Mukahara

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Jessica Poli

Yesterday I saw a tree the color
of the sky it stood against
and thought of Rothenberg’s painting 
of the translucent horse
barely outlined in a pink haze—the same color 
that lit the glass buildings some mornings

in Pittsburgh, where I studied photography 
for one misplaced year. There,
in a darkroom, a girl held my hips 
while I mixed chemicals that smelled 
like sweat licked off of skin,
and the shape of her hands
felt like shadows touching me. I told her

about the horse that lived
at the end of the road where I grew up,
how I fed it handfuls of grass
and dandelions from across 
the electric fence. That horse

was a kind of shadow too, forgotten 
by the neighbor who asked for it
for her birthday
and then never rode it. Rothenberg’s horse

is mid-gallop, legs folded,
body suspended
in the pink air. Where is that girl
from the darkroom now? She’d been living 
in a tent in the woods when I knew her.
Her arms were covered in red crisscrossed lines. 
She told me not to worry about her,
and I, young, didn’t. Later, I had dreams

of pink fields, a figure blurring
along the tree line.

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Our Eyes Can See Colors That Don’t Exist

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Lisa Alletson

Magenta is a trick of the brain 
my sister explains, her hair 
abandoned like a trick of God.

I take her photograph as sunlight 
muscles in on her bald head,
her daughter hugging her legs.

She glances at it, laughs. 
Mom will like this one 
because I look like an angel.

She does, backlit near Durham Cathedral 
fourteen strands of golden hair—
a halo of wisps.

I like numbers, so I walk ahead
to read the date on the Statue of Neptune
between the Kate Spade store

and the old pub, looking back to watch
my sister cross the Elvet Bridge.
Her four kids trail behind her

as a busker sings Elton John,
How wonderful life is 
while you’re in the world.

We fight about who will buy lunch, 
not in a teasing way
but a way that makes her cry

big hard ugly tears. 
Nothing makes her cry,
but her youngest is only five.

And I cry too, because 
this is the fourth last time 
I will see her.

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The Hofstetters Go Back to the Hotel

.Reading time 51 minutes.

By Will Kelly

Featured Art: Hotel Lobby by Edward Hopper

Dad was reading the encyclopedia from cover of A to back cover of Z right up until the week he died. He had been at it for two years, and was somewhere in the Es that night the tie rods failed. We’d never know exactly which article he left off on, because he could remember page numbers and had no need for bookmarks. He was amazing like that.

If five volumes in two years sounds unimpressive, I should add that this was on top of all his regular reading: all the novels, the popular nonfiction, the medical journals, and every one of those yearbook supplements that went with the encyclopedia itself. I don’t know of anyone else actually reading those things, but he did so every year as soon as they arrived in the mail.

I dream about Dad this morning. I dream he’s alive again, as are Peter and Denise, both of them adults now, though Mom and Dad are still young. Matt and Henry are there too, the former with his shins, the latter fully mobile. All seven of us are having a quaint dinner way up in an Alpine chalet. Halfway through our meal some beams split and the ceiling caves in, but nobody is hurt, just caked in plaster dust, which Dad starts vomiting out. And then laughing, and then taking a big gulp of his wine, even though it’s filled with debris.

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205 Bistro

.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Brock Guthrie

Converted historic train station—perfect place
to sit with my family at this reclaimed farmhouse table 
in view of the corrugated-metal-paneled bar
with its bowls of hardboiled eggs 
instead of pretzels or peanuts
and to observe, with the intent to eventually eat, 
this grilled watermelon salad
while waiting for my herb-crusted duck
which was free-ranged in nearby Marengo County 
as Mina redacts with purple crayon
any semblance of the comical panda 
on her coloring placemat
and Brooke says Manny kicked her kidneys 
from inside her thirty-week womb. But look:

there goes Dennis, father of three, newly divorced 
from his wife of fifteen years, and with him’s
old Pete, engaged to a woman we haven’t yet
seen proof of, each carrying a stein of golden lager 
into the warm Thursday evening
of the spring-dappled beer garden
to watch, no doubt, underdog Auburn
take on top-seed UNC in the Sweet 16
on the bistro’s new 85-inch 4K Ultra HDTV.

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Future Perfect

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Susan Kress

This mail is been
writing to you
because I have come
to understand
you want
to have received
your reward for
succeeding to rescue
me, a prince of royal lineage
with seven palaces
and still a wife
of beauty and resplendence
to find.
I will have been awed
by your patience shining
in its box of gold
but for you to stop from living
solitary
in the desert
and to have enter
in a garden of soft green
leaves, all I will have needed
is your name and date
of having been born
and a check you will
have written now to me
care of the federal government of
Nirvania.
Link here to make good
my trouble in sending you
a horde of dollars.
If you will have trusted
in this translucent
arrangement of letters,
I can promise you
a future perfect and
forever joy.

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“You May Want to Marry My Husband”

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Susan Kress

We are at breakfast, he and I, enjoying Sunday
tea and buttered toast, browsing sections

of the newspaper. Here’s a thing, he says, a letter
written by a dying woman. She’s listed

all her husband’s assets, commending him—
a handsome, smart, kind, loving, pancake-

making man—to some future spouse.
I sip my cooling tea and do not offer any future

letter of my own as I watch him lick his
forefinger to mop up toast crumbs—

see beyond him through the window heavy
heads of peonies bowed down from summer storms.

Here’s the thing:

I most surely do not want my husband
to be happy without me. If I die first, he’s got

to miss me every minute (my cold feet, chili meat
loaf, helpful interruptions when he tries

to make a point). No one else can wear my opal ring,
put on my oven mitts, warm my yellow teapot.

When he turns the pages to another section,
looks up again, he’ll see that I am gone—

my orange chair quite empty—our cross-
word puzzle on the table, one clue left to solve.

Outside, the peonies have straightened up a bit.
With stakes, they’ll last another day or two at least.

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One of Us and The Other

.Reading time 10 minutes.

By Lisa K. Buchanan

Featured Art: Studies of Men and Women in Medieval Dress by Byam Shaw

One of us is eloquent at 11 P.M. on unhinged dictators and the threat of nuclear war. The other is half-lidded in pursuit of flannel sheets. Or was, anyway.

One of us is a rowdy sleeper, blankets swirling and pillows airborne. The other babbles. One repels intruders and struggles to defuse a bomb. The other dreams a question: Can the failure of bodily organs be contemplated in random order or must it be chronological? One flails, tossing a wild fist; the other yelps in pain. One laughs without waking up. The other wakes up if a neighbor down the block inserts a bare foot into a fleecy slipper.

One of us wonders whether consciousness came before matter; the other doesn’t. One grapples with matters of spirituality. The other cannot suffer the word. One burns with existential questions: Are we alone in the universe? What happens to our memories after we die? Does evil exist, like radio waves, beyond human will? The other talks to strangers on the bus.

One of us hotly refused to marry a person who didn’t believe in God. The other hotly refused to marry a person who did. Each stomped down the street in the opposite direction. Eventually, one pulled up to the curb and opened the door. The other had crafted a cutting refusal, but slid into the passenger seat instead.

One of us was expelled from Hebrew school. The other preached the gospel to sidewalk strangers. One wore hair grease and played in a rock band at thirteen; the other wore a white robe and hymned as a child of Job. One graduated high school with the titular distinction of Crush; the other, with a distinguished truancy record. One was tear-gassed at an anti-war protest in Berkeley. The other attended martini lunches in what POTUS 40 called “the place where all good Republicans go to die.”

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Nothing Will Happen

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Jeff Tigchelaar

Don’t buy that, nothing will happen
I said to Johnny Cash
played by Joaquin Phoenix
early in that movie
when he was in Germany
when he was in the service
and saw some six-strings hanging in a store
and was like huhh guitars huh
and for some reason my wife cracked up
and had to press pause and use Kleenex
on her eyes and I thought
yes
because I hadn’t made or even heard
her laugh in a while

we were separated almost or mostly
her dad was dying plus Trump and Covid
then about an hour or so later (oh it’s a long one)
Johnny sees June
Carter alone in a diner
and figures what the heck
and starts heading over
and I figure what the heck and say
Don’t talk to her, nothing’ll happen
and my wife didn’t crack up like before
but she did laugh again
a real one not just courtesy
and I was like hell yes but of course
there’d be hard times
and there would be scenes
like the one where he rips
the sink from the wall
though it wasn’t in the script he just
summoned his rage up and did it somehow
and you can hear the gushing of the water off screen
as it all hits the ground
but an hour or so later in the credits
(toward the end but we stuck around)
the real June and Johnny start singing

and sing Maybe we can work this out
Oh honey I think we can

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A Day at the Museum

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Kathleen Holliday

Despite blistered heels
in new shoes,
I can’t seem to leave this gallery
of sarcophagi.

I limp closer to a glass case
where displayed en pointe
a pair of tiny sandals lies
pristine, and I wonder—
never worn?

Parting the stream of visitors
two statues rise monolithic
a man and woman, side by side
each an arm circling the other’s waist.

Look at them, still standing
never turning back.

Look, I’d say, if you were here
how they’ve outlasted us.

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A Fortune in Trades

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Cecilia Hagen

Once, for fixing a car, my husband was paid with a large bag
of small fish—smelt, frozen into a block that was flecked
with scores of silver eyes. I would bring a dull knife
out to the chest freezer and break off a chunk,
let it thaw in the sink and feed it to the cats and dog.

Another customer shaved off some of the cost of her engine rebuild
by knitting my husband wool socks that needed to be washed
a particular way, which I failed to do, because this customer
wanted to do more for him than knit his socks, and maybe did.
After they shrank, I could have but wouldn’t wear the socks myself,

a waste I could live with. In the pantry sat another trade, a jar
of home-canned venison I never dared to open.
Those purplish cubes of meat in their purplish fluid
pushed against the jar’s insides for years.

My favorite trades were the things the metalsmith made:
a hammered a rack for pans, a copper vase,
and three bright numbers that still mark that house—
beautiful things with the tang of the earth inside them.

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Keepsakes

.Reading time 42 minutes.

By Tanya Bomsta

First, it was a painting of sunflowers. He had always been afraid of them, had always thought their gaudy yellow petals blossomed from something sinister. And their height—it was unnatural, he thought, for a flower to stare you in the face. They were plants, not people. Christopher was tall himself, just about six feet. Tall enough to meet a short sunflower, but not quite tall enough to tower over one. It unnerved him, the way they seemed to look at him, the seeds in their disks like so many spider eyes. He shuddered every time he drove by the boundless fields of them on his way to work, with their leggy stems bending under the gross weight of their heads, their huge blank faces open and screaming in the wind.

But there had been a painting in the museum, and he hadn’t been able to stop looking at it. In the background, a nasty storm with deep purple clouds billowed against a bruised sky. In the foreground, the shadowed, golden petals of three sunflowers were being buffeted by the fierce gusts. Dark sky, dark flowers, the threat of storm so strong he almost turned his head and looked out the museum window to see if it was raining.

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Open Mic at Tony’s Bar and Grill

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Tracey Knapp

There’s a man with the rope of a cowbell curled
around his Captain Morgan. He whispers his poems
from a stack of papers, sees your own and nods,
buys you a drink. No conversation needed.
Another person adjusts their blonde wig and quietly
sings Mi mi mi mi meeeee repetitively. You wonder
what song they’ll actually sing—their wig slightly off tilt.
A man cradles his ukulele like a baby. Everyone stares
into their drinks, performing their rehearsal, rubs
the dark worn wood of the bar. You doodle stars
on your pages. Half the people here will only show up
once. No one will tip, and they’ll leave their empty glasses
on the sticky tables, their printouts of songs and poems
on the floor. You were the first to arrive, not thinking
to stop home and put on something more formal
than yoga pants. It doesn’t matter. There is some
common urge to perform whatever thought you have,
to share with these strangers. It’s Sunday night
and raining. Why sit alone silently on your faulty couch
with the endless drone of 60 Minutes on the television,
the single-serving life of pasta and tomato sauce, the rain
driving the ants into your kitchen? Someone taps
the microphone, says HELLO, HELLO. The wig rises
to the stage, sings “I Fall to Pieces” unconvincingly.

