An Oklahoma county fair, in case you’ve ever wondered, pretty much comes down to strippers and livestock and sad-eyed freaks and Jesus, all of it thrown into a deep fryer and scooped out hot and dripping. It was a lot going on for a town where normally nothing did, but the fair always made me dizzy. Not just the Scrambler and the Bullet or the drooping strands of yellow lights, but more like the spirit of the place.
Mama didn’t see it that way. She called this annual traveling road show an atrocity and said the rides were half-bolted together by half-wit vagrants, which was true enough. And yet each November it seemed like we ended up going anyway, just like everybody else in town. What else is there to do once football is over and basketball hasn’t yet started? She did at least insist we go on Thursday, when the crowd wasn’t as big and the trash wasn’t quite as trashy. Tickets were half-price the first night too, which was probably her real reasoning.
But what Mama said went, so we showed up on a Thursday, just as it was about to get dark. For the first few minutes, when the haze of daylight still lingered, I could sort of see what she’d meant. Because if you looked at it closely, the fair wasn’t much. The carousel squeaked and the man selling candy apples had dirty fingernails and the prizes in the midway were made out of paper and tin. Kevin and Daddy headed straight for the livestock tent. Mama went to the baking competition, which was sort of a torture for her since the oven in our trailer didn’t even turn on, forcing her to make whatever she could on the cooktop. And I found myself alone to wander the midway, alone and unfettered for the first time in my life.
By Siamak Vossoughi Featured Art: “Mirage in the Sky” by Gina Gidaro
Dear Yara,
I figure you ought to know something about the year you went from two to three, and how I would go quiet sometimes when we were playing or reading or walking somewhere together. Some days I’d see the kids in Gaza in you and I’d take the moment we were in and hold it as the last moment one of them had before being killed. I’d breathe through it, telling myself to do two things, as evenly as I could, fifty-fifty: Stay in the moment with you, because you deserved that. And recognize it was true, that each one of them had, in the moments just before, been just as alive as the aliveness in you. And something would happen to the moment with you then. It would hold all of who you were, and I would come as close as I could to touching that. I’d get as close as I could to understanding the thing the mothers and fathers there had lost.
Keep breathing, keep breathing, I’d tell myself. As big as the feeling of the death of children was, it was important to stay small. It was wonderful to stay small with you, because there was plenty that was still big. There would be days that year when I would be reading about Gaza just before you came home from daycare with your mother, and it would seem like a long way to travel to go from where children were dying to playing with you, but when I got it right, it wasn’t a long way at all. It was love both ways. If those children deserved to live, then let’s you and me see what kind of funny business Blue Bunny and Ruffles the Dog can get up to. Those children were in our games all that year. They were there because I was thinking that someday I would tell you about them the same way I was telling you stories of the animals who were lining up for school. I didn’t know when that would be. This was also the year that you started having nightmares. You’d wake up early and tell us that a scary monster had been chasing you. I would quietly admire your ability to articulate your fear. But I’d wonder too if you were getting it from me. I’d wonder if you could tell the way I was carrying around the kids I was reading about at the same time that I was playing with you. If you were, that seemed like a decent way to start having nightmares. I remember when I was nine and the men who I’d learned had tortured my father in prison in Iran replaced monsters in my dreams. I said goodbye to monsters then. Now you were saying hello to them, but your bravery made me wonder if you knew the world could be worse. That year we tried to let you in on it as carefully as we could. Back in November, we went to a family peace march on Beacon Hill, led by Jewish Voices for Peace. We taught you what peace meant. There were kids there holding up signs saying Stop Bombing Children. I knew you might be one of them in a few years, and I didn’t mind that I’d have to tell you about war by then. It was the same as sharing a lot of beautiful things with you that day, like the view of the Cascade Mountains from the top of the hill and the circle of people gathered outside the library. I thought about how to have the right balance between anger and sadness when I told you. I looked forward to your anger because there is a time in a person’s life when anger can rightly feel like strength, and five, six, seven, or eight is right about in that sweet spot. It’s because anger is likely to be an appropriate feeling at that age, at least the kind that’s just discovered the foolishness or ugliness of the world. But I looked forward to your sadness too, because sadness carried me farther than anger did. There were more stories to come out of it for me. There was more singing too. I thought about how I was going to have to pay close attention to how sadness or anger helped or got in the way when you learned about war and everything else, but the nice thing was knowing that if I ever wasn’t sure which one you needed, I could always ask.
