NOR: Embrace Your Conjunctions
By S.J. Stover
Daily bread’s gone blue
as a tulip.
Kitchen’s a bust—
wizened potatoes
stacked like luck
rocks,
beans, knobbly
as prayer beads,
an onion’s thin
green talon.
One cannot not live
by bread alone you say.
Okay, so
I will live by
sentences, tenuous,
precious, line by line,
one rhyme
at a time.
I will live by God’s
thin smile, hung
crooked from
a dogwood tree.
By Lory Bedikian
Not every song on the radio is a great song. Usually
it airs because someone knows someone knows someone.
There are most likely a million songs that will never
make it to any Billboard top chart ranking yet will
kick the amp, graze the sound factor with tonal bliss.
I like calling it phenomenal. To give examples would be
dangerous. So instead, one could say, a song needs
to be a bit like paprika. Before we go there, let’s imagine
a punk band named Paprika. Perfect. Even better,
a vocal artist who goes by just: Paprika. Catchy.
We never really knew where it came from. Maybe
just another ground red pepper, but it was what
we always fell back on. Sometimes spicy, sometimes
smoked, sweet. Music. It’s what we are all looking for
all of our lives, just in different incarnations.
Let’s forget the song or I’ll never tell you the story
of how paprika was my mother’s diva and crooner both,
the spice she believed, with all her soul and lashes,
could save any cooked dish from ruin. Paprikah tuhrehk!
Meaning “put paprika on it!” However, in Armenian
addressing you in the second-person, plural, formal,
sounds like, although only two words: all of you, listen to me,
before it all gets thrown out, get the paprika, sprinkle it on, damn
you all! My mother. A woman who saved nothing,
but thought almost anything could be saved from ruin.
Mended socks, shortened the cocktail dress because
she never went anywhere really, but shorter she could
wear it to work, to her job selling formaldehyde-filled
furniture at Montgomery Ward, waited for commission
checks, came home late because it was her turn to close
the register, waiting for her between asphalt and neon
lights. Almost forgot we were talking about the belief
that one could save things from ruin. Last night I almost
forgot that my mother was dead, gone for four months now.
I know paprika is not my style. At least as a spice. Just as
I’m certain that there are too many songs not being heard
because someone’s got to know someone and someone
else has got to close the register before the walk home.
By David Dodd Lee
Featured Art: “Nectar” by Mateo Galvano
Frank thought pork chops, the way they were
cut and packaged these days,
looked an awful lot like excised angels’ wings.
But he also sometimes just
got light in the head. He was adamant—
I am as fit as a mountain range!
Though Frank may have suffered mania
from too much weightlifting.
Frank bullied his moods.
If he woke up feeling angry at the world
he rowed the demons out in his kayak
or went a few rounds with the heavy bag.
He was so dialed-in sometimes!
A deer fly could make him throw punches in the air.
If he walked to the gym he’d listen to the cars
flying past, how they stuck to the asphalt a little,
asphalt trying to suck up rubber. It was annoying!
Now he heard the fluorescent lights pinging,
lording it over the T-bones and bundles of asparagus.
The natural color of food—
the blood red of the beets, for instance—
seemed to be fading, as if color
were an essence weakly subservient
to manufacturing and chemical abuse.
Red meat, drained of blood, whimpered
from where it was stacked in the meat section,
bloated red by carbon monoxide infusions.
Frank tightened his grip on his grocery cart.
Cans of kidney beans are destined
to be left standing on store shelves
for centuries after the apocalypse,
in which each person will have long ago
been torched from their bone marrow
on outward. When the pleasant checkout clerk said
“Thank you for shopping at Schaeffer’s,”
Frank thought, You don’t know the half of it, sonny,
but said, “My pleasure” instead.
He knew the boy was just a tool, cheap labor,
a cog in something too sinister for words.
