NOR: Embrace Your Conjunctions
Newohioreview.org is archiving previous editions as they originally appeared. We are pairing the pieces with curated art work, as well as select audio recordings. In collaboration with our past contributors, we are happy to (re)-present this outstanding work.
Issue 4 compiled by Julia Robertson.
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 Dunn
Featured Art: Improvisation No. 30 (Cannons) by Wassily Kandinsky
The music was fidgety, arch,
an orchestral version of a twang.
Welcome to atonal hell,
welcome to the execution
of a theory, I kept thinking,
thinking, thinking. I hadn’t felt
a thing. Was it old-fashioned
of me to want to? Or were feelings,
as usual, part of the problem?
The conductor seemed to flail
more than lead, his baton evidence
of something unresolved,
perhaps recent trouble at home.
And though I liked the cellist—
especially the way
she held her instrument—
unless you had a taste
for unhappiness
you didn’t want to look
at the first violinist’s face.
By Kathy Fagan
Featured Art: Alfred Sisley by Pierre-Auguste Renoir
If it’s been ten times it’s been forty-five
I’ve checked the man out in the car behind
mine, teeth bared, laughing in my rearview.
I cannot stop myself from watching him,
sun full on his face. He’s all alone—
we are, among our fellow rush commuters—
and then it dawns on me: it’s Mr. Cahill
from sixth grade, my first male teacher (heart, be still!),
who taught sex ed to us in ‘69,
in Catholic school, till someone narked and he
was gone for good. Those days, we venerated
the venereal, reciting sex words right
By Kathy Fagan
Featured Art: Café Concert (The Spectators) by Edgar Degas
When Peter Byrne of the 80s synthpop duo, Naked Eyes, played for me his acoustic cover of k.d. lang’s “Constant Craving” in his studio over-looking Los Angeles, the peacock—not the NBC peacock but a real peacock among the many on the grounds—opened his fan as if the music were a potential mate. He strutted and shirred. He shimmied his many eyes. He’d been drawn to the music, then spotted himself in the sliding glass doors. He leaned in and turned for us like a Vegas show girl. He brought tears to my eyes. When the song was over I could barely muster, “What a tender version, Peter,” though tender wasn’t the word for the primitive if aimless seduction on the lawn.
By Jack Myers
Featured Art: Houses at Murnau by Wassily Kandinsky
Memory in her drab gray dress was the first to arrive.
She sat there bored, with nothing to remember,
so she talked to herself, her mind streaming
like a black-and-white dream full of words.
Upstairs, Regret circled and circled her mouth
in hard red, ironed the wrinkles out of an old
embarrassment, and doused herself in lavender.
After humping Memory’s leg, Happy
rolled over and over, his little thoughts
like the insides of a Scrabble box.
Hard Work trudged downstairs
to the basement to soak and snooze
in the anesthetizing glow of the cathode tube.
Part of me was there too. The omniscient narrator.
A you without a mouth. A mist of a face
in a black-on-black painting.
The rest of me, never having tasted or seen
or heard or been held before, was about to arrive.
Everyone cried and was glad somebody had the chance
to be anything again. That was the occasion.
By Jack Myers
Featured Art: October Day by Jean Charles Cazin
was never large enough even for a B movie
though I think I’ve felt as deeply as Brad Pitt.
No one I grew up with ever became famous
or notorious on that spit of land that ended in the sea.
But we became as adept at reading storm warnings
in the muscle and color of water as we did in a face.
In the cold-war doldrums of the 50s, all my teachers
hated teaching. We were such little shits back then
I thought who could blame them, and became a teacher
so I could show these younger versions of myself
how to open their hearts and enter into a different,
richer kind of darkness that exists in them.
We were an obstinate desert people given a single animal
which we rode and milked and roasted and skinned.
The stories strangers told us about fabulous places
we’d never get to taught us how to open a door in rock
and go inward, how to widen our hearts with longing
and a song and bang along on a drum skin and a string.
By Jack Myers
Featured Art: Houses of Parliament, London by Claude Monet
I thought of my soul as something like a scent,
like an air of kindliness. That my selfish heart
would grow enormous in battle. I thought I could help
the troubled because I was troubled. I wanted my humility
to be large, to float like a balloon above the parade I was in.
But you know how it goes. My epic turned out to be
a miniature self-portrait painted on a brick from a wall
in me that had fallen in. My oxen were small as bugs.
