Journal

.Reading time 2 minutes.

by George Bilgere

Feature image: Paul Sérusier. The Beach of Les Grands Sables at Le Pouldu, 1890. The Art Institute of Chicago.

Now we’re on this tourist island and I am going to rent a golf cart.

That would be a good way, a very good way, to start a novel.
But this is not a novel, it’s my life.
It must be written down so that later, when I’m old,
barely able to walk around whatever fearful place
I finally end up in, I’ll look in my journal

and there will be my writing,
my own hand, bolder and darker than the trembling scrawl
age has dealt me. I will stand at the window
looking at the new kinds of cars—mostly Chinese, I’m guessing—
zooming past in a world I no longer get on any level.

I will think about the 58-year-old self
who rented a golf cart that day,
his beautiful young wife beside him
as he talked to a nice Mexican guy named Ernesto
about insurance and late-return policies,

and not one of us—my wife, Ernesto, me—
recognizing the enormity of this, the sorrow,
the hugeness of the moment
in all its beautiful ordinariness
as it leaned so temporally,
so irrecoverably against the void.

And I will stand there weeping impotently.
I can see it coming. Already I’m prone
to saccharine effusions, and it’s only going to get worse with age.

I write this down in my journal: saccharine effusions—don’t worry about them.
Which will make my 88-year-old self smile,
then weep all the harder.

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Royalty

.Reading time 2 minutes.

by George Bilgere

Feature image: Odilon Redon. The Beacon, 1883, reworked c. 1893. The Art Institute of Chicago.

So this young couple, overweight
and seriously tattooed, comes into the café,
and each of them is actually wearing a baby
in one of those tummy-papoose things,
and they have two enormous dogs
designed to kill elk and wolves,
not sit under the table at a coffee shop,
and as I watch them smile at their babies
which are now screaming bloody murder
while the great slobbering mastiffs
begin earnestly licking their own privates,
something terrible happens to me:
it’s like The Manchurian Candidate,
when Lawrence Harvey suddenly realizes
the reason he’s been acting so strangely
is because he’s been brainwashed by Soviet agents:

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The Usual Way

.Reading time 3 minutes.

by Sydney Lea

Feature image: Odilon Redon. Ophelia, 1906. The Art Institute of Chicago.

Our bus streaks bullet-fast by the soaring Crowne Plaza Hotel
and the sundry Hartford insurance companies’ towers
where millions of dollars are made and lost,
for all I know, in an hour.

I don’t care. I’m searching for something else as I cross
Connecticut for New York City to greet my daughter’s
newborn twins. We should think of a child

as constituting the highest form that spirit can know,
and I’m headed south to witness such spirit, twofold!
Still I’m petty, comparing myself to the mannerless
couple—young and loud—

who bellow laughter from a seat behind me, perhaps at the latest
YouTube clip. What can their futures hold?
But what, after all, of my own?

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Fuchsprellen

.Reading time 12 minutes.

by Rob McClure Smith

Featured image: Edouard Jean Vuillard. The Artist’s Mother Playing Checkers, c. 1890–91. The Art Institute of Chicago.

vulpes vult fraudem, foemina laudem—Publius Syrus, Fragments

It is claim’d that these little Pamphlettes which have passed from me formerly have got me some little Credit and Esteem amongst all of the Female Sex who delight in or be desirous of good Accomplishments. But there being so much time elaps’d since the last came forth methinks I hear some of you say “I wish dear Mr. Wooley would present some new Instruction.” To say the truth, I have been importun’d by divers of my Friends and Acquaintance to do so. To which end being very desirous still to serve you, I offer this Fuchsprellen, which I assure you worthy for the very precious things you will find there.

There are an hundred Divertissements harmless enough, which a young Lady may find suitable to her Inclination; but give me leave to find out one for her which hath the attendance of Profit as well as Pleasure that is a Toss. To speak the Truth, a Toss is a most excellent qualification for a Gentlewoman to exercise and please her Fancy therein and the best and readiest way to put the Body into a graceful Posture. The chiefest thing to consider is how to govern and behave your selves in this laudable and ingenious Art. For how will you blush when you come into a mixt Society, where each Person strives to shew her utmost Art and Skill, and you for the want thereof must stand still and appear as one whose Body wanted Motion, or a very Soul to actuate it. Yet the Mode and Humour of these times look upon it not only as a generous and becoming Property, but upon Gentility illbred if not thorowly acquainted therewith. Ladies, it is presumed you know the rudimentary grounds of Tossing, else your resort amongst wellaccomplisht gentlewomen would not only be improper but much hazard your Repute and good Esteem among them; and as you can toss, so I would have you learn other Formalities. By this Assistance, you will be enabled to give proper Directions for preparing every necessary Entertainment and be directed also how to act as Hostess in manner as befits your rank.

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Slip

.Reading time 2 minutes.

by Jeffrey Harrison

Feature image: Charles Émile Jacque. Seated Boy, n.d. The Art Institute of Chicago.

If I call my son by my daughter’s name
or vice versa; or if I call one of them
by the dog’s name, or the other way around—
all of which I have been known to do—
it’s funny, and only means I’m spaced out.

