Deadhead the Marigolds

February 20, 2026.Reading time 1 minute.

By Bridget Bell

I am forever bending toward you like
the marigold starters packed onto
these plastic trays curve

toward the windows. I save my SSRI
bottles. Pack them full of the papery
seeds from the deadheaded

wasted petals, pulled off at their narrow necks and
even these stupid flowers
know they need warmth to survive. You say you are trying

but when you pass through the
door arch—the one I’m leaning
into (as if to hold me up)—

you do not brush against me so it feels like you
are lying, like you’ve passed through this tight
space, not only without touching me

but with an avoidance of touch. I
turn the plastic trays so the
seedlings curve away

from the sun—and tomorrow when I check
they will lean again toward the window—
all the back and forth

buttresses their stems into strong green
spines, so I know they will be okay when
they are left outside and exposed for the
first time to all the brutal elements.

Ecstasy Facsimile

December 2, 2025.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Mark Anthony Cayanan
Featured Art: “Event Horizon” by Mallory Stowe

Guess manageable despair arrives on time today,
my soul cracking when sunlight sharpens my migraine.
I listen to Wilco and amplify my unoriginal sadness.
The U-Bahn stalls at Ullsteinstraße and now I’m sure
I’m going to be alone forever, and it’s oh so important,
this intimate history between my earbuds and my feelings.
It wouldn’t be so bad, being somewhat lonely, mostly
ordinary, if I could soundtrack my life. I’d stare at rows
of bottled wieners while mumbling invented lyrics.
And I’m still mostly male and so adjust myself in the aisle,
my ball cap and sullen face, chili & lime chips, cheap IPAs.
I self-checkout to avoid talking. I bring my own bag.
Pleasure never lasts, you know, but pleasure does. And how
embarrassing, to be unloved. I hum every longing home.

Difficulties

November 2, 2025.Reading time 1 minute.

By Wes Civilz
Featured Art by Rachel Hall

Today will be a paradise if I
Can manage to control the many hells
I’m made of. If I misidentify
The buzzers, flashing lights and warning bells
Haphazardly erupting here and there
Inside my skull, my soil, my sin, my sex,
I’ll pay the price—which means that everywhere
I go I’ll be nowhere, a circumflex
Over myself. Not quick, just dead. No good,
Just bad. No song not noise. All kisses stone
And any kindnesses misunderstood
As counterfeit. All indicators show
Too much vibration in the system now—
Reach up and flip the switch and shut it down.

Fly on the Wall

November 1, 2025.Reading time 1 minute.

By Wes Civilz

The threadbare jacket that I wear is made of
Woven catastrophe. The car I drive
Is powered by a liquid I’m afraid of
(Fluid Apocalypse). There is a sound I’ve
Heard now and then, soft buzz, a background hum
Of slow disaster . . . and disaster is
The word that means the stars have come undone,
So I can’t sail among them with Osiris
At death, as planned, so while I live I’ll try
To drink each tall cool glass of loss, cooled more
By colder cubes of void, and force-feed pies
Of difficulty with misfortune’s fork,
And be a boss of shock, a bird of woe,
A watching fly upon a wall of bone.

Small Project

March 4, 2025.Reading time 3 minutes.

By William Wenthe

Two autumns ago, after our home
had broken up, my child and I
were left in a rugged way. If I were to paint it
with tempera on wet gesso, on a wall
in some palace chamber, it would be
a man carrying his daughter
who is holding a lantern for him.
This autumn we are settling in
to a new house; but that same pain—as if
the season, not us, were remembering it—
comes prying. Today, the same day
I begin the pills I’ve asked
the doctor for, whatever space
in the mind they might afford, I’m starting
a small project, a simple rack
for my daughter’s closet. It’s a habit
of making things, passed to me
by my father, but scant measure
to the skills of the man who made
a perfectly scaled four-poster bed
for a sister’s doll, as well as the life-size
bedroom where for years I slept.