By Celeste Amidon Featured Art: “Olwyn (she/they)” by Jemma Leigh Roe
Sylvia was a waitress at the Desert Jewel Casino in Scottsdale, Arizona. She wore a little black dress with a white bowtie to work every night, where she served food and drinks—pork dinners and Tequila Sunrises and cheddarstuffed meatballs and Irish car bombs—to bachelors and addicts and men with catheters snaking down their legs.
She had just graduated from the University of Arizona Sierra Vista with a 2.4 GPA in psychology. Not knowing what else to do, she moved into her parents’ basement with the blind cat and the washing machine. Her mother said she was welcome any time, but her father wanted her to pay rent, so she got a job at the casino. When she wasn’t working, she was playing solitaire or combing the cat’s fur with a pink brush from the dollar store. Sometimes, she tried to meet people, at a live music event or on an internet date, but those nights always ended so miserably she could not eat the following day. She hated Scottsdale—the dialysis centers and the nursing homes and the golf courses and the dry heat—but she liked her job. She liked working the graveyard shift and sleeping all day. She liked how men stared hungrily at her from across the room. She liked how the black nylons made her legs look. She liked the endless music box noise of the games.
Most of all, she liked Wes. Wes worked as a slot attendant. He had long blond hair and tiny diamonds in his earlobes and a blue sea turtle tattooed to his forearm. She liked to watch him walk on the casino floor, how he played the drums with his fingers in the air as he went. She liked to watch him in the break room, the way his shoulder blades hooked over the backs of the plastic chairs like bat’s wings.
By Sofie Llewellyn Riley Featured Art: “Before Sunrise Locarno Beach” by Thad DeVassie
Autumn in Minnesota doesn’t look so different from Ohio. The trees are the same color, the farms the same distance from the cities. The congestion and construction are the same consistency, slowing traffic to a mucus-like crawl. If I were to close my eyes in the park beside the Mississippi River, I would hear birds that sounded like the starlings that sat on the pine branches in my childhood backyard. This is a trick I play on myself sometimes, to try and feel as though I am near where I am from.
“Biological sex,” “birth sex,” and “sex” mean the biological indication of male and female, including sex chromosomes, naturally occurring sex hormones, gonads, and nonambiguous internal and external genitalia present at birth, without regard to an individual’s psychological, chosen, or subjective experience of gender. [ . . .]
“Gender-related condition” means any condition where an individual feels an incongruence between the individual’s gender identity and biological sex. “Genderrelated condition” includes gender dysphoria.—Ohio House Bill 68 [Emphasis always mine]
No one knew Putin when he became prime minister. I remember it well—Dan
In case there is any doubt, I am guilty. —Dzhokhar Tsarnaev
“The thing about Chechnya is, there were two wars,” Dan says, fishing two Chalkidiki olives out of the jar with chopsticks and plopping them into chilled glasses. The ten-year anniversary of the Boston Marathon Bombing is coming up, and I am feeling nostalgic or depressed, and I want to get to the bottom of something in my mind. “We refer to Putin’s war as the ‘second war’ in Chechnya, counting Yeltsin’s war in the 1990s as the first. But really the first was the Russian imperial war to make Chechnya part of the Russian empire, and the second was Stalin’s exile of Chechens to Kazakhstan.”
“Exile qualifies as war?” I ask.
“It’s a euphemism for genocide. Between half- and three-quarters of a million Chechens were rounded up at gunpoint and forced to move to resettlement camps. They had less than half an hour to pack, and Soviet soldiers shot people for any reason. They got them out quick so they could plunder their houses. If there was any organized resistance, they killed everyone. They were stuffed into cattle trains in the middle of winter and transported 2,000 miles to godforsaken places in Central Asia with no food, shelter, or infrastructure. A quarter of them died. Half of them were children.”