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A Working List

.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Tracey Knapp

  1. Tell your online boyfriend your real age.
  2. Sweep the seeds and leaves from the porch. The winds were harsh last week.
  3. Practice sneezing more quietly. Stop the throat-scratch hacking. Who
    could sleep next to that?
  4. Why are you still single? Ask your friends. They know everything about
    your failures.
  5. Dump your shitty friends who can detail your failures verbatim back to you.
  6. Do the dishes. Remove your socks from the bed sheets.
  7. Bobby pins are not Q-Tips. Baby wipes are not bathtubs.
  8. Commit to eating like a person. With other people. Stop wasting your
    money on wine and prepackaged food at the 7-Eleven.
  9. Spend more time talking to yourself outdoors at night when stoned.
  10. Stop drinking wine. Stop drinking. But only when alone. Except if you
    were drinking with people beforehand, and you came home to your dog.
  11. Watch less TV. Except, re-watch the movie Frances Ha. You are a dancer,
    and you have dreams.
  12. All those goddamn books you buy and barely open.
  13. Make the world more beautiful! Take one earring, preferably dangled and
    missing its mate. Hang it from an old nail or forgotten hook. A quiet,
    lucky place.
  14. Quit losing earrings. Quit earrings. Quit things.
  15. Put your old jeans in a box and then the attic. And someday when you
    move into a new bright house with a new love, you’ll pull them out, thin
    and mothy, you’ll delight: I CAN’T BELIEVE IT! THEY ALMOST FIT!
  16. Grow things. Give away things. Give away your neighbor’s excessive
    lemons. Your tight jeans.
  17. Recycle more. Stop hoarding the little gifts that someone gives you when
    they kind of liked you because they barely knew you. The broken ceramic
    rabbit isn’t even emblematic.
  18. Appreciate your one good knee, your moisturized cuticles, and the hair
    that grew back on your head after you got rid of that fucking IUD.
  19. Reach into that folder of old letters pull out the one with the nicest paper.
    Don’t read it. Just touch it and let it be the cramp in the gut of all the
    people who used to love you by hand.
  20. Celebrate your old-man dog. In the following order, give him: a walk, a
    scratch, a bath, a treat, a nap, a brush, a walk, a treat, a nap.
  21. Write down a list of what you could do to be your best.
  22. Narrow it down to ten.
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Absolution

.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Kathleen Loe

The gravelly edge of the old macadam
crunches when Daddy Man veers, slightly over
his two-cocktail breakfast limit—whoa!

And Mama’s all, “Bi-ill!”, sherry sloshing
in her Dixie cup, me and my altar-boy brothers
welded to the backseat of red Chevy summer

vinyl, our own trinity, looking and not looking
for a tiny worn-out sign set meekly back
from the scorching road—St. Lucy’s Catholic Church,

faded and falling away, not the go-to
for the church-going in this neck of the north
piney woods. Far from a hundred cathedrals

sinking in the soft black silt of New Orleans,
we aim toward a single consecrated
gray rectangle stuck in the Chitimacha’s

red clay of North Hodge. Lucky pagans,
or even Methodists, might miss the turn
and be flung past the money-stench

of the paper mill, or further still to actual
wet towns with no need for Jubilee—
Jubilee, cross-dressing bootlegger

come to wax our floors and pocket the cash
and slip my mama her black-market hooch
every week in our dry-as-dust little podunk town

in East Jesus North Looziana, the pure
whitewalled tires of her luscious pink
booze-bought Caddy cutting trenches

in the sweet St. Augustine grass
of our front yard. It ain’t me that’s drunk
in this story about having to go to church

every damn Sunday morning all summer long,
no matter how crazy hot, no matter
if my best friend Bernadette is fixin’ to go

waterskiing on Black Lake instead,
worse thing about that being the snakes
you might wake falling in the wrong spot,

but I’d still pick some dozing water moccasins
over this weekly ecclesiastical misery.
Any minor road accident would be welcome

I pray, I pray we hit a huge nine-banded
armagorilla if it means I don’t have to go
to Confession today, having traded

The Examination of Conscience last night
for finishing Catcher in the Rye under the covers,
accompanied by muffled laughs from Johnny Carson

in my parents’ bedroom. Okay. Pinched
my brother, lied to Mama, ate my best
friend’s Twinkie. Wished and wished

that I was the pretty one, instead of her.

Read More

Tapping

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By John Bargowski

I’d already watched him do it a hundred times,
my old man talking me through each step

since I was a young kid, forever warning me
about blow-off, all the hazards

of pressurized air as I stood behind him silently
mouthing: toggle, regulator, output port,

and watched him slide the tap into the spear
of the barrel and lock it down.

So as soon as I’d grown strong enough
to handle a full barrel,

maneuver it around the beer cooler, I followed
him into the basement of the D&J.

I can still hear the rattling compressor kick in,
feel the blast of CO2 sizz past my face,

the ache from the squeeze of his chapped hand
on my shoulder that big day

he shadowed me as I straddled the barrel
then opened the cut-off valve

and let the Rheingold stream through the tubing
to the upstairs spigot.

And after I sopped up spillage from the lip
of the bunghole, tumbled the empty

onto it’s dimpled belly and rolled it out
the double-sealed door into the cellar

then stacked it in a webby corner, I wish
I’d gone back inside, to finish the job,

scratched my name next to his on the rime
coated walls of the walk-in cooler.

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Abu Hani’s Middle Eastern Foods and Gifts

.Reading time 53 minutes.

By Sarah Cypher

Kelly took a bookkeeper/handyman job at his friend’s deli. He showed up at Abu Hani’s whitewashed corner shop in East Palo Alto three mornings a week. While Abu Hani prepped the food for the lunch crowd, Kelly squared the receipts and paid the bills. He made sure all the little lights in the deli’s sign were working and stocked the anemic rack of trinkets—hamsa talismans, blue-eye pendants. Then, if Abu Hani was still busy, Kelly sat at the register and charmed customers with his radio-announcer voice. The job, to him, was the most dignified way to hide that his energy was draining fast through the sieve of his sixties.

One morning when he was entering receipts in the side office, he heard a customer talking to Abu Hani. Kelly hovered at the door—he couldn’t place the accent, though its dense consonants were almost familiar. He poked his head around the corner. Over the top of the deli case, the guy looked like any of the old-country Arab geezers who came in for their weekly breakfast olives: that gull-wing hairline gelled back from the brow, hair so silver-bright it made a blurry reflection in the polished deli case. Abu Hani had stopped working and was leaning his bulk on his two hairy fists planted on the counter.

The man noticed Kelly standing there, and he swept up his parcels and exclaimed to Abu Hani, “But you are busy! I am keeping you from your day.” In a last flurry of goodwill, he paid his bill and left.

“New guy?” Kelly asked.

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Upcountry Detour

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Sydney Lea

An old man sluggishly waves a hand.
He looks spellbound, as if by an apparition:
A stranger, me, in a place few visit.
I’m sidetracked into my own odd spell—
Both sadness at bleakness and fascination.
There’s a sign in another dooryard, bizarre:
Atrini, World’s Finest Files.

A softball arcs on the blistered common,
A father pitching, a son at bat.
One newer car, a Buick, glitters
Like gemstone in front of a postage-stamp store.
Back lots full of witch-grass show unwheeled pickups
Dead amid whips of lilac and sumac.
I drive out of town past further signs:

BECKYS TRUCKERS HEAVEN ONE MILE
COME IN AND HAVE A “CUP” WITH BECK
BECKYS CLOSED FOR RENOVATION
Its windows, boarded over with wanes,
In brush beside it, a bedspring, a dryer.
I notice a black cat eyeing a bird
On its roof, too high for him to consider.

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The hardest part of losing her mother in 2020

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Nancy Miller Gomez

was after the memorial, her laptop propped on the table
cluttered with half-empty teacups and books
as her mother’s body was buried two time zones over

in Louisiana. After the eulogies and prayers,
and the few people standing graveside walked away
and all the others clicked off, there was nothing to do.

But she couldn’t bring herself to close the screen.
So she sat a long time watching her own face
looking back, and imagined she was her mother,

and watched to see what her mother would have seen
if she’d been there, and in her expression
she could see the love she knew her mother had felt

that last time they’d talked. And then she was crying
and watching herself cry—as if she was her mother,
and the connection was like a counterweight

she could carry, as though an infinity mirror
had opened inside her. It didn’t matter then,
if she hit the red button that said “End.”

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My Family

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Nancy Miller Gomez

I used to keep old black-and-white photos in my wallet.
They weren’t people I knew, just snapshots of strangers

fished out of a shoebox at a junk store: dark-eyed men
in bomber jackets leaning against muscle cars, or sitting

astride a tractor wearing khakis and an undershirt, a pencil
of mustache above their lip. Women with cat-eyed glasses,

dressed up in feathered hats for a night of gin rickeys,
arms draped across each other’s shoulders and angling

for the camera. Even in grayscale I could see their cheeks
were rouged and their lips were slick with lipstick.

Sometimes I would take these people out and show them
to someone I’d just met. This is my family, I’d say

and watch as they shuffled through the pile of strangers
politely noting how nice-looking they were.

I don’t know why I did this. But it felt good
that all anyone could ever know of me was what I was

willing to show them. This heavyset blonde posing
on the steps of a California bungalow wearing a fur coat

in the obvious heat of summer. These children splashing
in a kiddie pool on a lawn cluttered with beach balls

and hula hoops, a spray of water suspended mid-air
as the camera clicked on the girl’s congenial scream,

her brother’s swashbuckling grin, while father watches
from a folding chair, a beaming fat baby on his lap.

I keep them ready, these people I don’t know. That’s me
I say, pointing at the fat baby. I was happy then.

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Cultural Appropriation

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Nancy Miller Gomez

—a mi esposo

I appropriate your tongue,
your lips, your teeth, the smooth
inner skin of your cheek.

I appropriate your rolled r’s,
and soft v’s, the way you say
wolf without the letter L

(the plural of which is wooves).
I claim the patch of hair
in the small of your back,

your brown skin, your mother’s molé.
I appropriate your mother,
rename her La Loca. I appropriate

your appropriators, the conquistadors
who came with their archangels
and saints, Our Lady of Guadalupe

with a chisel of moon
at her feet. I descend the ladder
of your lineage, past missionaries

and rancheros to inhabit your ancestors’
ancestors, the Nuhuatl gods
with feathered names I’ve learned

to pronounce. Coatlicue, the mother
of mortals, Huiztlilopotchli—
the hummingbird patron of War,

Tialoc—he who makes things sprout.
I appropriate sugar skulls and mezcal,
Día de los Muertos. Your pyramids

and painters, your Kahlo and Orozco.
Your poets, Octavio and Carlos.
I take your lowriders

and La Raza, the happy/sad
ting of mariachis singing.
I appropriate each sweet bite

of pan dulce and tres leches
and eat your street tacos
smothered with guac and tapatía.

I’ll take la plaza with its bandstand
and white ibis, the man selling
balloons and churros. And words,

nights filled with appropriated
besitos y sonrisas. Abrazos
and the rest of the Mexican lexicon,

all mine. I’ll take your lime and salt,
your fire and fault lines. And our son,
see where I have appropriated

your blood, your eyes, your love
of basketball, the sport you say
your people created, a game

played by the victors
with the decapitated heads
of their victims.

Read More

Siren Song

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Nancy Miller Gomez


A songbird mimicking the sounds
 of emergency sirens has been
 caught on video . . . —CNN

A starling has taught himself to sing
like an ambulance. Now the air is filled

with emergencies. Whee-o, whee-o, high and low,
a fire truck rides out of a mockingbird’s mouth.

Grackles impersonate police cars. They dive-bomb
the precinct parking lot, bashing their beaks

into the rearview mirrors of their rivals.
The magpie knows a lovely air raid. Now

she trills like a helicopter, next a chain saw,
then an AK-47. The quail stop, drop

and cower. Take-CO-ver they cantillate.
Whee-o, whee-o, high and low. Juncos,

pass to Vireos. Catbirds steal the flow.
The chickadees have gone on lockdown.

They bore like bullets through the bleeding bark
of the cedars. Crows reload from rooftops.

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Watching the Wind

.Reading time less than 1 minute.

By Roger Mitchell

Featured Art: Wind by Mikhail Gordeevich Deregus

Lift a small shovelful of snow
               without a shovel
off the stubborn blanket of it
               in the field
and throw it completely away,
               quickly, too,
so quickly you couldn’t find it ever
               crawling
on your hands and knees, calling
               out its name,
puff of purest cloud, smoke
               of frozen fire,
wind’s breath, you,
               with no shovel
and a handful of white air.

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After Petrarch

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Emily Wheeler

A romance developed in my sixtieth year,
which gave me hope, perhaps inane,
surely extreme, especially in my verse,
and affirmed principles of affection and cheer.