Looking for a layer against
the season’s first chill, I reach for
a folded sweater on the high shelf
of my closet, one I’ve never worn before.
Though it’s thoroughly worn: shot-gunned by moths,
a ragged suture I sewed where the V-neck meets
the breastbone. It was twenty years ago,
this time of year, beginning
of the season for sweaters,
my father died. How strange now
to feel this sweater he wore, one
that I remember him in, cling to me
tight as old clothes I’ve outgrown.

Still I keep it on,
something I’ll work within
like this house where we now live,
with room for the two of us, but
small enough we have to imagine hard
how best it can be filled. Which is why
I’ve sawn a white pine board,
and will sand it, varnish, sand again;
and measure and drill, to fix the hooks
to hang the jackets, hoodies, and her prized
cow-print pajamas, now floor-strewn
like debris flown from the bed of a pickup.
She may or may not pick up
on the idea, also passed down, that one small thing
works into another, larger one: a jacket
on a hook, a hook on a board, fastened
to a wall holding up a roof, enclosing
the ongoing, unfinished project
of a house. The work, the daily intentions—
and the luck (all the apartments shelled
to ruins by one-eyed missiles)—the luck
to even have any of this—
careless, rich, flamboyant chance.

Blood Moon Blues

November 20, 2024.Reading time 1 minute.

By Johnny Cate

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Keats

July 18, 2024.Reading time 1 minute.

By Robert Cording

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

Miraculous

March 27, 2024.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Pam Baggett

Featured Art by Eliza Scott

Switch on the car radio, music falls out of the air
into my ears: James Brown, Joni Mitchell,
Jim Croce. Old gold. Plus, when I got in my car,
it cranked like it does every time, so many miracles
in that I can’t even count them. Traffic lights
that help us get along with one another,
scent of roast chicken rising from my grocery bag,
which also contains the most delicious bread,
whole wheat with flax, sesame and a hint
of cherries. That someone thought to turn wheat
into bread, miraculous. Yeah, I know, I just
had to start on a heart pill, but it’s nothing,
a little electrical nuisance, no effect
on longevity. And yeah, my best friend
has a hurt so deep and wide whole oceans
pour through it, and her story’s not mine to tell
but jeez, what a soul-shatterer. Yet even she
watches bumblebees. She swears they’re her favorite
miracle. So aerodynamically complicated
in the way they get off the ground you’d think
they never would—flapping their wings
back and forth, not up and down—yet up they go.
She says if they can beat gravity she can too,
and I gotta tell you that to see her dressed
and laughing, hear her singing with that voice
that sounds like water tumbling over rocks
in some ancient river, water that’s passed through
some murky cavernous places but has emerged
into the stunning light of day, to hear her sing again
is one big fat black-and-yellow buzzing miracle.

To Save a Life

May 19, 2022.Reading time 3 minutes.

Co-Winner of the Movable / New Ohio Review Writing Contest

by Kari Gunter-Seymour

Featured Art: Aperture, by John Schriner

We did what we could,
hid the bottles, drove what
was left of him deep
into the yawning hollow,
built a campfire, drank water
from a long-handled gourd,
a galvanized bucket.

We set up tents for triage,
counted his breaths, worried
over irregular heartbeats,
sweats, persistent vomiting,
his jacked up adrenal system.

We waited. Listened for a canvas
zipper in the night, each long slow
pull a call to duty, our legs folding
over duct taped camp stools,
tucked tight around the fire,
his gut-punch stories, stenched
in blood and munitions,
overpowering the woodsmoke’s
curling carbons.

Compassion Fatigue

November 30, 2021.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.

How to Choose a Mattress

November 29, 2021.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.