But when, while talking on my cell phone,
I walked past my new African-American colleague
and distractedly said hi, using the name
of another black colleague, it was stupendously
unfunny. It felt like I’d been punched

in the stomach, which is probably what
I deserved, even if he shrugged it off,
as he seemed to do when I caught up with him
and apologized too fervently,
my assumption that I’d caused him pain

itself a kind of racism, no doubt. It’s so
complicated!—though it doesn’t seem to be
for my teenage son and daughter,
and I’m glad of that, and admire their ease.
As for me and my colleague that day,

he absolved me with offhand grace,
doing his best to nudge me away
from my floundering shame, then
gently steered the conversation elsewhere
the way one does to protect a child.

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Commuter Buddhist

.Reading time 2 minutes.

by Jeffrey Harrison

Feature image: Alfred Stieglitz. Car 2F-77-77, 1935. The Art Institute of Chicago.

I’m learning to be a Buddhist in my car,
listening to a book on tape. One problem
is that, before I’ve gotten very far,

my mind gradually becomes aware
that it has stopped listening, straying from
the task of becoming a Buddhist in my car.

I’m also worried that listening will impair
my driving, as the package label cautions,
but I haven’t noticed that, at least so far.

In fact, I may be driving with more care.
There’s a sensation of attentive calm
that’s part of becoming a Buddhist in your car.

A soothing voice drones on until the car
is transformed into a capsule of wisdom
traveling at high speed, and you feel far

from anywhere but where you really are . . .
which is nowhere, really. The biggest problem
is getting the Buddhism out of your car
and into your life. I’ve failed at that so far.

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Queenie

.Reading time 23 minutes.

by Jeff W. Bens

Feature image: Johann Christian Reinhart. Lying Goat, from Die Zweite Thierfolge, 1800. The Art Institute of Chicago.

Dr. Frank Shire had never been down to Athlone before, hadn’t been back to Ireland to see the Kennelly brothers in the decade since he’d finished his fellowship at the University College of Animal Surgery, had seen them just the one time when they’d visited New York. The only American at the Fisherman’s Rest, the only American in all of Athlone for all he knew at that time of year, November, in the wet cold, driven straight to their father’s fisherman’s hotel by the Kennellys before he’d even had a chance to eat breakfast after the all-night flight to Shannon from JFK.

“She may be dying,” is all Robbie K said.

His brother Michael added, “She may be dead.”

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A Mile In

.Reading time 4 minutes.

By Julie Hanson

Selected as winner of the 2011 New Ohio Review Poetry Contest by Nancy Eimers

Feature image: Claude Lorrain. View of Delphi with a Procession, 1673. The Art Institute of Chicago.

The snow had been with us for awhile
and was dingy and not well lit.
But the sun promised to come out.
The light fog lifting
against the skinny tree trunks
and the grounded limbs they’d lost
and the thick, half-detached vines
would lift off,
dissolved, by the end of our walk.
We’d taken the footbridge
across the creek and followed the bend
away from traffic and toward the west ridge.
We’d gone a mile in,
to where usually I begin to listen to
our progress in the twigs and gravel of the path,
and past this, and past my own
periodic reminders to the dog
to the short, uncomplicated songs
of winter birds. And there,
near the spill of rocks in the creek
where the fog was still passing through branches
and a little farther and to the right
where a stretch of tall grasses
received a wide gift
of sunlight and several cows,
the air that stood still
between the trees and shimmered
over the grasses filled with sound—
a big voice moving through
a hundred thousand habitats—
and it said, “Attention in this area.
The following is a regular monthly
test of the Outdoor Warning System . . .”
It spoke from the west first,
sounding closer than it could be.
And it spoke from the southeast next.
“This is a test,” it said, “only a . . .
“This is a test . . . ” it began again
from somewhere else.
The dog returned to me, cowering.
I’d wondered before
without much curiosity,
where were those speakers housed,
were they towered, did they revolve?
Ordinarily heard in the yard
while I stood pinning laundry to the line,
the broadcast soon plunged and sank
into the noise of passing cars
and blown and rolling garbage cans
and faded like the little ringing
that emanates from construction sites.
But here, it seemed full minutes long
before my breath was back again in my chest,
and my dog’s breath,
steady and rough, was back in hers,
when the voice had left the air
between the trees, as had the fog.
At last a bird sounded from a twig.
At last a squirrel came down
and sent the dog. And then,
made up of other sounds
I could not have singled out,
a normalcy rolled in.
Infinitesimal bits is all it was
—quick beaks breaking up the peat,
the slow collision of a leaf landing, scooting
half an inch along a big flat rock,
a splat of excrement in white,
a flinch, a flap, a flick. But as it came it felt
to be a counter-vigilance. Or like
the sound of consciousness. The is.

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Pretending to be Asleep

.Reading time 2 minutes.

by Angie Mazakis

Selected as runner-up of the 2011 New Ohio Review Poetry Contest by Nancy Eimers

Feature image: Jean François Millet. Sleeping Peasant, c. 1865. The Art Institute of Chicago.

is like knowing exactly what you
are saying to me, but nodding,
yes, what else? anyway, as though,
I have never heard what you are saying before.