My lover was tender, our love serious, useful.
It was as if in the afternoon, gray, crepuscular
an angel had arrived! And we both so secular!
Of course we never spoke of death, its easeful

nest, or the unlikelihood we’d ever alight
together in the tall trees or, quivering,
fly off at the same moment, but that was alright,

because, whenever new or found or at least not lost,
desire adds a drop to the earth’s thousand rivers
and briefly greens the grave, its bed of moss.

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The Missing Poem

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Emily Wheeler

Less a description of a Thanksgiving
I remember than an invitation
to a party that asks many people,
some alive, some dead,
to fill the front hall
of the old house
with such loud joy
at faces long unseen
that few can reach the quieter
fire-lit room at the back
where cheese and bread await,
and raise glasses of the most delicious,
deepest red wine.
No war, no plague, no economic
collapse deflate the mood.
I make a beeline for my favorite aunt
in the corner looking out the window
at the black river. There I join her
bringing the news that the river
doesn’t mean what it used to mean,
now it’s behind her, not ahead.

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Vernal Equinox

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Kari Gunter-Seymour

Featured Art: Equinox by Eugene James McFarland

I’ve been thinking about last times
I never knew were the last—
grandma cooing me unconscious,
daddy whistling me home to supper,
my toddler’s toothless grin, tiny fingers
clenching wildflowers, the last time
I prayed, desperate for those departed,
how they flit ahead of us, flying.

Tonight the Big Dipper balances
on its handle. Tepid tree frogs peep
songs of resurrection. One morning soon,
I’ll eat a good breakfast, fill a water bottle,
pack a book, walk the fencerow into the holler,
rest beneath the eagles’ favored perch,
shake off this inexplicable sadness,
two cinderblocks where lungs ought to be,
let spring hold on to me for a while.

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“When We Talk About Mountains, We Talk About Memories”: a Conversation with Ohio Poet Laureate Kari Gunter-Seymour

.Reading time 41 minutes.

New Ohio Review editor, David Wanczyk: I’m speaking today with Kari Gunter-Seymour, a 9th generation Appalachian, and the current Poet Laureate of Ohio. Her new anthology, I Thought I Heard a Cardinal Sing: Ohio’s Appalachian Voices, will be published in March 2022. Kari, welcome. Can you tell us about the project generally and more specifically about your hopes for what it will bring to light about Appalachian poetry?

Kari Gunter-Seymour: I would love to do that, David. My hope is that people will become aware that Ohio is part of Appalachia. Because some people don’t know, and a lot of people forget that a quarter of the state of Ohio rests in Appalachia proper, and there are pockets of Appalachian families throughout Ohio, even in major cities throughout Ohio, that still practice those teachings and learnings from their Appalachian heritage and their culture. And so this book is all about bringing notice to that.

I think of us as being Central Appalachians. With roots deep in South and North. You know we had those who came up during World War II and the Great Depression to find work. To seek out the steel mills. We have to remember there was lots of coal and iron mining in Ohio early on, too. And so this book is specifically my dream of being able to give these voices an opportunity to sing. Because they’re different. We’re a little bit different.

We’re more of a mixing pot, I think, here in Ohio, because we are, as we’re finding out, Central. We’re not necessarily North; we’re not necessarily South, but we’re a really good mix of it all.

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A Review of Melissa Febos’s Body Work: The Radical Power of Personal Narrative

.Reading time 9 minutes.

By Morgan Riedl

A body can work and do work in many ways—a body can also not work, or perhaps another way of saying this is a society can make it harder for some bodies to work, in which case a body itself can become work. Our body can be our life’s work—a body of work is the work of our lifetime. 

In Melissa Febos’s recent essay collection Body Work: The Radical Power of Personal Narrative, she investigates how bodies and writing intersect, how to tell the stories of our bodies and why we should. By mixing memoir and craft, Febos’s book does exactly the kind of work it argues is important, underscoring the power of the personal. I can’t help but think of the slogan from Second Wave Feminism here, the personal is political, and how today we might consider the personal is professional—that sometimes this binary, like so many others, subjugates certain bodies.

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homecoming

.Reading time 42 minutes.

By Caro Claire Burke

Featured Image: Shadows II by Sam Warren

It had been the loneliest summer of my life, which is maybe why I was so looking forward to seeing Beth.

I’d been living in the city for about four months by then. I still wasn’t quite used to the foul-smelling puddles, the fire escapes that blotted out the sky, the way the subway would be whispering along then suddenly scream to a stop, forever lurching me into the lap of some nameless and scowling person. And Beth was nice, I remembered: she’d been the type of girl in college who was always the first to laugh, the first to dance; the type of girl who never complained when we ran out of cold beer and had to switch to room temperature. She was a good sport, I remember a buddy saying once, and I’d agreed.

It was a clear Friday afternoon. I was headed to my mother’s house for the weekend, and the idea of leaving the city for a full two days had left me feeling light. I decided to throw my weekend bag over my shoulder and walk the fifteen blocks to the coffee shop Beth had suggested.

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Pill

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Louise Robertson

                 Sometimes I,   
                            I mean you,
                I mean I,
are
           like an advil stuck
in a pocket of my/your throat

           and I/you wonder if I,
                       I mean you,
           I mean I,

                       am dissolving there—
                                   easing the ligaments,
                       except the body

isn’t eased, nor ligaments
             hushed and I can still feel you,
I mean me,

                                    I mean you
                       there in the neck
                                   waiting, in fact,

hard as a choke.

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On the Inadvisability of Good Decisions

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Louise Robertson

Featured Image: Knowledge 2 by Sam Warren

I regret my good decisions while
staring at digital timestamps within
the carpeted walls
of my assigned cubicle as November
darkens to evening right after lunch.
I regret them as I climb
into the hybrid and track its mileage.
On an after-work walk,
plastic bags, candy wrappers, and
beer cans sprawl.
I decide to corral
strips of wild sheeting
massed into a wig of see-through hair.
A slippery ooze
crawls onto my hands.
I should have fucked that guy.
I should have broken my heart
over him and kept breaking those gears
—a clockwork that spends almost
all of its time junked
just for those
two moments everyday,
when it is exactly right.

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Jetson Whirr

.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Louise Robertson

The Prius should make a noise
as it creeps behind school children
scattering across the road,
sunlight and leaf shadows waving
around them.
It should be, as one petition
suggested to Toyota,
the sound of the Jetson car,
a whirr and a dapple of a sound.
But Toyota has done nothing — nothing.
The cars glide out each year,
shark silent.

When I was 11, at the school trip to Kings Dominion,
standing next to a plastic statue of George,
Maria Framingham declared she
had lost a $10 bill and so of course I checked my back pocket
and of course my $10 bill slipped out. Maria
picked it up and said she found her
$10 and I made no sound
and slunk away, my inner petitioner
demanding, “Hey, make a noise!”
And my inner Toyota doing nothing — nothing.

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Seven Ways to Get Blindsided in a Restaurant

.Reading time 28 minutes.

By Melissa Bowers

5.
I am in a restaurant when I learn Rob has a wife. It shouldn’t matter, since I’m already a wife, too—Timothy sits across from me, cutting a chicken strip into toddler-sized bites between swigs of his craft beer—but something catches in my chest at the sound of Rob’s name. Maybe it’s because Timothy and I are hardly speaking at the moment, or maybe it’s because of the person delivering the news.

Amaya is supposed to be a ghost from the past. She is not meant to materialize inside the life I have now, this many years after college, as she exits Timothy’s favorite burger place. I don’t notice her until she sidles over and leans against the edge of our table, runs an invasive finger around its glossy tiles, slowly, as if she’s trying to seduce them one by one. We exchange pleasantries: Nice to see you. Yes, it’s been forever. What are you up to these days?

“By the way, Rob got married,” Amaya tells me. “She looks a lot like you, actually—brown hair, kind of wavy. They have a daughter.”

She winces a little when she says it, in sympathy or solidarity, as though we both have the right to feel jealous. Then she tsk-tsks and sets her lips in a thin, apologetic line, flutters her fingers over her shoulder: “‘Bye, honey.” The finality of her hips swaying toward the door.

“That was the Amaya?” Timothy asks through a mouthful of ground meat.

I raise my eyebrows.

“Oh yeah,” he says. “We’re fighting.”

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Ghosting

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Emily Kingery

Featured Image: Ghost Crossing by Ellery Pollard

The Ghost buys me a cocktail
the color of Barbie’s dream house,
the taste of the well. He shrieks

and stakes a tiara in my hair.
I am laden in plastic and ask
where he came from. He says

Barbie’s dream house. It’s time
for karaoke. Do you remember
high school, the back of the car

and your aching lips, rewinding
the tapes? He tucks my loose hair
and his laugh is my favorite

from the dead. Ghost, I tell him,
let’s smoke. He slides two cigarettes
from his sleeve. I laugh like a rabbit

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I Said Maybe

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Allie Hoback

Featured Image: Untitled by Tanner Pearson

I can’t stop listening to your dumb wonderwall cover
that I asked for as a joke. I don’t know what you did
to make it sound all distant and a little haunted
but I want to projectile vomit when you giggle through the reverb
miss a chord and sing alltheroadsanananasomething.
Why do people hate this song and why do people only
ever play it on acoustic, it’s so good on electric or maybe
I just like you—oh fuck, do I like you? During sex I asked
how long you had wanted to do this for and you said
within the first ten minutes of meeting you and I said same
if not even longer, maybe before I met you, does that make sense?
Am I making sense? Should I seek professional help
if a fucking joke cover of wonderwall makes me want to grin
at every blank-faced stranger in a gas station, makes me want to stitch
your name into my underwear, makes me want to backflip
into the Atlantic Ocean where you are treading water—
and I don’t think that anybody feels the way I do about you now.

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A Shark Story

.Reading time 42 minutes.

By Erika Warmbrunn

A dark shadow lifted off the sand and floated forward.

“Sting-ray!” she thought, and reached up to pull her goggles down over her eyes. They had seen several rays during their dives that week. She hoped this would be a spotted eagle ray. Velvety black beneath an ebullience of crisp white dots, the spotted eagle rays had been her favorites. She ducked below the surface.

And saw that it was not a spotted eagle ray.

It was not a ray of any kind.

It was a shark.

She had never seen a shark before. Of course she’d seen a shark before: in a movie, in an aquarium. But that was the sensation: I’ve never seen a shark before, but I know one when I see one, and that shape swaying through the not quite crystal-clear water, that is a shark. It felt primal: ancient, encoded, instinctive recognition of predator.

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Reading the Ancients

.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Matthew Tuckner

What Sappho calls 
the desiremind or the couragesoul  
I call the swirling Chesapeake Bay 
of my brain and sure
you could call the tugboat 
trawling through the brackish waters 
desire and yes 
you could call the striped bass 
sourcing speed from the tugboat’s wake 
courage and sure 
you could call the crushed beer can 
scything the surf the mind and yes
the soul looks like a blue crab
when I close my eyes to picture it 
aquamarine claw    olive-green shell
I can’t quite place 
the bird tipping its beak into the bay
to capture an absent worm 
absent because fields 
of eelgrass are emptied daily 
by giant pesticidal blooms 
heaps of dead fish 
falling upwards
towards the surface 
but in placing the bird
a red knot    a piping plover
one could easily mistake it for 
the faculties of the soul 
particularly the appetites
so many Plato doesn’t even bother
to tally them though he does
warn of their penchant for battle
the appetites who are hard to see 
when they stand still 
like the piping plover for whom 
they are often mistaken 
yes I’ve been out combing
the waters for a new bird 
one whose bright rusty throat 
and striped back better represent
those flightier emotions
not even Sappho 
has the words for 
is it the tundra swan 
with ass upended and neck submerged
searching for the eelgrass
that isn’t there 
the tundra swan that birdwatchers 
who don’t know better
call suicidal ideation 
maybe the tawny-throated dotterel
is the one for me 
if I cover my left eye 
and squint my right the bird looks like 
the dysmorphia that keeps me 
out of the view of most mirrors
just look at this dotterel
can’t you see the pointed beak
that just screams 
I want to be your worst best friend
a voice that sings
come breach that little bay
of yours come tie the sky together with
us birds a pointed beak that’s just dying 
to be the Orpheus
to your Eurydice the kind of bird
that wants to kickstart
your katabasis a word
that if I’m reading the Greek correctly
can be widely defined as a descent 
of any kind such as moving downhill 
the sinking of the sun
a military retreat 
clinical depression
a trip to the underworld
or a journey to the coast

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Virginity

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Zuzanna Ginczanka
Translated from the Polish by Joanna Trzeciak Huss

Featured Image: Untitled by Tanner Pearson

We…
A frenzy of hazel trees, disheveled by rain,
a scented nutty buttery crush.
Cows give birth in the humid air
in barns, blazing like stars.
O, ripe currants and lush grains
Sapid to overbrimming.
O, she-wolves feeding their young,
their eyes sweet like lilies.
Sap drips like apiary honey.
Goat udders sag like pumpkins.
The white milk flows like eternity
in the temples of maternal bosoms.