My arrows that I imagined shredding the sky like black rain
in a Japanese ink print melted back into brushstrokes.
So it’s good to feel small once more, to bow at the end
of a long line of becoming everything again. No more
struggling to fit in after wind-light sweeps me up or a dying
ember takes me in as easily as I thought my life should have been.
Or maybe what’s next will be harder or nothing or I’ll be
totally surprised without there being a me. I always felt like
that anyway. But the place in me where all of this is missing
has turned sacred over time. That’s the best explanation I have
for why we aren’t allowed to know even the simplest things.
By Lawrence Raab
Featured Art: Eve by Lucas Cranach the Elder
When Adam and Eve lived in the garden
they hadn’t yet learned how to forget.
For them every day was the same day.
Flowers opened, then closed.
They went where the light told them to go.
They slept when it left, and did not dream.
What could they have remembered,
who had never been children? Sometimes
Adam felt a soreness in his side,
but if this was pain it didn’t appear to
require a name, or suggest the idea
that anything else might be taken away.
The bright flowers unfolded,
swayed in the breeze.
It was the snake, of course, who knew
about the past—that such a place could exist.
He understood how people would yearn
for whatever they’d lost, and so to survive
they’d need to forget. Soon
the garden will be gone, the snake
thought, and in time God himself.
These were the last days—Adam and Eve
tending the luxurious plants, the snake
watching from above. He knew
what had to happen next, how persuasive
was the taste of that apple. And then
the history of forgetting would begin—
not at the moment of their leaving,
but the first time they looked back.
By Lawrence Raab
Featured Art: Valley of Aosta: Snowstorm, Avalanche, and Thunderstorm by Joseph Mallord William Turner
and all the other instruments of silence,
lawns mowed by sheep, for example,
their soft eyes fixed on the earth,
the small sounds of their labor never rising
to the upper floors of some vast country house
where, centuries ago, I’m hard at work
on a new poem for my patron. Right now
I’m distracted by the extravagant view,
which reminds me of the many consolations
of great wealth, although my subject
this morning is neither privilege
nor pleasure, but time—his choice,
following yesterday’s underappreciated ode
on virtue. Tell me, he said, what you think
I should feel, and I wanted to suggest
how much more inspiring I would find
a slightly larger room, one farther away
from the servants, and their whispering.
Ah, the wanton hours—they turn, they laugh! No,
personification irritates him. I must be wary
of the sea itself, restless and unfathomable,
though birds in flight may work, even those sheep
whose ceaseless munching I’ve been trying
all morning not to imagine. The scythe
glides silently through the bending grass.
Or should it be wheat? Yet always it glides.
And clouds pass, as all things will
in this world, I might add, but do not, since death
pleases him only if the thought of it
reminds someone pretty how foolish she is
to cherish that which worms too soon
will take without asking. A good point,
he’ll tell me later, perhaps noting
that “the soft eyes of sheep” strikes him
as unnecessary—too poetic, or else too common,
like the unmown fields, or the scythe
some weary laborer has left gleaming
out there in the noonday sun.
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.
By René Houtrides
Featured Art: Tree Trunks (study for La Grande Latte) by Georges Seurat
When he was thirty-eight years old, he decided not to see. It was a clear decision, and he was aware of its unfolding inside him. He was standing in the small, small bedroom—luckily, he was not claustrophobic—with the bunk beds, the high-piled desks, the tiny walking corridor within the room. He was stretching his arms outward and realized he could not straighten them without meeting an obstruction. A lamp to his right. A heavy window curtain to his left. It was only possible to walk into the room, climb into one of the beds, sit at one of the desks, or walk out of the room. It was not possible to walk around within the room. He was standing in the walk channel, his arms horizontal, bent at the elbow, and decided not to see. He had two reasons for deciding this.
First, not seeing would encourage him to turn inward, where he could build a secret chamber hushed, but with just enough elbow room. Others would be able to enter only if he permitted it. He needed to form this architecture because he lacked the sedative of space in his daily life. For even this bedroom, small though it was, was not his. If it were, he would have cherished it, in all its close airlessness, for its privacy. No. This room was where his children slept.
He slept in the living room, where a narrow red chair folded out for his nights. From there he could hear his wife, in her own small room, play out her illness in silences and exhaustion and screams and cruel words. Something was growing in her brain. Something that would not kill her. But something that the surgeons determined they could not excise. Perhaps the doctors were wrong. Perhaps what was growing in his wife’s brain was not a thing, but a process. A reverse alchemy: emotional gold transmuting to base metal.