I have to purify from my appearance
appraisal and purpose,
my face distilled to stillness.
I have to guess when to genuinely tremble,
never having seen myself in sleep,
moving aimlessly beneath
awareness—I wager one
hand from the sheets,
toward nothing.
How does one believably breathe?

It’s like hearing words I was not
supposed to hear and just turning
in my chair as though I needed to reach
my arm this way, toward this phone,
toward anything, as if to say,
I am occupied; I was before.
It is all now exactly as I meant it.

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Owen and Paul

.Reading time 4 minutes.

by Angie Mazakis

Selected as runner-up of the 2011 New Ohio Review Poetry Contest by Nancy Eimers

Feature image: Sir John Everett Millais. Study for the Head of the Rescuing Lover in Escape of the Heretic, 1857. The Art Institute of Chicago.

It’s any two strangers’ conversation.
The proportions of the tall one’s face
make him look like an Owen.
The other one, easily a Paul.
Owen makes a face, a gesture—
his forced half-smile squints one eye,
as he barely shrugs in a way that falsely
means tentative, in a way that pejoratively
leans and says, I’ll give you that much,
a gesture which says entirely,
You know, it’s like this. Maybe I’m wrong,
but it’s something to think about.
The maybe I’m wrong suggested by some
softening of his eyes that kept him from
a face that said, nice try or dubious—
something he had to lose.

I catch my eye just beginning to imitate
the gesture, try it out, here in this coffee shop.
Maybe I’ll start wearing this look after saying things like,
Yeah, I’m pretty sure that’s the city rock ‘n’ roll was built on.
Or after anything ending in most people don’t know that.

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Antonioni at Nineteen

.Reading time 6 minutes.

by Jeffrey Harrison

Feature image: Adriaen van de Velde. Pastoral Landscape with Ruins, 1664. The Art Institute of Chicago.

I saw Antonioni’s The Passenger in September or October 1976, at the beginning of my freshman year at Columbia. It was the first “art house film” I ever saw, well before I’d heard that term. I was from Cincinnati, where apparently they didn’t have such things. I had just turned nineteen, or was about  to. I was taking a writing class with Kenneth Koch, discovering Frank O’Hara and Rimbaud, and doing everything I could to peel or dissolve the suburban Midwestern scales from my eyes. In that pursuit, this movie was as important as the LSD I would drop for the first time a few weeks later. Not that it was hallucinatory—just the opposite, in fact . . . though in both cases, perhaps, it was “the visuals” that I liked best.

The film was playing at an auditorium on the Barnard campus, and I remember walking over there alone, being completely amazed by what I saw, and hurrying back to my Spartan dorm room to write excitedly about it in a notebook that is now long gone. I don’t remember what I wrote, but I know it wasn’t focused on Jack Nicholson, who plays a television reporter disillusioned with his life and work. Nor did I write much about the plot involving switched identities, riveting though it was. If I wrote about these things at all, it would have had to do with the way Antonioni de-emphasized Nicholson’s movie-star status and took the weight off a plot that would have been handled ponderously in a Hollywood movie, accompanied by ridiculous, tension-building background music. (I’d seen Jaws just the year before, which suddenly felt like ages ago.)

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Death, Cashews, and “No Country for Old Men”

.Reading time 6 minutes.

by George Bilgere

Feature image: John Clerk of Eldin. Sheriff Hall, n.d. The Art Institute of Chicago.

I saw No Country for Old Men (Academy Award winner,  2008) ten times  on the big screen at close to twenty bucks a pop (including popcorn by the bushel and cola by the quart). If that ain’t obsession, to paraphrase Tommy Lee Jones’s oracular Sheriff Ed Tom Bell, it’ll do till the obsession gits here.

When the movie left the theaters I bought the DVD and raised my madness to a new level by slipping the disk into my stereo and listening to it. Cormac McCarthy’s dialogue, as adapted to the screen by the Coen brothers, has an understated lyricism and humor, thrillingly true to the laconic rhythms of the southwest (I lived in Oklahoma for a few years and I know my laconic rhythms). In fact, the soundtrack is one of the film’s most striking features, which is odd, given that there is no music whatsoever. Just the pitch-perfect dialogue and the silence of the plains, where the smallest sounds—the squeaking of a hinge, the unscrewing of a light bulb—acquire an ominous eloquence.

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On Lubitsch’s “Angel”

.Reading time 6 minutes.

By Lloyd Schwartz

Feature image: P. Roberts. Allum Bay, c. 1794. The Art Institute of Chicago.

It’s probably hard to remember, but there once was a time when Hollywood took for granted from its audience a certain level of cultural knowledge. I mean high culture. Art. Literature. Classical music. My favorite example of this assumption occurs in a 1937 romantic comedy-drama called Angel, a generally overlooked film by the great German-born director Ernst Lubitsch, still admired for his inimitable “touch” in such stylish masterpieces as The Merry Widow, Trouble in Paradise, Ninotchka (“Garbo laughs!”), and The Shop Around the Corner. His earlier Lady Windermere’s Fan, based on Oscar Wilde’s play but without any of Wilde’s dialogue (just as my nominee for the greatest Shakespeare movie, Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood, hasn’t a line of Macbeth), might be the most sophisticated silent film ever made.