In the Morning I Wake Up Feeling Unmoved

December 13, 2020.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Emily Lee Luan

Featured art: Into Something Rich and Strange by Caleb Sunderhaus

   In the morning I wake up
feeling unmoved   hardly
   particular   the house

around me quieted by early
rain I feel hungry and so
I eat I wash my face

   measure the relative length
of my hair    to my shoulder
   Sometimes I let myself feel

exceptional stretch my arms
in open grasses
the suspension lasting only

until dinnertime or upon
learning he once loved a girl
with collarbones just like

mine   But today isn’t remarkable
   I’ve stopped looking at my
body   naked in the mirror or

   washing in between my toes
It feels as if nobody   has seen
   me in days   Something in that

makes me want to be   object
   caught in a window frame
or otherwise violently   found

   I scatter brightly colored
candies into my palm   frame
   my hand against the white

of the porcelain sink   It makes
   so much sense that someone
would love me until it    doesn’t Read More

We Can Fry Anything

June 15, 2020.Reading time 4 minutes.

By Abby E. Murray

Featured Art: Sunshine by Bill Dooley, John Marquis, Wendy Minor Viny

I’m at the fair to test

how American my blood cells are

and whether my heart

is the monster pumpkin I forced

from the mouth of a flower,

big as a tractor and thirsty AF.

When I say give me something fried

I don’t mean cubes of cheesecake

or spools of battered bacon,

I mean give me what I never thought

could be skewered in the first place,

give me executive orders,

give me stolen land

served on a stick and wrapped

in white paper smeared with oil.

I want to put my failures

on a Ferris wheel then watch them

pause at the top, ready to jump.

Told You So

March 15, 2019.Reading time 1 minute.

By Craig Bernardini

If I had a choice
between being wrong
and the world dying—
you know, the oceans
turning into lemon juice, the air
to Lysol, the forests
cinder, tundra
swamp, shipping lanes
jammed with dead
polar bears, Manhattan
a gondola, the world,
a Gondwana of dengue—
I would, of course, choose
the latter.
And maybe, just maybe,
clinging to the last
antenna of the last
skyscraper to be swallowed
by the waves, pointing
my big fat finger
at the dead world,
and at all the mother-
fuckers who did it,
shouting, Told you so,
Told you so—maybe,
as the water was closing
over my mouth, I’d understand
how we got into this mess
in the first place.

You Are My Sunshine

February 7, 2019.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Bobbie Jean Huff

Let me begin by offering my condolences, I said,
holding out my hand. She shook out her umbrella
and placed it open, just beside the altar. They thought
it was an ulcer, she said. They gave him some tablets.
Did he have any special requests? I asked. Favorite
hymns? Or something for Communion, like maybe
Water Music? He was worse by Christmas, she said.
He couldn’t manage the pumpkin pie. He always loved
my pumpkin pie. The King of Love is nice, I said. I
opened the book to page 64. As an alternate to Crimond,
you know. Most people don’t recognize it as the 23rd
Psalm. In January his feet turned black, she said. Toe by
toe. It took exactly ten days. The shadow of a branch
moved slowly back and forth behind the stained glass.
I thought: When I get home I’ll check my toes. Will
there be Communion? I asked, finally.

The last three days he started to hiccup, she said.
He wouldn’t take any water. It never stopped, the
hiccupping. Not once, not one minute until he went. I
could play Pachelbel’s Canon. That’s very popular now.
There’s no reason it can’t work at funerals as well as
weddings. At the very end, she said—then stopped, her
eyes squeezed shut behind her glasses—as if the
rejected water, each wretched hiccup, and every
blackened toe formed a chain she could use to haul
herself back to September, when she would claim
him, finally whole again.
She reached for her umbrella and frowned. Play
what you like, she said. He was never fond of music.
Not hymns, anyhow. Only once in fifty-three years
did I catch him singing. You are My Sunshine, I
believe it was.

Aesthetics to Change the Way You Live

November 28, 2015.Reading time 1 minute.

By Sally Bliumis-Dunn

Featured Art: The Burning of the Houses of Lords and Commons, 16 October 1834 by Joseph Mallord William Turner

“Aesthetics to Change the Way You Live”
—Growth Magazine

For instance wabi sabi,
a Japanese view of life
that celebrates the imperfect,

the light-hearted sound
of the two words
like figures balanced on a seesaw,

behind them, cloudless sky,
and in the spread, the photograph
of nicked and tarnished silver spoons

arranged in rows on lilac velvet—
how perfectly imperfect.
But separate from the printed page,

the air around me darkens—
and then the sound
like thunder pressing closer

as I think of my own flaws—
and then they all
come charging toward me

like a herd of bison,
so dense it’s hard to see
from all the kicked-up dust.

