A Little Longer

May 13, 2023.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Matthew Thorburn

Featured Art: Polar Chroma Midnight by John Sabraw

“Tickets, please,” he calls out, “Tickets!”
and I think, Hang on, I know him,
the conductor who shuffles toward me
down the aisle, this big guy, pink-
cheeked, coppery buttons on his dark
blue suit, his blue cap with a short
sharp brim jammed down over reddish
hair, shirt collar disappearing

beneath his curly red beard, look how
he keeps his feet set wide like
a sea captain, sways in the nonplace
of our constant motion, as I heard a French
philosopher call it, the steady-as-she-goes
of this racketing NJ Transit train,
his ticket nippers going click-click,
click-click, poor morning light catching

the pixie dust of ticket snips sprinkled
behind him as he calls out again,
“Tickets, tickets,” coming closer now,
not asking but naming what he wants,
and there’s something I want
to tell him after this shock of recognition,
startled awake by a world
made strange again, but is this

really the place to say, You know,
you look just like Joseph Roulin the postman,
Van Gogh’s friend, his neighbor he painted
five or six times back in 1889 and you
can go see down in Philly at the Barnes,
then relate how Roulin sorted the mail
each day at the train station in Arles
where Van Gogh used to go to send

paintings home to Theo, how Roulin
cared for him when he cut himself,
wrote letters to his family, welcomed him
into his own, made Van Gogh’s life
a little better, probably a little
longer, though the conductor I imagine
is not a son of Arles, though maybe
of Manalapan, but up close I see

his badge says JOE, his sapphire eyes
are filled with delight, filled with
deep light, just the way Van Gogh painted
them, as I’d like to tell him
in this moving moment we share
when he says “Tickets” once more and
then—Click-click—punches mine
and then—“Here you go”—hands it back

since I’ll need it to board the AirTrain
at Newark, but because this train
keeps rattling along, he keeps walking,
calls out again, clicks his nipper
once, twice, just because, and that’s when
I spot it, there at his coat hem, how
it glints and burns in the dusty light,
that smudge of sunflower yellow.

Morning Commute with Revenant

June 14, 2019.Reading time 3 minutes.

By James McKee

Featured Art by Courtney Bennett

You know how it is: going in to work,

Who looks at anything? You’re late, it’s cold,

hot, raining, no buses again, whatever.

You’re long past fighting this fast-forward blur,

pure A-to-B time, better numbed than bored.

But then the street-views you sluice through slow and lock:

some old warehouse abutting a blacktop lot.

high up this soot-caked chainlink fence

that nets, for no one else, blank swaths of sky,

there juts forth a sawn-off sumac branch,

em dash black and cocked at ten-to-three.

See it first, since you must, as a quenched torch,

a club hanging half-swung,

or someone’s bony forearm thrust through the mesh,

lopped at wrist and elbow, and left as a warning.

Fine. But you’re not one to confuse

fancied-up musings with the truth:

one hapless stick is all the chainsaw left

the day someone decided

this tree—a weed that wedged upwards from

the cracks its seed happened among,

that rose against the traffic-ravaged air,

that pierced that fence and knuckled this pavement up—

had to come down.

Rough cobblestones plug the square yard

where its raw stump once weathered anvil-hard;

no doubt the sheared-off roots still grip

deep undertiers of pipe and stone.

A passing siren’s wave-crest flushes you

back in the churning surf of city noise,

but by now it’s too late:

you’ve gone and glimpsed that voided silhouette,

you’ve heard, in its tousling leaves’ soundless hiss,

another of those random sidewalk elegies

work alone can dismiss

And not because it isn’t true,

because it is.

Los Angeles, 1990

March 29, 2018.Reading time 1 minute.

By Jerry Williams

Featured Art: Motorcycle Race (Motorradrennen) by Oskar Nerlinger

I can recall riding a Kawasaki 750
down Sunset Boulevard
on a Saturday afternoon in light traffic.
Cruising along at thirty mph in fourth gear,
I let go of the handlebars,
braced myself on the fuel tank,
and slowly rose to my feet.
Helmetless, I stood like a surfer in the wind
on the imitation leather seat,
my longish hair blown back,
sunshine bursting through my goggles.
A thin membrane of fear lined
the inside of an urn made of pure joy.
After about an eighth of a mile,
I returned to the legal sitting position
and only then did I notice my runaway pulse.
When you’re twenty-three years old
the saddle of a thousand-pound motorcycle
feels as firm as the ground you walk on.
You get full access to your inner maniac.
Nowadays, doctors and sounder reasoning
have rescued me from worldly vices
and a rapid heartbeat often provokes alarm.
But I miss the brash torque of myself,
the quality of light in that urban desert,
all the midnights and years out in front of me
like the beautiful stupid jewels of infinity.

Before the Storm

November 2, 2015.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Christopher Kempf

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

Featured Art: Storm Clouds by John Henry Twachtman

Birds fled. The city fell
quiet. Across
the night the neighbors raised
their glasses & together, gathered
on our porches, forms
in a Japanese landscape, we stared
up. Or was it
Turner the sky resembled? How every
late seascape became
for him, given
to opium & with his father’s
death, depression, a tempest
of motion & color. Clouds
roiling. The oils
of his tiny boats bleeding
out. Only,
he knew, the frame’s gilt edge
splits beauty from terror. Airplanes,
that night, climbed
from the city & steeply, fleeing
too the ruinous
wall of rain, banked
south. Schools, a step
ahead of the looming cataclysm,
closed. Newscasters
leaned forward into the wind & we, raising
our own glasses to the neighbors
drank. Dark
& Stormies. Sazeracs. We imagined
the city flooding. Mudslides
on Foothill Parkway. Prospero, fallen
from his dukedom, does it
all for pleasure he says, every
shipwrecked Milanese aristocrat, every
extravagant clipper cast
up in the pitch & tumult his rough
magic fashioned. That,
we know, is mostly
what the groundlings came for. To fancy
a world they would never see struck
low, & so
close, sometimes, as to feel even
on their faces the great
king’s spit. There is,
in catastrophe, a satisfaction
exceeding sex, psychologists
believe. Before
the storm the city
bristled. Bells
tolled. Before
the last helicopters cleared
Saigon, operatives
burned in a rooftop incinerator
the state’s documents. We watched
from our porches the planes
shudder & mount. On Merritt
Lake, the pelicans, frenzied,
fed.

Blood Buzz, AZ

October 30, 2015.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Shane Lake

Featured Art: Fifth Avenue Nocturne by Childe Hassam

A Red Cross bus gets hit by a truck
and lands on its side, the driver unconscious.

Blood spills from the broken glass,
coats the pavement in bubbling rust.

It is 1977 and the theme for summer is .44 caliber.
It is one hundred fifteen degrees.

A crowd forms in the contagious heat,
pulls back as the red pool expands.

I watch from the ailing shade of a palm tree,
the sweet taste of blood in the air, on my tongue.

Someone tries to rescue the driver
but the mix is slippery. He lands on his back.

His impact speckles the closest few,
who scream and cover their mouths with their hands.

Sirens sound, and soon the fire trucks are here,
hosing donations into the street drain.

Secretly, we all enjoy this,
being here at the scene of the crash

where news vans make stars of us all.
We want our trauma to trump everyone else’s.

We want to be able to say:

“You weren’t there. You wouldn’t understand.”