Issue 30
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 & 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 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,
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 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 Lawrence Raab
Featured Image: 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 Image: 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
By Lawrence Raab
Featured Image: 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 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
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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.
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
By Stefi Weisburd
Featured Image: 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 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 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.
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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
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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 o 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 are 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;
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 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.
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 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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New Ohio Review 