By Angie Estes
Featured Art: The Holy Family with the infant Saint John by Valerio Castello
At the edge of the apparent
disk of a celestial body, known
as its limb, is the border
between light and dark, there
and not. First a gradual dimming,
then small crescent shapes appear
on the ground under trees as
the temperature sharply drops
and birds become quiet, the stars,
visible: when the sun and moon
come face to face, small beads
of sunlight shine through the valleys
By Angie Estes
Featured Art: Bathers by Paul Cézanne
buried across the barren plateaus
of Provence, where stone altars
chiseled with FVLGVR CONDITVM
mark the point where lightning entered
the ground. Around each site, a wall
remains to keep the divine
fire of Jupiter’s signature within
the shafts and passageways
of the earth. According to Plutarch,
whoever is touched
by lightning is invested with divine
powers, and anyone slain by
its bolt is equal to the gods, their bodies
not subject to decay because
they have been embalmed
by celestial fire. Light,
when it leaves
the air, is the color of blood
that has entered a vein:
By Stefi Weisburd
Featured Art: A Vagabond Walking Along a Lane by Alphonse Legros
The wind has come to remind us of our wings — Mississippi artist Walter
Anderson, who tied himself to trees in order to experience hurricanes
Lashed to the mast, ears thrashed
by sirens in the eyewall, Anderson
is the squall’s canvas, ravaged
by wind that wants to strip
his skin from skull
and howl.
Only yesterday he sank
to hands and knees
to understand the guano of green heron, to paint
the violet frog. Lying by a quiet
lagoon, inking a white-throated
sparrow, he saw cadmium and red madder happily
flare in foliage. In the slash pines of Horn Island
where imagination fills the space between trees, art
defers the evil moment. Contour of bark
or butterfly is ballast; it calms the
gale within him, bulrush pool, always a balm until
a storm makes land.
Then it froths and spits, rain
needles him, ankles deep in the surge.
How will he paint the sting
of maddened sand, the batter of root
torn from loam, blue strafed from
sky? Titanium whitecaps throttle
the mangrove beach. All around him, palms
flash and flinch like broken
umbrellas in brash light, the shed
in shivers under
the blotted sun. A locomotive
in his ear, wind
wrenches his breath from
its palate, whips
him beyond himself, out
of his sleeve of pain, sopping
and so close, so
close to capsizing . . .
Something in the cyclone
cries out.
Something wheels
and sings.
Originally appeared in NOR 4
By Stefi Weisburd
Featured Art: Stoke-by-Nayland by John Constable
Through the forest’s dark persistence, hugging
the relentless road, you search the inevitable
for the sad address, then find yourself paused
in front of the driveway, just
before your halogens startle the dim
windows, the porch out of joint, in that moment
before you are knotted irrevocably
to the future, to her avocado refrigerator whining
like a beast, its gullet full of Ice Age ice cream and the odd
trap-sprung mouse in a Ziploc, before the legions
of art magazines piled in solemn cairns and the Old Countries
purpling her arms, her throat’s
dry drapery and the keys to abandoned
rooms clutched
like a crucifix. In that moment
before her body slips
out of itself and she dampens the floor, before
her ears traffic in the static of her dead
father’s scolding, before her dull
doe eyes fever with fury and shadows hunch like Dante,
before she calls you “Mother,” demanding
you wipe her ass, before her heart cherries and
Tolstoys, in that moment, turned in the driveway, before
all that, back out. Gun it.
By Kim Adrian
Featured Art: The Child’s Bath by Mary Cassatt
The current set of complications involves a three-unit bridge—the kind a dentist puts in your mouth. Actually, I’m talking about half of a six-unit bridge that at some point during my mother’s cleaning rituals got cracked down the middle. In any case, my mother swallowed this thing while she was driving out from Chicago after my sister kicked her out. She was taking a handful of pills when the bridge, which was loose, dislodged and got swept down her esophagus.
You see, already, how complicated?
Three-unit bridges are weighty little constructions made of porcelain and gold. At the base, where they fit into the gumline, they are, as my mother puts it, “sharp as razors.” I don’t think they are actually that sharp, but that the metal tapers to a very thin point is certainly the case.