By James Lineberger
today which is hotdog day
at forest hill methodist i ran into
my old high school lit teacher
from the tenth grade
one of the great influences in my life and it really got to me
while i was waiting in line
to put in my order
and i thought about all the other
teachers i used to have who lived and died maybe never
realizing how much they
had meant to their students and here was
a perfect opportunity
to express my gratitude and not to just any teacher
but miss ruby herself but then huh oh
all of a sudden i thought ohmygod what if
my eyes were playing tricks on me
and it was just some little old lady
that somewhat resembled her so just to make sure
i went over to another former student
wanda she used to be wanda yow
i forget who it was she married but wanda
was one of the volunteers
who was bringing food to people’s tables and i said
wanda is that her is it really her
and wanda said oh yeah that’s ruby all right don’t she
look wonderful but she’s
deaf in one ear i think the good one
is her left but you better hurry
if you want to speak to her she’s already
called her grandson
to come pick her up so i left
my order with wanda and circled around
behind ruby’s table
hoping i could surprise her and leaned down
from the left side
with my face just barely touching her hair
which smelled my god like violets
a really refreshing smell
and there was something else some kind
of perfume from elsewhere and
i don’t know how it happened but i was already starting
to weep it was such a profound
moment for me
and my feelings damn near overtook me
but i managed to get it out even
though my voice was shaking when i said miss ruby
until i had you for a teacher
i didn’t know
what great literature was and i—
but then
i just ran out of words and out of breath
and as i started
to pull away
she reached her hand back and slapped
me right in the face
turning around
with a stare like she had seen a ghost
saying oh goodness jimmy is that you i thought it was
a brown recluse
By Madalyn Hochendoner
When a potato you’re frying
hops out of the pan
into the unknown space
between the wall
and the oven
you know it’s gone
forever.
And sure you could
get the broom
and do a blind sweep,
see if you could rustle-up
more than a disturbing
amount of hair,
but you won’t.
At least not today, but really
not ever
because you’ve already moved on.
The phone rings, it’s your dad
telling you you need
to pick up
the snowshoes
for your trip
and he’s making
white bean soup
with the ham hock
he’s been saving
in the freezer
for this moment
said he thought
he could throw it in
whole
but mum said no
no you need to cut it off the bone
and he sees now how right she is
sees now that it’s better this way
like the beans he soaked overnight
you still have to cook them he says
I say yes, I know, the soaking
only reduces the cooking time
but what I think he means is
separately, you still have to cook them
separately from the rest of the soup
which is another truth. Now,
it’s tomorrow and I’m thinking
I need to ask him how
the soup turned out.
By Becca J. R. Lachman
I’m ashamed to say it, but it’s taken me this long
to pick a carcass clean with just my fingers
for the first time, setting aside the good
morsels for a soup bright with dill.
Which one’s the dead thing, and which one
the maker? And when is it again
that a shell’s truly useless?
This one will be submerged, savory
shipwreck in filtered water, with thick
lemon wedges and rosemary. For the first
day of a new decade, it will sit atop a burner,
heat pulling and cajoling from its bareness
the very medicine
I need. I’m no witch doctor, no pagan
goddess wanting to read my
future, maybe even change it. My grief
tastes of nothing, it’s been boiled
for so long . . . But I’m ready now: give me
fresh thyme,
ginger,
salt.
By Linda Ann Strang
After Jack Gilbert
Scoping out the fattened apples
and snatching QR codes with an iPhone,
Evie, always eager to bootlick, says, in lipstick,
What do you think, Addie, babe? Requiring
no official arraignment to condemn herself
to death, she proffers in turn Paula Red,
Ginger Gold, Jonamac, Jonagold. Her last ditch:
How about tonight I make tarte tatin,
or apple crisp? Then, Would you like me to get you
another cup? Careful, take mine. There’s a drip.
Her voice leaping in pitch, she tries to forget
that time she snuck off with fucksome
Lucifer—Dodge Viper parked in the Johnstone’s
orchard, midnight cigarettes, a demon pretending
his cock’s a rattlesnake to make her laugh.
She stifles a rebel guffaw right now, nearly losing
it in front of the key limes. Bitching husbands
and fruit can mess with your head, plus
you never know when God might appear pink
aproned on the porch, pie upfront, and eager to snitch.
By Patrick Kindig
I plunge my hand into my husband’s gut
& squeeze. He giggles, doubles over
like an uncovered pill bug.