In Angel, the glamorous heroine, played by Marlene Dietrich, perfectly cast, is married to a British diplomat (the touchingly stolid Herbert Marshall) who devotes more time to the League of Nations than to his wife. She loves him, but is frustrated by how much his desire to save the world from war   has blinded him to his need to save their marriage. So she slips off to Paris to visit an old friend, a Grand Duchess (Laura Hope Crews—soon to be Gone with the Wind’s Aunt Pittypat) who runs a social (very social) club where people connect anonymously (there’s a delicate post-Production Code innuendo that Dietrich may have been an active member of this “private club” before her marriage). On this impulsive visit to Paris, she meets at the club Melvyn Douglas, who instantly falls for her. Hard. Since she refuses to give him her name, he calls her “Angel.” Their negotiation for their first rendezvous has some of the film’s most deliciously teasing double-entendres (screenplay by Samson Raphaelson). But Dietrich becomes frightened by the intensity of this fling and disappears, returning to London without even saying goodbye, leaving Douglas no way to reach her.

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Acting the Truth

.Reading time 21 minutes.

by Linda Bamber

Feature image: Circle of Giuseppe Cesari, called Il Cavalier d’Arpino. Angel Playing a Flute, 1580. The Art Institute of Chicago.

Angels

Beautiful slim girls dressed in gauzy white, hands touching, dancing around an invisible Maypole. High voices singing. The girls themselves are not to blame for their performance of perfect white womanhood; but what a handy excuse for all kinds of racist bullshit.

Cut to a man in the audience, watching. He has been gifted with every gene there is for male beauty, but by this point in Long Night’s Journey Into Day (2001) his expressionless face looks nothing short of criminally stupid. He is one of the Boer policemen who murdered four anti-apartheid activists in the rural town of Cradock, South Africa. Then he poured gasoline on their bodies and burned them. We have come to know two of the dead men’s wives pretty well. They are thoughtful, intelligent, sober and articulate; their suffering is unmistakable and intense.

Long Night’s Journey Into Day is a documentary about the Truth and Reconciliation process in South Africa. As an early inter-title explains, those who committed crimes under apartheid (mostly white) wanted amnesty when it ended. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) was established  as a compromise, offering the perpetrators amnesty in exchange for the truth. Shockingly, eighty percent of those requesting amnesty were black. Where were the whites? Eric Taylor, the handsome Boer policeman, can at least be commended for cooperating with the process. But the wives of the “Cradock 4” opposed his request, and their lawyer caught him in a meaningful lie, so in his case amnesty was denied.

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New Ohio Review Issue 9. Originally printed Spring 2011.

.Reading time less than 1 minute.

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

Issue 9 compiled by Gryphon Beyerle.

Fly

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Joyce Peseroff

Featured art: Street Musicians by Eugène Atget

A small fly hung around my kitchen mid-October.
It didn’t buzz. Outside wet shape-shifted, drop to
flake: knock-knock of rain, a who’s there of snow.
The fly tiptoed on the meat-cutting board where I aimed
to smash it like a head of garlic. It bounced wall to wall to
wall, baby trapped in the balloon that was a hoax.
Was it my mother’s perturbed spirit warning me that blood
stains? Of course not. Last of its kind, Robinson Crusoe landing
on a kitchen island, the fly needed to be warm.

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Happiness

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Ellen Bass

Featured art: Indian Mother with Her Child by Adam Clark Vroman

I had a student once who was so depressed
she wanted to die. She was a young single mother,
lonely, poor, watching other girls
go to parties and bars while she was home
cutting the crusts off peanut butter sandwiches,
reading The Berenstain Bears and the Bad Dream.
Then she collapsed with heart disease
and spent the next few years waiting for a transplant.
The strange thing is, now she was happy.
Every day, almost every breath, was semi-ecstatic.
She was a modern-day Chicana Rumi,
hanging out with the Beloved, grateful just to touch His hem.
I find I’m telling myself all the time now,
look how you lift one foot and then the other,
all the nerves and synapses firing together.
Look how you reach for a carton of blueberries
and eat each dusky globe, one by one.
Look at the spotted dog tied to the newsstand,
drops of saliva sliding off his tongue,
and the cracked Bic lighter in the gutter
shining a watery turquoise blue.
Even when your heart is a used teabag
you can lie down in a warm bed,
even though you cry half the night
with the window open a little
to let in the stars.

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Solstice

.Reading time 4 minutes.