“Fie on the witch!” cried a merry girl, As they rounded the point where Goody Cole Sat by her door with her wheel atwirl, A bent and blear-eyed poor old soul. —from “Wreck of Rivermouth” by John Greenleaf Whittier
By Matt Miller Featured Art: “Close Up – Spatial Neighborhoods” by Alex Brice
The world will work to twirl girls into witches, or they will twirl themselves into witches, or they will twirl and turn away from the witch they could be, would be if not for the world saying no, the world saying that their lives are their own fault. Goody Cole, the witch of Hampton, walks the marshes, haunts the dune grasses, watches the ships from the granite perch above the Atlantic shoreline of Little Boars’ Head. She is looking for her name.
“I can’t back,” my father said and so I thought this was a story about my father. In the old stories, every father is an ogre, an ogre of absence or an ogre of presence. Today he was present and being pulled out into the Atlantic, borne upon his own currents.
I sat at a Taco Bell reading a book about cultural marxists, contraception, and immigration. Someone gave me this book and told me it would define the election, but all I could gather was the author yap on and on about country clubs and labor unions and working-class business practices and shoestring budgets. I very much wanted to dump the book in a garbage can and never read anything about it again, but I was waiting for someone and had nothing else to do. I looked up from my carne asada steak taco and watched a man in the corner enjoy a soccer game on his phone and take savage bites out of a large, engorged chalupa. As he bit into the fried casing’s manila envelope colored flesh, a bright red sauce squirted out and spread across the table. Holy Cucamonga, this was a wild, satanic place. Men with the legs of flamingos and heads like snakes from Central American jungles rummaged through middle American taco concoctions like a teenager in a 1950’s drive-in theater parking lot. They fondled these damn tacos and burritos in uncomfortable, godless ways. What sort of place was this? What kind of man visits a Taco Bell in the middle of the afternoon and orders twelve of these grease torpedoes only to consume them in one twenty-minute sitting? What sort of liver processes that kind of modern nutritional content?
Featured Art: Stephen Reichert, Untitled, 2014. Oil on canvas, 12″ x 12″. “Cirlce” series.
I first saw her aboard the JADE PRINCESS, a cruise ship several miles off the coast of New Hampshire. She wore ribbons in her hair and a leather choker around her neck that read GIVE ME A REASON. The two of us made up the entire wedding party. I played the roles of daughter and maid of honor and she, her father’s best man. The other guests were staff on their dinner break and a couple gamblers, vying for a seat at the blackjack table.
The captain kept the ceremony short (on autopilot like his ship). Ma had already been married twice, yet for Husband #3, she still felt giddy and hopeful. Where I saw folding chairs and a wrinkled backdrop, she saw romance. Where I saw a cardboard cutout of her last boyfriend, she saw the love of her life. When the time came to exchange vows, I handed Ma the wedding band for her five-second fiancé, a mood ring from LOST & FOUND that glowed black in my sweaty hands. The best man gave her father a light-up jelly ring and our parents sealed it all with a kiss.
“Faye,” she introduced herself at the reception, my stepsister before I learned her name.
I was supposed to go on vacation to a National Park, but I don’t vacation. I mean, I did go, but I came very close to not seeing anything at all, because here is how I am accustomed to seeing: There are windows in my home office, but my desk does not face them, so light enters from the side. I am obliquely aware of the day. Sometimes I twist my body to see if the sun has risen, whether fog covers or wind stirs the big green shrub outside. In this small room in my house, I face three computer monitors and their glowing non-sun. I do a real-time job. Creation and consumption of the product are simultaneous; I make live captions for people to read on the Internet, like a stenographer does in court. I do it for seminars and webinars and legal proceedings, in Zoom or Teams or Chime or the platform du jour. My job is to listen and talk at once. What I do is called Voicewriting. It is a job of ears and mouth, an occupation more physical than cerebral, though I’m very stuck at a desk. I receive an audio feed from a remote source and say aloud what I hear as I hear it. Voice recognition software instantly converts my speech to text, which appears in a unique URL, or onscreen in a meeting platform. Someone I don’t know, someone far away or near, reads it as it unfurls. The job is sweaty and live. I’ve parroted defense contractors, nuclear regulators, pastors and poets. It’s echo, not interpretation.