And we…
…in cubes of peach wallpaper
like steel thermoses
hermetic beyond contemplation
entangled up to our necks in dresses
conduct
proper
conversations.

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Zuzanna Ginczanka Biographical Note

.Reading time 7 minutes.

By Joanna Trzeciak Huss

Any biography of Zuzanna Ginczanka (1917-1944), however short, should attempt to speak to her desire to define herself and her refusal to be defined by others. For her, social and artistic identity was something to be chosen and cultivated, but in the times in which she lived, identity ascribed by others was a matter of life and death.  Born Zuzanna Polina Gincburg in Kiev in 1917, she fled shortly after the Russian Revolution with her family to the border town of Równe in Volhynia (present day Rivne, Ukraine), which was at one point part of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and was about to become Polish again in 1920.  The destination was not accidental: it was the town where her Russian-speaking maternal grandparents were well-ensconced.  Yet this provincial capital proved too confining for her parents, who abandoned her to the care of her grandmother: her father leaving for Berlin when Ginczanka was three and her mother for Pamplona, Spain after she remarried.  Równe, a multi-ethnic city, was Ginczanka’s childhood home and it was there she attended a French pre-school and Polish elementary school and high school.  She adopted the name Ginczanka, and though Russian was her native tongue,  chose Polish as her language of poetic expression. Yet she was never able to obtain Polish citizenship and remained stateless throughout her life.

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Process

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Zuzanna Ginczanka
Translated from the Polish by Joanna Trzeciak Huss

Featured Image: Untitled by Tanner Pearson

1
In the beginning was heaven and earth:
black tallow and blue oxygen—
and fawns
beside nimble stags
and God, soft, white as linen.

2
Cretaceous
Jurassic
Triassic
The earth layers in strata—
The Miocene advances by tank — a majestic conquest.
There is a separation between water
and the land of ferns and birches
—and God sees that it is good when Genesis dawns.
Nitrogen brews in magma,
magma congeals into rock
mountain
thrusts
upon mountain
in a thunderous, cosmic mounting
The Carboniferous enriches the earth with bituminous pulp.
—and He sees that it is good
for moist amphibians and stars.
Iron pulses like blood
Phosphorus hardens into tibia——
— and with singing air, God whistles into pipes of crater.

3
In the beginning was heaven and earth:
and fawn
and tawny stags
but then things took a different course:
and
flesh
was made
word.

4
Back then, a lone rhododendron trembled before a fragrant angel,
horsetails tall as New York creaked and clattered.
Now daisies wilt
in town squares
in Konin, Brest, and Równe
and at night
policemen
and their spouses
make love.

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Cocooned

.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Maud Welch

Featured Image: Before I Leave by Tanner Pearson

There’s a split down the center
            of your upper lip, like the crack
of a window on that first warm-
            blooded day of spring, when 

cherry blossoms sprinkle back
            broken pavement and we feel
able bodied to birth sticky children
            of our own on training wheels –

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Prayer for Reconciliation

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Kelly Rowe

In the study that a child playing hide and seek
once called the messy room,
in a drawer, in a manila envelope, still sealed,
I’ve filed the police report on how you died.
It will stay put: it will age, though you don’t.
I’ll open it today.
I’ll never open it.

Here, photographs spill out of boxes, and you
return, a small boy perched on a stoop
in tiger pajamas. You grin, flashing
little white cub teeth; you claw at the blue sky
beyond a black and white world.
You are about to climb a tree, to grow
feathers, to rise, to become cloud.

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What Will Kill Them

.Reading time 24 minutes.

By Christina Simon

Featured Image: Untitled by Tanner Pearson

We were staring at a snake eating a rat.

At my son Kyle’s 12th birthday party, about fifteen boys in the pool stopped swimming long enough to look up. Ten feet away, up on the hill, a brown snake’s mouth was wide open, and a large rat looked like it had been stuffed head-first down the snake’s throat. Its pale pink legs and tail hung out of the snake’s jaw, which was clamped firmly on the rat’s plump midsection. The rat was not moving.

“Get my phone, I need a photo,” shouted Kyle, scrambling out of the pool. The rest of the boys followed him. Within seconds, they were watching the snake, snapping photos, mesmerized by the surreal scene. My husband joined them, along with a few of the boys’ parents.

“Can anybody save the rat?” I yelled frantically. I stood by the pool, looking up at the snake but I wouldn’t get closer. The snake was perfectly still, its mouth stretched wide open to hold onto the rat which dangled out of its mouth, limp. The snake looked about 5 feet long, with a thick body, teeth bared and eyes deadly.

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The World

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Hannah Marshall

Featured Image: Randy Gals by Ellery Pollard

The world is a broken thing, a paper doll from my grandmother’s childhood. On the farm in Wisconsin, she cut  

the world carefully from a magazine. On the back of

the world was a recipe for drop biscuits. Men in New York City streets planned

the world for this girl to cut into shape,

this world which she dressed up in a red dress, in a white apron and little blue pumps,

this world which is brittle now to crumbling, and torn.

The world was designed to be temporary.

The world was made of dead trees and smeary ink. My daughter sets

the world and its old clothes in a line across whitish carpet. She props

the world against bent tin furniture the size of my thumb.

The world is a broken thing, and so she handles it carefully.

The world opens from its paper breast. We try to become what

this world has made us to be. We carry

the world with us in the bottom of a purse, scribble notes about

the world and carry them tucked up our sleeves, like used tissues.

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Watching a House Renovation Show

.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Hannah Marshall

The lives of the briefly famous, the fortunes
sunk into places rich people call home.
What they might tear down,
what they deem worth standing.

Perhaps it is their need for comfort
which makes these calls.
The dumpster departs,
and they are clean.

For me on Tuesday night,
it’s all hypothetical; I owned a house once
for a year, fixed it up, decided to sell.
I rent now, happy

to call the landlord when the shower handle breaks
or a tree falls on the telephone line.
Through all the places I’ve lived as an adult—four rentals
and that one home I briefly owned—

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What is Mine

.Reading time 40 minutes.

By Claire Robbins

Featured Image: Untitled by Tanner Pearson

The first package contained a light blue pair of Nike Huaraches, size 8. I took this as a sign that I should keep stealing packages: my son laced them up, and they fit perfect. He started jumping around, walking on air. We both laughed until our sides hurt, and then I cooked a box of macaroni for dinner, made with water and oil instead of milk and butter, But who cares, my son said, lifting up his feet to admire his shoes. 

I only took packages from the porches of nice houses, but not nice houses with fancy doorbells. Some of the doorbells had cameras and attached to smartphones. I could see the older style cameras, so I avoided those packages as well. Everything had to line up perfectly for me to steal a package. 

I drove a Ford transit van delivering flowers for a flower shop, which is how I came to realize that there were neighborhoods in my town that I never even knew about, full of nice houses with packages on porches. Some of these neighborhoods were gated, to keep people out unless they belonged. 

I also delivered flowers to neighborhoods like my own with old houses falling into disrepair or bought up and cheaply brought to code by slum lords. There were widening gaps between the houses where condemned houses had been demolished by the city. Every once in a while, Habitat for Humanity would slap a cute little bungalow in one of the empty lots. But I never took a package from neighborhoods like my own. It didn’t seem right.

In the mornings, I clocked in to work and looked at the flower arrangements that were going out for delivery that morning. They stood in the cooler in the flower shop, and I read each tag before deciding on my route. Then I loaded the vases into the back of the van and drove off. Sometimes I had to gas up the van or air the tires or stop at the grocery store to pick up fruit for a fruit basket. Then after my deliveries, I helped process the flowers in the shop, while the designers put together bouquets for the next day. That was it, the entire job. Sneaking the packages from the van to my car was easy. I never took anything larger than a shoebox, and I slipped it into the backpack I kept on the passenger seat. 

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Nights of Noise

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Rachel A. Hicks

Featured Image: Untitled by Tanner Pearson

“I don’t want to be cured of beautiful sounds,” insisted Milo.

            —The Phantom Tollbooth

Must I implore you for more of what I want?
A clanging of fine china, symphonies of wet
spoons, clattering of forks falling from the violent
sky, a click-clack-click of yellow teeth
saying not much of worth in the night.

If trash can be treasure then I can be sound.
I can be the scream rising like steam
from the red kettle sitting on your mother’s stove.

I am the thumping & cheering & crying
of every bum, junkie, bride & boy in town.

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Ms. Appalachia

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Rachel A. Hicks

I’m an Appalachian beauty queen,
a capable kitten with smooth birthing hips.
Applaud the cinema kitty cat caught in the smoke ring.

I rule over Kentucky junkyards, zoom in as I sit on refrigerator thrones,
play pianos by the highway, cigarette-thin fingers give a tinkle tankle of a tune
perking ears that belong to someone twenty years ago.
The honeysuckle sweetness of my fingertips, syrupy sweet on the dirt keys,
greasing up the notes, F, E, B & so on.

Underneath the toasters & the books from all those rummage sales
sits some hot ghost of a memory. Smitten kitten, the smell of trash
makes me think of our place & the breeze outside is the same one
I feel at night when trains go by.

Stack the broken binds of hymnals for a stage, wrap, rip, some leaves, some dirt,
pack, perch, pack it all in, real tight, until the only clumps to fall
from my deciduous crown are intentional. A tap dance for you, a finale
with hula-hooping hubcaps & juggling light bulbs. I sing in a rusty tune,
decaying notes in the keys of D, C, G & so on.

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To Love Love the Beloved

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Rachel A. Hicks

Featured Image: Pride by Ellery Pollard

When I die, no fly will buzz,
no bird will crow, no man
will cry. Or maybe when I die,
every man will cry

and say, “There goes the love
of my life—a beauty—if only
she had known.” Women
will hate me stealing

their men’s hearts even in death,
for taking over their dinner conversations
after they’ve carefully prepared
the pink-orange ham loaf.

Forks & spoons—the men will swear
to see my eyes—my teeth will show
up in all the fine china. My legs prance
through the women’s heads

as they look at the octopus waving
its arms, wrapping its tentacles
around another. Dirty salt water
will turn red with their fury

as their husbands say, “She was such a beauty.
If only she had had eight arms.” A constellation
will form in the shape of my face & planets with
my thumbprints will be discovered.

When I die, don’t send me roses
because I am now the dirt, I am the plant,
I am the seed that sits in the crook of your skull, always
reminding you what it’s like to call a place home.

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Stomach Pains

.Reading time 53 minutes.

By Danie Shokoohi

When the doctor found the tumor in his brain, when the surgery was first scheduled but not yet scalpeled, before the poorly fitted tracheostomy tube which introduced the sepsis, your father forbade you from coming to Connecticut. He didn’t want you to see him like that, he said. That when your grandfather died, your father could only picture him ill and threadbare in a hospital bed. He did not want that for you, if he didn’t make it. 

“No.” You lifted your laptop from the coffee table and clicked your internet browser. “Absolutely not. I’m pulling up Delta.” The ticket would be expensive from Iowa City, but you would pay anything to be there.

He told you that you could visit when he was well again, for Thanksgiving, maybe. “Look, Kimmy,” he said. “I got some bad apples, but we can still make applesauce out of them. It’ll be okay. The surgeon’s good. I’ll have to do some PT, but I won’t lose any cognitive function. That’s pretty good applesauce.”

You wanted to tell him there was nothing applesauce about a brain tumor. That you didn’t care how small, or how easy the recovery, or how experienced the doctor. You wanted to tell him that twenty-two was too young to be fatherless. If it was your Iranian mother, you would have had permission to scream and rip hair from your scalp and weep. But he wasn’t one for big sentiments, your father. He was American. So you laughed because you knew he wanted you to laugh.

After the phone call, you drove to the grocery store and picked out a jar of applesauce. It sat in your cupboard through his entire sickness, and you ate a spoonful a day as if it could keep him safe.

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Compassion Fatigue

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By: Mary Ardery

Driving the group back after a wet July week in the woods,
a week with a bulimia watch for a woman who’d trained herself

to purge so quickly, so quietly, she did it between numbers
when she counted aloud as she peed, we came across

a raccoon in the center of our lane. Run over, still alive.
I stopped the van. I knew the worst injuries are internal.

