or the one where

Strapless

June 23, 2012.Reading time 6 minutes.

By Z.Z. Boone

Featured Image: “Breton Girls Dancing, Pont-Aven” (1888) by Paul Gauguin

I don’t know what happened, but last night I just lost it. Just fucking lost it.

It’s eleven o’clock at night, I’ve been doing inventory in my store all week, I’ve barely made a dime, and this is when my fourteen-year-old daughter decides it’s a good time for defiance.

“You have no idea what it’s like!” she screams.

I’m lying on my still-made bed, full dressed except for my shoes, and she’s standing with a hand on each side of the doorway as if to prevent my escape. I’m not going anywhere. I’m just trying to hear the TV, trying to get the news about how screwed up the rest of the world is, but I can’t make out a word.

Zigzag. Yeah.

June 22, 2012.Reading time 5 minutes.

By Scott Kreeger

Featured Image: “Flowers on a Footpath from Bijutsu Sekai” by Watanabe Seitei

Zigzag down the stairs. Yeah. Zigzag to the trash can and toss the bag in. Yeah.

Zigzag through the gate and into the pool area. Yeah. Zigzag between the chaise lounges. Yeah. Zigzag down the steps and into the pool. Yeah.

Zigzag too cold, too cold. Yeah. Zigzag out of the pool. Yeah.

Zigzag out the gate. Yeah. Zigzag onto the bike. Yeah. Zigzag past apart- ments 4, 3, 2, 1, and into the alley. Yeah. Zigzag down the alley and out to the street. Yeah. Zigzag wait for traffic. Yeah.

Zigzag across the street. Yeah. Zigzag off the bike and into the store. Yeah. Zigzag past the smiley man behind the counter. Yeah. Zigzag smile back, wave, say hello. Yeah.

Zigzag to the candy. Yeah. Zigzag to the Zagnut bars. Yeah. Zigzag pick out a Zagnut. Yeah. Zigzag Zagnut. Yeah.

Zigzag say that again three times fast. Yeah. Zigzag Zagnut zigzag Zagnut zigzag Zagnut. Yeah.

Throw It Up

June 21, 2012.Reading time 58 minutes.

By Suzanne Richardson

Featured Image: “The Fallen Angel Spreads His Black Wings” by Odilon Redon

Heroin made Tristan’s breath sweet like mangoes. When we kissed it felt like licking the inside of a kiwi: fragrant, indulgent, the tangy saccharine rolling around my tongue. I didn’t know why he tasted like that, but I liked it. At the time I didn’t know I was sleeping with a heroin addict. He would sit up in bed and scratch his arms and face for hours. I would call his name, shake him even, but he wouldn’t answer. In all four years I’d slept with him, he had never acted that way before. I would put on a robe and pace the apartment, or sit on the couch, and think about my family. My brother. My parents. I had never felt this scared with them despite our differences. Sometimes I would grab fruits or vegetables from the fridge and nervously practice peeling, or dicing until dawn. I think I did this out of some compulsion to better myself even in the darkest of hours. My mother could always chop and dice things perfectly. I taught myself to peel mangoes in one motion so the peel piled into one long strand in the sink drain. I couldn’t think of anything that would make him act that way. One night, lying on the couch, staring at the ceiling, I recalled a conversation I’d had at a party with an EMT.

Dhaka Nocturne

June 20, 2012.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Tarfia Faizullah

Featured Image: “Tête-á-Tête” by Edvard Munch

I admit that when the falling hour
begins to husk the sky free of its
saffroning light, I reach for anyone

willing to wrap his good arm tight
around me for as long as the ribboned
darkness allows. Who wants, after all

to be seen too clearly? Still, the heart
trusts, climbs back down the old
mango tree outside the bar to marvel

at the gymnast tornadoing forward,
electrifying the air with her soaring
body on the TV, even as the friend

beside me asked, But how could you
sleep in the same room as your dead
sister’s things? Once, a man I loved

told me I was stunning. It terrified
me, the way grief still can, rising
above us in the bar, seeking its own

body. I told her the body, exhausted,
does what it must, as it does now,
suturing itself to his, saying, I’ll be

yours forever, with all its secretive
creases turning to steam in this heat
flustered city, wet fever of the nape

of my neck chiffoning beneath his
lips galaxying across it. I could have
told her about the shelves of porcelain-

cheeked dolls tarnished lavender by
falling light, the ebony abundance
of my mother’s hair varnished blue

as she slid my sister’s child clothes off
the old wooden hangers then back on—
but what else is mine, if not all this

strange beauty? Look, I say to him,
running my own hands down my own
body: night-rinsed anaglyph of muscle

and bone holding against everything
yet to plunder this or any twilight’s
nameless and numinous unfurling.