He has never had a gut before. We
are both taking pleasure in it,
this soft appendage extending
his silhouette. Of course, he is also
taking some shame. Once,
his stomach was ribbed & rigid
like a Victorian corset. Unlike me,
he never knew his body
to grow unexpectedly, never fingered
an expanding love handle. Now
he has. Now
we take turns touching his tum
& laughing like young mothers, delighted
to discover a new fold in the baby’s
arm. Sometimes
we press our bellies together
& jiggle them. For some reason,
we call this the jam
sandwich. Who knows why.
All I know is it makes me feel
like a child, doing something silly
& a little naughty, joystruck
by all our bodies can be.
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
By Jon Fischer
Your lunch at the French bistro was more essence
and foam and reduction than food, and that pelican
is the size of your remaining hunger. He surely tastes
like the history of the sea and especially the doubloons
nestled in the sand in busted buccaneer sloops. Read More
By Mari Casey
I enrolled my boyfriend in a beef jerky of the month club
one Christmas. In January, we broke up, and it was
a horrible breakup that still hurts a little, years beyond.
In February, when notice came that his jerky had again been shipped,
I cancelled it. It was the type of breakup where the kindest thing we could do
was leave each other alone forever. We hadn’t been very kind. I wanted to change.
In March, I got another shipping notice, tracked to his front door,
but my card had not been charged. I called
and was assured that no more jerky would be sent. Read More
By Mary Leauna Christensen
Featured Art: Hand of crop woman on crumpled bed sheet by medium photoclub
I am very go with the flow—
I used to wipe down airplane
trays only when they were sticky.
Now my hands have dried
from soap and alcohol.
But they are still the same
hands that fixed your hair
and earring against the pillow
that most likely was not silk
because we did not buy
the premium package
from the funeral home.
Everything is packaged nowadays.
I try not to use plastic bags
for produce. Not because
I’m environmentally conscious
but because I want to slow down
rot. Just a few weeks ago
I finely chopped cilantro and
green onion while the man
I was cooking for drank wine.
He was nervous and high
so we danced to the music
that came from his phone.
He tasted like peach Moscato.
I led him to my room
though I knew nothing would happen.
And by nothing
I meant between the two of us
because here I am
in bed and alone
wishing I could live in that sentence—
nothing will happen.
By Jeff Knorr
Featured Art: Winter Dreaming of Spring by Nancy Dick, Norman Calkanic, Kate Goreman, Patty Mitchell, and David Dewey
What information could you possibly deliver—
that he’s safe, that the kite he put in
for the GED has come through.
If you know the party’s extension you wish
to speak to, you may dial it at any time.
To dial his reference number
and have a phone ring in his cell.
Otherwise hold for a representative—
Information, Officer Medeiros speaking.
Yes, Officer Medeiros, can you wander
over to dorm C, bed 211
and check on my son for me?
Can you tell me what he’s been fed the last two weeks?
Can you check if the light flickering
above his bed at all hours has been fixed,
Instead I ask, is he allowed to
receive packages yet, new books?
Read More
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.
Read More
By Madeleine Cravens
Featured Art: Bats by Jason Douglas and Wendy Minor
I worry what it says about my character,
that I cannot picture the reality of sickness,
I just wake and read Whitman
and watch the sun on the brick
of the next-door apartment.
I have three cans of chickpeas,
freezer-burned strawberries,
half a bottle of wine. You have
a stronger sense of the anthropocene.
You buy soup, talk with your father.
You know microbes are alive
as they move across the grid.
And in France each small town
has a street named for Pasteur,
who made men dig drains,
convinced them to stop spitting.
I wash my hands with hot water.
I don’t want to be clean. What does it say
that I am fully on my knees to this,
that I admit such weakness willingly,
that should you want company
after any of your transatlantic flights
I would take a cab immediately
to your red and burning door.
By Danusha Laméris
Featured Art: by Clara Peeters
He’d wanted the persimmons
and asked her for them, but when
she gave him the brown paper bag,
brimming over, he was taken
aback. Did he really need that many?
Still, he brought them home
to his wife, and soon
there were persimmons ripening
on the kitchen counters, lining
the windowsills. Each day,
growing more and more succulent
until the air was thick
and sweet with their scent.
At breakfast, he’d break one open
with his spoon—the skin supple
and ready to give—stir it into
his hot cereal. Indescribable,
the taste. And a texture he might
have described as sea creature
meets manna from heaven. When
he ate one, he thought of her.
