2020 Winter Exclusive
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 Image: 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 & on- tological 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 Image: 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.
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By Stephen Dunn
Featured Image: 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.
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By Kathy Fagan
Featured Image: 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,
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By Kathy Fagan
Featured Image: 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.
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By Angie Estes
Featured Image: 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
By Angie Estes
Featured Image: 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
By Stefi Weisburd
Featured Image: 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.
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
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
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’tcare that I came in with someone.
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By 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 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.
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.