By Maya Sonenberg

Featured art: The Vanishing Race (Navajo) by Edward Sheriff Curtis

Eight o’clock, nine o’clock, ten o’clock on a summer evening—it’s time to close the eyes, allow the breath to deepen, and sleep. The neighbor’s cat sleeps under the camellia bush and the neighbor’s baby has given up her screaming and sleeps in her crib; the hummingbird babies sleep in their nest perched on the Christmas-light wire strung across the porch ceiling; boys and girls everywhere put on their pajamas and brush their teeth; grandparents, all four of them, rest underground. In this house, though, the children call for glasses of water, kick off their sheets and pull them back up, ask for stories about the grandparents they’ve never met, count airplanes going in for a landing at SeaTac, their red lights blinking down through the trees, tell each other jokes through their open bedroom doors, and throw pillows at the back of any parent who dares suggest it’s time for sleep. Yes, darlings, you’re right: while light still fills the sky and the first star appears and then the others, and while your parents sit on the porch steps with their glasses of wine, trading stories, it’s impossible to think that this vast middle—life—will ever end, that anything will ever die. Now, before dark sets in, watch all the colors fade to gray: the last stripe of orange sunset in the west; the blue sky pulsating overhead; the cedar and eucalyptus and dogwood all dissolving into dark—a gray and then a darker gray that is the color of our house walls, headstones, and storm water rushing over Snoqualmie Falls. At the falls today, after playing in the hot sun and the icy rocky riverbed, attempting to catch minnows, you hiked the slowest hike in all creation back up the steep slope you’d run down an hour before, scuffing the gray dust with your toes, and moaning about your aching legs and parched throats and sweaty backs and lack of ice cream, but once we got back to the city, you decided you hadn’t had enough of the outdoors and insisted we stop in Volunteer Park where you, Ezra Jacob (grandson of Jack and great-grandson of Jake) and Phoebe Rose (granddaughter of Phoebe and great-granddaughter of Rose), sat side by side on the swings and pumped yourselves up and up and almost out over the fence separating the playground from the cemetery, out over blackberry bushes and hydrangeas, out over the chain link and then the short clipped grass and the monuments, so that if you’d let go, you would have sailed toward a waiting angel who would lift her stone arms and catch you, happy for the chance to save someone, happy for the reprieve from guarding a grave.

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What Comes Next

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Maxine Scates

Featured art: The Girl by the Window by Edvard Munch

Life’s police car, lights flashing, on the sidewalk
in front of McDonald’s and two boys on the bus stop,

one boy moving quickly away from the other
who raised his hands and dropped his pack as the officer

approached, gun drawn. But how did the cop know
which one he wanted since both wore watch caps

and gray parkas and carried backpacks? He seemed
certain enough as he handcuffed the boy

then helped him into the back of the cruiser
his now gunless hand almost gently dipping the boy’s head

into what comes next, all we don’t see swallowing him,
the signal changing, day swallowing me until this morning

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Luna de Miel

.Reading time 68 minutes.

By Melanie Unruh

Featured art: The Herwigs by Edouard Antonin Vysekal

I like to practice what I’m going to say in therapy each week. The opening line is always the most important part because it has to be something attention-grabbing that still makes me sound stable.

I slept pretty well this week, except for Tuesday, when I stayed up all night watching a marathon of The Wonder Years. They played the one where Kevin touched Winnie’s boob.

It’s been six months, eighteen days, nineteen hours, and six minutes—give or take—since I last saw James.

This week I only made twelve lists.

My cat bears a striking resemblance to my therapist, but this isn’t because of their matching whiskers so much as the fact that they both make the same frowning concerned face when I tell them about my life. Boots and Dr. Andrews, who has tried without success, to get me to call her Maggie, are not formally acquainted.

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Match.com/Matthew likes buttered toast, vulnerability…

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Elizabeth Powell

Featured art: Tujunga Canyon by Walter Elmer Schofield

My love lives in a little tiny box
Made of pixels and engineering. When I write him
He writes me back and when he writes me
Back, I write him. Even though we exist
Me/him, here/there: one day our band
Of consciousness will grow outward,
When science puts chips in brains
So all mysteries can be known—
Delusions, proclivities, sentences.
For now imagination a gangly vine
Grabs for a life. He has been so busy
Writing a narrative where he has no wife
That she has disappeared. So much first-person
Construct and banter. He has
A vixen schoolteacher held down
On the bed of his mind. And when he
Writes me he makes me
And when I make him I write him.
We are invented, in part,
By the wanting and not having
Of others. Soon someone else
Will pick him out of his little box
And begin again, wait for him
In the rain in front of the coffee shop
Where inside the donuts harden like
He can’t, and the red counter chair swirls empty
As if trying to conjure something so close.
But so close is almost, and almost is really
Far, still. She tries to pick him out of the crowd,
Ever hopeful, though night comes on like emergency.
And he is two places at once, virtual and real.
My love lives in a little box. Someone
Is making him
Into something else now.

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Chemistry.com/Palmer is a Match–

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Elizabeth Powell

Featured art: Edna by Robert Henri

I knew you really wanted to meet me,
But I had the sneaky feeling you were an uber-Aryan
Chiropractor with homoerotic tendencies,
That maybe I should re-up with my academic
Asperger’s husband, and wear muu-muus on Saturday nights.
But I met you anyway before your snowboard race.
The style gel in your crew cut looked like ice,
Your red coat was puffy. You were disappointed
That my hair didn’t look like my picture. You implied
I was a liar. We walked down Main Street in Stowe
Past scented-candle-buying New Jerseyans
And Gnostic punk-rock townies eating baguettes,
My nose beginning to run in the cold,
Until we came to the cemetery and after you
Talked about your lying ex-wife, and your pretty ex-girlfriend,
You talked about a pair of little green baby shoes
That made you realize you were now too old
For children and I thought of the poetic
Significance of shoes, how used and alone
They stood for death. Your incoming text messages
Beeped us all the way to my car, which was German
But somehow not Aryan, where you told me good luck,
Shook my ungloved hand, then thought better
And gave me a hug
As if I were a patient on your ward.