So loud I cannot think.
How much easier to be won over
by a living room’s worn rug,

the reds and blues, faded,
even threadbare in those places
I have most often stood.

In a Year of Drought, I Drink Wine in a Los Angeles Hot Tub

November 3, 2015.Reading time 4 minutes.

By Christopher Kempf

Selected as runner-up in the 2015 New Ohio Review Poetry Contest by Robert Pinsky

Featured Art: Interior of the Pantheon, Rome by Giovanni Paolo Panini

So too on Troy’s final afternoon
the doomed children of the city sang. Such
      was their joy, Virgil tells us, such

was their simple awestruck wonder
at the great beast even
      the Achaeans, cramped, standing

on each other’s shoulders inside
the close wood, wept. What
      he means, of course, is that inside

of the other’s suffering, one
can imagine always aspects
      of a wild beauty refusing

negation. Or no. Not
that it exists, this
      beauty, but that

it can be made so. Rome
Virgil says, springing
      from Ilion’s ashes. Elsewhere

Orpheus. This
is not my home. Here
      for the weekend only, I float

out into the hot tub’s bubbling, bleach-
& salt-scoured water. I watch
      the few stars the city permits

still flicker on, the long
avenues of light below them—Cienaga
      & Sunset, Ventura—burn

& spangle in the mountains’ dark bowl. The bottle
of La Marca prosecco sweats. To secure
      for their desert metropolis water

enough to nourish all this, city
developers—circa
      the arrival, reports suggest, of something

The Circus Lion’s Lament

November 25, 2012.Reading time 1 minute.

By Michael Derrick Hudson

Featured Art: Circus Clown and Dancer by Marc Chagall

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

zebras on the hoof. Days spent pissing hot gold

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

of fly-blown torpor, those gristly jawfuls of prey

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

the muscular scourge of my dreaming tail . . .

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

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

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

and tooth the Ringmaster’s splintery stool. Dolts

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

draggers waddling away in diapers and tuxedos . . .

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

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

A Pocket Introduction to Our Universe

May 27, 2010.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Claire Bateman

Featured Image: The Throne of Saturn by Elihu Vedder 1883-1884

What does our universe most like to do?

To contort without any warning
into nothing but corners,
an awkward though not unbeautiful
configuration.

Of what elements is our universe composed?

The first is distance,
of which there are innumerable varieties,
such as the chromatic stutter between
forethought and aftertaste,
and the measureless span between
the transparent and the merely translucent.

The second is otherness,
that of the other
and that of the self,
reciprocal and ever-escalating glories.

What holds things together and apart?

The strong and weak gravitational forces.
Scar tissue.
The Great Universal Loneliness,
from which not even the material realm
has been excluded.

What are some of the forces that pass through flesh and bone?

Neutrinos.
X-rays.
Invisibility itself passes through the body
in immense, inarticulate storms.

The Woman Who Didn’t Know How

May 4, 2010.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Maya Jewell Zeller

Featured Image: Clouds and Sunset, Jamaica by Frederic Edwin Church 1865

Her skin was too human too often,
hands too happy to touch the splintered

door of a barn, too easily moved toward
a nettle, too ready to cover her mouth

when she gasped in joy, so she let
the aliens take her when they came.

They moved like question marks toward her
and she dropped the garden tools

to watch their wavy willow-like eyes, slits
of smoke their mouths flung out in nets.

They didn’t make a sound. Instead they held
signs with shimmery words to tell

what they wanted. On board,
they began to teach her restraint,

offering pudding then peeling the lid
to reveal the round torsos of bugs.

She wanted to laugh, but they asked
her to keep the noise down.

She wanted to explore, but they said
it was best if she lay back, rest a while,

it would be a long trip, would she please
just draw them a picture of a horse or a spade,

a packet of seeds they could plant
back wherever they came from. Through

the floor-holes she could see her husband
still sleeping on the lawn.

