Tag: Home

Trying

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Kim Farrar
Featured Art: “Window Stamp” by Alex Brice

At four-thirty a.m., I contemplate 
how to catch the bright white moon. 

Do I need both bright and white?  
I conjure my doubts. Start again. 

Then, thankfully, a window flies open 
and out leans my cranky neighbor, 

hair in curlers, timeless housedress, 
but no rolling pin, only fists. 

Her fury echoes off the buildings, 
shaming her no-goodnik son below. 

She jangles the keys from six stories up, 
warns him not to be an idyot, 

and lets go. They accelerate  
at thirty-two feet per second squared. 

When he catches them, I’m surprised  
by how happy that makes me 

and I’ve forgotten all about the stupid moon,  
a little lower now, just above the chimney. 

Read More

The Registry

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Dustin Faulstick

They had been together ten years when they decided to get on the registry. They had been to a wedding over Labor Day weekend and realized that all of their stuff was shit. They decided, as anyone would, that they might as well collect what they deserved. It started as an adventure. One of them wanted a knife holder. One of them wanted a blender. They had always both wanted a cast-iron skillet. It went on like this until one of them wanted a kitchen organizer. We don’t need a kitchen organizer; we’re not toddlers, one of them said. That one removed the kitchen organizer from the registry. The other one removed the down comforter from the registry: it was a tit-for-tat. It went on like this. Occasionally an item was added, but mostly items were removed: the electric drill; the waffle maker; the geometric-patterned area rug, one of those coffee cups that keeps itself warm. Once there was nothing in the registry, they started in on the stuff they already owned: a broken-down bicycle, a Don Quixote-themed fork-and-spoon wall decoration, a plastic Adirondack chair held together by duct tape. This, too, became a      tit-for-tat: an Ikea shelf from one of their sister’s college dormitories, license plates from the states where they used to live, their hospice plants on life support. It went on like this until there was nothing left. 

Read More

A Small Room Off To The Side

.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Ockert Greeff

Featured Art by Karen Renee

He will come to live with you
Make him feel welcome 
My mother says 
Her eyes turning away from mine 
Before I can search for the meaning 

I imagine I might have a small, empty room off to the side 
With a reddish glim 
That might bother him at night 
When he takes off his thick, black-rimmed glasses 
And his eyelids become soft and white 
Butterflies in his leathery face 

I would have to get a night-side table for his glasses 
And his teeth 
And his cowboy book 
So that he feels welcome when he comes to live with me 

I think that old single bed will be fine 
Now that he is alone 
He wouldn’t want more anyway 
But I will get new sheets 
For his old, pale body and his tanned forearms 
And maybe a soft, new pillow for his sunken cheeks 

I will ask my sister for that old painting 
With the open plains and hazy blue mountains 
So far, far in the distance  
The one she took when he died 

So that he has something to look at 
And so that he feels welcome  

When he comes to live with me, in me 
In a small room off to the side of my heart 
So very far from the plains where he grew up.

Read More

Watching a House Renovation Show

.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Hannah Marshall

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

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

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

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

Read More

What Is There To Do in Akron, Ohio?

.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Darius Simpson

Featured Art: Open Lock, Akron, Ohio by James Henry Moser

complain about the weather. wait five minutes
watch the boys you grew up with outgrow you
bury your cousin. go sledding on the tallest hill you can find
keep a family warm until their son thaws out of prison
ice skate between the skyscrapers downtown
inherit an emergency exit sign from your father
spray-paint your best friend’s brother on a t-shirt
daydream your way through a semester-long funeral
watch jeans and sleeves and family portraits unravel
play soccer with the black boys who almost evaporated
with the icicles. kick it outside with the skeletons
from your childhood. go to columbus and pretend
to be a grown-up. spend a weekend at kalahari resort
and call it a vacation. go back home. leave. shoot dice
with the dead boys playing dress up. stay long enough
to become a tourist attraction in a city nobody stops in
mount bikes and ride until the sun dribbles
out of the sky’s mouth. wade through the oatmeal july makes
of morning air. swim in a public pool where everyone
is drowning and no one knows how to survive
what happened last month. stop runnin in and out unless
you got somethin’ on the gas bill. seal yourself with cold air
while the trees melt. bet the boy down the street, who’ll have
the best first day fit. come out amid orange leaves lookin fresher
than all the food in a five-mile radius of granny’s house.
eat jojos from rizzi’s on sunday after pastor guilt trips you
on your way past the pulpit. dream about a city
where headstones don’t show up to dinner unannounced
where fried chicken isn’t on speed dial and diabetes
isn’t the family heirloom. where grief isn’t so molasses
root for lebron in whatever he’s wearing. become
an athlete as a way out of corner sales. never escape.
start a pickup game that never ends. rake leaves
with a rusted afro pick your older brother left you in his will.
let the leaf bags melt into the chimney on the side of the house.
play basketball with the ghosts who don’t know what year it is
volunteer at your local funeral home. open a cemetery
across the street from the playground. mow green.
cut ties with your grass-seller. survive the summer.

