Frank Buys Groceries

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By David Dodd Lee

Featured Art: “Nectar” by Mateo Galvano

Frank thought pork chops, the way they were
cut and packaged these days,
looked an awful lot like excised angels’ wings.
But he also sometimes just
got light in the head. He was adamant—
I am as fit as a mountain range!
Though Frank may have suffered mania
from too much weightlifting.
Frank bullied his moods.
If he woke up feeling angry at the world
he rowed the demons out in his kayak
or went a few rounds with the heavy bag.
He was so dialed-in sometimes!
A deer fly could make him throw punches in the air.
If he walked to the gym he’d listen to the cars
flying past, how they stuck to the asphalt a little,
asphalt trying to suck up rubber. It was annoying!
Now he heard the fluorescent lights pinging,
lording it over the T-bones and bundles of asparagus.
The natural color of food—
the blood red of the beets, for instance—
seemed to be fading, as if color
were an essence weakly subservient
to manufacturing and chemical abuse.
Red meat, drained of blood, whimpered
from where it was stacked in the meat section,
bloated red by carbon monoxide infusions.
Frank tightened his grip on his grocery cart.
Cans of kidney beans are destined
to be left standing on store shelves
for centuries after the apocalypse,
in which each person will have long ago
been torched from their bone marrow
on outward. When the pleasant checkout clerk said
“Thank you for shopping at Schaeffer’s,”
Frank thought, You don’t know the half of it, sonny,
but said, “My pleasure” instead.
He knew the boy was just a tool, cheap labor,
a cog in something too sinister for words.

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High Tide and Full Moon in Paradise

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Ken Holland

Featured Art: “Fear Bridge” by Mateo Galvano

I’m waiting for the rain to grow tired enough
to put itself down.

The rivers are flooded with ill-will and
shopping carts freed from Walmart servitude.

People stop talking about the apocalypse
the moment it becomes one.

People stop taking out the garbage
when they see what’s floating in their backyard.

Outside my window, the rivering street rivers
to the left, while my neighbor across the way

sees the street rivering to the right
and refuses to understand how it could be the same river.

I’m reading a book on the means and methods
of early seafarers.

I’m reading my DNA for trace elements
of Polynesian blood.

My orchid has pinned a tropical flower above its ear.
My Persian is stalking the mirage of a dry oasis.

I’ve come to enjoy the mystery of dinner
once the labels have long soaked off,

while my wine still has the grace notes
of the last vintage blessed by drought.

My neighbor swims over and asks if he can borrow
a cup of mercy.

My neighbor swims back with my gun
which his lawyer will use to execute

his last will and testament, as a jury is convened
to bear witness that no one’s yet pled guilty

to living in a state of innocence.

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As Is

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Susan Blackwell Ramsey

That house on the corner is for sale
again. Last week it flaunted SOLD

over the gap-toothed retaining wall,
the sparse weeds in the barren beds,

the desiccated hedge. And now
the sign is gone. So are the weeds.

The fallen bricks are balanced back
into the wall, and near the steps

someone has mulched the beds halfway,
as far as a single bag goes.

I laugh, it feels so personal.
I recognize the scramble up

that gravel bank, repair instead
of maintenance—my housekeeping,

my teeth, my spine, my charity,
all after-patched, too little too late.

My mental double-entry weighs
regret against effort and expense,

while sloth and wishful thinking keep
both thumbs on the scale. I have two friends

who silently agreed to let
their house disintegrate, then sold

“As Is” and walked away content.
Bad for a body or realtor, still

I nod companionably at that mulch.
Maybe too little will be enough.

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.Reading time 2 minutes.

In the Midst of It

By Gregory Djanikian

Featured Art: “Titania Dreaming” by Mateo Galvano

The woodpeckers are making holes
in the eaves of my house,
destroying some small part of it
while I count the wood chips
falling from the sky.

Isn’t it lovely that the natural world
can be so companionable,
keeping me frazzled and deeply alert?

Yesterday afternoon, the sky turned gray
as if it were going to thunder and rain
though it never did,
what a turnaround.

Sometimes it’s all you need,
a little reprieve, a surprise
to make you think
it’s not all ruthless
even as the shots ring out
in the heart of the city.

It’s the life we’re given
the pulpit managers say,
some of us having more life than others.

The woodpeckers are still at it,
doing what they are born to do
and I’m throwing tennis balls at them,
I’m squirting a jet stream
of water from my hose.

They disappear, then cheerfully come back.
There’s no manual that says
everything will stay as it is.

Look at the sky.
It’s as clear as day.

In another hour,
I might have to bolt the doors and windows
against the hurricane onrush of all that keeps me weathering away

from those long expansive afternoons
when I was young
and the wind was a feather in my hair.

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“Chucking the One Hip Out”: Dance as Joy and Resistance

.Reading time 1 minute.

We asked ten writers to comment on the use of dance and dance imagery in poems. The following feature includes:

  • Sara Henning on Ross Gay’s “Burial”
  • Sarah Nance on Lucille Clifton’s “untitled” (1991), “God send easter,” “spring song,” “homage to my hair,” “my dream about being white,” “untitled” (1996), “the poet,” “from the cadaver,” “amazons,” “in salem,” and “1994”
  • Christopher Kempf on Frank Bidart’s “Ulanova at Forty-Six at Last Dances Before a Camera Giselle”
  • Hugh Martin on Yusef Komunayakaa’s “To Have Danced with Death”
  • Jesse Lee Kercheval on Gerald Stern’s “The Dancing”
  • Jennifer Schomburg Kanke on Annie Finch and The Furious Sun in Her Mane
  • Bonnie Proudfoot on Rainer Maria Rilke’s “The Spanish Dancer”
  • Therese Gleason on Anne Sexton’s “How We Danced” and “The Wedding Ring Dance”

Subsequently, we added six essays to an online expansion of this feature. Those are:

  • Lisa Bellamy: “‘The Dancing’, by Gerald Stern”
  • Maya Sonenberg’s “Dada Dance”
  • Karen Hildebrand’s “Blinded by Love”
  • Jocelyn Heath’s and Joanna Eleftheriou’s “girls/all night long: (re)constructing sappho”
  • Renée K. Nicholson’s “Sur Les Pointes”
  • Victoria Hudson Hayes’s “why,it is love”

My Mother, Baryshnikov: Dance as Joy in Ross Gay’s “Burial”

.Reading time 8 minutes.

By Sara Henning

My mother never took formal dance lessons, but that didn’t stop her from hanging a large portrait of Mikhail Nikolayevich Baryshnikov in our living room. Saturday afternoons, I’d sometimes catch her, bare feet and leg warmers, leaping across the kitchen floor or spinning like a top, MTV blaring. She danced without form or technique and since I, too, was not a dancer, I had neither knowledge nor language for the magic she created with her body: jeté, pirouette. What mattered was that I saw my single mother joyful in the kitchen of our small duplex. I saw my mother—same woman forced to bury my father a handful of years before—exuberant. I didn’t know how important these small moments of joy would be when my mother was diagnosed with stage 4 colon cancer at the age of 59, how I would hold onto them when bilirubin from a failed liver turned her jaundiced, how I would hold them even harder as she was moved to hospice, my desperate daughter’s clutch becoming vice grip as she took her last breath in May of 2016.

Shortly after my mother passed away, I encountered a copy of Ross Gay’s gorgeous collection of poems Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude (2015), which I devoured in one sitting. It was during this time that I discovered his remarkable poem “Burial,” a poem I would turn to constantly during the throes of my personal mourning.

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“dancing the syllables”: Lucille Clifton and Dance as Poetic Practice

.Reading time 10 minutes.

By Sarah Nance

Featured Art: “Alluvium Variations 25” by Mateo Galvano

“when i stand around / among poets,” Lucille Clifton writes in an untitled poem from her 1991 collection quilting, “sometimes / i hear [ . . . ] one note / dancing us through the / singular moving world.” Here, Clifton configures a communal space for poets where some adjoining strand—what she calls a “single music”—transforms their ordinary path through life into a dance. In drawing a connection between dance and poetry, Clifton evokes a long poetic tradition (consider how villanelle, as one example, comes from the Italian word for “dance”) and forges an association she both troubles and expands in other work. Over the course of her forty-five year poetic career, Clifton takes what are on the surface simplistic references to dance—something one does for joy, praise, or worship—and crafts nuanced claims about embodiment, writing, and Black resistance.

In Clifton’s early work, dance is configured at first as a kind of religious ecstasy, such as in “God send easter” from her 1972 collection good news about the earth. There, the poem’s subjects “dance toward jesus” as they:

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.Reading time 10 minutes.

The Many Ghosts of Pomona

By Christopher Kempf

Featured Art: “Wanderer” by Mateo Galvano

The first time I encountered it—in the June 2007 issue of Poetry, alongside work from the late Craig Arnold and Claudia Emerson, and just before I entered the MFA program at Cornell—I understood neither the first nor last word in the title of Frank Bidart’s magisterial long-poem “Ulanova at Forty-Six at Last Dances Before a Camera Giselle.”

The former, as it turns out, is Russian ballerina and Stalin favorite Galina Ulanova, the Bolshoi’s prima ballerina assoluta for sixteen years from 1944 to 1960.

The latter is the classical masterwork Giselle, a tragedy of star-crossed love between its eponymous peasant girl and a disguised nobleman, its doomed romance steeped in the paranormalia of nineteenth-century Gothic; after Giselle dies of heartbreak, for instance, she is resurrected by an occult fairyhood known as the Wili, the ghosts of betrayed women who avenge themselves by dancing men to death-by-exhaustion. Though Freud likely never saw it, Giselle anticipates those notions of “hysteria” on which he would elaborate, since Giselle’s frantic dancing was perceived at the time as a symptom of silent—and problematically sexualized—madness. Bidart glosses this etiology midway through the poem:

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Rocking, or Rolling, on Silent Chrome Coasters

.Reading time 10 minutes.

By Hugh Martin

If “America is,” as John Updike wrote, “a vast conspiracy to make you happy,” then one might look—though, for awhile, you couldn’t look—at President Bush’s 1991 blanket ban on photographing coffins carrying dead American soldiers. Maybe the ban didn’t ensure “happiness,” but it did conspire to make sure the American public wouldn’t be bothered with images which might, perhaps, provoke unhappiness, or at least some discomfort.