She had never wanted more badly
to tear through his loneliness,

lie softly like an animal on his chest.

How to be Sad

January 9, 2010.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Laura Read

You’ll be heavier in the mornings, waterlogged.

Don’t try to put on anything from the upside down

clean clothes basket. Just wear yesterday’s pants.

There’s no need to bring in the paper. Or sweep

the dead bees from the windowseat. When

the doctor asks for your pain number, stick

with 2—it’s best to leave everything as it was.

Wish again that you could live in that prefab

house you tour at the fair. It doesn’t matter

what it’s made of. You love the vacuum stripes

in the carpet, which is taupe, always difficult to

describe. There’s a plasma television,

a microfiber sectional, and in the kitchen plastic

steaks on each plate at the table, covered in fake

hollandaise sauce. After you eat, you’ll still have

dinner for tomorrow, and you can just

go to bed where there’s a book already chosen

for you on the woman’s side. Apparently, you like

romance. And if you’re not tired, the fair’s always

there. You love the ferris wheel, the funnel cakes,

and especially the goldfish man, but you never

thought you’d win one of those bags with the small

fish swimming inside it, his life hanging

in the balance of your hands. And there’s no bowl

back at the house. So you’ll have to stay up all

night holding him, in case he panics.

Laura Read has published poems most recently in The Sow’s Ear, Red Rock Review, Edgz, and Poet Lore, and has work forthcoming in Spoon River Poetry Review and Floating Bridge Review. She teaches writing and literature courses at Spokane Falls Community College.

Originally appeared in NOR 8.

Objective Correlative

November 26, 2009.Reading time 1 minute.

By Ann Keniston

Featured Art: The Letter by Alice Pike Barney

All I could do was think of her face.
Or not think of it, the way
after receiving her letter I felt
relief, gratitude, and then
lost the actual note she wrote,
the tiny, lovely photograph
of her children I’d vowed to cherish.
And then I saw: my grief was
the objective correlative, a hook
on which I could hang all the scraps
of whatever other sadnesses
I was more frightened of. And the grief,
like a person, like her in her solicitude,
almost prevented me from seeing this

Aphorism Aporia

November 4, 2009.Reading time 1 minute.

By A. E. Stallings

Featured Art: Study for “An Aragonese Smuggler” by William Turner Dannat

What else should I do
But cry for what is spilled?
Not for the fresh glass,
Frothy, newly filled,
Safe on the tabletop
Beside the slice of cake,
Still untouched and chilled,

But for this little lake
The cat laps on the floor,
The glass poured for your sake,
That you would have me pour,
Negative of ink
Filling in the blank
Indelible mistake—

Sweet where tears are salt,
White as oblivion
The souls must learn to drink—
To watch it now escape—
With just myself to thank,
Out of the glass’s tall
Pure transparent shape,

What cannot be put back
And what is past recall:
Secret we couldn’t keep,
Hint I had to drop,
Fall turned into fault.
It’s done, but it won’t stop.
What’s there to do but weep?

Only Hat

October 27, 2009.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Julie Hanson

Featured Art: The Purple Dress by William Glackens

My sadness has the texture of a dime store balloon;
when I slide my hand across it, I get no pleasure from it.

My sadness has no merit whatsoever.

My sadness is a pose I cannot hold a moment longer, but I must
because I am in yoga class where this pose in particular would be
impossible to do had I understood it in advance,
yet when fed instructions bit by bit while bending back . . .
I can believe I just might get the hands.

My sadness stems from a bottomless blame. It knows
that it doesn’t matter, does it, if the reason is legitimate.

My sadness is lonelier the longer I sit with it.

My sadness comes back to me; it is all my own.

My sadness has three corners, three corners has my hat.
I have chosen this, my sadness, over all available hats.
Firemen hats and nurses’ hats, telephone line
repairmen hats. Military, ski, and Napoleon’s only hat.