And when he saw her, he thought
of the persimmons. When her arm
brushed, just barely, against his,
did he imagine they both felt
the same quickening? In myth,
fruit is usually the beginning
of disaster. And the way
they made themselves so obvious—
an almost audible orange
against the white walls—
made him wish he’d never asked
her for them, didn’t have to
smell them sugaring the air
with ruin, as he sat there,
face lowered to the bowl, spooning
the soft pulp into his mouth.
By Alpay Ulku
Featured Art: Landscape by Paul Nash
We’re in the Taqueria Uptown. People are eating, or gazing out of windows, or talking to each other. The food is delicious and the coffee hot and fresh. A man walks in with a cheap guitar and pleads for our attention, then fumbles through three mangled songs.
You can hear the pain in his voice. If he were drowning in Lake Michigan, he would flail and grab the lifeguard in a bear hug.
How much do we owe this guy, who’s interrupted us at dinner? What is it we owe each other? Nothing at all?
Bless you all, I hope I’ve brought some sunshine to our lives. He looks around. All that playing has made me hungry for a nice steak taco.
Everyone tenses and ignores him.
It’s my dream to be a paid musician.
A jornalero says something in Spanish. The waitress shrugs and writes the order.
Could I have a side of sour cream with that? he asks her. You see, the peppers burn my mouth. He looks over to the jornalero. My mouth is very soft and sensitive.
The jornalero ducks his head, embarrassed and a little pissed. He nods okay.
It’s terrible to be so lonely, he says to no one in particular.
The waitress has laugh lines around her eyes, she likes to laugh. But her face is neutral now. She brings him the sour cream in a saucer with a plastic spoon, and the taco.
Everyone is hoping that nothing more is going to happen next.
By Mary Jo Firth Gillett
Up from the mire of the primordial soup
came one-celled, tiny cavernous bits
whose innards knew a hollow ache only cured
when their shape-shifting borders engulfed
smaller bits, and came a world more complicated,
the paramecium with its oral groove,
the surprising planaria—nick its frontispiece
and the split becomes two hungry heads!—
then came, as ever, competition begetting variation,
to move or not to move, that was the question—
whether it was more propitious to see
with eyes multitudinous or on stalks or both,
whether it was better to be safely anchored,
waiting in camouflage, or to mount an assault,
evolution’s choices simple, almost biblical—seek
and ye shall find or lurk with bait in the hope that all
will come to him who waits, and then came
specialized beaks and teeth, fanciful horns
and coloration prompting procreation,
as well as a multitude of eating adaptations—
the water bird’s fused nostrils, air sacs in head and neck
to absorb impact as the feathered darts, pillaging
angels, plummet—and came homo sapiens with a myriad
of tastes and ways to cook—sear and braise, sauté
and soufflé, pickle and brine—came table manners, the urge
to gorge, to purge, came sorbet and gourmet, foods
delectable and indigestible, epicurean delights, food fights,
and all the ravenous mouths of tomorrow and tomorrow.
By James Sprouse
Featured Art: ‘Modes et Manières de Torquat‘
The medium said you were not coming back.
So I ate my red beans and rice
same as on our wedding day
down in Algiers, Louisiana.
The next day you rode
off with the Russian, Porshenokov,
in a little MG, your long straw hair
whipping in the streets
in the wind of the French Quarter
and down on the bayous, where it’s
too hot to sleep. The cemetery on Ramparts
was a forest of stone, the dead
above ground. On account of
the hurricanes, they said, and high water
on the Mississippi that stirs underneath
and raises them up.
That time you came back,
in heat, in sweat, with cotton-mouth
and juju. The South was our
time to be hot.
Next day you shipped out
lithe as a dolphin
rolling and tumbling down to the delta
on whiskey and water we called our lives.
Beautiful dreamer, awake unto me . . .
on Lake Pontchartrain, in the boat
of our nights, your prodigal smile
alive with fabulous poison.
By Darren Morris
Featured Art: by nrd
I ran into the boxer Leon Spinks in 1992.
Spinks had won the heavyweight belt 14 years before
from Muhammad Ali. He had also won bronze
in the Olympics and gone to the penitentiary
for possession. By the time he got to me
he was all done with fame and fortune.