In Yusef Komunyakaa’s poem, “To Have Danced With Death,” from his 1988 collection Dien Cai Dau, the narrator recounts returning alongside other soldiers from Vietnam, and then trying to exit the plane as two hearses arrive. As the speaker waits in line, he describes how their return gets halted, abruptly, when a “black sergeant first class . . . / stalled us on the ramp.” Shattering any warm and fuzzy feelings about homecoming, the speaker quips that this sergeant “didn’t kiss the ground either.” From there, the bleakness intensifies: “ . . . two hearses sheened up to the plane / & government silver-gray coffins / rolled out on silent chrome coasters.” Bizarre as it sounds, these hearses appear to provide brand-new coffins for the bodies of soldiers, probably in body bags or other containers, still on the plane.

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The Dancing

.Reading time 14 minutes.

By Jesse Lee Kercheval

Gerald Stern’s “The Dancing” included in This Time: New and Selected Poems (W.W. Norton & Company, 1984) begins like this:

      In all these rotten shops, in all this broken furniture
      and wrinkled ties and baseball trophies and coffee pots
      I have never seen a postwar Philco
      with the automatic eye
      nor heard Ravel’s “Bolero” the way I did
      in 1945 in that tiny living room
      on Beechwood Boulevard, nor danced as I did
      then, my knives all flashing, my hair all streaming,
      my mother red with laughter, my father cupping
      his left hand under his armpit, doing the dance
      of old Ukraine . . .

When I read this poem I see a child-sized version of the adult Gerry Stern I knew, dancing, spinning in circles. I see him as he was in 1984 when I took a class with him at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, his bald dome framed by unruly dandelion puffs of gray hair. He was 59 then, but young in the time he had spent in poetry world. His second book, Lucky Life, the one that turned the world’s eye his way, had been published just seven years earlier in 1977 when he was already 52.

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The Echo of Meter: On En-Rhythming and The Furious Sun in Her Mane

.Reading time 10 minutes.

By Jennifer Schomburg Kanke

I went to a party once during my doctoral program where I noticed a man weaving back and forth as he chatted up some of the young women in the program. It wasn’t full on creepy, just sort of . . . odd. As I got closer to the group, I noticed that his speech was also a bit off, but in a mesmerizing way. He didn’t seem drunk. He didn’t seem on the make (or at least not more so than many other people there). But what was going on here? When I asked a friend about him, she said, “Oh, that’s his thing. Dude comes to every party talking in iambic pentameter like it’s 1606 or something.”

Was it an intentional flex? Maybe. But another possibility is that it was just the aftereffects of his intense study of early modern English literature. He might have been inadvertently engaged in what feminist poet and critic Annie Finch has called “en-rhythming.” In her book How to Scan a Poem, Finch defines en-rhythming as “the process of accustoming one’s ear and body to the sound of a particular rhythm in preparation for writing, reading, or scanning that meter.” According to Finch, the process can work by reading poems out loud, making music with a drum, or dancing in time with the desired meter/rhythm. Could it have been that all of his exposure to Shakespeare and Donne left those iambs so stuck to his soul that he couldn’t even engage in small talk without the echo of blank verse in the wings?

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Beneath Her Feet: Rilke’s “The Spanish Dancer”

.Reading time 11 minutes.

By Bonnie Proudfoot

It’s a warm spring evening on La Rambla, a street leading from the Port of Barcelona into the main city, a wide avenue lined with trees, shops, and restaurants, thin lanes of traffic, and a center island full of people strolling or dining outdoors. It begins to drizzle as we join a group on a narrow sidewalk. The queue flows forward, bottlenecking at a doorway leading into a foyer, barely wide enough for a ticket-taker and a sandwich-board sign advertising featured performers. We are at Tablao Flamenco Cordobes. Photos and reviews line the walls, and our group heads upstairs into a small, crowded, circular theater, arched stucco walls stenciled with Moorish motifs, rows of wooden chairs arranged between pillars around a small stage (tablao). We are offered a glass of sweet, dark sangria. The house lights dim.

And so, it begins. Two male guitarists and two percussionists whose wooden sticks rhythmically strike the floor are seated under an archway at the rear of the tablao. Just out of sight, a tenor (el cante) begins to sing. His tones rise and fall, stretching out syllables as if his vocal cords merged with the vibrato of a violin, as if he is almost weeping. As the song concludes, from behind the archway, a woman with long dark hair steps forward. She wears a tight, sleeveless, bodice, a fringed, knotted shawl, ruffled skirt slightly raised in the front. In deliberate, high steps, clapping her hands as if to gather both the tempo and the audience, she circles the stage, skirt flaring, boot heels accenting the percussion. It is impossible to look away.

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.Reading time 19 minutes.

“Doing the Undoing Dance”: Anne Sexton’s Brutal—and Brave—Struggle for Agency

By Therese Gleason

Featured Art: “Persona-1” by Mateo Galvano

Dance imagery abounds in Anne Sexton’s ouevre, but the waltzes and allusions to fairy-tale-inspired ballets in her poems are characterized by compulsion and madness like that of the girl in “The Red Shoes” whose feet “could not stop” doing “the death dance.” In this and other archetypal tales interwoven in Sexton’s poems, danger—a wolf, a witch, a dark wood—lurks beneath the choreographed steps of the perilous rites of passage to womanhood, especially marriage. As Sexton’s truth-telling, taboo-shattering work attests, breaking destructive intergenerational cycles to chart a new path—symbolized by the amputated feet in the red shoes that “went on” and “could not stop”—is an ongoing, even violent struggle.

In her 1971 collection, Transformations, Sexton reinterprets and revises stories such as “Cinderella,” “Briar Rose,” “Rapunzel,” “The Maiden Without Hands,” and “The Twelve Dancing Princesses” with a personal (and female/ feminist) lens. (Notably, a number of the fairy tales in Sexton’s poems are also classical ballets with famous waltzes, such as Tchaikovsky’s The Sleeping Beauty and Swan Lake.) Yet Sexton’s preoccupation with these themes transcends just one collection, permeating her entire body of work. In particular, marriage, as an institution—and as a reflection of dysfunctional relationships in the family of origin—is dissected under Sexton’s brutally honest and psychologically astute gaze in numerous subsequent poems, including “How We Danced” (number two of six parts in the poem “Death of the Fathers” (The Book of Folly, 1972) and “The Wedding Ring Dance” (in the posthumously published 78 Mercy Street, 1978). These mirror-image poems expose cycles of abuse and oppression at the hands of the father (both literal and symbolic), and they articulate the struggle for female selfhood and self-expression.

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“The Dancing” by Gerald Stern

.Reading time 7 minutes.

By Lisa Bellamy

Over decades, the late Gerald Stern crafted an exuberant, talkative, and highly-performative narrator. His first-person narrator’s consciousness—his loves, memories, opinions, and passions (personal, literary, intellectual, and spiritual) —is itself the true subject of the poems. External activities, objects, and other characters, in constant interaction, offer an opportunity for the narrator to react, explore, and reveal himself and his world.

“The Dancing,” like so many Stern poems, is a poem of largesse: very much in the lyric mode, existing outside conventional, linear time. The core scene in “The Dancing” is a family of three simply dancing together, in a spontaneous, joyful moment. It is a scene of heightened, intimate intensity, against forces of evil and inequality.

The narrator’s consciousness broadens past the moment, though: space is elastic, in motion. The narrator is active, mobile, depicting a mother, father, and child dancing in 1945 Pittsburgh, even—as noted with irony, and underlying sadness and horror—there is “other dancing,” thousands of miles away in Poland and Germany.

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Dada Dance

.Reading time 13 minutes.

By Maya Sonenberg

In May 1968, the Merce Cunningham Dance Company premiered Walkaround Time, their homage to Marcel Duchamp, that grand Dadaist. The idea for this work had been ignited the previous winter at the sort of dinner party one can only imagine taking place in the New York City artworld of the time, with Duchamp and his wife Teeny, composer John Cage (Cunningham’s life and artistic partner,), and painter Jasper Johns (the company’s artistic advisor) in attendance. While Cage and Teeny played chess, Johns sidled up to Cunningham and asked if he’d be interested in “doing something with the Large Glass,” Duchamp’s famous artwork more formally called The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even. “Oh, yes,” Cunningham replied immediately, and Duchamp agreed, as long as someone else would do all the work.[1] Johns took on the job of creating the set, consisting of seven clear plastic boxes silkscreened with motifs from The Large Glass. Several of these stood on the stage, while others hung from the rafters. Composer David Berman was enlisted to create the score, titled … for nearly an hour….

Much has been written about the specific ways this dance responds to The Bride…, and Cunningham himself noted that he placed numerous references to the work in his choreography. In the following, I’d like, instead, to consider how Walkaround Time aligns more generally with principles of Dada visual art and poetry, ideas reflected, of course, in Duchamp’s work and in The Large Glass and, most importantly for this essay, in the poetry of Tristan Tzara and Hugo Ball.

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Blinded by Love

.Reading time 13 minutes.

Poet Lynn Emanuel’s “Blonde Bombshell” meets Café Müller by choreographer Pina Bausch.

By Karen Hildebrand

An elegant light-filled space inside the São Luiz Theater in Lisbon resembles the marble terrace of a palace. A Botticelli style mural fills the wall behind the stage. As I enter, a commemorative plaque catches my eye:

Pina Bausch
Dancou Café Müller
Pela Ultija Vez Em Maio De 2008
No Teatro São Luiz
[trans. Pina Bausch danced Café Muller last time in May 2008 at the São Luiz Theater]

It’s 2017. I’m in Lisbon to attend a literary festival—on vacation from my job in NYC, where I work for Dance Magazine. In a matter of minutes, I will stand on this stage and read my poems—the same stage where the storied choreographer Pina Bausch once performed a dance work I adore. After twenty years of deep engagement with both poetry and dance, it seems I’ve arrived at the literal intersection of my two artistic paths.

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girls/all night long: (re)constructing Sappho

.Reading time 13 minutes.

By Jocelyn Heath and Joanna Eleftheriou

This essay alternates between Jocelyn’s voice and Joanna’s, beginning with Jocelyn’s and changing after each section break.

I first heard Sappho as an undergrad when Rosanna Warren, our visiting writer, recited a few lines in Ancient Greek for our workshop. I didn’t need to match word with sound to love the insistent, rhythmic press of syllables rising and falling. The fluidity of a waltz with the intensity of a tango. Lines that spoke what I could not yet understand.