Overflow

June 19, 2012.Reading time 1 minute.

By David Gullette

Featured Image: “Proposed Broadway Underground Railway” by Unknown Artist

The first of February 1855
Thoreau skates up the river:
it swells beneath its crust
making a musical cracking,
running like chain lightning of sound
athwart my course.

The rising of the mass
lifts the ice in one place
but drops it in another
the low patch filling with water
to form quite a lake there where he has passed
and he imagines

another skater two hours later
his successor who with wonder and alarm
will see Henry’s twin tracks
disappear in one side of it
and come out the other.
Sometimes I glide across

the brittle glaze of sleep
and am above and in and beneath
the dark currents
and wonder at dawn how did I drown
only to glance back and see my tracks
coming up and out and going on.

“Two Cockatoo and Plum Blossom” by Ohara Koson

June 18, 2012.Reading time less than 1 minute.

Birds In Cemeteries

June 18, 2012.Reading time 1 minute.

By George Kalogeris

Featured Image: “Two Cockatoo and Plum Blossom” by Ohara Koson

It must be the shade that draws them. Or else the grass.
And it seems they always alight away from their flocks,

Alone. It’s so quiet here you can’t help but hear
Their talons clink as they hop from headstone to headstone.

Their sharp, inquisitive beaks cast quizzical glances.
The lawn is mown. The gate is always open.

The names engraved on the stones, and the uplifting words
Below the names, are lapidary as ever.

But almost never even a chirp from the birds,
Let alone a wild shriek, as they perch on a tomb.

And then they fly away, looking as if
They couldn’t remember why it was they came—

But were doing what our souls are supposed to do
On the day we die, if the birds could read the words.

Pelicans

June 17, 2012.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Robert Cording

Featured Image: “Australian Pelican” by Elizabeth Gould

Last evening, another sunset party:
drinks, laughs, ironies, hidden desires.
All of us tanned and glowing, we exchanged
jokes and gossip, fresh and stale, self-conscious
that something larger was missing
when we turned to best watches, shoes, cigars.

So much time is lost trying to agitate
the envies of others and monitor one’s own—
the thought that crossed my mind as I watched
six pelicans rise and fall with the water’s flux.
The winds had quieted, and just before the sun plunged
below the sea, the pelicans rose in a wind-hung line

and flew off, silent as a council of gods
in the pinkish sky. Palm trees scratched
their cuneiform shadows on the sand.
I wanted to say something about the pelicans,
who I knew, for no known reason, choose to live
their lives as near total mutes, as if they’d decided

simply to be done with the fecklessness of speaking,
but I kept quiet, the light draining from the sky,
the others going inside. I felt like a child in hiding,
alone on the deck, made fearful and alive
by the darkened Gulf, the stretch of beach
now entirely empty, the palm trees,

the sliver of moon rising directly opposite
of where the sun had set. If I had been called
to come in, I would have kept silent.

Crow

June 16, 2012.Reading time 11 minutes.

By William Kelley Woolfitt

I’ve been told Crow’s story so many times I remember it better than my own memories. It was my bedtime, naptime, and story-time story. I think my parents told it to each other too, in whispers, in each other’s arms, striped with moonlight coming in through the blinds, too tired to say anything new.

There was a storm the night my parents drove me home from the hospital. I was a few hours old. Mother says that the rain was too fast for the windshield wipers, that Father pulled over three times. Father says that Mother sat in the backseat and held me the whole way. When we got home, we had to wait almost an hour for the rain to die down. Father found some jazz on the radio, climbed into the back to be with Mother and me. That was the first time he held me. Mother fell asleep, and dreamed she was a passenger in a boat.

Wind toppled the elm in our front yard, though later on some neighbors claimed it had been hit by lightning. It just missed our house. One branch scratched our bedroom window. Crows spent the night on our porch, their nest in the elm ruined.

Mrs. Yamato across the street saw the crows on our porch swing, screamed and dropped her chopsticks. An omen of death, she thought. She came running over with a broom. All the crows flew away, except a baby. Father put the baby crow in a shoebox and thanked Mrs. Yamato for her concern. Mother went into the yard, walked around the fallen elm and its jagged stump, poked into the fallen nests and found shiny things: bottle caps, bits of tinfoil, Father’s screwdriver, her own gold pendant necklace.