The raccoon’s eyes were moving toward glassy. Slow blinks.
Someone said, Mary, you have to put it out of its misery.

I considered the tires, my hands, the knife in my backpack,
then I gripped the wheel and guided us, slowly,

onto the shoulder instead. A wide, weak berth.
No one said a word. I glanced at the fading raccoon

in the rearview mirror. My worn-out body—
its overripe smell seemed suddenly sharper.

That night I dreamt a flood. A torrent of water, the street
a river. A child’s empty car seat rushed by on its side

while I stood at my window just watching. Countless times,
women asked me simple enough questions, but I was winding

through mountain roads. I was treading water. I was barely
afloat. I told them not now and I turned up the music,

spinning the volume knob like a planet about to break orbit.

Read More

Crayola

.Reading time 10 minutes.

By James Lineberger

Featured Image: Sun by Sam Warren

On the hayride night
our senior year in high school
we lay side by side
holding hands under the stars
trying to figure out how we could remain together
because back then
to a couple of cotton mill kids in the 50’s
what else did our first-time kisses and hugs mean
except true love
but after graduation she made a sudden decision to attend
the Richmond Professional Institute in Virginia
and learn commercial art
to get prepared to paint advertising pictures
for newspapers and magazines she said maybe even like
a cover for The Saturday Evening Post
and how was I to manage
a long distance relationship across the state line
when I didn’t even have a car which
I tried to tell myself was the problem but the real difficulty
was Jenny seemed like
some kind of pioneer woman to me
and already out of reach
a person who knew exactly what she wanted and wouldn’t
let anything or anyone stand in her way
while all I could come up with was maybe I would join
the army and get to see
the world myself someday – Hollywood or Africa maybe even what we did
to Hiroshima – some place
Read More

Kiddos

.Reading time 44 minutes.

By Leila Mohr

We are walking along the dunes at Corn Hill Beach with my grandfather, Baba. The sun is broiling our backs, and there aren’t any clouds. We smell like suntan lotion and laundered clothes. Baba breathes heavily as he walks. He wears clean sneakers with white socks pulled halfway up his calves. I have a new pair of flip-flops in one hand, my toes seeping into the sand. My brother runs ahead, an inflatable red lobster tucked under his arm.

We were supposed to leave the Cape a week ago to go back home to our mother, but we are still here. At night, after we’ve been bathed and fed, my grandparents fight about what to do with us. The day camp with the dreadlocked artist has ended; neither of us did well with tennis.                        

Wyatt is eight, and I am ten. We sleep in bunk beds in my grandparents’ renovated wing. When I close my eyes, I hear large ice cubes fill my grandmother’s glass, the freezer open and close. We have a whole dresser of new clothes they’ve bought us, some colorful toys in a wicker basket. If they yell at each other loudly enough, Wyatt sniffles and cries. “Be quiet,” I try to tell him, but he doesn’t understand. On my back, I lie as still as I can be in the top bunk, pretending I’m frozen in glass. If my grandmother hears my brother cry and peeks into the room, she’ll think that I’m asleep.

“Over here,” Baba says, and we move toward the water. He’s packed a cooler with Goldfish and Milano cookies, juice boxes, and cans of Coke. His white hair sneaks out the back of his baseball cap. Wyatt throws his shirt off and runs into the water, thrashing wildly in the waves. Baba takes off his shoes and socks carefully. He looks far out into the ocean, his soft skin glistening in the sun. The waves crash onto the sand, and the wind twirls through my hair.

Last week, when I asked my grandmother why we weren’t going back home to our mother, she wouldn’t give me a straight answer. “Your mother is busy,” she said. She was staring at herself in the mirror of her bathroom, fluffing her hair. “She’s writing a paper for her Statistics class.” My grandmother sprayed perfume on her wrists and then rubbed them together. Her gold bracelets slid down her arm. “She needs more time.”      

“Don’t you want to go in the water?” Baba says.

The truth is I am afraid of swimming, but I get up and walk slowly through the thick sand, sitting down at the water’s edge. Wyatt is pretending to be a shark, flapping his hands like fins and growling. We are two different islands; we almost can’t see each other.

*             *             *

Read More

My Mother Meets the Cast of Hair

.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Adam Grabowski

Featured Image: Rush by Sam Warren

                                              -Ludlow, Ma.  May 1970

                                             Let the sunshine
                                             Let the sunshine in…

Smoking against the façade of a moon-
bleached gas station she listens
with a waitress’s patience to the local boy’s prattle
—her senior year of high school

& already the air stinks of coveralls.
Her hair is black. Brushed out long. Flyaways.
The occasional breeze & his good blue eyes.
A mile from here the highway shakes.

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If the manufacturer’s promise holds true, the new roof will outlast my father

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Jessica Pierce

And he admires that probability. It’s far more likely
than the chance of us being here as who we are; someone calculated that
as about 400 trillion to one. He admires this, too, and how the sun

sits on our shoulders right now. Under the eaves of that sturdy-as-hell roof,
the common ariel hornet tucked her nest for the summer.
I was about to describe the season as brief,

but that is only how my stuttering synapses
process time. So, I assure myself that my father will live damn close
to forever, with a quick sidestep to knock on the closest tree and shush

any wisp of a god still hovering nearby. The bit of sun moves,
so we move. Dolichovespula arenaria probably notes
where our ungainly grounded bodies take up space

Read More

How to Choose a Mattress

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Leslie Morris

Featured Image: Forget the Flowers by Tanner Pearson

Twenty-six years have passed since you tried
out mattresses at Macy’s, hands folded over
your chests as if laid out for a viewing. No,
that was not how you lay on a mattress at home.
You had read in the paper that couples who rated
their marriages “satisfying,” slept spooning
and those who rated their marriages “highly satisfying”
slept spooning with their hands cupping their spouse’s
breast or penis, so nightly you wrapped your hand around
his sturdy cock believing that you secured a happy marriage
in your grasp. But after googling “how to” diagrams
of spooning on the web, you’ve learned that as the smaller spoon
you should have been the spoonee all those years.
So now you are shopping for mattresses by yourself
and the sleep expert at Slumberland wants to upsell you
a queen even though you are still weepy and lost
in your own trough within a double, a sinkhole
of busted continuous coils. He asks how you sleep.
Badly. You need something supportive, he says,
but with plenty of give. Yes, absolutely!
Memory foam, he says. Oh God, no. Knock me out
on horsehair or kapok, sheep fleece or pea shucks.
Give me a nightcap of nepenthe. Certainly not memory.

Read More

Love, Dungeons, Magic, Dragons or Some Combination Thereof Will Save This Marriage

.Reading time 52 minutes.

By Marvin Shackelford

Featured Image: Power Shots by Sam Warren

My finest moment, the occasion that defines me as a person. Okay. You have to imagine the cliffs. Sheer and bleached in the light of a moon or two and rising from the foam of a screaming ocean. The sky is bleeding down in a magical haze, and a horde of monstrous creatures roars nearer. That happens all the time. This isn’t metaphor. They’re armed and armored and charging from the landward side, and the petulant face of a dead god breaks open out over the waters. His teeth drip with death and his eyes are storms, literal lightning and thunder and hailstones, bearing down on where I stand at the edge of the world. He’s starting to take physical form. He’s getting real. I’m the focal point of the material plane for once in my miserable life, and I thrust the crystal, that plain-looking clear-color gemstone pulled unwittingly from a dragon’s trove, I drive it straight into my heart. Breastplate undone and hair flinging in the wind and my lover wailing as I drop into his arms. Our enemy screams and begins to fade. I’ve saved the world.

Read More

Clue Junior

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Luciana Arbus-Scandiffio

I cut the crowd loose, I stack the deck twice
I feed you shrimp cocktail
I sort through the loose mail
When it rains, it worms and we blow the house down
Wishing on the wick
I am the boss of this clique!

My uniform is a pebble, my mouth
Hums trouble. All I do is stay inside
One-legged, I hide
In the clutter of my mothers
Turning red with permanent marker
Wasting hours with Colonel Mustard

Eating ring-dings for dinner
Singing happy birthday forever
On Facebook, searching father
Then deleting my browser
Faceless, I cower and wave to the mirror
Eating the angel hair of the dog

Read More

Sonnet (I Have Two Moms)

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Luciana Arbus-Scandiffio

In the seventh grade we debated gay marriage. I was con.
I stayed home. Kept my hair in a braid and kept my braid
to myself. Tucked my name like a secret up my sleeve.
Wore hideous loafers. Ate full-sized boxes of Twizzlers.
Became rigid, a painting. Still Life with Social Studies.
My skullcap, full of doves. My face, a hot button.
Press it! Pierce my timid ears. In the bathroom eating
a turkey sandwich and Jenny dragging my zipper down
to see what was there. Con: my whole life riding
on a hyphen. Con: my hands blue with luck. An eyelash
on my finger. Two of anything can build a bridge.
The love makes me lonely. The love makes my family.
A slogan of roses. A crown of sugar ants
eating through the gymnasium floor.

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Mr. Cosmos

.Reading time 37 minutes.

By Jill Christman

Featured Image: Shadows by Sam Warren

It matters not who you love, where you love, why you love, when you love or how you love, it matters only that you love.

~ John Lennon 

This morning I made a single-cup drip coffee and poured too much water through the small yellow cone. When I lifted the cone to peek, strong, black coffee filled my white mug to the brim. 

Nay, not the brim, I thought. Past the brim. I hung onto the edge of the counter and brought my eyes down level with the top of the mug, marveling at the way in which the coffee arched up out of the mug, a bitter mountain, the strength of the surface tension pulling the coffee molecules beyond what seems possible. I would like to die on a coffee mountain, I thought, straightening my legs. I hadn’t yet had even a sip. Maybe it was time. The house was so quiet I could hear the muted ticking of the wall clock in the kitchen, thumping her plastic hands around inside her plastic face, bearing witness to the wonder of the coffee rising up and out of the mug, ticking off the seconds of our lives. 

Read More

Mr. Cosmos

.Reading time 37 minutes.

By Jill Christman

“It matters not who you love, where you love, why you love, when you love or how you love, it matters only that you love.”

~ John Lennon

This morning I made a single-cup drip coffee and poured too much water through the small yellow cone. When I lifted the cone to peek, strong, black coffee filled my white mug to the brim. 

Nay, not the brim, I thought. Past the brim. I hung onto the edge of the counter and brought my eyes down level with the top of the mug, marveling at the way in which the coffee arched up out of the mug, a bitter mountain, the strength the surface tension pulling the coffee molecules beyond what seems possible. I would like to die on a coffee mountain, I thought, straightening my legs. I hadn’t yet had even a sip. Maybe it was time. The house was so quiet I could hear the muted ticking of the wall clock in the kitchen, thumping her plastic hands around inside her plastic face, bearing witness to the wonder of the coffee rising up and out of the mug, ticking off the seconds of our lives. 

This is when I heard another voice in my head. Mr. Cosmos, my fifth-grade science

teacher at the round school in Newbury, Massachusetts circa 1980. He’d given us all big cups full of water and little cups full of nothing and told us to pour water into our little cups until our cups runneth over. That’s the way Mr. Cosmos talked. Children, he’d say as if we were attending boarding school in mid-century England, Children, are you ready? Pour. Pour your water. Pour your water out—and let your cups runneth over.

Read More

Poem for Paul Who Never Forgets My Birthday Even Though I Never Remember His

.Reading time 6 minutes.