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Dear Doris Day

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Pamela Davis

Featured art: Untitled (Surreal Abstraction) by Benjamin F. Berlin

I trusted you to never change, when I was 15, and needed
to believe men and women sat up talking all night,
like the movie with you and Rock Hudson joking in a satin bed,

both of you in men’s pajamas you buttoned to the chin.
Alone in my room crammed with horse figurines, you
were all that stood between me and what hid under the sheet—

the straining warm blossom that held me in thrall. I believed
you’d always be Rock’s chum, immune to Cary Grant’s mink-
lined smile. I’d be like you, beehive my hair, keep my knees tight.

We could have driven forever, you and me and Rock
in a two-tone convertible he steered with his big, clean hand.
How could you fall for Clark Gable, a man with a moustache,

and clearly too old? A burglar’s eyes. Safecracker hands.
In the movie you played his teacher in twinset and pearls,
eyes big as pies when he cocked one leg over the edge of the desk.

I needed you to report him to the authorities, not follow him
to a nightclub. Later there would be torn sheets, cigarettes,
counting the days between periods. Bad men with keys.

But I never imagined you’d go out of style, show up in the tabloids
bloated and hazy, surrounded by stray dogs, and, last I heard,
living alone.

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July 4th, 1984

.Reading time 60 minutes.

By Maggie Mitchell

Featured art: Figures by Benjamin F. Berlin

Maddy is thirteen, almost fourteen. Her chest is as flat as a boy’s and she does not own a pair of Jordache jeans.

“I hate Fridays,” she tells her mother. What she means is that she hates everything.

“I know you do,” says Jude, understanding perfectly. “I’m not sure what you want me to do about it.”

“It feels like I’m in prison. There aren’t any windows in there.” She’s referring to her room behind the bar, to which she is more strictly confined than usual on Friday nights: Jude insists that she stay out of the way when it’s crowded. “I can hear people but I can’t see them.”

“Why would you want to see them? They’re adults at a bar.”

“But that’s all there ever is,” Maddy rails, not even caring if she makes sense. “Adults at a bar. I wish we could be normal.”

“That’s what you keep saying. You tell me what normal is, and I’ll see what we can do.”

Maddy whirls around and storms into her room behind the bar, daring to slam the door. She knows only what normal isn’t.

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The Lecture

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Billy Collins

Featured art: Wrestlers by Thomas Eakins

If all of time were poured into a salt shaker,
human history could be represented by a single grain,
the professor of astrophysics claimed
as a shaft of light illuminated his head,

leaving me to marvel at how
there would be room inside for everyone—
for Mary Magdalene and Isaac Newton
and every month of the Hundred Years’ War,

and Andrew Marvell would have a place to think,
a garden in which to dwell,
and you would be in there as well
and your ex-boyfriend, the cheap bastard,

with his ridiculous sports car parked by a lake
in some small boring town and me
shaking the shaker furiously
over a plate of blackened fish and boiled potatoes.

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At the Mall

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Carl Dennis

Featured art: Youth by Frederick Carl Frieseke

It’s a long time now since the cedar tree
That you and Martha Spicer inscribed
With your twined initials was reduced to shingles
For a house later torn down to make way
For the Northtown Mall, the very mall
You walk now on rainy mornings.
In a few more weeks of the exercise program
Prescribed by your doctor, you should feel the strength
Lost with your triple-bypass finally returning.
Then you’ll confront the years still left you
With the zeal they merit, or the fortitude.
Be sure you’re in line when the mall doors open,
Before the aisles fill with serious shoppers
Intent on finding items more sturdy
Than their bodies are proving to be.
Could Martha Spicer be among them?
What you felt for each other back then
Didn’t survive the separation of college,
Though now it seems careless of you
Not to have kept in touch. Maybe you’ve passed her
Unrecognized as she’s looked for gifts
To make her grandchildren curious
About the world they live in, a book, say,
Devoted to local trees. On the cover
A cedar stands resplendent, the very kind
She carved her initials in long ago
With a boy whose name may be resting now
On the tip of her tongue. Try to imagine her
Hoping he hasn’t wasted his time on wishes
That proved impractical, like her hill house
Bought for its vista that proved in winter
Inaccessible to a snowplow. If he made that mistake,
Let him move back to town as she did
And focus like her on keeping her windows open
So a fragrance blown from afar can enter
When it wants to enter, and be made welcome.

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Forever

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Carl Dennis

Featured art: Soap Bubbles by Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin

Even in Dante’s inspired version,
Heaven and hell don’t seem like regions
Appropriate for humans, being too static,
Too imbued with notions of the eternal.
Yes, for the sake of justice, the violent
Who get away with murder on earth
Ought to feel a heat more fiery
Than the coals of rage that burned inside them;
The betrayers of friends and patrons deserve a chill
Colder than the ice in their arctic hearts.
But shouldn’t their sentences have a limit?
Won’t their victims, the pillaged and trampled
And rolled to the wall, eventually grow
Uncomfortable in the balmy realm of the blessed
At the thought of their oppressors
In endless torment? Won’t they decide
A determinate stay is long enough?
It isn’t our place to stand in the way if Abel
Throws down a rope at last to Cain,
If Jesus takes Judas by the hand.
So hell, if imagination wins out,
Ought to be slowly emptying,
And then heaven as well, as the saints
Return to earth to help the sinners
Learn what damage they can undo
If they give themselves to the effort,
And what damage they’ll have to leave as is.