Yet

June 15, 2012.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Eric Torgersen

Featured Image: “Study for “Le Bain”: Two Women and a Child in a Boat” by Mary Cassatt

You’ve got to act, and soon, but you don’t dare yet.
There’s one big load you don’t think you can bear yet.

You chose to dive this deep; it’s not for me
to tell you why you can’t come up for air yet.

You had big plans. You’re running out of time.
There’s no excuse to contemplate despair yet.

All that time and trouble spent on you.
For all the rest, you don’t have much to spare yet.

The world should find some meaning in your work?
You haven’t shown us why we ought to care yet.

Don’t give me that I-don’t-get-it look.
Sixty-five, and still not self-aware yet.

You might just want to start to pack your bags.
You may not have enough to pay the fare yet,

but that doesn’t mean the taxi’s not on its way.
Look out the window. No, it isn’t there. Yet.

Call it what you will, but thank something, Eric.
There’s one stiff suit you haven’t had to wear yet.

Awake

June 14, 2012.Reading time 1 minute.

By Richard Schiffman

Featured Image: “Rendezvous in the Forest” By Henri Rousseau

Already morning ignites
the high wicks of the pine.
A few birds trilling,
don’t ask me their names,

or my own as I stumble
out of bed on sea legs,
rub my eyes until stars appear
like ships still foundering

on the reef of night.
But when I open them again, day
is fully rigged and sailing off
with me on it.

Unfinished

June 13, 2012.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Richard Schiffman

Featured Image: “Houses of Parliament, London” by Claude Monet

“It is not known why they were not finished,”
the curator noted of two hundred later canvases.
Turner’s work becoming increasingly unhinged—
cyclonic sunbursts, hills skipping like rams, crepuscular
curtains, reeling cliffs and brimstoned cities.

“I did not paint it to be understood.”
Was he mad, as some critics alleged?
Were these “mere freaks of chromomania,”
posters of a private apocalypse, flotsam
and jetsam from the shipwreck of a soul?

“I only wish I had any color to make them blacker.”
A glutton for whirlwinds and monster blizzards,
snow funnels and conflagrations. The lakes abysmal,
the seascapes either black or blinding—
a roller coaster few Victorians could ride.

“Indistinctness is my forte.”
Prophet for a world unravelling at the speed of light.
With hands as “fast as lightning,” when he sketched,
organs of creation, and equally destruction,
all churned together in the cement mixer of his palette.

“It is not known why they were not finished.”
Yet surely he knew that finishing would be a lie
in a world where the waxing / waning moon
is unfinished, the river ends, but does not finish,
nor the bronking sea, nor the calving sea-ice,
nor life itself, which only knows—
again and again and again—how
to begin.

Take Your Trash and Make it Fly

June 12, 2012.Reading time 36 minutes.

By Devin Murphy

Featured Image: “Shoes” by Vincent Van Gogh

One night a month, people in my hometown outside of Buffalo, New York, put their large trash items on the curb for the sanitation department to pick up the next morning. Our neighbors would drag out old Whirlpool appliances, ironing boards, and whatever else the weekly garbage route couldn’t take. On those evenings, my Dutch immigrant mother loaded me into her rusted-over white 1970 Chevy Caprice station wagon with its vinyl side panel, and we’d slowly cruise the streets picking through the refuse.

From where I was slouching low in the passenger’s seat I’d get this fishbowl feeling as she slowed down and parked in front of those houses. Each home gave off a sense of neatness and order that seeped into their lawns. It always made me feel as if strangers were looking out their windows at us—or worse, people we knew. The idea of being watched made me want to pull my lower lip over my head and swallow myself whole. But my mother was unfazed as she picked discarded rabbit-ear antennas, steel rods, sheet metal, chicken wire, aluminum siding, rebar, large bolts, coffee cans, aluminum fruit cans, and every scrap of metal or iron and tossed them in the back of the Caprice.

She walked from lawn to lawn on the sidewalk while I inched the car along beside her. I nudged the gas pedal and braked with my tiptoes. I wasn’t big enough to see over the steering column, so I navigated through the line-of-sight between the dashboard and the top of the enormous steering wheel. When we had to cross an intersection, she’d get back in, drive across, and we’d start down the next block.