By Alyssandra Tobin

paul says                                careful with the benzos  
& I’m like                                                  I think of you
whenever                 my therapist brings em up      &
he’s like aww                     dunno if sweet’s the word                     
but it’s nice                                        to be thought of   

okay    sure     let everyone see  my cute belly     let
everyone know                    I covet some people I’m
supposed to hate                       paul’s stupid meth’d
out calls unbearable       his empty bottles his days
& months       wild-eyed                  & away

once                                we wore each others jeans  
his tiny gold waist                   in my teen girl pants 
now    on the phone                      he says what’s up
ya fuckin guinea!           he teaches me to play iron
man      he gives me that   ninth step apology  that
making                                  of meandering amends   

me     so  scared  of  dying                &  him  always                                     
chest deep in it                          I sit so quietly       a
very good dog                        in her dim little room      
but he            gives me cocky courage                  he
gives me  warm love        that boston street salt
kinda love              that let’s never brawl kinda love    
that I’ll kiss your dirt love          that I’ll help you lie
to chicks love       that mall parking lot love      that
if I’m a blight                     you’re a blight kinda love    
that noogie     that cackle      that snakebite     that
augur        that    yeah                          I’ll call you on
your bullshit pastures               if you call me when
my dumb pig jumps her sty         off to somewhere
cleaner than both                    our loud green yards

Read More

I Love You Too, Bro

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Alex Howe

Featured Image: Mun by Sam Warren

–for Catya McMullen

Beauty rears its ugly head – Assassins

You can be non-suicidal and less than jazzed about being here, two
Juuls at once like a pacifist dragon or the mild Dionysus of bad

ideas. Skip the Trix rabbit’s abjection: gift yourself the gift of
desperation, the terrible utility of popcorn for breakfast. “Whatever

you find uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium becomes its
signature, cherished and emulated as soon as it can be avoided”

explains Brian Eno bombing by on rollerblades into the flip phone
flipping shut into his fanny pack. The hotel’s Mahogany Hall

blooms two hundred vape plumes the moment the emcee mentions
prohibition on same. These teen alcoholics don’t drink, they bong

Monster, fuck senseless, talk about drinking. Pray to doorknobs.
Play Mafia. Splash the ping-pong ball into the cup of Red Bull.

Drop the sick beat. Crack your glow stick.

Read More

Turn To Kristen Bell

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Alex Howe

–for Darcie Wilder

Turn to Kristen Bell and ask if you should do something a little
reckless. “You know the world is ending, right?” She’s not the
person you go to when you want to be talked out of something.
That’s what probation officers are for. Kristen Bell doesn’t think
people take yolo seriously enough. It’s tough to argue with her. She
says, “What’s a little reckless?” You tell her you’ve always loved
her. Love-loved. She laughs. “That makes sense. No offense.”
You’re starting to have second thoughts about flying this plane into
Exxon headquarters. You’re starting to panic. Name three objects in
the cockpit. Name an animal that cloud resembles. Estimate the
plunging angle of descent. As if sensing your turbulence, Kristen
Bell says, “Have you ever seen First Reformed? With Ethan
Hawke?” “Daddy,” you respond. “Exactly,” she whispers. “Daddy.”

Read More

Domestic Chess

.Reading time 28 minutes.

By Andrea Bianchi

Featured Image: Pink Rat by Ellery Pollard

1. His first move is checkmate.

2. A punch that expels the laughter from my stomach as I stand before him at the end of our chess game.

3. “Wipe that smirk off your face,” he hisses beneath the Saturday morning chatter and jazz of the coffeeshop. “You’ve been gloating. Taunting,” he says. And yes, after our first sips, I did tease him to try for a victory, challenge him to a game of chess. Wanting to imitate another couple, heads bent intimate over their own little world of 64 checkered squares, at a tiny table just a bishop’s diagonal from the sofa where we sat.

4. He waits there afterward, tense on the cushion’s edge, when I return from the restroom, from a respite after his loss of the competition, his loss of composure. But his eyes pierce my smile as I pause in front of him. My stomach at the same plane as his arm. And then his fist connects level with the center of our lives.

5. It breaks the rules of play—and of the law, and of our love. Our months of happy Saturdays at the beach. Dinners beneath twinkling lights. Fights, arguments, yes. But afterward, mornings under the sunlight-checkered bedcovers, where we fed each other breakfast and curled together with our cats, as we mapped out plans for our shared weekends, then our first shared apartment. Our relationship’s next moves.

Read More

My Daughters Sometimes Dress as Ladybugs

.Reading time less than 1 minute.

By Brian Simoneau

Featured Image: Untitled by Tanner Pearson

and I hope they won’t
outgrow it—little heroes
flitting leaf to leaf
in their polka-dotted suits
of armor, their vicious
pursuit of the feasting
pest that destroys what
beauty these days still lives.

Read More

Make Sure There Is Breathing Room: A Conversation with Tania De Rozario, author of And The Walls Come Crumbling Down and winner of the 2020 NOR nonfiction contest

.Reading time 14 minutes.

By Kay Keegan

Kay Keegan: Describe your writing practice and how you sustain it. Has your process changed over the course of your writing career? How about during the pandemic?


Tania De Rozario: I am not a very organized person by nature so I work really hard to set detailed schedules and deadlines for myself because if I don’t have a schedule to look at, I am unable to get anything done. Setting aside daily time for my personal writing becomes part of my overall schedule. That said, I am not one of those people who has output goals. Like I don’t have a word count I need to meet every day. I am actually a very slow writer -slower than most, I think- and I need a lot of time for things to percolate. So in that time that I set aside for my writing, I am not necessarily literally putting words on paper – I could really just be sitting with an idea and dwelling on it and letting it develop in my brain. And when I am blocked, I use that time to do something that activates a different part of my brain (like drawing or baking, for example) so that the writing part of my brain can continue to solve the issues it needs to solve subconsciously without me bothering it. Once things are on paper, I try to make sure there is breathing room between edits – again, this is to let things percolate, and to make sure I come back to the draft with fresh eyes every time. I don’t think my process has changed very much over the course of the pandemic. One thing that has changed over the course of my writing career is that I am now in much less of a rush to get to the “final product” and more focused on giving every piece of work enough breathing room to develop into the piece it wants to be.

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Review: Jessica Pierce’s Consider the Body, Winged

.Reading time 10 minutes.

By Eric Stiefel

Jessica Pierce’s debut collection of poetry, Consider the Body, Winged (First Matter Press, 2021) is earnest, contemplative, and hauntingly elegant.  Perhaps most importantly, the poems in Consider the Body, Winged are unflinchingly honest; they say what a less courageous poet might shy away from, what a less thoughtful poet might hide behind unnecessary flourish.  Throughout the process of reading it, I found myself thinking of Jessica Pierce’s collection as a collection of meditations, each poem devoting its unfettered attention to the subjects at hand, from divinations and incarcerations to postpartum depression and lapsed faith.

The collection opens with a poem called “What do we know of endings?” (p. 13), which begins with an extended hypothetical: “And if the earth could gather up all / it contains, all its clouded greened / burning dusty torrential glory and grit…” the poem continuing on with bloated vultures and scrawny cats drawn into the image, new blues and crescent moons and wicked gods alike.  Near the end, the poem turns toward introspection, asking if the world has room for “my grief / and my longing and your grief.”  Then, after a pause, the poem makes a point to include “And maybe, / maybe, forgiveness.”

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“The Way You Might Search a Dark Attic”: A Conversation with Faith Shearin, Author of Lost Language and winner of the 2021 NOR nonfiction contest

.Reading time 12 minutes.

By Kay Keegan

Kay Keegan: Describe your writing practice and how you sustain it. Has your process changed over the course of your writing career? How about during the pandemic?

Faith Shearin: I write in little notebooks. I keep one in my bedroom under the bedside table, two in the study, one in the kitchen where it is frequently stained by soup, and one in the back seat of my car. These notebooks are full of images that seem to require my attention. One of my professors in graduate school, Thomas Lux, recommended writing ten pages a week about anything that captured my imagination; he though the act of putting pen to paper regularly kept a writer in touch with their own unconscious and creativity. (Two of my favorite books for writers The Artist’s Way and Writing Down the Bones offer similar advice.) He taught me to revisit this stream of consciousness writing with a highlighter the way you might search a dark attic with a flashlight if you were seeking love letters or fine china. I have managed to keep this habit in place, mostly because I enjoy routine and solitude. I write, in part, to see what I think since this is not always immediately apparent. In a letter to [her] literary mentor Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Emily Dickinson wrote: “I had terror since September, I could tell none; and so I sing, as the boy does by the burying ground, because I am afraid.” Like Emily, I also write because I am afraid. I wrote much less than usual during the pandemic; my daughter came home from college and we went hiking together among the rows of slate headstones in old New England cemeteries; we hiked through the remains of four towns that were drowned to create the Quabbin Reservoir; we made soups, and tie dyed masks, and watched every rerun of Northern Exposure and M*A*S*H.

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Review: Taylor Byas’s Bloodwarm

.Reading time 8 minutes.

By Eric Stiefel

Taylor Byas’s debut chapbook, Bloodwarm (Variant Lit, 2021), does the work that a good chapbook should: It’s bold, concise, and daring, and it hones in on what it wants to say, collecting its poems as variations on a theme without spending too much time retreading worn territory.  Bloodwarm dances between the formal and the formally engaging, from sonnets to pantoums to erasures, to poems written from the past, to poems written as voicemails, as highway exit signs.

The collection starts in media res with “My Twitter Feed Becomes Too Much” (p. 1), opening with a pair of violent images from 2020’s George Floyd protests against police brutality (and the further police brutality inspired by the protests).  “I come across pictures of two rubber bullets / nestled in a palm,” the poem begins, later telling us “The caption reads These maim, break skin, / cause blindness.”  These lines are contrasted with the next image: “Another photo—a hollow / caved into a woman’s scalp, floating hands // in blue gloves dabbing at the spill.”  

Read More

New Ohio Review Issue 29 (Originally printed Spring 2021)

.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.

New Ohio Review Issue 29 (Originally printed Spring 2021)

.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 29 compiled by Brady Barnhill, Benjamin Bird, Sarah Hecker, Callie Martindale, Ellery Pollard, and Julia Smarelli

Ode to the Fresh Start

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Susan Blackwell Ramsey

Featured Art: Untitled by Joseph Taylor

Sock drawer with its moth husks, limp mismatches,
       rank refrigerator’s stink of shame, closet
               whose back wall I don’t remember . . .

In Sanskrit abhyasa means practice, discipline,
       not giving up, but starting over
               and over and over again. Just start. Abhyasa.

So when I unroll my yoga mat
       and it promptly rolls back up, I flip it over,
               fling myself down on it, grunt “abhyasa.”

Veteran of fresh starts. I’ve trained myself
       to believe there will be dustless bookshelves,
               push-ups, French refresher courses, kale.

This time will be different. It always is.
       Maybe the trick is shorter and shorter gaps
               between the restarts until they run together,

like rolling out the lawn mower in May,
       working to get a cough, another, three, and with a roar
               it starts again. Once more that green smell rises.

Read More

Entropy

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Elton Glaser

Featured Art: Apartment With a View by Tyler Thenikl

Will this be one more summer spent
Among the ornamental mailboxes and garden gnomes,

As if I’d come down with a dose of lassitude,
Too much muck in the bloodstream?

That’s better, I guess, than a long month in Lubango,
Not far from the hovels and dead dogs,

With something strange steaming in the heat
And a bad case of the squitters,

And no worse, in its own way, than hearing someone
At the next table praise the taste of

Extra virgin truffle oil on the rutabaga fries,
Parsley butter sliding down a bison steak,

When what I crave is cruder: ecstasy of the unraveled,
Loose elations in a rumpled bed.

I’ve got nothing against sampling a farmer’s stand,
All those honeydews nestled in straw

And peaches fat and pink and above reproach,
Or an afternoon rocking on the front porch,

Sipping a tall cool glass of julep and watching
The dappled daze of sunlight on the leaves.

Ambling through the season, in a moveable feast,
Suits me like balm on a busted knuckle,

But when this life winds down I’d like to leave
Clean and alone, like a bone

Scrubbed free of the misery it went through,
And with a knob at the end

Big enough to knock some sense into
God On the messier side of heaven.

Here, in this bulging summer, too stuck or lazy
To rent another place to roost,

Let me at least reach out to what remains,
Anything still succulent and touchable.

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A Summer Wind, a Cotton Dress

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Kate Fox

A glance held long and a stolen kiss,
This is how I remember you best.
—Richard Shindell

Little fires light themselves in the hearth, like tongues
                of flame that reclaim the Holy Spirit, like pitchforks

in this clapboard house where mayflies swarm and crackle
                against the porch light. On down, a gas station, a five-and-dime,

and your house, which I can see from the kitchen, where
                clothes on the line billow and collapse, billow and collapse.

This small town holds everything I will ever know and have
                to leave behind: bidden and forbidden glances,

voices from the second-floor landing that warn, Go no further.
                Night will fall and you will fall with it. Which is what I want,

for the universe to take up where I leave off, this longing
                so deep it can hold entire planets in its bottomless pocket,

yet shrink to the size of a finger at the hollow of your neck,
                heart drawing blood from the branchwork of your breathing.