Like the odd-numbered beat of the sapphic stanza, 11-11-11-5, I felt at odds with an even-beat, rise-and-fall meter of the world I lived and wrote in. Something felt incomplete, rather like the fragments I would later learn made up our record of Sappho. But something in these ancient rhythms stirred a familiar step, and like Sappho, I knew “I would rather see her lovely step/and the motion of light on her face” than so much else.

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Sur Les Pointes

.Reading time 14 minutes.

By Renée K. Nicholson

It happened well into my thirties, over a decade since I’d last performed, and only a few years from publishing my first full-length collection of poems, Roundabout Directions to Lincoln Center. I’d said the words thousands of times—En pointe. In French, it means “pointed,” as in, “to make a pointed argument.” It can also mean “cutting edge.” Yet, I’d heard this terminology used by dozens of ballet instructors to describe the action of rising up on the toes in pointe shoes—en pointe—and I’d read it hundreds of times in newsletters and marketing materials from ballet companies and schools all over the world. En pointe. Never once had I stopped to consider whether the term was correct or not; my rudimentary French never prompted me to question it.

I was sitting in Studio Nine at American Ballet Theatre, surrounded by other aspiring ballet teachers, some who had been accomplished dancers, in the cavernous space. We applied, we were accepted, and traveled across the country and across the globe to learn how to translate our experience as ballet dancers into teaching proper technique.  For me, it was easier to get a position teaching ballet than finding one teaching creative writing.

Raymond Lukens, one of the coauthors of the ABT National Training Curriculum and an internationally renowned pedagogue, wasn’t imposing perched on a tall stool at the front of the class. He was often warm and funny. Still, he was intimidating.  He’d traveled to all the major schools, studying the methods of the best ballet teachers in the world.

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why,it is love

.Reading time 11 minutes.

By Victoria Hudson Hayes

but if a living dance upon dead minds
why, it is love;[1]

Camille Saint-Saëns’ Danse macabre, Op. 40, opens with a D struck twelve times for midnight, inviting death to emerge from its grave and dance.[2] Its earliest iteration, for orchestra and voice, featured the text of a poem by Dr. Henri Cazalis — Zig zig zig on his violin/The winter wind blows and the night is dark[3] — but audiences objected on the grounds that it made them feel weird, so Saint-Saëns replaced the voice with a violin, Franz Liszt transcribed the piece for piano, and pretty soon it was 1929 and Walt Disney’s skeletons were absolutely cranking it all over the cemetery.[4]

Danse macabre has since scored figure skating routines, whiskey commercials, and a short scene in the first episode of “What We Do in the Shadows.” You can catch it near the end of Shrek the Third and install it as your vehicle’s horn in Grand Theft Auto Online under the title “Halloween Loop 2.” In 1872, it was an appeal: remember death. Now it’s the quintessential spooky jingle.

but at the earliest spear
of sun perfectly should disappear
moon’s utmost magic, or stones speak

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Announcing the Winter Online Exclusive

.Reading time 1 minute.

The latest winter online exclusive from New Ohio Review is now available! Scroll down to read.

The issue includes art by Leo Arkus, Jordyn Roderick, and Zelda-Thayer Hansen; poems from Baylina Pu, John A. Nieves, Matthew T. Birdsall, Elisabeth Murawski, James Lineberger, Johnny Cate, John Wojtowicz, Shelly Cato, Joanne Dominique Dwyer, Erin Redfern, Dustin Faulstick, Madalyn Hochendoner, Michael Derrick Hudson, and Annie Schumacher; fiction from Mary Cross, Ellen Skirvin, Matt Cantor, Noah Pohl, and Teresa Burns Gunther; essays from Jill Schepmann and Lesa Hastings; reviews of work by Anna Farro Henderson, Ron Mohring, Betsy Brown, and Matthew Cooperman by Jenna Brown, Kate Fox, Tessa Carman, and Sarah Haman; and interviews of Jodie Noel Vinson, Joanne Dominique Dwyer, Allegra Solomon, Johnny Cate, Dustin H. Faulstick, Arya Samuelson, and Noah Pohl conducted by Clare Hickey (Vinson, Solomon, and Samuelson), Rachel Townsend, Cam Kurtz, Parker Webb, and Shelbie Music.

We hope you enjoy.

Thanks for reading,

-The Editors

(a)rs poet(i)ca 

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Baylina Pu

Featured Art: “Stolen Beauty” by Leo Arkus

I have been looking at images 
of AI-generated art all day. Something about 

the control in the brushwork 
mimics the delirium of a real artist, 

though what “real” means anymore 
I can’t exactly say. Lately I’ve been 

eating rice crackers at midnight 
while solving logic problems for fun, 

a bad habit.  There is something 
such that, if it is wet, then 

everything is wet.  I tell the robot 
to paint “Dream of the Red Chamber,” 

and it gives me a roomful of blood. 
How many photos did it dissect before 

it could make that? I mean paintings 
garbled into code, the way a prism 

reassembles light? I ask the machine 
to show me the fifth dimension: what I receive 

is a door. Its surrounding walls are made 
of something like stained glass, which spreads 

lattice-like across the floor and ceiling, 
like the brain of something more beautiful 

than a living thing. The colors shine metallic, 
though if you look closely the shapes 

appear distorted, confused. What is the robot saying, 
I wonder. Everything it knows, it learned from us. 

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Aural Projection

.Reading time 1 minute.

By John A. Nieves

I used to believe in the tang of orange
Tic-Tacs—that it had anything to do
with oranges. That three bright sugar

pills in my child-hand could shine
up a dark morning. And they did. What
little magic. What’s so easy to miss

so much. I believed rainbows on
window dew hid tiny treasures, that sneezing
while saying someone’s name meant

they were thinking of me, that everything
I loved would stay forever if I took
care of it, if I did my part. I have almost

none of that now: the purple stuffed
rabbit, my two pet Siamese cats, my best
friend across the way, my whole

family. I used to believe music could
change the weather. I’m lying. I still
do. I still believe people attach themselves

to songs they love, creep into their choruses.
This may be literally true in the science
of memory. This may also make me

superstitious. But, O, when I sing
you, I can almost reach. There is no way
there is nothing there.

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SHASTA GIRL 

.Reading time 27 minutes.

By Noah Pohl

Featured Art: “Bumblebee” by Leo Arkus

(March 27) 

Today, I came to work eleven minutes late. My co-worker Lenny said he didn’t know if he could cover for me, even though he thought I was “cool” and “down to Earth” and “pretty for twenty-four,” whatever the fuck that means.  

Lenny is sweaty. He sweats near the hot dogs sometimes, and that’s not cool. I try to avoid Lenny when he’s in one of his moods. He cries loudly in the Target bathroom because of his impending divorce, but he’s also extremely hairy and his eyebrows are out of control. Since his wife left him, he kind of resembles a giant, lumbering piece of sage. I know because I smudged my apartment last night to keep the bad spirits away. 

I also made sure my Target Pizza Hut uniform was clean ’cause I dumped Alfredo sauce on myself yesterday like a total dope. It smelled like hot garbage. Then I got quarters from one of the girls at the registers so I could do my laundry. No more free laundry.  

I mean, I feel like that’s a metaphor for something, I just don’t know what. 

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 Trying Not to Lump Together More Unknowns

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Matthew T. Birdsall

       “We know what we are, but know not what we may be”
                        -Ophelia, Hamlet, Act IV, Scene 5

Uncertainty looms heavy before sunrise.
Dark driving, she calls it, at 5:00 AM
to the hospital for her surgery,
when she mentions losing our dog,
Penny, a few months ago—
anxiously lumping together unknowns—
and I had trouble focusing
but I tried to turn the conversation around
with compliments—her outfit, hair, shoes—
but I shut down when she said,
It’s okay, Dad, I know that living is dying…

Stuck in the white shock of her wisdom
I wanted to say something to redirect us
but I couldn’t decide whether
she was that conscious of her own mortality
or if she was just being a child—
redirecting gravity away from her upcoming operation
toward something more certain.

At the last minute, the operation was canceled.
As we walked out, my daughter took my hand
because she knew I needed it telling me she felt good.
She said she still missed Penny,
and she would miss her as long as she was alive—
me too I said but holding back on diving deeper
trying not to lump together more unknowns,
as we headed home with just enough sun
to get all the way there without headlights.

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Mrs. Love  

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Elisabeth Murawski

Featured Art: “Mr. Love” by Leo Arkus

An adult neither liked 
nor disliked, 

she taught music 
appreciation, 

played 78s of Verdi  
and Bizet. 

Teens in letter 
sweaters, we were 

the children 
she didn’t care 

to know. A thin 
gold band on a red- 

nailed finger 
declared she’d snagged 

a Mr. Love 
so long ago we  

weren’t even born. 
She seemed resigned 

as our parents were 
to not going  

anywhere, tapping  
her black shoe 

like a metronome 
while reckless Carmen 

goaded Don Jose, 
Radames and Aida  

smothered 
in the tomb scene. 

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today which is hotdog day 

.Reading time 3 minutes.

By James Lineberger

today which is hotdog day
at forest hill methodist i ran into
my old high school lit teacher
from the tenth grade
one of the great influences in my life and it really got to me
while i was waiting in line
to put in my order
and i thought about all the other
teachers i used to have who lived and died maybe never
realizing how much they
had meant to their students and here was
a perfect opportunity
to express my gratitude and not to just any teacher
but miss ruby herself but then huh oh
all of a sudden i thought ohmygod what if
my eyes were playing tricks on me
and it was just some little old lady
that somewhat resembled her so just to make sure
i went over to another former student
wanda she used to be wanda yow
i forget who it was she married but wanda
was one of the volunteers
who was bringing food to people’s tables and i said
wanda is that her is it really her
and wanda said oh yeah that’s ruby all right don’t she
look wonderful but she’s
deaf in one ear i think the good one
is her left but you better hurry
if you want to speak to her she’s already
called her grandson
to come pick her up so i left
my order with wanda and circled around
behind ruby’s table
hoping i could surprise her and leaned down
from the left side
with my face just barely touching her hair
which smelled my god like violets
a really refreshing smell
and there was something else some kind
of perfume from elsewhere and
i don’t know how it happened but i was already starting
to weep it was such a profound
moment for me
and my feelings damn near overtook me
but i managed to get it out even
though my voice was shaking when i said miss ruby
until i had you for a teacher
i didn’t know
what great literature was and i—
but then
i just ran out of words and out of breath
and as i started
to pull away
she reached her hand back and slapped
me right in the face
turning around
with a stare like she had seen a ghost
saying oh goodness jimmy is that you i thought it was
a brown recluse

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Flying into Darkness 

.Reading time 36 minutes.