By Bruce Weigl
Featured Art: Woman at Her Toilette by Edgar Degas
Now, as the popular girl walks among us with the microphone,
most of the stories are about loss,
or include exquisitely precise medical and pharmaceutical details,
as if the words could suture the wounds, or save us even one last breath.
I came here to dance with the Puerto Rican women
of my class of 1967, and to remember a few pals lost in the war,
who had been so beautiful, you were happy just to look upon them,
and one more
lost to his own drunken wildness
under a moon who doesn’t remember us.
It’s not a going back we long for, but a staying still
for one incomparable moment, all the lost loves’ faces
spinning in the mirrored ball.
By Bruce Weigl
Featured Art: Two Plant Specimens by William Henry Fox Talbot
The anonymous brown song bird
is annoying in her insistence
on repeating the same three syllables
in exactly the same way, endlessly.
She must know something
about inevitability,
to sing so long,
no one else in sight.
The persistence of nature;
the blind and infinite dedication to a thing
in the face of emptiness and silence
that won’t let you believe that you are the last.
By Neil Shepard
Featured Image: Old Sarum by David Lucas
For Robinson Jeffers
We had come to the Great Wall’s end
in the desert of Jiaguyuan. Our tempers flared
across the crumbled battlements, out into the red heat.
There were weeds, thorns, a few hard-
shelled bugs. Love reduced to a black
carapace, under which a stinger,
a biting mouth, a reflex, a poison.
Heat withered our patience. Our bowels,
stung by a virus, made us say words we’d regret—
peevish, pernicious—wo yao, wo yao,
I want, I want, and nothing else.
We both stormed off—“stormed”
could have brought some moisture
to this desert, but no, this storm
was a hot wind, stinging sand
in the face, chipped sandstone
from the last outpost, that would cut
and bury us. Wei guoren. Barbarian.
By Michael Chitwood
Featured Image: Mountain Brook by Albert Bierstadt
The thief was none other than the wind.
The thief was the color of nickels.
The thief hummed in the downspouts, around corners.
I’ve already told you.
You should know better.
Mister Know-it-all. Mister Hands-in-your-pockets. Mister Sleep-for-the-morning-is-coming.
The thief had the cinnamon of fallen leaves on his breath.
The thief put a tear in our eyes.
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By Maya Jewell Zeller
Featured Image: A French Market Scene, possibly Boulogne by David Cox
At seventeen I worked after school
and most weekends for a local grocery,
and when it was slow I would straighten
the shelves—we called it facing—
which helped me memorize where everything was,
right down to the canned loganberry topping
Eleanor loved for her cheesecakes
or the clam juice or the coriander
or the yellow food coloring I knew could give people
impotence, and really what would be so bad
about that, I was familiar with most of the customers
who came in and frankly it wouldn’t hurt them
to have fewer babies, the way they laughed
at the Mexicans who brought vans on Saturdays
to fill three grocery carts with tortillas, bagged
chilies and metal-clipped tubes of ground beef,
the way they would ask me what I was doing
when I got off, did I want to come out
to their campground where they were fishing
and no, I didn’t, but I’d smile, ring up
their hot dog buns and Coors Lights,
while they grinned at what little skin I had showing
beneath a black apron that said Okie’s and a button shirt
and I wished instead of their eyes it was wind
at my collarbone, thistle-sweet air while I ran
the road toward Altoona, birds
following my legs with their call,
those honest phlox faces lilting in the wet ditch.
By Katherine Lien Chariott
Featured Image: Icebound by John Henry Twachtman
Here is the beginning. I’m walking down the sidewalk and then the curb, sidewalk and curb again, under a sky full of tiny sad stars that light up this city as well as they can, but not as well as the neon signs all around me, not as well as the rainbow glitter of the Strip, just five miles away, I’m walking with the glitter and the neon and the stars, in front of the Sav-On Drugstore and then past it, towards the Dottie’s—video poker and snacks, cheap smokes and booze, twenty-four hours a day. I go into the Dottie’s, with money in hand for two packs of Reds, and a hey there to the man working security. I’ve seen him before, know that brown skin and that smile, so I can look at the carpet instead of at him while I tap my hands on the counter, waiting to be rung up. He’s watching me, I think, and when I look at him, I know. Just like I know he hasn’t seen or doesn’t care that I came in with someone.