There is no time to fall behind. A dropped word can be fatal to sentence meaning, a dropped sentence is dereliction. Tethered to my laptop by a web of cords, in my black microphone-headset, I resemble an air traffic controller. When a meeting has weak audio, I jack the volume up, and with my palms I press the headphones to my skull, so I am filled with sound and its vibration, then quickly I move my lips and tongue. If I get a very speedy talker, I close my eyes to eliminate all extraneous stimuli. The trick of the job is to tune out your own noise, to be a channel of syllables divorced from sense.
Tanya says Hollis beat a boy last night. Tanya says the boy crawled through the girl’s bedroom window and good thing Hollis caught him. He beat that boy so hard he soiled himself, Tanya goes on, taking a drag from her cigarette. She saw it with her own two eyes, heard all the whooping and hollering, then the boy curled up beneath the window, jeans streaked with shit. We’re at work when Tanya tells me this. She’s standing near my desk, her back against the easel where I lay out the company newsletter. I’m twenty-three, she’s thirty-eight. She works in purchasing. I’m in PR. Her cubicle is catty-corner to mine. As she talks Tanya adjusts the underwire in her bra with long, tapered fingernails painted the color of strawberry frosting. My boobies are sagging by the minute, she says, Hollis used to spray ‘em all over with whipped cream then slurp up every last bit, but now he never touches them let alone glances their way.
It embarrasses me when she talks like this, but I keep a straight face, so she’ll tell me more. I like to know what’s coming down the pike. She has a young son, Hollis Junior, and a daughter named Mercy who just turned fourteen. Mercy is the one with the window in her room that the boy crawled through.
Selected as winner of the 2023 New Ohio Review Nonfiction Contest by Barrie Jean Borich
My housemate sleeps all day, makes art all night, and paints giant bees. “I want people to feel my paintings,” she says, stroking the palm of her hand against a still dripping head-to-toe canvas.
I keep my hands in pockets. We’ve only been at the art residency for a week, and she has already transformed her garage studio into a whimsical world of texture and wonder and touch. My art is trapped inside me. Weighs down my womb with rocks.
The lobby of the midtown hotel, packed with disheveled travelers asleep on loose rows of waiting room chairs, or fidgeting next to their rolling suitcases in line for the electronic kiosks, resembled nothing less than a Greyhound bus station. Otto cut briskly over the unmopped floors, spinning out into the livelier air over the sidewalk on Seventh Avenue, jogging across the standing traffic and merging with the crowd onto the escalator that carried him down into Penn Station to catch the 3:13 Amtrak Keystone to 30th Street Station. Leaving his conference early, buoyed by the prospect of improved surroundings, carefully weighing his snack and magazine options, he was warily eyeing a copse of NYPD officers and their German Shepherd on a leash, when he heard the pattering of the first shots.
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.
I had on Pawn Stars, Man Vs. Wild, and Diners, Drive-Ins, & Dives, which is not a bad lineup for a Tuesday afternoon. Though, I’m not supposed to watch the TV behind the bar, since it means I’m not facing the customers. Even if, for instance, a customer wants to draw my attention to something happening on TV. In that case I’m supposed to look at the far TV, or in the mirror. This way, if someone walks into the bar, I’ll be facing the right direction. McIlhaney feels strongly about this. But there was no one here except me. The only other person working was Arsenio, who was in his car in the parking lot FaceTiming with his daughter. Read More
Walking in the West Village, I stop at the park on Clarkson Street to watch some little league baseball. I lean against the chain-link fence and am grateful for how its curves accept my weight without comment or judgment (as I imagine the inside of a whale might). A man is standing near me; he speaks in easy platitudes, and I nod along, not so much because I agree with him—for example, he says the weather is perfect, and all I can think of is how one of the clouds looks like you and the other looks like Nixon and how I’m in no state to rank omens in terms of their relative inscrutability—but rather because I really like nodding: as with launching a satellite, once you’ve done the work of getting your head to the top of its apogee there is a pleasing feeling of submission to a higher power in letting gravity complete the act. The man, who I decide to name Bubba (because I have never met a Bubba and fear if I do not take this opportunity, I never will) tells me that its been a crazy year for the team, though I don’t know which team he is referring to (one is in blue, the other green, and I wonder if I’m the only one who is bothered by the fact that the team whose shirts do not have piped collars is the one sponsored by a local plumbing concern).