By Mary Cross

Featured Art by Jordyn Roderick

Sometimes in the middle of the summer when it was so hot that the tar on the road stuck, like Juicy Fruit gum, to the bottom of my tennis shoes, I’d see a mirage in front of me and think of my grandmother—imagine her a painting. She loved the heat in the summer, and she told me that she even chewed a hunk of tar when she was a little girl. I’d imagine her head was a wide stripe of white across a green-colored canvas, and her hips were shimmering shades of red and caramel; but the craziest of all were her lips—they were yellow buttons, the same kind on my spring coat. At night in our room we shared, I’d think of this painting when I’d watch her remove her Junior Petite coffee-colored stockings, rub her shins with the clinical expertise of a practiced masseuse at the Y, then rest her feet in a bucket of Epsom salts, while I studied the gap between my front teeth with her compact mirror. She’d repeat the story about her sixteen-year-old daughter who died; “Molly, there is nothing worse than losing a child.” She kept a lock of her daughter’s hair in the second drawer of her dresser, along with fortunes from Ray’s Chinese takeout. On the night table, her top teeth sat in a jelly jar painted with the outline of Fred Flintstone. Without her dentures, she sounded as if her tongue were swollen. 

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The Skater

.Reading time 2 minutes.

                                                                                                                                    —for Bam Margera
By Johnny Cate

Modus operandi: grace cut with chaos, every
drop-in a death sentence he’d somehow
skirt and skate off to nollie another day. 

If we got our hands on a burned Bam DVD
we’d play it until the player was hot to touch,
until every trick was etched into the mind’s 

fish-eye and we were sketched up
with strawberries trying to land one like him.
The kids who by high school couldn’t hit  

a heater pitch for shit or cared to run suicides
found a home in the sheet metal half-pipe,
a new American pastime and a hero in  

an unhinged prodigy. Jackass came later—
what mattered first was the skating, each
varial and crooked grind a live creative act 

that left like a vandal Michelangelo, bank
rails marked with paint, curbs darkened
with candle wax. But the rebellious aesthetic 

was just that—aesthetic. A sly disguise for the
same glory, the guttering flame of a single
God-breathed second. Under Bam’s feet,  

the deck spun like a plywood electron,
elemental and holy: 360 degrees of don’t-care
that would carry him to self-destructive stardom. 

Now, hardly a day goes by that TMZ wouldn’t like
to eat him alive, so I’m pulling up the tape,
posted by a stranger, just to see what I saw  

years ago on those long-gone discs: a man
risking blood and bone with total nonchalance,
his soul sliding recklessly, breathlessly diagonal. 

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Down Jersey

.Reading time 4 minutes.

By John Wojtowicz

Featured Art: “Pebbles vs. the world” by Leo Arkus

As a kid, I spent Saturday nights  
underneath this boardwalk, poking a dollar bill  
between cracks, pulling it back  
after luring unsuspecting tourists. 
Now I’m back around, fixing up a friend’s beach bungalow: 
paint-peeling and porch-rotting    
on the bay side of town.  
I’ve only walked the boards a few times 
mostly forgoing views of the ocean 
for beer-drenched nights at the Shamrock. 
Tonight, a thunderstorm rolls in  
and the preacher at the boardwalk chapel 
offers shelter to all but those  
with a still lit cigarette. 
Zombie Crusher and Terrordactyl  
don’t let lightening stop them  
from barreling over jumps made of beach sand 
but the amusement rides have ceased to amuse. 
The tram car watches me. 
I like riding the Sea Serpent with its upside-down  
and backwards thrills; 
how for that 1 minute & 48 seconds 
it’s hard to think about anything  
other than staying alive.  
I like the monster trucks too.  
The way they flatten.  
I put out my Marlboro and take shelter  
in the wood-paneled chapel  
next to a handlebar-mustached-man  
sporting a throwback Hulk Hogan  
t-shirt: Hulkamania is running wild, Brother. 
I think about how Dolly Parton  
made a spoof music video  
in which she married Hulk Hogan 
after reading in a tabloid  
that she was having an affair with a professional wrestler.
“He’s got a headlock on my heart, 
it was a take down from the start.” 
For Dolly, it’s all fertilizer; she’s a western- 
wigged buddha two-stepping through life.  
For me, it’s been more of a hot-coal-  
hop-skip. The rain slows, thunder booms. 
I have no special someone for whom  
to buy a pair of custom booty shorts.  
I grab a beer before the concessions close,  
toss rings on bottles, land quarters  
on plates. The unbridled ocean  
gives me chills. I think about how sailors  
wore earrings worth enough  
to cover the cost of their return and burial,  
salt-slicked mariners 
with no need for gold hoops.  
I bend down to pick up a dollar that disappears
before my fingers can grasp it. 
I think I want to be buried at sea too;  
being decomposed by sea lice  
seems more exotic than earthworms. 

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Like Communion

.Reading time 48 minutes.

By Ellen Skirvin 

My dad warned us that aliens were watching him before he disappeared. He also had checked himself into a psychiatric hospital five times throughout my sixteen-year lifetime. During his last visit to the hospital, the doctors said he vanished in the night. His clothes were left in his dresser. The framed photo of my sister and me left on his bedside table. None of the night nurses saw him leave. There were no tied up sheets found dangling outside his open window. The doctors reminded our family that my dad had admitted himself voluntarily and was free to leave at any time. There was nothing they could do. My mom didn’t seem worried at first. He’d left and come back before. One time he left for almost a week and returned with a pet frog that died the next day. Another time he traveled halfway across the country to tour a NASA museum. He needed space; he’d tell us later. Most of the time he checked himself into the hospital for a long weekend, casually packing his car as if he were leaving for a fishing trip.  

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IN THE DAYS OF CHILDHOOD AND VIOLENCE —

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Shelly Cato

Featured Art: Notes and sketches from “Life as distraction as practice as discovery” by Zelda Thayer-Hansen

⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀One Morning Before School

A tricorn hook pierced a night
       crawler before
       entering a boy’s
       thumbnail—
       the bone

At the same moment
      a grain of grit shifted
      into his mother’s left eye
      which remained to stick—
      twitch

On her cutting board
       apple peelings wilted—
       and the hound
       outside jowled
       ham fat 

Behind a shed
       seldom used for skinning
       the boy waited  
       for his school bus—
       nursed blood

from his thumb—believed
       in the way his mother
       arranged his lunchbox—
       believed he would live
       to open his lunchbox

that day

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Tilting

.Reading time 17 minutes.

By Matt Cantor

It’s been a full year, now.  

It’s October 7th. 

I stand at the platform at Kenmore, waiting for a D-train so I can get home to have dinner with my parents. I’m not waiting very hard. They’re going to ask all sorts of questions about what I’ve been working on.  

“Don Quixote,”  I’ll tell them.  

“Hasn’t somebody already written that?”  they’ll ask me.  

“Lots of people have already written lots of things.”—like it means anything, or makes any sort of difference in the direction that I want it to.  

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Featured Art

.Reading time less than 1 minute.

Detail of “I Carry Our Weight: Artifact” by Zelda Thayer-Hansen, photo by Bee Huelsman

Hymenoptera

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Joanne Dominique Dwyer

This is not a poem about insects of the family Hymenoptera.
It’s not a poem about pounding nails.
It’s not a poem about flashlight tag.
It’s not a poem about famous writers addicted to laudanum.
This is not a poem about the burial of a baby raccoon.
This is not a poem about the core of the sun becoming unstable
   and everything going black and cold.
This is not a poem about the definition of Hymenoptera.
Hymenoptera: derived from the ancient Greek words
hymen and pteron—membrane and wing.
This is not a poem begun in silence.
Before dawn the wolf dogs howling inside the pen.
And a 5:30 am text from a man who says another man
entered his bedroom while he slept—
   and a threat of beating the intruder to death.
This is not a poem about cannonball splashing.
This is not a poem about the softening and weakening of bones in children.
It’s not a poem about parachutes
It’s is not a poem about being born in a field of horses.
This is not a poem about oxygen.
It is a poem about the migration
   of ruby-throated birds and the effects
of artillery on tongues.

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Acquainted with the Night  

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Erin Redfern

Featured art by Jordyn Roderick

At the all-girls school they taught us  
don’t fight back: the rapist might get mad.  

Against my will, I remember this  

when I need to take a walk to clear my head.  
When I fear the sound of feet, a distance  

closing. When I drop my eyes in passing,  

my neck for decades bending. On the train  
a man asks me what I’m reading. Show me  

the Great American Writer; I’ll show you  

a man who finds by walking out alone 
what freedom is,  

and, so, America, I want to be  

the kind of woman who walks into night,  
a fine rain, her own thoughts.  

If at dusk I hear a clutch of cries 

and rush of wings from powerlines.  
If I love a spread of stars, dark wind in trees. 

If walking is a bodied way of thinking. 

If I love a subway map, a screech of trains. 
If walking out and back intact is luck. 

If I have been a long time without thinking. 

If I wanted to go there by myself

thinking. If I just wanted to go somewhere.  


Quoted phrases and lines are from Robert Frost, “Acquainted With the Night”; Judy Grahn, “A Woman Is Talking to Death”; Kim Moore, “On the train a man asks me what I’m reading”; June Jordan, “Power”; Lisa Shen, “Sixteen Seconds”  

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Flights

.Reading time 34 minutes.

By Jill Schepmann

Featured Art: “Spring Returns and So Do I” by Leo Arkus

I walk out of class, my mis-spoken and fragmented explanations of the day racing. A greatest hits of my unworthiness as a teacher. I think of earlier in the day, walking around the lake with a friend. The building I’ve just left is called Lone Mountain, which stands on a hill, in a city of hills, dramatic, grand. And I trick myself again into believing that I belong here. Sometimes, Lone Mountain makes me witness the fog coming off the Pacific to swallow San Francisco’s avenues. Sometimes, the glass buildings downtown. Once, on a rainy, windy day, I looked out my classroom window to see two giant cypress trees grown as one split and fall away from each other, their branches pointed skyward until they came to rest in sudden-found angles, fossilized insects on their backs. 

As I descend the mountain, I think of going home to my new girlfriend in Oakland. Oakland is also new to me. Susannah is making pasta for us. This caretaking, too, is new. I walk a little quicker thinking of the way she comes to unlock the door when I’m too long finding my keys. Her warm lips. Cupping her elbow in my palm. Her cheek resting against mine. I quicken. I quicken. 