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By Kenneth Hart
Featured Image: Odalisque by Jules Joseph Lefebvre
It’s uh-oh time again when a woman asks me out
after a year of being on my own
and her number on the bar napkin is the permission slip
to stop hating myself
Stop walking around all day in sweat pants, stop leaving
a nest of dental floss stuck to the tiles
where it missed the garbage can
I’ve got to start taking better care of myself
is what her voice on the answering machine suggests
Got to get back on the StairMaster Got to learn new recipes
By Kenneth Hart
Featured Image: The Print Collector by Honoré-Victorin Daumier
I suspect you must be dead.
If you are reading this,
then you are not dead—
after I chose the wine,
and teased the waiter for spilling a little on my good shirt;
after the appetizers arrived,
and I told the joke about the priest and the porcupine
By Kenneth Hart
Featured Image: Pity the Sorrows of a Poor Old Man! by Jean Louis André Théodore Géricault
Some things are easier than they look
and some things are harder than they look.
Riding a bike, for example, is easier than it looks,
unless you are five and your feet don’t reach the pedals.
Playing guitar is harder than it looks, as is milking a cow.
Fall down when you are skiing,
forget someone’s phone number, be used by others as a bad example—
failing is easier than it looks.
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By Alix Anne Shaw
Featured Image: David in Prayer by Rembrandt van Rijn
Don’t give up Hopkins, my brouhaha. The manacle is crafty, oh yes. He has his agent oranges. There are some he trains to look just like Jung and Mead. But we will thwart the manacle. Thwart him at every turn-on.
When the manacle comes, we will open our windpipe. We will turn on our air mail. We will seal the crackerjack with Marxist tape recordings. We will hide our topaz under the doorjamb. We will make a blow job by putting dryer sheet music into a cardboard tube rose. We will not answer the doorjamb when the manacle knocks.
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By Rick Bursky
Featured Image: The Vase of Tulips by Paul Cézanne
I wasn’t sure if she kissed me
or simply used her lips
to push my face away. Yes,
the moist warmth was enjoyable,
but when my head was forced
back over the top of the sofa
the intention grayed.
Earlier that day I planned
to quit my job and pursue
a career writing romantic novels
that would be confused with memoirs.
But if I couldn’t distinguish
between a kiss and a push
what chance do I have
of writing romantic novels
that would be confused with memoirs?
After the kiss, and I prefer
to think it was a kiss,
she sank back into the pillows
and watched me
out of the corner of her eye.
By Billy Collins
Featured Image: The Annunciation by George Hitchcock
It’s so beautiful outside today
and we’re all going to die,
especially me,
is an observation that drenches
the pages of every anthology of poetry.
The trees are brilliant in crimson,
and I am one day nearer the grave
would be one way to put it.
Red and white tulips are swaying
in a mild breeze this morning,
and just look at the dark gullies under my eyes
would be another.
So many variations,
you have to wonder how would it be
if the picture were flipped the other way
and poets never tired of declaring
in poem after poem
that the world is a mound of ashes
and that they will never die.
How crummy the flowers look!
How well I feel!
How hideous the mountain range!
How handsome I will always be!
How fine to live forever in the midst
Of such relentless and unspeakable ugliness!
Which brings us to the question:
how much more of that would you have to hear
before you longed for
a bead of dew on the tulip
and that cough that will be your undoing?
By Billy Collins
Featured Image: Beach at Cabasson by Henri-Edmond Cross
is not just a phrase I made up
though it would have given me pleasure
to have written those words in a notebook
then looked up at the sky wondering what they meant.
No, I saw Bathtub Families in a pharmacy
on the label of a clear plastic package
containing one cow and four calves,
a little family of animals meant to float in your tub.
I hesitated to buy it because I knew
I would then want the entire series of Bathtub Families
which would leave no room in the tub
for the turtles, the pigs, the seals, the giraffes, and me.
It’s enough just to have the words,
which alone make me even more grateful
that I was born in America
and English is my mother tongue.
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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By William Todd Seabrook
Featured Image: Blasted Tree by Jasper Francis Cropsey
name this particular spot after me. I don’t know where I was going with that. I have a tendency to lose track of things, as Mom used to say. I think it’s just impossible to focus and live in Laudanum at the same time. Laudanum’s the name of my town, not that you’ve ever heard of it since it is mostly just the one intersection of Chillicothe and Route 87 out in Ohio Amish country. No ones calls it Route 87, they call it Boulevoux Road, after some guy named Boulevoux, whom I never met. The rest of the town is Amish people and strip malls and the two rarely conflate. I stand next to the Marathon station and across from the Dairy Queen, 197 feet from where Boulevoux’s daughter died, and I am positioned so that when five-speeds come off a red light they down-shift as they pass me, as if I’m the catalyst for their propulsion instead of just a cow, or a guy in a cow suit with a high school diploma and a sign that reads Ranchero’s Restaurant in lazy letters.
