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 9 compiled by Gryphon Beyerle.
By Joyce Peseroff
Featured art: Street Musicians by Eugène Atget
A small fly hung around my kitchen mid-October.
It didn’t buzz. Outside wet shape-shifted, drop to
flake: knock-knock of rain, a who’s there of snow.
The fly tiptoed on the meat-cutting board where I aimed
to smash it like a head of garlic. It bounced wall to wall to
wall, baby trapped in the balloon that was a hoax.
Was it my mother’s perturbed spirit warning me that blood
stains? Of course not. Last of its kind, Robinson Crusoe landing
on a kitchen island, the fly needed to be warm.
By Ellen Bass
Featured art: Indian Mother with Her Child by Adam Clark Vroman
I had a student once who was so depressed
she wanted to die. She was a young single mother,
lonely, poor, watching other girls
go to parties and bars while she was home
cutting the crusts off peanut butter sandwiches,
reading The Berenstain Bears and the Bad Dream.
Then she collapsed with heart disease
and spent the next few years waiting for a transplant.
The strange thing is, now she was happy.
Every day, almost every breath, was semi-ecstatic.
She was a modern-day Chicana Rumi,
hanging out with the Beloved, grateful just to touch His hem.
I find I’m telling myself all the time now,
look how you lift one foot and then the other,
all the nerves and synapses firing together.
Look how you reach for a carton of blueberries
and eat each dusky globe, one by one.
Look at the spotted dog tied to the newsstand,
drops of saliva sliding off his tongue,
and the cracked Bic lighter in the gutter
shining a watery turquoise blue.
Even when your heart is a used teabag
you can lie down in a warm bed,
even though you cry half the night
with the window open a little
to let in the stars.
By Maya Sonenberg
Featured art: The Vanishing Race (Navajo) by Edward Sheriff Curtis
Eight o’clock, nine o’clock, ten o’clock on a summer evening—it’s time to close the eyes, allow the breath to deepen, and sleep. The neighbor’s cat sleeps under the camellia bush and the neighbor’s baby has given up her screaming and sleeps in her crib; the hummingbird babies sleep in their nest perched on the Christmas-light wire strung across the porch ceiling; boys and girls everywhere put on their pajamas and brush their teeth; grandparents, all four of them, rest underground. In this house, though, the children call for glasses of water, kick off their sheets and pull them back up, ask for stories about the grandparents they’ve never met, count airplanes going in for a landing at SeaTac, their red lights blinking down through the trees, tell each other jokes through their open bedroom doors, and throw pillows at the back of any parent who dares suggest it’s time for sleep. Yes, darlings, you’re right: while light still fills the sky and the first star appears and then the others, and while your parents sit on the porch steps with their glasses of wine, trading stories, it’s impossible to think that this vast middle—life—will ever end, that anything will ever die. Now, before dark sets in, watch all the colors fade to gray: the last stripe of orange sunset in the west; the blue sky pulsating overhead; the cedar and eucalyptus and dogwood all dissolving into dark—a gray and then a darker gray that is the color of our house walls, headstones, and storm water rushing over Snoqualmie Falls. At the falls today, after playing in the hot sun and the icy rocky riverbed, attempting to catch minnows, you hiked the slowest hike in all creation back up the steep slope you’d run down an hour before, scuffing the gray dust with your toes, and moaning about your aching legs and parched throats and sweaty backs and lack of ice cream, but once we got back to the city, you decided you hadn’t had enough of the outdoors and insisted we stop in Volunteer Park where you, Ezra Jacob (grandson of Jack and great-grandson of Jake) and Phoebe Rose (granddaughter of Phoebe and great-granddaughter of Rose), sat side by side on the swings and pumped yourselves up and up and almost out over the fence separating the playground from the cemetery, out over blackberry bushes and hydrangeas, out over the chain link and then the short clipped grass and the monuments, so that if you’d let go, you would have sailed toward a waiting angel who would lift her stone arms and catch you, happy for the chance to save someone, happy for the reprieve from guarding a grave.
By Maxine Scates
Featured art: The Girl by the Window by Edvard Munch
Life’s police car, lights flashing, on the sidewalk
in front of McDonald’s and two boys on the bus stop,
one boy moving quickly away from the other
who raised his hands and dropped his pack as the officer
approached, gun drawn. But how did the cop know
which one he wanted since both wore watch caps
and gray parkas and carried backpacks? He seemed
certain enough as he handcuffed the boy
then helped him into the back of the cruiser
his now gunless hand almost gently dipping the boy’s head
into what comes next, all we don’t see swallowing him,
the signal changing, day swallowing me until this morning
By Melanie Unruh
Featured art: The Herwigs by Edouard Antonin Vysekal
I like to practice what I’m going to say in therapy each week. The opening line is always the most important part because it has to be something attention-grabbing that still makes me sound stable.
I slept pretty well this week, except for Tuesday, when I stayed up all night watching a marathon of The Wonder Years. They played the one where Kevin touched Winnie’s boob.
It’s been six months, eighteen days, nineteen hours, and six minutes—give or take—since I last saw James.
This week I only made twelve lists.
My cat bears a striking resemblance to my therapist, but this isn’t because of their matching whiskers so much as the fact that they both make the same frowning concerned face when I tell them about my life. Boots and Dr. Andrews, who has tried without success, to get me to call her Maggie, are not formally acquainted.
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By Elizabeth Powell
Featured art: Tujunga Canyon by Walter Elmer Schofield
My love lives in a little tiny box
Made of pixels and engineering. When I write him
He writes me back and when he writes me
Back, I write him. Even though we exist
Me/him, here/there: one day our band
Of consciousness will grow outward,
When science puts chips in brains
So all mysteries can be known—
Delusions, proclivities, sentences.