It’s been a crazy year for all of us, I say, unsure of what a “sane year” would look like.
Oh yes, he answers, lots of ups and downs for the squad.
Don’t I know it? I say, and with each nod I become more emotional about the (no doubt unjust) obstacles that the team has faced as they have tried to do nothing more than live their lives and play some baseball on Saturday afternoons.
Bubba does not look at me as he speaks, keeping his eye on the field (and I wonder if he is actually talking to someone on his other side instead of me, and, by extension, what percentage of the conversations I’ve ever had did not actually require my involvement). He says that the team has struggled with fundamentals.
In poems, Ohio—as word, as a set of landscapes, as a cradle for psychological, emotional, and cultural exploration—exists with significance and versatility. Derived from the Iroquois word that means “beautiful river,” Ohio, as a name, is vowel wealthy, bookended by o’s, assuring that its mention brings a sonic vitality and depth. Ohio, in terms of topography, is rolling plains, glacial plateaus, Appalachian hills, stretches of bluegrass. Due to its proximity to the Great Lakes, and its general position on the continent, Ohio has hosted all of the following: major, ancient routes used by Native American tribes to travel and trade; pivotal exchanges between Native American and European fur traders; the ruthlessness and violence brought on by the heightened European demand for exportable goods and by the grueling process of colonization; numerous battles fought during extended, armed confrontations or wars (Pontiac’s Rebellion, the American Revolutionary War, the Northwest Indian War, the War of 1812, and the American Civil War); hubs and final stops for freedom-seeking slaves along the Underground Railroad; early industrialization; and destinations for African Americans leaving the Jim Crow south during the Great Migration. To many poets and readers, the mention or involvement of Ohio can at least subconsciously educe some of the locale’s extensive identity. Looking closely at two poems by Rita Dove and Ai, we will examine a few of the elements and forces that the incorporation of Ohio brings to the texts.
Second Prize, New Ohio Review Fiction Contest selected by Charles Baxter
Featured Art: The Eventuality of Destiny by Giorgio de Chirico
I am this heart, this brain, only these, right now—no other. This is what Susan (that’s her name now) tells herself every morning upon waking. She opens her eyes and sees the flaking ceiling above her, sees the wash of sunlight coming through leaves. She touches her chest, feels her heart beating steadily—no rush of fear—and exhales. She’s alone. She touches her head, hair just starting to gray and she’s not bothering to color it. “This can be my new disguise,” she thinks, “my new self.” One of the million selves she’s been in the last twenty-odd years. She rubs her eyes and before she can silence herself again, she remembers days when she thought more, remembered more: a million legs all running toward the Pentagon or induction center or federal courthouse. Flowers in the barrel of a gun. A Viet Cong flag. Giant puppets of Kissinger, Nixon, McNamara. Or their heads atop the bodies of gigantic hawks, perched among the blackened trees of a burned landscape. Bring the war home. A placard of a napalmed child. If people see, they will join us and this atrocity will have to stop. A million hands waving. A million arms, fists raised in salute. They were the million legs and hands of her—her legs and hands—the million-limbed body of resistance, then revolution. Why does she allow these things to come back to her today? Because it’s spring and her curtains are the color of a daffodil she handed to a child once at a demonstration? She remembers when the remembered voices were always with her, singing off-key but loudly together. She never felt alone. But then suddenly she was alone, amputated from everyone and everything she knew. Most mornings she silences these memories of memories, she manages to.
New Ohio Review 