But he still scrapped with life, just trying to be.
At that time, I was staying with my brother
in Springfield, Missouri. He ran a pool hall
and kept an apartment in back of the place.
I snuck into the kitchen late one night for a slice
of that industrial orange cheese that I was
addicted to. I flipped on a light and
there was a large man sleeping on a cot
in the middle of the white-tiled room. But
I went ahead and opened the fridge because
when you are visiting someone, nothing is
unusual. It should all be that way, every day,
everything new, but it rarely is. I reached in and
lifted out a long orange sleeve. That’s when
the sleeping man said, “Leon hungry,” and instantly
I remembered my brother telling me that Spinks
had started coming into the bar, but I did not
believe him. It had been so matter-of-fact
that I barely retained the anchor to the info.
I made sloppy towers of tomato and cheese
sandwiches for Spinks and me and we ate them
in silence except for all the tooth-sucking
that bread and cheese promoted, especially
for Spinks who had more than a few teeth missing.
I cleaned up and Spinks lay back down. There
was nothing really to say. But when I turned off
the light, as if still a boy, Spinks said, Nigh-night.
They call it American cheese because it is processed
from nothing much. In 1978, Ali taunted him
and Leon beat his ass in one of the biggest upsets ever.
I met a ton of people back then who ceased to matter.
But that did not stop them and they persisted.
By Micheal Chitwood
Featured Art: Main Street, Montreal by Louis Wiesenberg
That his old Impala still ran
was a miracle. The blue puff of exhaust
and the way the engine rattled on
for a minute or two when he turned off the ignition.
A miracle. He shaved maybe once a week.
And his clothes. The wrinkles and stains
held them together.
But he came to the diner every Tuesday.
Where he got money no one knew.
He would nurse his black coffee
and have a piece of pie.
He wanted to talk about God,
mostly to the county deputies having lunch,
who talked to him as a way of keeping an eye on him.
“God’s grandeur is in his silence,” he told them.
“And the silence is immense and not all that quiet.”
He looked into the bowl of a spoon
as if he was looking into a river.
The deputies joshed with him.
They told the waitresses he was harmless
if a bit ripe.
There was plenty of coffee.
Sometimes a waitress would give him another wedge of pie,
cold lemon, warm apple with a dollop of whipped cream.
The deputies paid, winked, and left.
The leather of their holsters squeaked.
Outside, the afternoon filled the sky.
Selected as winner of the 2015 New Ohio Review Poetry Contest by Robert Pinsky
By Keith Kopka
Featured Art: Spring Flowers by Claude Monet
Knowledge of crime is a crime
even if one is not committed
by participation. At this cookout,
in a parallel universe, a version
of me lifts the gun, considers
its weight a handful of peanuts.
Another variant lets off a shot
into Godless sky, a traditional
celebration of manhood, in
the dimension of Texas oil barons.
I have a self who understands
breech-bolt action, another
who can separate grip cap
and butt stock, put them back
blindfolded, turn shotgun into
sawed off. In our current rotation
of speed and light, his pump
action is between us on the table.
The cookout has been great,
and I’m glad his sister, my date,
invited me. His mother is grilling
cow tongue. The whole gang’s
here to celebrate Marshmallow’s
release after three years in prison,
he’s at the grill asking for a fourth
helping. The word Rascal carved
in his chest like a pacemaker scar.
In the universe of wooden nickels,
I am best friends with this blunt
instrument. Of course, this isn’t
the universe where we live. My date’s
brother is asking if I’m interested
in a job, simple robbery, I get a part
of the product, but he needs me
because I’m white, because it won’t
get back to his gang, or the black
gangs, if a white man robs a white
man of some drugs. I’ve noticed
I’m the only guy at the cookout
wearing a shirt. Her brother
has a tattoo of two devils balanced
on the top of a mountain range.
It covers his whole stomach.
He tells me if I shoot the guy,
when I rob him, it’s okay, but if I kill
there’s nothing in this world
he can do to help me. Marshmallow
settles himself in a deck chair,
eyes closed, the meat on the grill
smells like warm wood. Hungry
is the only word I can think of.
By Kevin Prufer
Just a glass of water for me, thank you.
One ice cube. Thanks. Just one.
But you should order what you want. Don’t be shy.