The Vacuum

October 26, 2009.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Julie Hanson

Featured Art: Woman Bathing by Mary Cassatt

Don’t ask what it was all about.
Ask instead how sudden it was, how complete.
One minute I was an ordinary woman
vacuuming, a thing it seemed I had too recently done,
and the next minute sobbing,
emitting sounds loud, rapid, and long.
It was the kind of sobbing that makes you feel five—
five years old, or housing a feeling five people wide.
I was seated, my left elbow on my left knee,
my glasses hanging from my left hand
as if they were the problem,
(no use in wearing them, no use in putting them down)
and the vacuum, part pet, part sculpture,
sprawled awkwardly, still shrieking
on the floor in front of me.
The sorrow seemed pulled from outside, unselectively,
as if I had swallowed a magnet.
Each time I felt that I could silence this,
that something had been spent, something settled,
I opened my eyes to that canister,
attachments on its back, hose, and extension,
reality-piece which had withstood the worst of me,
had witnessed, and was unaffected.

Teddy Agonistes

April 8, 2009.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Teddy Macker

Summer after high school I lived alone on my family’s farm in Carpinteria,
California.

I didn’t know a hoe from a spade but still reveled in the new role, begging my
mother to send money so I could rent a tractor and disc the field.

I disced the field, had my neighbor take pictures of me discing the field, then
sent those pictures to my ex-girlfriend.

Right before the photo I mashed hay into my hair.

At night I put on my Walkman and drove the tractor up and down the
lightless street, the speed of the machine shocking, the sycamore branches
raining down their sweet womanish incense. . . . I’d listen to Emmylou Harris
sing, You think you’re a cowboy but you’re only a kid, never once thinking I
was a kid.

During the day I spent hours not working but prayerfully wandering the
barn trying to be spellbound by every mote in every last shaft of light, then
scrawling T. S. Eliot on the walls of the hayloft.

Once I found a dead owl and for some reason washed it with a hose.

And late at night, lying on my back, the sounds of the coyotes pinned me to
my bed till I became an infinitely petalling blossom of strange clear dread.

Little Bird

November 8, 2008.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Lawrence Raab

Featured Art: Seascape by Pierre-Auguste Renoir

One cloud was following another
across a blue and passionless sky.
It was the middle of summer, far enough
from December for a man to feel indifferent
to the memories of cold, not yet close
enough to autumn to be caught up
in all its folderol about death.
Neither cloud looked like a whale
or a weasel, or any kind of fanciful beast.
All morning I’d felt my life dragging me down.
The view from my window refused to lift my heart.
The sight of a blank piece of paper
filled me with sadness. I wanted to set
my life down in a comfortable chair, tell it
to take a long nap, and walk away as if
I were somebody else, somebody without a house
or a family or a job, but somebody who might
soon feel with a pang precisely the absence
of everything I had. A cool breeze lifted
the curtains in the room where I was sitting.
A bird was singing. Had it been singing for long?
Far off there were mountains, but I didn’t
wish to go there. Nor did I yearn
to be standing by a lake, or walking
beside the tumult of the sea.
The little bird kept repeating itself.
I filled a glass with water and watched it tremble.

Longing

September 1, 2007.Reading time 7 minutes.

By Natania Rosenfeld

Featured Art: by Creative Commons

I’m not sure what it has to do with length, but it makes sense to think of them together. For longing by definition has no end.

The O.E.D. gives as one definition, the cravings of women in pregnancy. Those objects can be had, though some are quite unhealthy. But cravings are concrete, and they come to substitute for longings. Krunch Kones at the Dairy Land instead of scintillating talk, achievement, the limelight. Whiskey instead of love.

Perhaps “longing” suggests the power of the want, not its unattainability. Perhaps I confuse “longing” with “pining,” which is a word containing pain. To pine is to long with pain for something you’ve lost and can’t have back, ever, or for a very long time: home, or a lover. (The pine tree strained at the sky, stripped, attenuated, its trunk graying.) But I think you long for something you’ve never had, that’s always just beyond the horizon. At the end of a long road whose end is invisible.