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By Peter Stokes
Featured Image: The Kiss IV by Edvard Munch
This is a whole new world to us, and
We drove up to some rooftop parking garage
To look out on the Western night
There up above the Terminal Bar & Grill
And later moving on down darkened East Colfax
Past all the whores with their narrow old asses
And bars wide open with their doors bent back
I thought I saw Bo Diddley
At the wheel of a cream-colored Cadillac
Like out of some wet dream from my Visions of Kerouac
And I knew that at last we had arrived.
By Peter Stokes
Featured Image: Baby (Cradle) by Gustav Klimt
Lenny’s elbows jut from the sleeves
Of his blue barber’s shirt
And carve the air about my head
In a series of unreadable signs
That I trace in the glass of his square barber’s mirror
Where I watch myself watching his face give expression
To the subtlest whir from his scissors and comb.
Or we talk for a moment
About a change in the weather
And I realize for the first time
That Lenny is gay.
“So how’s married life?”
He says through the silence,
The strange edge in his voice
Like a barb on a wire
In the point-blank talk of our new acquaintance,
And I smile a smile that communicates nothing
And it’s suddenly clear that Lenny is drunk.
How much, then, I wonder, does he want to know
About my wife in the hall
With the bread knife in her hand,
Or the one about me,
It was midnight at Tim’s place,
Falling down drunk from the top of the stairs,
Or the sub-zero talk in the car outside Lena’s
And making her cry until 3:00 a.m.
And I talk to myself,
Three speeches in the silence,
And all of this world,
On the still point of a pin,
Spins through the minutes
With nobody talking
As we confess to ourselves
Everything we conceal
And the hair from my head just falls to the floor.
By Mark Kraushaar
Featured Image: The Drinkers by Vincent Van Gogh
It’s rained all night,
and it’s rained all day, and by evening
when I get to the gym it’s started to thunder.
Still, here we are anyway, all of us, all the regulars,
George, and Phil, and Johnny B, and Bob,
and me and the big guy, the lifter from Janesville.
So first off George (who’s zipping his coat)
asks Phil who’s on the treadmill and the only
one raising a sweat, will he run a mile
for every beer last night.
Which very funny, but Phil follows with, Hey,
I’m not drinking any more in ‘08
(beat, beat) but I’m not
drinking any less either which, again,
very funny except we all know Phil has
problems with alcohol, but since he’s getting no laughs
he looks up and on the tv over the rowing machine
there’s the real life trial of a woman, blond
and twenty-three, a teacher who’s
had sex with an eighth-grade boy.
Are you kidding, says George,
Are you kidding, says Phil, I’d clap her erasers,
and someone else, I’d polish her fruit,
and everybody’s nodding yes and yes again
until, at last, George who’s had problems with school
and problems with money and women and work tells
us he’d have majored in meredial reading
which is where the tv goes to an ad
and George waves once and steps into the weather.
So as the rainy wind flips his cheap rug straight
off his head like a flattened cat
it’s strange, nobody’s laughing, in fact, we’re quiet finally,
Phil with his crashed marriage and the daughter
on drugs, and even handsome Bob
and Johnny B, even the big guy
with those silly disproportionate arms,
and for a moment, for a discrete, small portion of
what I will one day refer to as the past, there’s
the five of us facing three
double-door sized panes
of rattling glass:
rain on the awnings, rain over the windows,
rain over the gutters and rain
in soft, sparkling ropes along the curbs,
and into the drains and under the ground.
By Gary Percesepe
Featured Image: Seated Youth Writing in Book by Raphael
Gary Percesepe: You wrote an essay for the New York Times Book Review in April 1988, back when the “minimalism slash postmodern” discussion in literature was still in vogue. It had a wonderful Veronica Geng title, “On Being Wrong: Convicted Minimalist Spills Bean.” Your essay sparked a lively discussion among academic folk which was published in Critique in 1990 as “Postmodernism: The Uninhabited Word, Critics’ Symposium.” Looking back twenty years later, what has changed, and what remains the same?
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