Tauromaquia

June 10, 2012.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Deborah Casillas

Featured Image: “Standing Bull” by Jean Bernard

The days dragged on, steady ticking of the clock.
My mother’s cancer; surgery, injections, drugs.
Long afternoons I sat in my grandfather’s library
looking at books. Shelves of books about bullfighting—
la lidia, combat; la corrida, the running of the bulls.
Books on Manolete, Belmonte, Joselito,
his copies of The Brave Bulls, Blood and Sand,
Death in the Afternoon. Books aficionados collect,
those fanatic followers of the taurine subculture.
I stacked volumes beside me, looked at pictures
of the black bulls, studied their deadly horns,
the ritual sacrifice. Here were portraits of the famous
matadors, their lives venerated like the lives of saints.

The Swans

June 9, 2012.Reading time 9 minutes.

By Anamyn Turowski

Featured Image: “Woman with a Butterfly at a Pond with Two Swans” by Jan Toorop

She bought the swans because of the empty pond. Lonely; that’s why, really. She saw two swans in profile in a poultry magazine she’d picked up at the dentist’s. She paid $1500 for a pair. As if swans could change anything. Her husband says she needs birds like she needs a hole in her head. A lobotomy, she thinks, that’s what I need. Every time she stares out the window toward the pond, the empty water makes her cry. She charged the pair on a new credit card that came in the mail that day. What’s the interest on that card? You never read the fine print.

She isn’t the sexiest wife. She’s aware of this. Since the operation he hasn’t touched her. That was three years ago. They’ve the house and the dog and their two grown children who call on birthdays, Christmas.

Standing on the Desk

June 8, 2012.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Donna L. Emerson

I am twelve years old in Mr. Ody’s art class and he’s teaching me to use an
eraser on my watercolor of rain and sun. To make the sun stream like spotlights
through the clouds. He moves the eraser by placing his hand over mine. He rests
his hand on my wrist a little longer.

I start to back away.

He asks me to be a model for the class. He lets me stand on his desk. He says,
Don’t take your eyes off her. Let your pencil try to draw her without ever stopping
your looking and drawing. I’m glad I wore my new turquoise skirt and
flowered blouse. Mr. Ody pulls his chair out to see better.

While Danny Sessa makes jokes, I can feel Mr. Ody’s eyes. He’s staring. I turn
red, start to joke back and Mr. Ody says, Just stand still and be quiet.

This was the beginning of the first time.

The Jaguars of Southtown

June 7, 2012.Reading time 56 minutes.

By Amos Jasper Wright IV

Featured Image: “The Repast of the Lion” by Henri Rousseau

Forty days passed without landing a sale. For a while, I felt sorry for myself, and then self-pity shifted gears and boiled into a rage that curdled everything I touched. The BP spill down in the Gulf had put a damper on auto sales. The economy in general was in shambles, but this town hadn’t prospered much since the Red Mountain cut. Meanwhile, we’re dumping good, hard-earned USD into foreign countries and our Harvard-educated Kenyan president was doing all of jackshit about it. Instead of buying new cars, people just drive them longer. Used to I could sell forty cars in a month. You don’t need a Harvard degree to do that.

When DOT took a slice out of Red Mountain, most of downtown Birmingham reverted to a giant used-car lot, a smooth asphalted prairie where trash and news blew before the winds. I managed a downtown lot on 20th Street. My office was in a portable trailer stacked on cinder blocks. Long strands of razor wire outlined the perimeter of the lot like a concentration camp. The warehouse next door had probably been abandoned since I got my driver’s license. Sale banners flapped and whipped in the hot winds and the flat air in that metal can was tight as my collar. We parked cars on the sidewalk. On Saturdays, when the urban prairieland was empty and dead, looking more and more like a southern Detroit, instead of getting hung up on by irate voices, I played lonely games of golf, as blue and red klaxons dopplered by.

The Open Door

June 6, 2012.Reading time 1 minute.

By. Alan Shapiro

For Peggy Rabb

What did it mean when she said at last, “All day I

have been running to the open door”—

What door was it she ran to, opening to what?

From what? And did she reach it and get through?

No one was there with her, it seems, inside or out, no

one she mentioned, no solving light or phantoms

calling in parental voices, urging her

to come, child, run; and that she ran “all day”—

was that the joy of being able now

to run in some way none of us could see, a

bodiless release imagining a body

if only to feel how free of it she was?

Or was it desperate running, running to

get out of the nightmare room that was all day

uncrossable, the door like a horizon

a stride away with every stride she took?

And if she reached it, running, what did it feel like

then, that moment, being nothing but

the motion of herself without herself,

over that threshold into nothing else?