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The Registry

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Dustin Faulstick

They had been together ten years when they decided to get on the registry. They had been to a wedding over Labor Day weekend and realized that all of their stuff was shit. They decided, as anyone would, that they might as well collect what they deserved. It started as an adventure. One of them wanted a knife holder. One of them wanted a blender. They had always both wanted a cast-iron skillet. It went on like this until one of them wanted a kitchen organizer. We don’t need a kitchen organizer; we’re not toddlers, one of them said. That one removed the kitchen organizer from the registry. The other one removed the down comforter from the registry: it was a tit-for-tat. It went on like this. Occasionally an item was added, but mostly items were removed: the electric drill; the waffle maker; the geometric-patterned area rug, one of those coffee cups that keeps itself warm. Once there was nothing in the registry, they started in on the stuff they already owned: a broken-down bicycle, a Don Quixote-themed fork-and-spoon wall decoration, a plastic Adirondack chair held together by duct tape. This, too, became a      tit-for-tat: an Ikea shelf from one of their sister’s college dormitories, license plates from the states where they used to live, their hospice plants on life support. It went on like this until there was nothing left. 

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It’s Better This Way

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Madalyn Hochendoner

When a potato you’re frying
hops out of the pan
into the unknown space
between the wall
and the oven
you know it’s gone
forever.
And sure you could
get the broom
and do a blind sweep,
see if you could rustle-up
more than a disturbing
amount of hair,
but you won’t.
At least not today, but really
not ever
because you’ve already moved on.
The phone rings, it’s your dad
telling you you need
to pick up
the snowshoes
for your trip
and he’s making
white bean soup
with the ham hock
he’s been saving
in the freezer
for this moment
said he thought
he could throw it in
whole
but mum said no
no you need to cut it off the bone
and he sees now how right she is
sees now that it’s better this way
like the beans he soaked overnight
you still have to cook them he says
I say yes, I know, the soaking
only reduces the cooking time
but what I think he means is
separately, you still have to cook them
separately from the rest of the soup
which is another truth. Now,
it’s tomorrow and I’m thinking
I need to ask him how
the soup turned out.

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Ground Control

.Reading time 50 minutes.

By Lesa Hastings

Everyone has to start somewhere. I began as a child stalker, or rather an accomplice to my mom’s propensity for stalking.

We first saw the man we called “Tony 86” parked in the dirt lot rest stop adjacent to the motel my dad would go to after fighting with my mom. After he left us, it became the meeting point for my parents to exchange me and my brother for the occasional weekend. Mom called it a fleabag motel for lowlifes.

“Late as usual,” Mom said. Dad was late enough I wondered if he was actually coming. He was late a lot, but this time he was really late. I’d never stayed in a motel before and made up stories about the people we’d see coming and going while waiting for Dad. Minutes passed as I watched a couple argue on the second-floor balcony, then embrace in a farewell, the woman walking away with the man holding her hand as long as her arm would stretch, until she moved out of reach. Mom had stopped nagging about Dad being late, distracted by something.

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Blood Moon Blues

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Johnny Cate

Featured Art: “Choreographic Translation,” black and white scan of choreographic
notation encapsulated in hand-made paper, by Zelda Thayer-Hansen

    Post-punk November puts on
  her black lipstick in the year’s mirror.
Eye shadow and zygomatic rouge

    give time that Bauhaus cool: we’ve all
  got it coming—who cares?
Death’s inevitability

    means as much to me
  as the bone-dry bottle of pinot noir
I drained solo under the blood moon—

    gonna die and soon, soon.
  So what? You won’t see me cry.
I’m deep six, baby—crystal-iris wastoid

    in a white feather bed, voices in my head,
  yeah, born doomed but it’s no
business of mine. I’m

    drawing the blinds,
  thinking about a girl in leather,
last name Jett slash first name Joan—

    throw out your lame zodiac, loser,
  and repeat after me: I don’t give a damn
’bout my bad reputation.

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Feeling Sorry for Myself After Failing to Tame a Unicorn 

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Michael Derrick Hudson

At first it was sublime, all her medieval tapestry qualities,
her plangent, gracile profile against a field

of heraldic green, the silvery trill of her neighs. My life
has purpose now, so I told myself happily

shoveling fodder and greasing the tackle. An obligation
to myth and legend, so I told myself, 

is worth the hassle. So I showered and shaved every day, 
expelled vulgarity and embraced the necessity

for an orderly household. And yet she still craps the halls,

and crap is crap even when it shimmers like the rainbows
on an oil slick and smells an awful lot

like butterscotch candy. She’s moody! And an incurable
insomniac keeping me awake gobbling stardust and

moonbeams in the middle of the night, her dainty hooves
clip-clop-clip-clopping across the kitchen tiles. 

She leaves the refrigerator door open half the time, uses up
the ice cubes. Every day it’s something, poking

her narwhal horn through the porch screen or another divot
gouged out of the drywall. Come the weekend,

she inevitably lays her head in the laps of my lady visitors, 
pestering them to scratch her ears and 

pat her dazzling pure white withers while she knocks over
beer cans and ashtrays. Some Knight Errant

or another is always pounding on the front door demanding
proof of her existence, as if I’m the Fairytale Ogre

keeping her locked away. Ha! She hides the whole time
in her bedroom like a teenager, ear pressed

against the door. Everything I say mortifies her. She plays
the same sad Joni Mitchell song over and over

on her little portable record player and mopes at suppertime

and smudges eyeliner all over the vanity. And each morning
she reproaches me over waffles with her doleful 

little nickers, and I still have no idea how I got this so wrong.

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Covenant 

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Baylina Pu

We were making mojitos 
in the kitchen when we found 
a  mortar and pestle made of 

Marble. With them, I crushed mint leaves 
and later, slices of lime 
four or five at a time. My friend 

Mixed in sugar, the water 
we’d carbonated ourselves, and 
white rum with a wooden spoon 

In a stainless-steel bowl. 
That evening, the sun was 
setting through the Japanese maple 

By the porch, and leaves 
had slid down the car windshield 
like paper cut-outs. I felt 

Grown up, a real woman. At dinner, 
there were eleven of us crowded 
around the table, beside 

A glass door which looked out 
over the lake, still unfrozen 
even in November. We licked brown 

Sugar off the rims of our glasses. 
My hands could still feel the weight 
of that marble mortar, an invention of 

The Stone Age. Even as early 
as then, happiness had already 
been discovered: simple movements of 

Grinding and stirring. Somewhere, desire 
was calling, but we were so deep 
in the woods nobody heard it. 

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PORTRAIT OF LUCI (ON FRIDAY NIGHT)

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Johnny Cate

Featured Art: Still from “feed me stone fruits”, by Zelda Thayer Hansen, a collaborative performance with Isabella DeRose

She’s driving buzzed
but the PSAs call that drunk.
Soft swerve under a gibbous moon
ripe as a white bleb
ready to pop, subs banging
College Dropout. Baby blue
cardigan over a hot pink bra—
call it cotton candy Bubblicious,
messy pony strobing
in the passing streetlights.
Crimson lip’s been her thing
since something like eighth grade,
and in the dash-glow
it’s the deepest red imaginable,
catching the light as she raps
every word to every verse.
This is pretty girl privilege shit,
sweater riding up the small
of her back shit, black
and white rattlesnake boot shit.
If all beauty is truth and truth
beauty, her body’s sola
scriptura—spritzed with
“God is a Woman”, the latest
Ariana Grande eau de parfum.
The right tire grazes the rumble strip:
kiss of death but it’s a butterfly,
a literal vibe, and subtly
the whole car shudders, touched. 

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Baby Shower 

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Annie Schumacher

Featured Art by Jordyn Roderick

We drive six hours to a San Diego swimming pool.  
A padded bikini top adorns a deer  
trophy, buoys balance on the mantle.  

Blue balloons, stuffed pheasants  
in a fishing net. I place a gift bag 
on a blue tablecloth. After rehab,  

my brother smiles with ease,  
skewering meat on the other side 
of a screen door. Star spangled   

diaper cake, blue M&Ms in a wide- 
mouthed jar, gun safe in the bedroom.  
Kitchen towels from Camp Pendleton. 

Proud USMC Wife, Proud Mother,  
Proud Unborn Baby, Proud Australian Shepherds.  
My hair in the frosting,  

my hair in the fishing net.  
I follow the nameless dogs  
through blue wrapping tissue, 

decide on divorce with 
a paper plate in my hand.  
The baby, a murmur,  

folded in his mother.  
He will be named after a type of metal.  

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Echo-Delta

.Reading time 16 minutes.

By Teresa Burns Gunther

“Echo-Delta,” his wife shouted from the dining room. “Can you order Chinese?” 

Ed sighed and checked his watch. He’d given up begging Tanya not to speak this way. Tango, as she’d taken to calling herself, spoke in the NATO phonetic alphabet now: a side-effect of her new life mission, to change the medical-insurance-industrial complex one military letter at a time. Ed waited the last seconds until his office clock read 5:00 before leaning his hands into his desktop, where a client’s financial records were arrayed, and pushing himself up. 

He grabbed his cane and made his slow way to the kitchen, wincing at the jolt of pain in his left leg, pain that poked a shaming finger. Since the pandemic, his accounting firm had allowed him to work from home, which was convenient given how the accident had left him.  

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Interview with Jodie Noel Vinson: Author of “Survival of the Unfit: A Retrospective”

.Reading time 12 minutes.

By Clare Hickey

Read the essay here!

Clare Hickey: What was the moment you knew that Charles Darwin needed to be a part of this story? Were you familiar with him at all before?

Jodie Noel Vinson: Yeah, I love that you ask about the origins of this essay ’cause. I feel like it really became an exploration of origins. The essay really started with me in the early pandemic. Looking at, you know, this protester who was holding their sign sacrifice the week and kind of realizing I was one of the weak, maybe that they wanted to do away with and thinking, OK How did we get here? You know, and then kind of looking backwards and reflecting and Darwin’s story came into that. To kind of help me explore that question in my own life.

I really knew very little about Darwin’s life when I started the essay. He had been just this kind of iconic, almost stereotypical, even cartoonish, figure in my mind. And one thing I’ve learned in writing and researching, looking at the lives of of folks through the lens of illness, is that it kind of opens up kind of their humaneness and their vulnerabilities. It was really rewarding to learn about him in a more nuanced way. I think it was just really learning about the fact that someone who had studied and talked about and thought about survival of the fittest might himself be unfit. That kind of was the spark for the essay.