Read More

4D

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Jon Fischer

Featured Art: Above San Gimignano by Tyler Thenikl

The 3D printer made a man and gave him a beard
to rub thoughtfully. It printed a book on mortality,
a pamphlet on sin, a monograph on time, and many other
fine things to keep in mind. Then it spun out two
of each animal and a boat around them. It printed rain
so long we thought it was broken, then
it printed an olive leaf. Its final act
was to print a 4D printer, which printed a memory
for the man, who said with his rubbery tongue,
I remember there were olive trees,
and he released one of the doves from its cage
below deck, where it spent the time we were given
under the gaze of two housecats and two weasels.
But the 4D printer started to print more
than the time we were given. Weeks rolled off in pairs, still
warm from the furnace of creation,
and wedges of space to move the stars apart
so the man had room to fill the weeks with many
fine things to keep in mind. That’s how we turned the world
into a dream, where time doesn’t know what to do with itself,
and you always end up falling.

Read More

Heron or Plastic Bag

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Jon Fischer

Far off in a vacant field beside an irrigation
canal alights a stately gray heron

or a plastic bag. The plastic bag flaps
and in the tricky light thick clouds leave behind

trembles in and out of translucence,
just like a heron. The heron flew here from another

land in search of a plot to fill and warmly
fulfill and mute the Sisyphean rhythm of restless

creatures’ lives, across countless miles
that would never do, just like a plastic bag.

Close up it’s clear the field holds both
a stately heron and a plastic bag, each

studying the other like figure and reflection.
Now the difference is obvious. The heron’s eyes

recognize the predicament he’s in, the infernal
froglessness of all this wiregrass, the length

of the horizon, the lean of a eucalyptus. Behind
his eyes is the continent where he first

leapt into a crystalline gust, and at beak’s end wriggles
a continent uncharted, fleshly, ready to be snapped up

like a young shad. But this time of year his wings
know everything there is to know about south

and nothing else. Whereas the bag simply is
the predicament it’s in and billows

with all the joy that has ever flown through
a thousand years of wind.

Read More

What the Drawing Explains

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Jon Fischer

It’s hard to describe a drawing of a millennium,
but you know it when you see it

on a sticky note fallen to the speckled tile
near the lockers in a high-school hallway

It’s rendered half of the social commentary
inherent in a peach-colored crayon, half

of ablative carbon fiber and iridium dust,
the artist’s signature a sketch

of the human genome. This millennium is half past,
half future, neither all that great.

The drawing smells like a philosopher’s feet.
It tells a story that rises off the paper

and reads the palms of passersby, turning life lines
jagged and love lines into spirals. It tells a story

that sinks deep inside the paper, seizing
for its fibrous heart the best and most harrowing

plot twists. Nonetheless, the drawing explains
why the Nile changed course, why tornadoes

and the sea found fancier homes,
why we made no new religions

but let the ones we had grow brittle, why we still
lose languages and serenade machines

and can’t be bothered to speak with aliens.
There you are in the middle, anatomically accurate.

Built around you are a cathedral and a labyrinth
then skyscrapers and scaffolding, a rational galaxy,

a fleet of anxieties, ignorance
efflorescent in a waxing tide, and your personal

win-loss record. You do with the drawing
what fine art does to you,

folding it into a Möbius strip for later,
and also for earlier.

Read More

Spring Reflection

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Stephanie Choi

Featured Art: Scarlet by Joseph Taylor

               You crave
For the wheels to ride across the puddle, muddied
With pebbles & all your past lives too

               You want to find again
That sky blue that’s been shut tight
All winter long

               You don’t know why
When you finally do
The birds mistake each strand of your hair for a branch

               You wish for the pecking to stop
And for the stillness of a bud before blossom
To return to you

               You ask for a taste
Of the warm cold wind on your wet lips
Just once more—

               You try to remember
What everything was like before
But you take a sip from the cup filled with dust
               & ash,     instead

Read More

In the Garden

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Kelly Rowe

Featured Art: Mimic by Dylan Petrea

When you were small,
we lived in a tropical state,
and you spoke fluently
a language only two could understand.

It had one word
for bean or ball or m&m or kiss,
three for water, six for dream
or any other risk.

When we talked, the dog danced on hind legs,
and the house sailed down the river,
waving its red and white flags.
The rain took you wading under the live oaks

and mispronounced your name,
but showered you with opals,
while high in the branches invisible birds
whistled back and forth in code.

Now, you live somewhere else,
I’ve gone a little deaf.
I press the phone to my ear
as your voice cuts out, fades,

and like the last speaker
of a lost language, I grope
for one of the hundred names for river,
or the single shouted syllable: Ma!

Meaning flash flood, meaning ark,
meaning the one we need
no words for, the one who flies to us
when we cry out in the dark.

Read More

Garden Sitting

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Jennifer Dorner

– for my mother

Season of moths in the strawberries.
An apple or two fallen from the tree.
Plums not yet ripe, through the cornstalks
are burdened with silk,
the vine tomatoes split,
and the sunflowers track the sun,
a bee in each dark center.

Late to the tasks you left me
I unfold the watering instructions again,
late to harvest the beds circled
on your hand-drawn map.

The evening is a haze,
sheets of starlings stretched
over the mown grass field,
a brush of red beneath
the shadowed tree line.

This week I read about the dying,
how those who have passed
can speak to the ones left behind
in the language of what they loved.
One man who tended rhododendron gardens,
a canopy of blossoms suddenly falling
over his first daughter’s car
while the second daughter
gathered a loose cluster
blown down into her path
the moment their father died.

I slide your patio door open, step over
trays of vegetable starts
on the faded rug
packed with potting soil.
Your handwriting vertical on the slim
labels beside each stem:
chard, fennel, romaine, madeley,

winterkeeper. I wish I’d known better –
this world of straw hats and arthritic wrist,
the duct-taped trowel,
these rubber boots that fit my feet.

Read More

How to Peel an Orange

.Reading time 53 minutes.

By Stephanie Wheeler

Featured Art: Peeled II by Samantha Slone

The dryer was making a monstrous sound. The repairman stood with his hand resting flat on top.

“I feel the vibration,” he said. He was a fat man with a three-day stubble sprouting in uneven patches on his face. His uniform shirt was belted into his trousers around the front and haphazardly untucked in the back. Hazel could see his milky eyes shifting rapidly through smudged glasses. She hated him a little.

Hazel nodded. “And you can hear it, too.”

He squinted his eyes, then squeezed them tight, concentrating.

Hazel decided that she hated him a lot.

“The grinding sound,” Hazel said, straining to make her voice heard above the din. “It’s quite obvious, really.”

“Ah, yes. The grinding. I hear it.”

Hazel’s cell phone chimed then, and she looked at the screen. The name Walt appeared in white letters, glowing.

Read More

Raw Numbers

.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Jasmine V. Bailey

During his reign, four hundred bears.
On the bloodiest day, twenty-four.
On a hunting trip with friends, staged,
as they all were staged, twenty-two
and eleven for his friends. No one
tallied the boar and deer.
Ceaușescu sitting in his perch above a clearing a gamekeeper chases the bears through,
                 firing an automatic rifle.
One hundred thirty bears
in those last six years.
Brown bears, grizzlies in our West,
eat mostly plants
but Ceaușescu’s bears ate pellets
fed to them by the gamekeepers
who say they don’t like hunting anymore. 
He will die next to Elena
in December, nineteen eighty-nine, 
the shortest day of the year.
One hundred sixty-eight centimeters: Ceaușescu’s height.
The bears flourished with the kibble,
hunting forbidden to everyone but
Ceaușescu, their Conseil International de la Chasse points
unnaturally high.
Twenty thousand dollars 
to hunt a brown bear in Romania now
if you are a citizen of the EU. 
The population is smaller, each bear
smaller since Romania joined Europe—
seven thousand five hundred at the height
to fewer than five thousand three hundred
once the doors of the Carpathians opened. 
Forty-three grizzlies died
when Yellowstone closed its dumpsters.
Staggering in their final, worst hunger.
Once someone hatched a scheme
to raise bears for Ceaușescu’s hunts.
Two hundred twenty-seven 
bear cubs were torn from their mothers
who, crazed, had to be shot
to let them go, as I would have to be shot.
One or two: the number of toes cut off without anesthetic 
to create a code by which to identify each cub, 
who went insane with grief for their mothers,
who were never successfully raised for the hunt,
who all escaped or were released
haphazardly, dying on highways
and in circuses, ending in a daze
the daze of their lives.
Two: the number of days 
the cubs howled 
after their claws were ripped from their paws.
The number of suicides
during his twenty-four years as general secretary of the Communist Party 
of Romania:
not known.
Twelve weeks my daughter’s lived
outside my body.
I want to lie with her under one blanket
until God thinks better of so much. 

Read More

Ocean City, New Jersey

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Jasmine V. Bailey

I drove to meet you the first day of the year
at a B&B fifteen miles east of my childhood
on the White Horse Pike.
For three mornings we had a German pancake
and three cups of coffee 
with the black-haired innkeeper
whose husband coughed in another room,
whose philodendra vined her walls
and ceilings like a cage.

You led me down the beach that first night 
all the way to Longport Bridge
keeping secret what we were after.
Everything seemed a candidate—
the armor of some crab picked clean,
Polaris beneath the moon
like Marilyn Monroe’s mole.
When we got to the bay
I thought we might swim it.
Your face fell realizing
what we’d come to see was gone,
that you would have to tell 
what you’d brought me there to show.

The bioluminescence you’d seen
the night before I arrived
coaxing a glistering shore
out of the dark
was gone with the jellies
or bacteria arrived now in the Atlantic. 
You described it as a lit path, if
a narrow one, like the aisle
of an airplane you pace at night
when every passenger is asleep
because you no longer know
what your country is like
or if your mom will manage
to find her way to Philadelphia
to pick you up, or if there will ever 
be a child to grow so tired 
you have to carry her, sleeping,
all the way home on your chest,
her heavy head just starting to dampen,
her eyelids working against your heart—
and I saw it.

Read More

All Animals Want the Same Things

.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Jeanne-Marie Osterman

Featured Art: “Catpurnia” by Julie Riley

I had a sickly cat whose cure,
said the homeopath, was raw meat 
so I replaced the canned food with scraps 
from the butcher and overnight 
her gingerly eating turned feral devouring.
She’d yowl as I took the jiggling red flesh
from the fridge, pace as I cut it into pieces, 
then suck it down before I could rinse the knife. 

This so exhausted her, she’d lie on the sofa 
for hours before getting up to prey 
on the dustbunnies under my desk. 
While I was watching Shark Tank one night, 
a ball of Kleenex walked across my living room floor. 
It turned out to be a mouse 
who was carrying it to the bookcase 
where she was building a house 
behind my dog-eared copy of Balzac’s Lost Illusions. 

Seeing the mouse brought my cat back to full health. 
She stalked the tiny creature, crippled it 
with her jaws, sat back to watch it struggle. 
I called the building super and asked him 
to take the mouse away, signing 
the creature’s death warrant. 

My sister and her husband raise cows for the slaughter. 
Though my sister will eat them,
she refuses to go to the slaughterhouse 
when their time has come. 
I watched how they do it on YouTube. 

An operator lines the stunner up 
with the sweet spot of the cow’s brain. 
The bolt inside is captive—
held like a breath in its chamber, 
then expired with such force 
it knocks the animal unconscious. 
The bolt doesn’t penetrate. 
It recoils to be used for the next. 
And the cow lives!
The heart keeps beating,
which speeds the bleeding-out,
which is the actual slaughter.

When my husband left, it hit like a bolt. 
He’d held his infidelity in like a breath, 
then walked away, recoiled.

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Encore

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Maura Faulise

Featured Art: “I Feel Like Pieces” by E’Lizia Perry

Pulling out of Dingle Bay 
in the rental van that rainy day 
after singing to the tunes 
of the fiddle player in the family pub, 
my father drove red-faced 
and under the influence 
of what I now know 
was nostalgia 
for the affair he’d just ended 
before flying us over the ocean
to kiss the Blarney Stone. 
He mumbled her name at the wheel,
and something about O’Shaughnessy’s
fine music and the fountain of tears
and the Celtic rain.
When the van slid off the road
and into a field of peat, he punched
the gas to get us out
but the wheels stuttered in the cold mud.
Unconcerned with our fate,
we four kids sat stiff
in the backseat, doe-eyed
and glued to the rhythm
of our mother’s timorous noises.
I don’t know what moved him
—the relentless gray sky
or the lightning hammering
so close to the metal,
but he looked at us one by one
for a while
before opening his mouth to sing
of the long-long way to Tipperary,
where the heart remains
and he got us singing too,
broke us down the way he always did
amid claps of thunder,
angry rumble or applause,
I just couldn’t be sure.

Read More

Heels

.Reading time less than 1 minute.