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Engagement

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Adam Sol

Featured art: Reverie (Study for the Portrait of Frank Burty Haviland) by Amedeo Modigliani

The young man knows he’s going to die today, but he’s wrong.
The other young man figures the army is the best way to improve his life, but
he’s wrong.
They both think their weapons will protect them, but they’re wrong.
They both believe their prayers will help.

Their commanders have intentions and intelligence, but they’re wrong.
We’ve heard the story before. It’s wrong.
The news will document it, but it will be wrong.
The war on terror, the war on Islam, the clash of civilizations.

The explosion will exceed the necessity of the occasion.
The exchange of fire will be unbalanced.
The response will be disproportionate.
The reporter is factually incorrect, theoretically misinformed, morally reprehensible.

The clear typeface and perfect binding are misleading.
The reader is uncomfortably and inappropriately implicated.
The tranquil mind is insufficient to the task.
The young men, necks dirty and damp, advance.

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The Ugly Law

.Reading time 6 minutes.

By Jillian Weise

Featured art: Futurist Garden by Benjamin F. Berlin

Any person who is diseased, maimed, mutilated or
can I continue reading this? will it affect my psyche

so that the next time big Logos comes over
I will not be there in the room & instead I will be

wandering a Chicago street in my dress with my
parasol as a cane, on the verge of arrest, where arrest

could mean “stopping” or “to keep the mind fixed
on a subject,” where the subject is the diseased,

maimed, mutilated self of 19th-c. Chicago, the self
in any way deformed so as to be unsightly

& will I tell him to stop looking, tell him I’m tired
& I’m about to be arrested for walking in public

& I can’t possibly climax when I am an improper
person who is not allowed in or on the streets,

highways, thoroughfares or will he say we’re alone,
no one is watching, there is your bedside table

& there your mirror & who am I kidding? I won’t tell
him anything. There is no room in bed for this.

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Abundance

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Chelsea Rathburn

Featured art: Elephant Combat by an unidentified artist

The island seemed in permanent full bloom.
Through hairpin curves, our driver pointed—mango,
lime, poinciana—this one hanging low,
that one as bright as flames. And in our room,
a riot of blossoms. Across the bed, hibiscus
letters spelled out Congratulations. Welcome.
Bottles of champagne, pitchers of rum
punch. Why would we bring up poverty or loss
or the scorpions we pounded with a shoe
by the bathtub drain, small and densely black?
We ate golden apples, and had a view
of the mountain from the shower. On the third day,
darkness dropped from my towel. I jumped back:
a welcome-flower no one had swept away.

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How It Happened

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Chelsea Rathburn

Featured art: Girl in Checkered Dress by George Benjamin Luks

I blame that little village in Spain,
the one with the whitewashed houses
in a crescent along the sea,
a fleet of pastel fishing boats,
and that celebrated coffee with brandy.

A sour wedge of apple lurked
at the bottom like a tea-leaf fortune.

Because we couldn’t afford the fish
we ate pizza with peaches and oregano
on the beach, the sun and breeze conspiring.

Seeing us there beneath the cliffs
and the postcards of the cliffs,
who wouldn’t have predicted luck and beauty?
Can I be blamed for loving it all
and thinking it was you I loved?

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Amerikanka

.Reading time 68 minutes.

By Maria Kuznetsova

Featured art: Seated Female Nude in Profile, Bending Forward by Arthur Bowen Davies

I met a man in Russia, after my father’s funeral. It was only appropriate.

Papa always knew how to make things harder for me and I didn’t see why his death should be an exception. This is how it happened: after the service, I was taking a walk through the cemetery, hoping to get lost. The throng of admirers and chemistry colleagues had left long before, and it was just me there, staring at the grave of this little girl who died on her second birthday. I don’t know how long I must have been standing there, considering this, when I heard a voice say, “Excuse me, Miss. You dropped this. And this. And this.” A man came up from behind, holding my wallet, my passport, and the headphones from the airplane. He gestured toward my purse, which was hanging open.

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Wet Carpet Awakening

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Kevin Stein

Featured art: Europeans Embracing by an unidentified artist

Cursing the stubbed-toe 2 a.m. call—my father?—

I picked up a woman’s feather-brushed gush, “Wilbur,

it’s a grandson! Jamaal José O’Bryant.”

And I, unhappily not Wilbur, croaked Wrong number as one does

when plucked frog-eyed off sleep’s lily pad.

She was old. Who else misdials the pay phone’s tiny numbers?

Who else marries a Wilbur, their grandchild an American blend?

Outside rain misted not cats and dogs but litters of kittens.