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An Interview with Joanne Dominique Dwyer: Author of “Hymenoptera” and “Irish Traveler’s Writers Block”

.Reading time 31 minutes.

Featured Art: “Veines” by Leo Arkus

Read “Hymenoptera” here!

Read “Irish Traveler’s Writers Block”

Interview conducted by Rachel Townsend

Rachel Townsend: Thank you so much for doing this, Joanne!

Joanne Dominique Dwyer: Thank you for asking!

RT: Let’s get started! So, you grew up in Queens, New York, and you now live in New Mexico—that’s a dynamic change of scenery. I was wondering if you find that coming across in any of your writing. I read your poem “Snow” in Belle Laide, and there’s so much cold imagery—the man with a shovel, the beavers clawing at the ice—associations that you make that are so powerful. Can you recall that shift happening in your work? Or perhaps your favorite things about both places?

JDD: I was born in Rockaway Beach Hospital, Queens, NY, and lived there from birth to three years old three houses away from the Atlantic Ocean. I left at three years old. I don’t have concrete memories of that time of course, but the ocean is a very primal influence. Even after we moved up to Rockland County, about 30 miles north of New York City, where my childhood home had a forest behind it, and a horse farm about a mile away, the ocean remained a constant throughout my childhood along with the forest.

When I was eight or nine years old, my mother signed me out for riding lessons through a town recreation program. After those lessons expired, I worked at the horse farm as a child in exchange for lessons.  I was exposed not just to caring for animals 20 times my weight—cleaning stalls, feeding, brushing and catching ponies in the back field—but to many types of human beings, including the staff of grooms who were predominately ex-cons. It was a rich early childhood. My parents descended from Irish immigrants, their parents were working-class people in New York City. But my mother was adventurous and she decided she and my father would learn how to ski and before long they became volunteer ski patrollers—so my brothers and I skied as children. So I do think that snow, water, birds, horses, mountains, and trees appear in my work. I don’t think there was a shift, really, because I didn’t really start writing until I was in New Mexico.

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Interview with Allegra Solomon: Author of “Seeing It Through” and Pushcart Nominee

.Reading time 11 minutes.

Read the Story here!

Clare Hickey: I just want to start by telling you I love “Seeing It Through” so much. I think it actually did make me cry. I’ve read versions of this story before that maybe don’t have a happy ending and they don’t reconcile. It was really beautiful to see a story where that did happen and they really realized how much they loved each other. What inspired you to write a story like that?

Allegra Solomon: Well, thanks for saying that. I watched Eyes Wide Shut for the first time in 2022. After I watched it I got really interested in the idea of a couple that watched it and then somehow and inadvertently ended up having the same argument that Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman have in the story. But, I didn’t really know how to do it or how I wanted to go about it or anything. So I sat on it for a little while and then in 2023, I watched all of Richard Linklater’s Before (Before Sunrise, Before Sunset, Before Midnight) movies. I was unemployed at the time so I was watching a lot of movies, and I watched them all back-to-back in one day. I think something about watching the evolution of that relationship as well as watching a very dialogue-heavy movie inspired me. I’d been wanting to write a dialogue-heavy story, but I didn’t know how to go about it and so something finally clicked. Right after I finished watching the third movie, I just opened my computer and started writing this story. 

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Pyrotechnic Poetry: An Interview with Johnny Cate

.Reading time 11 minutes.

Interview conducted by Cam Kurtz

Cam Kurtz: When was the first time that you were published as a poet?

Johnny Cate: Well, the first time I count was actually not that long ago. I believe it was like last year. It was kind of mid-summer last year. I had three picked up randomly before that, but I’d never read them to anybody, I would never perform them for anybody. It was a small press in Portland or something, but I don’t really count that. I think that was sort of like a fluke thing. So I count my official history of publication as beginning last summer basically. I think it was like last April that I got my first poem picked up.

I started to try [to get published] because I was coming to the end of my MFA, so I was like, okay, I’m going to start transitioning from the work of writing this book or this thesis, into the work of publishing. And that’s when I seriously started to find opportunities and push them out and really get going.

CK: What has it been like as your first year as a published poet?

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Interview with Dustin H. Faulstick: Author “The Registry”

.Reading time 18 minutes.

Read the Poem Here!

Parker Webb: So, tell me a little bit about “The Registry,” just like a little overview. Anything you’d like to share about it?

Dustin Faulstick: Yeah, I like talking about this prose poem because it has a kind of story behind it. You know, sometimes ideas just spring from our minds, but more often, they don’t. In this case, there was this interesting thing that happened.

It started with my partner’s sister. She was going to a wedding and looking at the registry and saw that one of the options was a kitchen organizer. She was like, “What even is that? I don’t know what that is.” The funny thing is, unbeknownst to her, her partner decided to buy it for the couple. That’s what he got them—the kitchen organizer.

She found it hilarious because she didn’t even know what it was, and her partner had already ordered it online. I haven’t looked it up myself, so maybe kitchen organizers are incredibly useful and indispensable kitchen tools. But in my mind, it just sounds like one of those Little Tikes toy playsets for toddlers with fake eggs, a tiny spatula, and so on.

I thought it was an interesting little story. My partner did, too, and we started bouncing ideas back and forth about how something like this could escalate. Not for them—they’re happy; I think they’re totally fine—but we took the idea in a different, more dramatic direction.

It was fun to use this story as a starting point and to collaborate with my partner, whose sister is the person the story came from. We imagined a scenario with two people—one who wants this thing and one who doesn’t. That’s sort of how the prose poem was born.

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Interview with Arya Samuelson: Author of “I Am No Beekeeper,” notable in Best American Essays 2024

.Reading time 14 minutes.

Read the essay here!

By Clare Hickey

Clare Hickey: Congratulations on your essay “I Am No Beekeeper.” It’s been out for a little while now, but it just won Notable in Best American Essays. Has your relationship to the story changed at all since writing it or publishing it?

Arya Samuelson: Yes, definitely! I just read the essay a few weeks ago as part of a performance piece, so it’s fascinating to kind of relive that story all over again – especially with the recent Best American Essays nod. One of the really beautiful things about having this story in the world has been hearing people’s responses. Many people have shared about their own abortion experiences, some of which shared deep parallels to mine and some of which were completely different, but all of which carried a similar kind of lingering potency, especially because we had been carrying these stories in secret.

Since publication, I’ve had the pleasure of being invited into many reading and collaboration spaces centered around subversive motherhood. It’s been so powerful to witness such a spectrum of experiences surrounding the complexities of motherhood and to deliberately bring abortion into that conversation.

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Interview with Noah Pohl: Author of “SHASTA GIRL”

.Reading time 10 minutes.

Read the story here!

Interview conducted by Shelbie Music

Shelbie Music: How did you get into writing? What did that journey look like for you?

Noah Pohl: So I started writing in middle school, it was kind of a creative outlet for me. I was always a big reader growing up and if I had an opportunity to use creativity in something, I would try to do that. I had some really encouraging teachers who helped kind of nurture that. It’s funny ’cause I originally was more into screenwriting than I was into fiction. And when I was growing up, I would buy published screenplays off Amazon and I would just read them and study them. And I later pivoted into fiction. It’s been a long journey, but I like the fact that I can kind of bounce between the two mediums.

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A Kind of Terroir: Anna Farro Henderson’s Core Samples

.Reading time 10 minutes.

By Jenna Brown

Amid a climate crisis—hurricane after hurricane in the Gulf Coast, flooding in the Sahara Desert, and bleaching coral reefs—Anna Farro Henderson’s Core Samples (University of Minnesota Press, 2024) attempts to redefine our interconnectedness with the Earth in its intimate writing style.

Published in late-2024, Core Samples follows Henderson’s experience as she balances motherhood, writing, work as a climate scientist, and her time as an environmental policy advisor to Minnesota Senator Al Franken and Governor Mark Dayton. Weaving together scientific findings, stories of misogyny in the science field, and anecdotes of foibles in governmental systems, Henderson creates a captivating memoir that screams at the top of its lungs, “carpe diem” (but also “fuck carpe diem”).

Henderson begins her narrative with a notebook, the “first tool” she obtained as a scientist. “While some people see art and science as opposites,” she writes, “for me, they are a braided river, each strand and flow an approach to wonder.” Climate change primarily has not been a main political concern, her writing implies, because of the inaccessibility of climate science literature (i.e. scholarly publications, journals, and studies). Through memoir, Henderson makes the climate crisis approachable, framing our interaction with the Earth’s systems as a relationship, an ongoing story.

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Review: The Boy Who Reads in the Trees by Ron Mohring

.Reading time 10 minutes.

By Kate Fox

In a 1967 interview with Time magazine, Elizabeth Bishop said of the Confessional Poets, who were her contemporaries, “You just wish they’d keep some of these things to themselves.” Having secrets of her own, she kept her own poems cool and distant, cerebral and succinct. What is interesting, though, is that she didn’t use the term “confessional” to describe these poets. Instead, she referred to the work of Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, W. D. Snodgrass, her close friend Robert Lowell, and others as the “School of Anguish.” After reading Ron Mohring’s The Boy Who Reads in the Trees (The Word Works, 2024), I would place these poems firmly in that category. 

“Confessional” implies that someone needs to confess—that they’ve done something wrong or shameful. Bishop seems to have sensed that the term was all wrong. These poets weren’t confessing things they’d done; they were in anguish about things that had been done to them: Bullying. Neglect. Homophobia. Physical, emotional, and sexual abuse—and the depression, alcoholism, addiction, suicidal thoughts, and other mental maladies that might naturally result from such treatment.  

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Review of City Nave by Betsy Brown 

.Reading time 9 minutes.

By Tessa Carman

A good guide welcomes her charges into a new building, book, or idea, and prepares them for encounter, perhaps struggle, and for unexpected delight. She pulls open doors previously locked, unveils portraits, and leads the group up balustrades, through vaults, and up turret stairs, peering into transoms, calling attention to cornices and corbels and rayonets. But she never gets in the way of the encounter; she arranges, interprets, but ultimately steps aside so that they can see for themselves. 

A good teacher is a guide, who has also been the seeker, the asker of questions, and remains so, even as she becomes someone who inspires others to see, to seek and question, and then to make their own songs, sculptures, portraits, craft. 