By Justin Rigamonti

With a bouquet
of ferns
and lemon
yellow roses,
she looks
incandescent
in the dug-up
photo of
“the time I
got married
the first time.”

Meaning,
pain followed
hot on this
happy woman’s
heels. Meaning,
don’t think
her life has
hummed along
luminously
ever since.

Life never does.
But won’t a smile
like a string of
holiday lights
still have been
a smile?
And joy
for awhile
was still joy.

Read More

Anne Lester

.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Emma Aylor

—1936–2013

Sleeping it off last night I dreamed I had one lung.
The other next to me in bed dark and putting
off smoke.                      When you were young
I passed my Virginia Slim so you wouldn’t get
the taste for it: I remember standing in the kitchen
lighting it up                                        for my girl.
You never did smoke after that. In front of the TV
last night I spilled the whole drink down my shirt
          a little in this world                                    a little in the other.

I’ve been Anne Moore for most of my life.
My last morning as Lester I looked
like Liz Taylor’s sister                        hair dark and glossed.
It’s hard to remember myself like that.
I depend on a picture to know I was beautiful—

waist a switch                in a virgin’s dress.
Couldn’t have done better at nineteen,
grew up so close to Tennessee.
We moved all over the plains for a time
and came back to Bill’s dad’s store.
I remember days up to my elbows in spicy chili,
nights raising you                               right up the hill.

My hands have shaken my whole life. Always think
it could have been worse. A favorite joke:
a parrot who swears is punished by being put
in the freezer. Once, it sees a frozen turkey
in the corner                          and says,
DAMN, that bird must                         have said fuck.
             I remember I told you and your daughter         you looked at me
like I didn’t understand a single stupid thing.
Would it make a difference if I did

that same house    your father repeating            GODDAMN IT ANNE
like a stuck station in front of you and all
my children’s                      children
                                                                    and

it’s morning in the bath now and I’m not getting up yet.
In the water a bruise on my arm
develops like a litmus paper                               a little
yellow—                                hardly acidic.

I remember leaving your daughter at the pool while I wet
my brain               came back to her sunburned
pink as a hot pig.              Remember she fell
off the bed and scarred her little nose
a white line still                            cut through the freckles.
Light through the bathroom                        glancing sideways.
            My daddy drank. I remember how bad.
It’s not really a reason                          but I remember enough.
My chest clutches                 a little
and then fills up.       Water gets a little bluer
with what comes off my skin.
It’s not possible that you remember me.

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Mt. Athos

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Emma Aylor

Featured Art: “Skin ‘N’ Bones” by Arianna Kocab

– 1936-2013

My granny died facedown in the kitchen
of the isolate house: atop a hill named for ruins
of a burned plantation near, whose owner was rumored
to be buried standing so he could continue to survey
the land from his summited tomb, up a lick
off Opossum Creek, itself off a bend

in the body of the James. A stroke. And grandpop
made a big show of never looking at her face
again; he said he couldn’t overlap his memory;
he let her lay crashed in her own bones until help came, 
let her face settle into its death with no witness,
and I don’t know where her ash was scattered
after that, if it was, the memorial just a party in the house without
her around—a body never really there—and closing night

for my grandfather’s fifty-eight-year claim
to a good marriage. I took a train from New York
down through Virginia, eight hours marked
at intervals by the crumbling backs of Newark,
Baltimore, Washington, Charlottesville—
to Lynchburg. At one stretch, hard pink spray paint over
a whole swatch of dry grass. To tell the truth,

the ease of missing her then was almost a comfort.
Its relative water-fed simplicity. When I got the call
I had space set for further clearing.
On the walls she was nineteen and already flickering,
her hair in my mother’s curls, or mine, careful set
of her mouth, her heels and her dresses.
Down the dark hill, weeds lushed by June,
our dead gathered to murmur through the river’s red throat.

Read More

We Don’t Die

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Darius Simpson
Selected as winner of the 2021 NORward Prize for Poetry by a panel of previous poetry contributors

Featured Art: “Candid Sampler” by Amy Pryor

we second line trumpet through gridlock traffic.
we home-go in the back of cadillac limousines. we
wake up stiff in our sunday best. we move the sky.
we escape route the stars. we moonlit conspiracy
against daytime madness. we electrify. we past
due bill but full belly. we fridge empty. we pocket
lint. we make ends into extensions. we multiply
in case of capture. we claim cousins as protection.
we extend family to belong to someone, we siblings
cuz we gotta be. we chicken fry. we greased scalp. we
hog neck greens. we scrape together a recipe outta scraps.
we prophecy. we told you so even if we never told you nothin.
we omniscient except in our own business. we swallow a
national anthem and spit it out sweet. make it sound like
red velvet ain’t just chocolate wit some dye. we bend lies.
we amplify. we laugh so hard it hurts. we hurt so quiet we
dance. we stay fly. we float on tracks. we glide across
linoleum like ice. we make it look like butter. we melt
like candle wax in the warmth of saturday night liquor sweat.
we don’t die. we dust that colonies couldn’t settle. we saltwater
city built from runaway skeletons. we organize. we oakland in ’66.
we attica in ’71. we ferguson before and after the camera crews we
won’t die we won’t die we won’t die we won’t die we won’t

Read More

Essentials

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Todd Boss

Featured Art: Silhouette of Person in Airport by Skitterphoto

I’m down to two bags.
I use a friend’s address.

I’ve only got one last
recurring nightmare

that forces me to face
my ex. There’s still one

child I haven’t lost, but
he’s next. Even loved

ones are non-essential,
sorry to report. You’ve

come here for news of
how to live, but Grieve

and grieve, is all I can
say. Grieve enough, you

can even get grieving
out of the way. Grief’s

chiefest among chores.
Do it well, and the

mostly empty universe
is yours.

Read More

Tracers

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Todd Boss

Featured Art: Window View of Sea during Golden Hour by Jeffrey Czum

Let’s say one day
the ballgame from
the day before mysteriously
rematerializes in the form of
tracers—each pitch,
each hit, each catch,
each toss, each
criss and crisscross
marked—chalked
in air—here, there—
reiterated, the way a
window, fogged,
remembers the last
things third graders
wrote with fingers
on it. Let’s say it
rendered the field
unplayable so they
let you walk it.
They would. It’d be
a big attraction—
tracers interlacing,
crepe paper streamers
of a pastime past,
most between bases
and the rest of the
bands connecting
home plate with
the outfield or even
the stands in some
cases—inning on
inning of contrails
twinning and twining
in defining strands
as if the ball’d been
string. It might
not mean anything
but it would be odd.
My god, you’d say
at the sight, ducking
the not-quite-straight
line of a line drive to
right, remarking how
much of the game,
which seemed so
grounded last night,
is in fact in flight—
pure energy
transferred from giving
hand to waiting
glove, the way our
lives are made of
thought and love
and word and prayer
in particle or wave
surrounding every
numbered and
unnumbered player
on the planet in a
dome of light
that stadiums us,
immense, between
the dugout caves we
crawled from and the
outfield fence.

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He Divides His Time Between

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Todd Boss

Featured Art: Green Leafed Trees by Pixabay

is a line I
always wanted
in my bio.

“He divides his
time between
Reykjavik and
Sandusky, Ohio.”

“He summers
on Lake Como
and winters
in Aspen.”

As it happens,
noplace is
like home.

We multiply
when we divide
our lives, our
loves, and our
addresses.

Now my father’s
son is a ghost,
a wisp of smoke,
a metaphor.

He divides his
time between
nothing and
much and
matters and
anymore.

Read More

At the Coffee Shop on Rogers

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Robert Wood Lynn

Featured Art: Close-up of Coffee Cup by Chevanon Photography

When I was done I took my teacup
to the bussing station where the tub said No Trash
so I fished out the teabag but the only trashcan
had one of those blue liners so I couldn’t tell
if it was for recycling. I decided to throw
the teabag out in the garbage on the street
which meant carrying it there dripping
in my hand like a dead bird, one I didn’t kill
but still felt moved to bury—the barista saw
and asked me why, as if a reason was
another license I’d forgotten to renew.
Composting. I said I was desperate
for compost in my garden. Now
every morning she gives me handfuls
of spent teabags, the way the cat would
bring me offerings of dead birds
which seemed sweet until I read how
cats think we can’t take care of ourselves.
After being fitted for a hearing aid
my deaf friend was most surprised to find
sunlight didn’t hum, unsettled by how cats
could choose to move in silence. She became
obsessed with the sounds of birds: collective
at first then individual. Quiet only in repose
like these teabags I throw away on the street
and feel guilty I don’t have a garden. Not even
a balcony. The cat’s been dead for years.
It’s morning and my hands are soggy, I know,
for the stupidest reason. In spite of the evidence
I am getting good at being alone.

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Albuquerque Sunrise

.Reading time 33 minutes.

By Ashley Hand

Sometimes I was Melissa. Other times I was Alexis, or Estelle. One night I was Shelby because we’d just watched a Pierce Brosnan movie where he drove a 1967 Shelby GT. By the end of the night the name felt natural and you were slinging an arm around my shoulder and calling me Shelbs. You were always yourself. You were Mac. I wore wigs. I wore peel-and-stick nails. I did elaborate makeup. One night in October we went to the Albuquerque balloon festival and wandered around at dark on the fringe of the crowd, watching the torches gas up into the hollows of the parachutes like they were big paper lanterns, and I was made up in the spirit of Día de los Muertos, a pompadour of blood-red roses that we’d trimmed from the yard crowning my head, and we held hands in public and my face was stiff from paint but I felt like a queen gliding through the stalls of the outdoor fair in my black bodysuit, unrecognized. It smelled like roasted corn and the grass was wet from a rain and the night was warm and it felt like we were free. 

At first we stayed in all the time. We played gin rummy and did crossword puzzles and had sex. We grilled on the patio for dinner. In the evenings we would drink wine and the house was quiet and we would listen to Taps play out over loudspeakers across the Air Force base and watch the last vestiges of violet light disappear behind the wall of cypress trees that blocked out the power lines and concrete buildings. After the final peals of the bugle call, the clicking of the cicadas would resume. We’d slick our legs and necks with bug spray and light a citronella candle and share a cigarette. We talked politics and books. We played mancala and cribbage. I’d tell you stories from my childhood and you’d pet my hair and tell me my father was a bastard.

Read More

The Delay

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Emily Sernaker

Featured Art: Black and Gray Metal Tool by _ Harvey

Maybe by the time you read this a golden retriever with a bandana
will be snuggled up against my knees. Or the man I love,
the one I get to keep, will be kissing me goodbye for the day
his lips tasting of cereal and coffee. Instead I’m living

with my college roommate Breezy in Bushwick, Brooklyn.
Breezy just gave me a bottle of Unconditional Love
perfume she won at the gym. Her little Tootsie Roll
of a dog, Charlotte, a Boston terrier, keeps hiding bones

in my bed. My bedroom used to be Breezy’s dining room
before the divorce. It’s safe to say neither of us thought
this is where we’d be—but we’re making the most of it.
She owns wind chimes. I bought peonies. Outside our front

door someone has graffitied the words TROUBLE FUCK!
which we prefer to read as FUCK TROUBLE!
And we found that duck in Central Park, the mandarin
rainbow that isn’t supposed to be there but is.

Maybe by the time you read this I won’t be waiting
to be happy. The truth is things are going well.
Everyone I love is alive. Breezy printed a 12×16
of the misplaced firecracker of a duck. She had it framed

and matted it’s hanging in our living room.
He’s staring down the camera
saying: Aren’t you glad you got to see this?
I dare you to wish you were anywhere else.

Read More

January Dispatch

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Emily Sernaker

Featured Art: Oblong Brown Metal Mailbox by sl wong

I misread a signal and accidentally hugged my mailman.
He was just tapping me on the arm and I somehow went all in.

In other news, my former barista is meeting me for coffee
and bringing Arthur her rescue dog. I met another fantastic

dog this morning who had never seen snow before
he was zig-zag walking losing his mind with joy

trying to lick it all up. I have to wear a brace on my right
hand for a while, it’s some kind of strain. Two days ago

Tom and I broke up. We were both hard crying. It was just
one of those top five hard things in life. I keep thinking

about the time Tatianni spotted a rose-beaked cardinal
in my backyard. She knew to look for the second one,

was sure it would be there. It’s like how I feel
finding Philip Levine and Larry Levis always spine

by spine in the bookshop. Some things you can count
on. Anyway, the snow has left impossibly soft lines

on everything. Bicycle tires, lids of mailboxes.
What’s the opposite of underlying? It’s like that.

Powdery bright marks saying take note.
This will probably be important later.

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