Her lavender sachet apology, my bed-headed threnody,  my 

No problem, and click. Lightning cracked night’s black egg

in halves I couldn’t tap back in place:

My father’s dead. I’m next.

Revelation arrives like that, thunder trailing the flash.

I rode the open window’s wet carpet awakening,

storm flipping its toggle above the wind-blown yarrow,

electric as any newborn. Shaggy, late autumn, nearly gone-to-seed-

bloom, naked ecstatic.

I floated my trial run out a window the rain had come

in. When the dark made light of me I was.

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Playing My Part

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Sharon Dolin

Featured art: Dancers by Edgar Degas

I let him go. I complied. Adjusted. Saw. Did not see his disappearing
act of staying while leaving the body. It felt so familiar.
My zombie-mom (on Stelazine, Thorazine to tamp

her paranoia down), would be there/not there to make
macaroni and cheese, do the wash, help me with my Spanish.
I knew she was sick, I knew she loved me though she lay in bed until noon,

again in the afternoon, comatose with the New York Post, her arm bent
at the elbow to cover her face. This was what love could feel like—
somnolent, absent. Why be paranoid when he slept in the same pose.

Sometimes cooked dinner, did the wash. Who knew a blunt face
could hold so much hate. The child in me saw his numbing out,
going to bed early, not as aversion but a version of my mother’s love

and all I had to do—as when she’d be taken away, hospitalized, shocked—
was wait for his return. (Is there a Penelope inside every troubled wife?)
Didn’t my mom always come back?

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Palimpsest

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Todd Hearon

Featured art: Purple Stylized by Hannah Borger Overbeck

What was the tongue we spoke when the lotus first
unfolded from the navel of the god, the one who dreams
the universe, and in whose ear we must have whispered
our hunger to hold each other? What were words
must now be reflex, shudder, blood, be impulse, pulse
a palimpsest of longing written over
eons, eons ago. If we could scrape
back bone, back blood, back breath to the original
dust the dreaming god himself has long
become, the universal dream a drift of ash
settling in some dark corner of the sun,
would we find ciphered there the DNA
relation to the tongues we speak today
when we want words to say what words can’t say?

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Hominid Up

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Neil Shepard

Featured art: Portrait of a Man by Wilhelm Morgner

I write at night when the old hominid
climbs up to the highest branch of the brain

and crouches there in a leafy crotch
listening to the night-sounds snarling below . . .

his heart outracing the big cats of the savannah.

He’s glad I’m civilized and live indoors,
far from the tooth and claw. Glad my central

plumbing works, my TP dispenser full,
so he doesn’t have to shit off a limb,

wipe his butt against rough bark or let it cake.

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The Two Lances

.Reading time 44 minutes.

By Scott Nadelson

Featured art: Disturbed by Henry Keller

The summer I should have hit puberty but didn’t, I went to a Jewish sleep-away camp in the Poconos. It was an uncomfortable summer for me, full of insecurities, and not only because of my = slow physical development. Most of the kids in camp came from Westchester and Long Island, and even if their families weren’t much wealthier than mine—we were solidly upper-middle-class—they
showed off their wealth in ways that mine never did. Their parents dropped them off in Mercedes, BMWs, even the occasional Ferrari. Around their necks they wore 24-karat gold Chais and Stars of David. They were obsessed with brand-name clothing—Guess, Polo, Benetton. They talked about vacation homes on Nantucket, Cape Cod, Hilton Head. They had rolls of cash to spend at the camp store, which sold shampoo, toothpaste, soda, and candy.

Now, of course, I can see that such displays of wealth were signs of insecurity in their own right. These parents were the tacky rich, desperate to prove how high they’d climbed, and their children were spoiled and snobbish, nothing to envy. And how rich were they really if they had to ship their kids off for eight weeks of every summer to a camp subsidized by the Young Men’s Hebrew Association?

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Any Time Soon

.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Joshua McKinney

Featured art: Maine Landscape by Preston Dickinson

Folks said it was about the worst thing anyone in our town had ever done.
Afterward, friends stopped calling and wouldn’t answer their phones. Coworkers
avoided me. My accounts folded and the VP asked for my resignation. I moved
out, rented an apartment on the bad side of town. Had my food delivered. Only
went out at night. That was months ago. Lately, I’ve taken to going out days.
But in disguise: dark glasses, Raiders cap, knee-length trench coat. I sit on a
bench in the park and feed popcorn to the pigeons and squirrels. I never have to
wait long. Somebody will amble by and make small talk. Ask if I’ve heard about
it. An old man tells me my wife cried so hard a vessel burst in her eye. A girl in
a tracksuit says a neighbor chased me down the street with a tire iron. A red-
haired woman, who looks vaguely familiar, says she heard that after it happened
we had to put our German shepherd to sleep. That the crepe myrtle by our front
gate blighted and died in the span of a week. I’m not sure how much is true.
“One thing’s for sure,” she says, “folks around here aren’t going to forget any
time soon.” I tell her I probably don’t want them to forget. I say that I probably
feel more alive than I did before, and some people will do anything to feel alive.
A pigeon flutters to rest at the end of my bench. I tell her I’ve heard I lost my job
but still live in town. I say I’ve heard I have taken to venturing out during the
day. That I might be wearing a disguise.

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