Betsy Brown is that kind of docent, and her debut poetry collection, City Nave (Resource Books, 2024), is structured like a cathedral, comprising four sections: “Stairs” leads us to the “Narthex,” a sort of waiting room before entering the sanctuary, the “Nave,” at the center, within which we find the “Altar.” 

I love showing Betsy Brown’s poems to my students. There’s a quality to the poetry that makes it an especial joy to share her with young people on the cusp of adulthood. Hers is a wise and winsome voice that has that golden quality of a good teacher. She respects the intelligence of her students, her audience. And she passes on the fruits of her own keen attention, inviting them in to see better—sometimes by asking them with her lively language to stand on their heads while they look.

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Review of the atmosphere is not a perfume it is odorless by Matthew Cooperman

.Reading time 6 minutes.

By Sarah Haman

Maximalist and sprawling, the atmosphere is not a perfume it is odorless (Free Verse Editions, 2024) by Matthew Cooperman captures feelings of familiar contemporary anxiety on the state of the world. Filled with nostalgia for objects of childhood and poetry from the 60s, Cooperman crafts prose that exudes confidence and love for country and culture. Most impressive are the many lyrical odes containing individual anxious obsessions on growing systemic issues including gun violence, ecological disaster, and other national issues that he consciously contrasts with the Whitman-inspired long-form songs celebrating humanity. 

In the first lengthy poem in the collection, “No Ode,” Cooperman develops a familiar three-section ode that includes an anxious speaker growing in confidence, and the poem ends in a song of the self, perhaps more accurately a song for humankind. In part one, the stanzas are more controlled and conversational, reminiscent of a 1970s Robert Pinsky that slowly unravel into a more lyrically fragmented, nearly surreal imagery a la Dean Young: “Come toward me now, my no generation, the image of less // from space // as we’re moving // away // | // So goes mercury into the fist, so plummet the man from a cliff.” The despair in the lyric moves playfully down the page as the anxiety of the speaker leads to fragmentation then to a lack of language. The first section of the ode ends with the speaker clarifying that “the impulse to deceive is a fear of perfusion, / my soluble membrane, your rage, / what’s missing in a poem.” 

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Survival of the Unfit: A Retrospective

.Reading time 68 minutes.

By Jodie Noel Vinson

Excursion to St. Fé—Thistle Beds—Habits of the Bizcacha—Little Owl—Saline Streams—Level Plain—Mastodon—St. Fé—Change in Landscape—Geology—Tooth of extinct Horse . . . Flocks of Butterflies—Aeronaut Spiders—Phosphorescence of the Sea—Port Desire—Guanaco—Port St. Julia—Geology of Patagonia—Fossil gigantic Animal . . . Causes of Extinction

(Charles Darwin, Voyage of the Beagle)

Tongue crimson in morning ulcerated—stomach constricted dragging—Feet coldish—Pulse 58 to 62—or slower and like thread. Appetite good—not thin. Evacuation regular and good. Urine scanty (because do not drink) often much pinkish sediment when cold—seldom headache or nausea.—Cannot walk abv ½ mile—always tired—conversation or excitement tires me much

(Charles Darwin, note to Dr. Chapman)

Charles Darwin had “taken the horizontal,” as he would have put it as a seasick young man on board the Beagle. He lay in bed, snowy beard cascading over the coverlet that shrouded his six-foot frame. Emma could see her husband was in so much pain he was “longing to die.” Their daughter Henrietta, hovering bedside, lamented how “this terrible nausea still goes on.” Darwin, before passing away on that April afternoon in 1882 at age seventy-three, answered with the equanimity of one who has lived in daily discomfort: “It is not terrible. But it is nausea.”

At this point, Darwin had been ill for over half his life. “I was almost quite broken down,” he described his chronic ailment in a journal, “head swimming, hands trembling and never a week without violent vomiting.” The naturalist took copious notes on his malady over the years, during which his stomach caused him “incessant discomfort, I may say misery,” as he once wrote to his cousin William Fox, predicting: “I shall go to my grave, I suppose, grumbling and growling with daily, almost hourly, discomfort.”

*

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.Reading time less than 1 minute.

New for March 2026: Selections from our print issue 36 are available now. Please scroll down to read!

We’ll see you at AWP and are excited to announce an off-site reading at Section 771 at 6:30 on Friday, March 6th.

New Ohio Review is a national literary journal produced by Ohio University’s Creative Writing Program. Now in its twentieth year, NOR has been the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts grant and support from the Ohio Arts Council. Work from our pages consistently appears in the Best American series and the annual Pushcart anthology.

Our print issues appear in the fall and spring and are available for purchase now. We also feature online editions in June and December.

Issue 34 Now Available!

.Reading time 2 minutes.

Issue 34 issue tackles themes ranging from grief to adoption to parenting to queer love, and it features the NORward Prize-winning poem “Reading Shackleton During My Husband’s Cancer Treatment” by Michele Bombardier.

In this issue, there is new poetry from Sara Baker, John Bargowski, Eben E. B. Bein, A. J. Bermudez, Megan Blankenship, Billy Collins, Robert Cording, Rob Cording, Steve Coughlin, Sara Fetherolf, Charlene Fix, George Franklin, Mary Jo Firth Gillett, Ockert Greef, August Green, Ted Kooser, Veronica Kornberg, Mark Kraushaar, Becca J. R. Lachman, Michael Mark, Maria Martin, Jen McClanaghan, Patricia Colleen Murphy, Meryl Natchez, David O’Connell, Dion O’Reilly, Lea Page, Seth Peterson, Michael Pontacoloni, Jessy Randall, Stephanie Staab, Alan Shapiro, Kenneth Tanemura, Chrys Tobey, Jaya Tripathi, and Rose Zinnia. 

Included in Issue 34 are essays written by Jess Richardson and Sunni Brown Wilkinson and stories by Adrienne Brock, V. F. Cordova, Shaun Haurin, Bruce McKay, Alan Sincic, Allegra Solomon, and Eliza Sullivan.

The Features in this issue include reviews of Carrie Oeding’s If I Could Give You a Line, Abigail Rose-Marie’s The Moonflowers, Jaswinder Bolina’s English as a Second Language, , E. M. Tran’s Daughters of the New Year, John Gallaher’s My Life in Brutalist Architecture, Katie Berta’s Retribution Forthcoming, and Zoë Bossiere’s Cactus Country from Claire Bateman, Apoorva Bradshaw-Mittal, Denise Duhamel, Gwen E. Kirby, Kevin Prufer, Erin Redfern, and Nicole Walker.

We hope you enjoy Issue 34, which you can order by visiting our online marketplace.

Thanks for reading,
-The Editors

We Were Talking About Words We Didn’t Like

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Jessy Randall

We were talking about words
we didn’t like. One of us
was making a list, and we all
wanted our words on it.

“Leverage” came up, and the
overuse of “awesome.”
(We were distracting ourselves
from the reason we were together—

or not distracting, exactly, but
giving ourselves a breather
from grieving and thinking about loss.
We were in town for a funeral.)

My turn came and I didn’t
want to say, didn’t want my mouth
to make the word, but I screwed up
my courage and said it: “meatball.”

The others laughed, not at my word, I think,
but at the face I made when I said it.
The conversation turned to social justice,
but “meatball” had been said aloud

and it imbued the rest of the visit,
for me, with ridiculousness, and maybe,
much as I hate “meatball”—my god—
with hope.

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Just

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Charlene Fix

I don’t remember her name.
It was Adrienne.
She lived with her parents
in an apartment on Cedar,
the road that split school districts.
So when she threw a party,
she invited kids from both.
Feeling shy in her crowded
living room, I sat on Mark
Shore’s lap while he sat on
the lap of a comfy chair.
We laughed and laughed,
my giddiness netting me
two new boyfriends I didn’t
want or seek and whose interest
waned anyway as soon as they
found I was fun only when
perched on Mark Shore’s lap.
I loved abstractly then, all in
my head, divorced romantically
from anyone real. Mark and I
were just friends, with all of
just’s implications. So we remain,
though he passed away a while ago.
That night I felt protected on his lap
where I could gaze upon the social sea
secure, even when he worked
his arm up the back of my blouse,
until his hand emerged at my collar
waving to those in the room
and, in this ebb-time, to you.

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Visiting the Natural History Museum with My 97-Year-Old Dad

.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Michael Mark

In the photograph that my father has
             me take of him with the woolly mammoth,
he’s pointing to himself. He asks

to see the selfie. I don’t correct
             his terminology. Next, the triceratops, then
the sabertooth tiger. He takes the same stance

throughout the Extinction Exhibit. With the 4000-
             year-old beetle, 300-million-year-old coelacanth,
the dodo. She was beautiful,

he sighs at the butterfly, and I get the sense
             he’s thinking about Mom. Earlier, in his kitchen,
he posed with a jar of mayonnaise

with the expiration date from 1998, also pointing
             to himself. At the cemetery, he stands on his plot,
next to my mother, because I refuse to let him

lie down. Back at his apartment, he says it’s nice
             to have some company. I know
he’s referring to his defunct card game, so we go

down to the game room. He sits at their once
             regular table and points around the empty chairs,
Billy, Dick, Harold, Nat, Frank, hey Joe. He deals

them in. I take the picture of him squinting at the cards, fanned
             tight to his chest. He tosses a chip to the center
of the felt. In the shot, it really looks like

he’s waiting for someone to call his bet.

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The Cost of Living

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Mark Kraushaar

With the thumb and first finger make an L.
L is for loser.
It’s a thing anymore.
Now think of 8th grade.
There was King of Detention Jimmy Ramish.
There was Too Tall Eunice Bugg, plus
Kitchen Tom plus Clyde Skopina
who’d said his father was an astronaut—
he was lying and Brenda
Kleefish let him know we knew it too.
Glide, she’d called him, meanly,
Glide away, she’d say and wave.
There was dummy Aldo Krull
and there was fatso Mitchell Beacham,
Beachball, he was called, of course.
And Annie Friebert?
Annie’s winter colds
were worst and left a criss-crossed
slug trail up her parka sleeve.
Achoo we’d say, achoo, achoo.
Hey Annie drop your hankie?
Ha, ha, ha, ha-choo.
She was a neighbor and our folks were friends.
But with Clyde Skopina came a certain desperation,
nothing anyone could name, leastwise not me—
it’s just I wish I’d looked out a little for him.
In the lunch line once, believing we
were friends, touching my arm,
and smiling hard to trick the facts,
he said, My dad can lift a car.