Read More

Chickens in Your Backyard

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Miriam Flock

They come, like the dishwasher, with the house.
“No trouble,” swears the seller, and—presto change-o—
for handfuls of Layena every morning,
the pair of hens trade one or two brown eggs.
The chick, if we approach with proper coos,
will let itself be stroked. This we learned
from our new bible, Chickens in Your Backyard.
Like neighbors of a different faith, we practice
tolerance, let them grub among the bulbs,
ignore the way their droppings singe the mulch.

Meanwhile, we are intent on our own nesting.
My husband paints the nursery; I quilt
a golden goose with pockets shaped like eggs.
We hardly register the added squawking
from the coop or look for more than tribute
when we rob the nesting boxes. Then
one dawn, I’m roused by what can only be
a cock-a-doodle-doo. And in the breaking light,
our chick-turned-rooster struts, ruffed as Raleigh,
shaking his noble scarlet comb. What waits

inside me to astonish like this male?
Such sudden majesty, sudden red.

Read More

Homecoming

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Christopher Brean Murray

Featured Art: United States National Museum Library from United States National Museum Photographic Laboratory

At the edge of town, you pass a water tower beside train tracks.

A shopping cart blocks your path.

The telephone poles have no wires.

Someone has spray-painted Fuk Yo on the train station.

A breeze bathes your face

as seed pods click overhead.

How long’s it been since you sat in a theater?

The marquee says JAWS, but the ticket booth’s empty.

The jewelry store says: 40% off weeding rings.

Brass clips clink against the flagless pole.

The library is a house that’s rumored to be haunted.

The librarian recounts tales of the first settlers’ deaths.

She’s seen books flung from shelves,

a woman at the bottom of a staircase.

You pass a garage where mechanics yammer.

At the nursery, a sprinkler douses the curb, leaving shrubs parched.

A Corvette peels out in a mini-mart parking lot.

Smoke drifts over storefronts.

At the Dairy Queen, a woman buys cones for kids.

She snaps at them, but they remain buoyant.

Read More

You Start To Grow Old

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Haolun Xu 

You start to grow old so fast, you notice how much you love home.
Home means a local mall, it means a place with a little Thai stand with all the world in the pocket.

You walk in with mystery.
People ask you with curiosity if you’re a student, if you work, if you have kids.

You laugh with charisma. You say you’re looking forward to all your time in the world.
London, maybe, next week. But next week never comes. Today just has too much of you in it.

But you’re adventurous, right? You order a new thing everyday. A meal that can be held in your hands, it is the best part of your day. It’s the biggest pillar of your lunchtime.

One day, you have a beautiful combo. Pineapple and shrimp, rice and chopped veggies.
It’s perfect. It’s yours,

you eat it more and more each next month, every other day, every day. You gorge yourself in it,
you start to smile more and more each time,

they start to cheer whenever you come over. You ask, do you know me, and they say yes! of course we know you! They’re all so happy, you’re family now.

But they stop asking about London. They stop asking where you’re going,
they suddenly have all the jokes of a lifetime to tell you.

And they stop asking for your name,
they don’t need to know what it is to know who you are.

Read More

Confirmation

.Reading time 3 minutes.