And don’t worry about me. Water is all I eat.
That ribeye looks promising, doesn’t it?
The charcuterie platter? The bay shrimp in a nest of deconstructed kale,
drizzled with truffle oil?
Get what you want and I’ll watch you eat, sipping from my glass of water
like a brilliant bird whose plumage once adorned ladies’ hats, but is now
available only on the black market,
please don’t mind me.
Did you read about how they beheaded another captured soldier?
Cut his head right off, clean as you like. I know, it’s
terrible. Awful, really. It ought to be a crime,
but the water flushes me out, gives me an inner clean. A kind of peace.
All this war must have been hard on you, the bodies and IEDs and the
threatening
music. It certainly was hard on our nation, and we weren’t even
there. Broccolini, yes. That’s for him. And the foie gras on toast with foraged
mushroom and lemon foam,
he’ll take that. I love the look of those cauliflower florets, like petite puffs of
smoke!
The raviolini afloat in broth like misfired paratroopers!
You’re sweet, but much too thin. You should eat.
They’ll send you back and you’ll be nothing but bones
beneath skin. Did you see how they sliced his head right off?
What do you think of my hat?
By Corrie Lynn White
Featured Image: Madison Square, Snow by Allen Tucker, 1904
Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington
I lay the sweet potatoes on
the roasting pan on their backs
or bellies—I can’t tell. The oven
is heating and the cat box
needs cleaning so I dip the plastic
shovel into the litter and grieve
that Frankie doesn’t go outside—
sit high in a tree or roll in
a lush patch of clover. I stare
out the window at the neighbor’s
raised beds and convince myself
he’d eat all their basil, puncture
the flesh of their first red tomato,
then run far away. What keeps us
where we are? I throw the plastic
bag of clumped urine into the bin
by the road and look down a few
blocks for a sunset. The sky is pink
past the stoplights. Nothing in nature
is as sudden as turning off the lamp
at night. Inside, I push the pan
into the oven and remember the guy
in my class today who said:
People don’t feel strongly anymore.
By Amanda Williamsen
Baltimore, Maryland
My uncle calls from the wharf; his freighter is in;
he’s walked to the nearest food and I find him
in a crab shack at a table by the window.
Waitresses carry crabs on trays, whole piles of them—
stiff, blue, dead—and the restaurant patter crackles
with the brittle speech of small mallets on their shells.
Elena, his wife—she’s from Colombia, my age—
wants a divorce. She’s living in Miami
with some Cuban, he says; she’s got his TV and his car.
When his crabs come, I order grilled cheese,
tell him about karma, how I’ve removed myself
from the chain of suffering and he says, shit,
picks up a crab and whacks it squarely on the back.
He tells me about winters on Superior, ice boats
cracking a path through December until the solid freeze
of January, how he shoveled iron ore from the hold
until the red dust rose in clouds from his clothing,
rinsed from his body in the shower like a gallon of blood;
and before that, how he went to Vietnam while my father
went to college, how he bombed the jungle beneath him
without ever looking down while my father dropped
out of college without ever looking ahead;
and before that, before the war, how the two of them
hit a tree one night while driving on River Road.
You’d have thought we wanted to be that tree, he says.
It broke the car, broke seven of his ribs, nearly broke
my father’s heart but in the end it just broke his spleen
and ripped him open from shoulder to hip.
My great aunt—the whole family tells the story now—
came from Kansas and prayed him back from the dead.
By Danny Caine
Featured Art: Drugs by Richard Estes
Oh shit I love “Landslide.”
I was going to get up to piss but then I heard me some Fleetwood Mac.
Hey that’s a pretty farm, too. Farms are dope.
Wait, oh goddamn it it’s a baby horse lying in some fucking sawdust.
That baby horse is so cute I can’t even handle it right now.
I am literally unsure how to proceed.
And now the horse is being fed from a bottle?
The hell am I supposed to do with that?
Dammit now the horse and the dude are playing and stuff.
Fuck me if I don’t love a playful goddamn horse.
Look! A Budweiser truck. Budweiser!
I should like this brand on Facebook.
I should follow this brand on Twitter.
I really should make an effort to engage
with this brand on social media.