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Magnets

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Mark Kraushaar

I’m watching the pinball
champ of Wisconsin: super flipper work,
perfect balance, both arms fully extended
excepting a slight bend at the elbows.
He’s playing Pop-A-Card, and Highway Patrol
and when he stops for a bite of his fries
I think, Yes, eating must be different for him
but I mostly mean different for the famous in general
and not only eating but reading, breathing, seeing, swimming, etc.,
because, and I’m guessing now, enhanced or diminished,
filtered, shaped or inflated, for there must be
something not the same.

I think, Immortality experienced from within
must be . . . must seem . . . must . . . or just . . . what is it exactly?
Plus he looks so totally focused
(which at the Barneveld Bowl-A-Drome
on league night with the TVs and the glitter
and glare, the clinking drinks and crashing pins
is no mean trick) but when his last ball bounces
off the lower left bumper and dives
straight down the gobble hole which is,
ask anyone, like a tiny dose of death
and he doesn’t get a bonus ball or free game
or even a match he looks just the way you or I might
suddenly look: sullen and shaken,
and then, pausing and perplexed he says,
he says because I’m watching and I hear
how softly his words reflect
a particular reticence,
Magnets man, magnets.

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The Year Time Capsules Started Showing Up

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Seth Peterson

it happened fast. Suddenly, everyone had Rubik’s cubes
& Game Boys.

All day, their eyes & hands were busy, waving sepia Polaroids,
lining up kaleidoscopes.

They felt an easing in their hearts, a silence they couldn’t place.
At night, they noticed these things

could still glow, these new old things, humming in their own way.
Humming

the way a mother hums to her child. A wrecking ball revived these things.
A confederate statue

had its head hacked off at midnight. No one could find it, & for months
it stood there, headless,

haunting all their dreams, until everyone agreed to tear it down.
Beneath the concrete

horse hooves, the elaborate part of the monument, was a hollow-slotted base.
There were murmurs

as the steel crashed into it. They remembered the capsule at its heart.
They remembered

what it was to be a child again. They remembered piñatas & birthdays.
The clap of steel

on concrete sent out a splash of color. A Cabbage Patch Kid.
A Walkman.

A pair of hot pink leg warmers. Each one humming like a memory.
The point is,

these were things they wanted to remember. & it happened
everywhere,

all across the country, all at once. & their hearts were eased.
Some boys, soon after,

claimed to have found the statue’s head. It was covered by wintercreeper
in the woods, they claimed.

It was haphazardly spattered with peat moss. The rumor is,
it’s still there,

absorbing knives of moonlight. They say its mask is ghastly.
It is ghastly.

You think it’s gone, but things can change.

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The World as It Is

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By David O’Connell

Some believe the new math
proves reality is actually

a hologram. And who am I
to argue when I don’t know

the language? I speak pig math.
At times, finger count. Failed

this week to help my daughter
with her fractions. Don’t worry,

you’ll never use it in real life,
remember? But now it seems

this math has always been
presiding over smoke-filled

back rooms of the universe,
invisible mover and shaker

knowing what we want
are answers, and that we want

them now. Outside, the street
is darker for the light rain,

and I’ve cracked the window
to catch the scent of earth

kicked up by water falling
back to us. Nothing is lost,

explained the talking head
last night, asking that we picture

clapped erasers raising
clouds of dust. The math

he detailed says it’s possible
for every molecule of chalk

I smacked out in angry
plumes beside St. Mary’s

one afternoon in 1982
to reverse and gather again

upon the board—faint, then
clearly remaking each mistake

I’d scrawled that day in class.
Implausible, but not. An act

the nuns would’ve taught us
wasn’t math but miracle

on par with the angels
that appeared—like, what?

if not holograms—to trumpet
what they knew was right.

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You Must Act as Though You’ll Live

.Reading time 1 minute.

By David O’Connell

You must act as though you’ll live,
though you will not live

and can imagine when you’re gone
the few stories that will be told

about your life, each a bright thread
that, in time, will fade

until all that’s said about your life
is genealogy, your name

or only your initials
beside those of the ones you love

and call by name
and struggle to understand.

It is for them that you must trust
when there is so little to win your trust

that it matters. Not just this rain
you feel falling

but knowing it’s fallen before
far from here under this same sun.

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A House So Vast

.Reading time 52 minutes.

By Adrienne Brock

Featured Art: “Autumn Window” by Scott Brooks (Passion Works Studio)

Before her father died, Amanda’s daughter used to crawl up onto the big bed and draw dramatic imaginative landscapes with her mother: tiny-shaped figures escaping from aliens using elaborately constructed slides or hot-air balloons. Immediately after the day of his funeral, they had tried to continue the tradition, but rather than adding onto each other’s fantastical scenarios, these two could only manage coloring bland shapes, inert and unanimated. Síomha had never been cuddly, not even as a baby, but in the middle of filling in a green rectangle with bright purple marker, the seven-year-old had pulled her mother’s arm around her and clung to it until her breathing slowed in sleep. Puffed breaths passed through the girl’s lips as if the child had summoned her father’s spirit to hold him in place on the Earth.

Before, Amanda had noted, warmly if resentfully, the uncanniness of her daughter’s unconscious impressions of her husband. She was ambivalent, taking a kind of painful joy in all of the ways in which Síomha literally embodied her father. But when they were out together, she felt the urge to scream to passersby, “I swear she’s my kid!” Or watching father and daughter play effortlessly, their humors and interests almost identical, Amanda felt as if she were watching her friend win a promotion for a job she’d wanted herself. On bad days, there had been a feeling that father and daughter were aligned against her. Now, it was immediately apparent that this feeling had been not only a result of her own stupid, stubborn inability to feel really at home, but it had also been a waste of time. A missed opportunity. Instead of vaguely threatening, these little ways in which Síomha resembled her father transmuted for a while into the only animate containers of his presence. His things remained in the house but were inert. His coffeemaker never needed to be cleaned anymore. A book was left on the bedside table, but the bookmark didn’t move, nor did the book travel around the house as it would have before, finding itself deposited in random locations on a sightseeing tour of their rooms, its owner calling out for the location of the lost tourist. At the side of their bed, her husband’s clothes hung suspended from wire hangers in the wardrobe. When someone walked quickly from room to room, the clothes would move slightly, and glancing in from the corridor, Amanda would have an illogical glimpse into what might have been: her husband had just taken something out of the wardrobe. He must be getting dressed. They were on their way somewhere together, and she would go so far as to open her mouth to speak, to ask what time it was, if he had rung the sitter. For weeks following the funeral, Tom’s phone would buzz with reminders about upcoming bills, and Amanda would feel the absence of a hand that might have reached for it, the absence of the sound of him upstairs, the absence when she returned home after work of smells from the kitchen from some experiment that would have become dinner.

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The Cardinal

.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Billy Collins

They say a child might grow up to be an artist
if his sandcastle means nothing
until he brings his mother over for a look.

I’m that way with my wife.
Little things that happen don’t mean much
until I report back from the front.

I ran into Rick from the gift shop.
The post office flag is at half-mast.
I counted the cars on a freight train.

Who else in the world would put up
with such froth before it dissolves in the surf?

But early this morning
while I was alone in the pool,
a Vatican-red cardinal flashed down
from the big magnolia
and landed on the deck
right next to where I was standing in the water.

Here was an event worth mentioning,
but I decided that I would keep this one to myself.
I alone would harbor and possess it.

Then I went back to watching the bird
pecking now at the edge of the garden
with the usual swivel-headed wariness of a bird.

I was an unobserved observer
of this private moment,
with only my head above the water,
at very close range for man and bird,
considering my large head and lack of feathers.

A sudden rustling in the magnolia
revealed the vigilant gray-and-pink female,
the mate with whom he shared his life,

but I wouldn’t share this with my wife,
not in the kitchen or in bed,
nor would I disclose it as she made toast
or worked the Sunday crossword.
Indeed, I would take the two cardinals to my grave.

It was just then that she appeared
in a billowing yellow nightgown
carrying two steaming cups of coffee,
and before she could hand one to me,
of course, I began to tell her all about the cardinals,

he pecking in the garden,
she flitting from branch to branch in the tree,
as if we were the male and female birds,
she with the coffee and me in the pool,

leaving me to make sure I divulged
every aspect of the experience,
including the foolish part
about my plan to keep it all a secret,
and that really dumb thing about the grave.

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Oatmeal

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Billy Collins

Many of us poets have been asked
to go someplace, often somewhere
we have never been, nor would ever think
to go, to read our poems out loud.

Audiences gather in these places
to hear us read our poems out loud
and to see what we are wearing,
which is often part of the disappointment.

Someone said that professors get paid
to read, but poets get paid to read out loud.

Julian Barnes said: they don’t come
to hear you read your work.
They want to know what you had for breakfast.

I think it’s a little of both,
as in Galway Kinnell’s poem called “Oatmeal,”
which is both beautiful and informative
regarding what the poet likes for breakfast.

It’s about having breakfast with John Keats
and he must have read that poem out loud
many times and in many places
where he had never been before

because we have only a handful of good poems,
so we read the same ones time after time,
if only to please the crowd,

and the poems come and go,
repeating like the painted animals
on a carousel, only without the up-and-down music.

And the audiences watch them go by,
the oatmeal poem coming around again
and one about a man in a hammock,
and a poem with an uncle in a single-engine plane.

And here’s the white horse again
with the orange plume and the wooden teeth,
as all the decorative little mirrors make their rounds.

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Keats

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Robert Cording

After my son died in October, I lived
with Keats’ Autumn in my head—
not the relish of lingering summer warmth
in mid-fall, but his one-line imperative:
Think not of the songs of spring.
I watched summer’s hummingbirds
fly off, then the gold of finches turn
dull green. But I couldn’t live with
the music of fall. I heard only those
first words—think not—which I did very well.
How much more Keats had demanded
of himself. And how many more falls I had
yet to undergo before I could hear,
just outside my door, hedge crickets sing.

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Driveway Toad

.Reading time less than 1 minute.

By Rob Cording

A year after my brother died,
I told my daughter about
the toad that once lived
in the hollowed-out knot
of an apple tree
in the center of my childhood
driveway. My brothers and I
liked to visit it after school,
but the tree came down
in a snowstorm, and my parents
graveled-over that spot.
When my daughter
asked what happened
to the toad, I explained that
it probably moved
under a rock, or to the woodpile
along the side of the house. “Or,”
she responded, “it died.”
Then, she skipped into the house
and left me outside.

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