By John McCarthy

You taught me how hands could be laid, how they could touch
     a head and heal, but all of those hands eventually fell limp
like a field bent by threshing or a lit match dropped in water. Once,
     we used to dance in The Corner Tavern’s neon light
where the pickup exhaust wafted inside like harvest dust.
     Life in the Midwest is like one long goodbye because it is the same
every day, and I didn’t realize you had left until there was nothing
     but hard work and long days ending with the wind’s silent dirge
that sounds like trying not to die but always dies in smaller ways—
     screen doors that slam closed but don’t shut all the way
because the house has settled and the roof is warping from the sky
     boiling over with thunder and rain. I wake up now to the flashing
falling from the gutters and the water dripping through the holes
     in the ceiling. All I do is recall your voice like a prayer thrashing
my skull that mines the night begging our fathers our fathers
     our fathers in prayer, but they are off begging other women
in other towns. This town is not the memory I want, but I know
     how sadness works. It’s like a kettle-bottom collapsing onto
the details of every thought. I shouldn’t have, but I stayed in town
     to try and keep what I love alive, but no that never works. We were
a long time ago and a long time ago is too hard to get back.
     The last time we talked you said, We will end up like our mothers—
waiting for nothing. Then you didn’t come back. No. Not ever.

Read More

My Hometown, the Hypothetical Guided Tour

.Reading time 5 minutes.

By Dan Wiencek

Featured Art: by Jasper Francis Cropsey

            First we come to the field
where I did not hit the winning
     home run, where no cheers rose
            up and the game ball went ungiven

     Beyond left field,
            the bleachers where I did not
    make out with my high-school
         crush, did not taste her perfume
                  or dodge her brother’s freckled glare

      This is the house where a family of
                color did not live, there, where
         that guy is hosing Chinese
                              menus off his car

     Then of course this tax attorney’s office, once
            the bookstore where I stole
                        Helter Skelter, which I still
                     visit in my dreams

                 Finally, this empty lot
          staring up at the sun like a vast
                   gravel eye, formerly the school where
     I never thought to imagine a future,
         where no one told me and I
             did not listen

                        that life could be a wave
      beating the rocks or

           a wind bouncing a kite—

                         taut string pinwheels,
               dips and swoops groundward only
    to right itself, to stay resolutely
                                                                in the air

                                              and here we are.

Read More

Tuesday Night

.Reading time 2 minutes.

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.

Read More

Three Houses and a Wish

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Linda Bamber

Featured Art: House by a River by Edward Hopper

1. Chevy Chase

Choked up to see the in-ground cellar door
behind the house
I was born in long ago

then had doubts, cell handy,
called older sister far away.

She said, wrong house!
Original had front yard oaks,
big porch . . .

found right house, had no
response at all. Used up tears on
house that didn’t know me from Adam! Read More

Craigslist

.Reading time 4 minutes.

By Maya Jewell Zeller

Selected as winner of the 2012 New Ohio Review Poetry Contest by Billy Collins

Featured art: Morning, Interior by Maximilien Luce

It’s all there—the stuff
no one wants to say is theirs anymore,
the single-slate pool table, the six-person
tent, a complete professional tattoo set
complete with analog power supply.

And my father’s 1988 Corvette.
He is no longer sad
to see it go, though he does lament,
my mother tells me, that young people
these days no longer want something like it.
They want a car with good
mileage, something they can take
a child to preschool in, cart around
the six-person tent.

Read More

Whirlpool

.Reading time 1 minute.

By George Bilgere

In the morning, after much delay,
I finally go down to the basement
To replace the broken dryer belt.

First, I unbolt the panels
And sweep up the dust mice and crumbling spiders.
I listen to the sounds of the furnace
Thinking things over
At the beginning of winter.

Then I stretch out on the concrete floor
With a flashlight in my mouth
To contemplate the mystery
Of the tensioner-pulley assembly.

And finally, with a small, keen pleasure,
I slip the new belt over the spindle, rise,
And screw everything back together.

Later, we have Thanksgiving dinner
With my wife’s grandmother, who is dying
Of bone cancer. Maybe,
If they dial up the chemo, fine-tune the meds,
We’ll do this again next year.

But she’s old, and the cancer
Seems to know what it’s doing.
Everyone loves her broccoli casserole.
As for the turkey, it sits on the table,
A small, brown mountain we can’t see beyond.

That night I empty the washer,
Throw the damp clothes into the dryer.
For half an hour my wife’s blouses
Wrestle with my shirts
In a hot and whirling ecstasy,

Because I replaced an ancient belt
And adjusted the tensioner-pulley assembly.

Read More