Wait, that’s a horse trailer. And our dude
is shaking hands with the driver? Is he—
DUDE YOU CAN’T SELL THAT FUCKING HORSE!
YOU’RE GOING TO MISS HIM SO MUCH!
Somebody get me a Budweiser.
By Nathan Anderson
Featured Image: “The Grocer’s Encyclopedia” by an unknown artist
So yeah, we all have these moments that suck
because what they mean
is like a mystery, like the Mariners last year
good a team as any, traded
what’s-his-name, the fat one, for that Puerto Rican dude
with a wicked right arm
and didn’t even make the playoffs.
Anyway, I can see you’re a man of the world like me,
standing here I don’t know how long and still
no damn bus. But like I was saying
we all have these moments and last week
there I was after work, making a stupid sandwich,
the kind of stupid-ass food people like me always make
when I can’t figure out what I’m feeling
and I feel like being true to myself
is about the dumbest thing a man can do,
knowing how easy it is for the truth to mess things up.
By Stephanie Burt
No one is going to make
much more of this stuff now, or ever again.
Graceless in defeat
but beautiful, harmless and sad
on shelves that overlap like continents,
these Cookie Monster magnets, miniature
monster trucks, scuffed multiple Elmos, banners
that say NO FEAR
and A GRILL FOR EVERY BOY
are a feast for every sense.
Some would be bad manners
to give or bring home-
By Michael Derrick Hudson
Yeah I snagged her, I snagged her good and then I shucked her
out of her shimmy, killed off that last twitch
of hers in the sink. And those labials, all of her wet slobbery
labials I reduced to a dried-out oxygen-starved O. I flensed
her down to the bone and chopped
away her emerald green flukes. I got wet to the elbows in her
and scraped at her dime-sized translucent scales
until they spangled the tops of my greasy boots
and clogged the drains. But her filets were worth it, redolent
of ambergris with a tincture of seaweed. In her eyes I found
tiny discs of abalone, the secret of their weird yellowish glint
like a cat’s in poor light. And then I brought her
to a resinous sizzle. But what a fight! Such fabulous breaches
How she resisted my hooks and gaffs, the vast tangle and bulge
of my nets. She couldn’t believe the multitude
of knots I’d mastered or these chains and rudders and screws or
my hand-over fist desires and
the way I whistled at my work. Or my inevitable appetite . . .
By Mark Kraushaar
Featured Image: Landscape by Peter von Bemmel 1685-1754
She’s in the first booth left of the planters.
She’s been waiting an hour now.
She’s been waiting at the Watertown Family Buffet
with her little girl who’s dreamed up
some kind of a costume:
giant glasses, backwards cap, taffeta gown
which is clearly for him, for Al who’s
just now arriving, finally, and now
he’s seen them, and now
he’s walking over, and now
he’s standing there, standing there,
husband and father, or boyfriend and father,
or boyfriend and father figure, except he’s way too late,
he’s too late times two and the party’s over
thank-you, and, no, they’re not having,
not the grin, not the story, not the hug.
The woman gets up, and then, face baggy with patience,
she nods to the girl who scoots out too,
and they exit together.
So over the chips and spilt dip,
over the drained Pepsi and the big white cake
with “Al” in caps and quotes
he watches them go,
looks out at the parking lot,
opens his book.
Here’s the waitress with her pad and pen.
And what in hell is he reading?
By Stephen Dunn
Featured Art: Luncheon Still Life by John F. Francis
Our good friends are with us, Jack and Jen,
old lefties with whom we now and then share
what we don’t call our wealth. We clink our
wine glasses, and I say, Let’s drink to privilege . . .
the privilege of evenings like this.
All our words have a radical past, and Jack
is famous for wanting the cog to fit the wheel,
and for the wheel to go straight
down some good-cause road. But he says
No, let’s drink to an evening as solemn
as Eugene Debs demanding fair wages—
his smile the bent arrow only the best men
can point at themselves. I serve the salad
Barbara has made with pine nuts, fennel,
and fine, stinky cheese. It’s too beautiful to eat,
Jen says, but means it only as a compliment.
By Heather McNaugher
Featured Art: Sweet Tooth by Dylan Petrea
I decide this will be it, my last pop-tart, cherry,
as I stand at the circ desk of the college library
and tear up your number
which I had written on a Post-it®, Hello Kitty®,
and then stuck to my ID.