Alan Shapiro will publish two books in 2012: Broadway Baby, a novel from Algonquin Books, and Night of the Republic, a book of poems, from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

Originally appeared in NOR 11.

“Pattern from L’ornoment Polychrome” by Albert Racinet

June 5, 2012.Reading time less than 1 minute.

Trust

June 5, 2012.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Liz Kingsley

Featured Image: “Pattern from L’ornoment Polychrome” by Albert Racinet

First he slept with someone else and later while he was busy sleeping, she slept
with someone else. No, before he slept with someone else, she slept with the
lawyer across the street who gave good oral argument. She did not tell him
about the lawyer. Their time together was privileged and she knew her rights.
While she was with the lawyer, he slept with the decorator. When she found out
about the decorator, she confronted him and said I trust that you know about
the lawyer. He said he in fact did not know about the lawyer, but that now he
no longer trusted her. She said that she had stopped trusting him after a flirty
consultation they had with the decorator about their living room, which is why
she slept with the lawyer in the first place. He said she had no reason not to
trust him, but that he sensed she didn’t, so he figured he might as well go ahead
and sleep with the decorator. She said that’s exactly why she can’t trust him
anymore. He slept with the decorator on the outgoing living room sofa. She
said the lawyer has a trust account, into which she deposited the money they
were planning to pay the decorator for the incoming living room sofa because
she didn’t trust him to go through with the renovation in light of their domestic
destruction.

The Farm

June 4, 2012.Reading time 23 minutes.

By Spencer Wise

Featured Image: “Poppy Fields near Argenteuil” by Claude Monet

We’re on our way to meet Charlene’s family for the first time, listening to Townes Van Zandt in the car, and Charlene’s saying, “‘Pancho and Lefty’ is me and my Daddy’s song,” when I suddenly smell fire. All along Highway 33, the smell of wood burning. She laughs. “Don’t laugh,” I say, “might be a forest fire.” She says, “First time south of the Mason-Dixon, and now you’re Woodsy Owl.”

“I feel vigilant,” I tell her, gripping the wheel tight with both hands, as we come over a hill and, on the horizon, points of orange flames burst from the tree line. “What the hell is that?” I say. “Those are laurel oaks. Those are pitch pines,” she says. “Not the damn trees,” I say. “The fire. We got to call your parents, tell them it’s time to evacuate. We got to get the hell out of Georgia.” She puts one hand on my knee and points to the parallel rows in the woods alongside the road, explains how the fire is burning in even rows, how it’s controlled. “Doesn’t look controlled,” I tell her. “Looks way the hell out of control.” Nacreous black smoke rises above the pines. She says her parents live about ten miles from here. “Correction,” I say. “Used to live. It’s all burned. You can’t go home again. Home is a marshmellow.” “Mallow,” she says. “If you’re talking about the spongy confection that you northerners eat two times a year when you go camping—that’s a marshmallow.”

When People Watch You

June 2, 2012.Reading time 4 minutes.

By Nathan Anderson

Featured Image: “Tingletangle” by Edvard Munch

I’m not like those crazy people.
The people that watch me
are real. I can see them.

Never mind the mailman. That blue coat
nearly swallows him. You never know
what’s under there—and he’s, well,
rather strange looking,

like a boy with a bald spot
bent over thick black shoes
and that bag he cradles

like a smooth gray animal
he does not recognize
is dead. Sometimes I believe

he really is a little boy
and I have to stop myself
from running after him.

Isn’t the mind amazing?
I’d like to know
what he’s doing when he’s not
walking through front lawns

or talking to the man
across the street. I’d like to know
what he’s delivering,
if it will require a deep breath

and more wine
than I’m willing to drink. If it’s even worth

the paper cut I’ll get
opening the envelope. And what about
that man across the street?

Stupid Sandwich

June 1, 2012.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Nathan Anderson

Featured Image: “The Grocer’s Encyclopedia” by an unknown artist

So yeah, we all have these moments that suck
because what they mean
is like a mystery, like the Mariners last year
good a team as any, traded
what’s-his-name, the fat one, for that Puerto Rican dude
with a wicked right arm
and didn’t even make the playoffs.
Anyway, I can see you’re a man of the world like me,
standing here I don’t know how long and still
no damn bus. But like I was saying
we all have these moments and last week
there I was after work, making a stupid sandwich,
the kind of stupid-ass food people like me always make
when I can’t figure out what I’m feeling
and I feel like being true to myself
is about the dumbest thing a man can do,
knowing how easy it is for the truth to mess things up.