The computer says I love you I owe 29 dollars
for Frank O’Hara and that thesaurus
I borrowed when I taught the class
how to find a synonym. I’m sorry. Hello Kitty’s ears
are burning—so tiny, so pink,
and so I pulverize them.
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By Maura Stanton
6 a.m. It’s cold and raining and you don’t want to get out of bed. It’s one of
those days when you’d like to stay home from work, curled up somewhere
comfortable and nice with your knees against your chest. Why not inside a for-
tune cookie? And at once you imagine yourself inside the sweet crispy shell, the
paper fortune wrapped around your body like a sheet. You’re about to close
your eyes and go back to sleep when you start to worry about the fortune. Is
this one of those really good fortunes like the one you’ve kept in your wallet
for years, You will never need to worry about a steady income? Or is it more
sinister like the one you pulled out last month, Idleness is the holiday of fools?
You want to read your fortune but you’ve got to break out of the cookie shell.
Only you can’t. You’re paralyzed. This is someone else’s fortune cookie, and you’ve got to wait patiently until they pour the tea, and crack it open. Then
they’ll laugh and read your fortune out loud for everyone to hear, Your prob-
lem lies not in a lack of ability but in a lack of ambition.
By Claire Bateman
Featured Art: The White Tablecloth by Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin
So there the world was, right smack up against the proverbial edge of time. No one was surprised that some people were leaping from skyscrapers while others were attempting pointless last-minute conceptions of offspring; & that in every city & town, acts of extraordinary altruism & vindictiveness had become so common as to go unreported. And no one was surprised that there was a spike in the number of couples suddenly eager to be married, but the spike was so dramatic, in fact, & the usual officials (rabbis, priests, justices of the peace, notaries public, & ships’ captains) were so beleaguered, that a squadron of kamikaze chefs had to be deployed to perform emergency nuptials for the multitudes of entities & identities demanding official union before the end of all things. Everyone knew someone who was calling for the chefs, those professionals capable of creating the alchemical events these transformations required, some of which would almost certainly release such molecular & ontological ferocity as to create titanic conflagrations, thus depriving some of the chefs of their precious last few weeks of life.
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By Stephen Dunn
Featured Art: A Family Meal by Evert Pieters
As usual, we were trying to please each other,
so Ryan told a story about a water buffalo,
a lion, and a crocodile, which reminded
Julie about a coyote and a groundhog, and
I could not help but offer my favorite of
this kind—involving the tarantula
and its natural enemy the digger wasp. The
problem was that each story was true,
therefore that much more difficult to tell,
and each had in it an element of the fabulous,
and therefore the promise of a moral.
Linda, the contrarian, asked us if we had heard
the one about the priest and the rabbi,
but was booed, and kept quiet for a while.
In each story an animal was in danger, one
always slightly more sympathetic
than another. The water buffalo rescued
her injured calf from first the crocodile
then the lion, the coyote got bored
with the groundhog and returned to the woods,
and the tarantula just stood there, frozen, while
the digger wasp dug its grave.
Ryan and Julie selected their details well,
paced and arranged them, as I hope I did,
and it wasn’t that our intent was to avoid
a moral, but that there was none to be had,
this being nature we were talking about
with its choiceless whims and atrocities.
Linda, of course, said she forgave none of it.
By Stephen Cramer
Featured Image: For Sunday’s Dinner by William Michael Barnett
At the festival when we were celebrating
harvest with pumpkin tarts & cider,
an older farmer asked what I was into
& maybe my answer was muffled a bit
from the cider’s tang because he started
talking passionately not about his favorite poet
or the use of weather in haiku
but about his chickens: White Leghorns,
Silkie Bantams, Rhode Island Reds,
Plymouth Rocks, how, in Corporate Agriculture
the birds are bred so big that their legs
cripple beneath them & isn’t that a shame.
I tried to break in, to tell him he misheard.
But he shook his head & held up his finger.
That’s not the case with his birds.
When his hens are laying he puts oyster shells
in their grit to give them extra calcium
for their own shells. His birds are free range—
not debeaked & stuffed two dozen
to a pen. No, his birds can go anywheres they want
from the barn to the bog & even in the house.
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