For now imagination a gangly vine
Grabs for a life. He has been so busy
Writing a narrative where he has no wife
That she has disappeared. So much first-person
Construct and banter. He has
A vixen schoolteacher held down
On the bed of his mind. And when he
Writes me he makes me
And when I make him I write him.
We are invented, in part,
By the wanting and not having
Of others. Soon someone else
Will pick him out of his little box
And begin again, wait for him
In the rain in front of the coffee shop
Where inside the donuts harden like
He can’t, and the red counter chair swirls empty
As if trying to conjure something so close.
But so close is almost, and almost is really
Far, still. She tries to pick him out of the crowd,
Ever hopeful, though night comes on like emergency.
And he is two places at once, virtual and real.
My love lives in a little box. Someone
Is making him
Into something else now.
By Elizabeth Powell
Featured art: Edna by Robert Henri
I knew you really wanted to meet me,
But I had the sneaky feeling you were an uber-Aryan
Chiropractor with homoerotic tendencies,
That maybe I should re-up with my academic
Asperger’s husband, and wear muu-muus on Saturday nights.
But I met you anyway before your snowboard race.
The style gel in your crew cut looked like ice,
Your red coat was puffy. You were disappointed
That my hair didn’t look like my picture. You implied
I was a liar. We walked down Main Street in Stowe
Past scented-candle-buying New Jerseyans
And Gnostic punk-rock townies eating baguettes,
My nose beginning to run in the cold,
Until we came to the cemetery and after you
Talked about your lying ex-wife, and your pretty ex-girlfriend,
You talked about a pair of little green baby shoes
That made you realize you were now too old
For children and I thought of the poetic
Significance of shoes, how used and alone
They stood for death. Your incoming text messages
Beeped us all the way to my car, which was German
But somehow not Aryan, where you told me good luck,
Shook my ungloved hand, then thought better
And gave me a hug
As if I were a patient on your ward.
By Pamela Davis
Featured art: Untitled (Surreal Abstraction) by Benjamin F. Berlin
I trusted you to never change, when I was 15, and needed
to believe men and women sat up talking all night,
like the movie with you and Rock Hudson joking in a satin bed,
both of you in men’s pajamas you buttoned to the chin.
Alone in my room crammed with horse figurines, you
were all that stood between me and what hid under the sheet—
the straining warm blossom that held me in thrall. I believed
you’d always be Rock’s chum, immune to Cary Grant’s mink-
lined smile. I’d be like you, beehive my hair, keep my knees tight.
We could have driven forever, you and me and Rock
in a two-tone convertible he steered with his big, clean hand.
How could you fall for Clark Gable, a man with a moustache,
and clearly too old? A burglar’s eyes. Safecracker hands.
In the movie you played his teacher in twinset and pearls,
eyes big as pies when he cocked one leg over the edge of the desk.
I needed you to report him to the authorities, not follow him
to a nightclub. Later there would be torn sheets, cigarettes,
counting the days between periods. Bad men with keys.
But I never imagined you’d go out of style, show up in the tabloids
bloated and hazy, surrounded by stray dogs, and, last I heard,
living alone.
By Maggie Mitchell
Featured art: Figures by Benjamin F. Berlin
Maddy is thirteen, almost fourteen. Her chest is as flat as a boy’s and she does not own a pair of Jordache jeans.
“I hate Fridays,” she tells her mother. What she means is that she hates everything.
“I know you do,” says Jude, understanding perfectly. “I’m not sure what you want me to do about it.”
“It feels like I’m in prison. There aren’t any windows in there.” She’s referring to her room behind the bar, to which she is more strictly confined than usual on Friday nights: Jude insists that she stay out of the way when it’s crowded. “I can hear people but I can’t see them.”
“Why would you want to see them? They’re adults at a bar.”
“But that’s all there ever is,” Maddy rails, not even caring if she makes sense. “Adults at a bar. I wish we could be normal.”
“That’s what you keep saying. You tell me what normal is, and I’ll see what we can do.”
Maddy whirls around and storms into her room behind the bar, daring to slam the door. She knows only what normal isn’t.
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By Billy Collins
Featured art: Wrestlers by Thomas Eakins
If all of time were poured into a salt shaker,
human history could be represented by a single grain,
the professor of astrophysics claimed
as a shaft of light illuminated his head,
leaving me to marvel at how
there would be room inside for everyone—
for Mary Magdalene and Isaac Newton
and every month of the Hundred Years’ War,
and Andrew Marvell would have a place to think,
a garden in which to dwell,
and you would be in there as well
and your ex-boyfriend, the cheap bastard,
with his ridiculous sports car parked by a lake
in some small boring town and me
shaking the shaker furiously
over a plate of blackened fish and boiled potatoes.
By Carl Dennis
Featured art: Youth by Frederick Carl Frieseke
It’s a long time now since the cedar tree
That you and Martha Spicer inscribed
With your twined initials was reduced to shingles
For a house later torn down to make way
For the Northtown Mall, the very mall
You walk now on rainy mornings.
In a few more weeks of the exercise program
Prescribed by your doctor, you should feel the strength
Lost with your triple-bypass finally returning.
Then you’ll confront the years still left you
With the zeal they merit, or the fortitude.
Be sure you’re in line when the mall doors open,
Before the aisles fill with serious shoppers
Intent on finding items more sturdy
Than their bodies are proving to be.
Could Martha Spicer be among them?
What you felt for each other back then
Didn’t survive the separation of college,
Though now it seems careless of you
Not to have kept in touch. Maybe you’ve passed her
Unrecognized as she’s looked for gifts
To make her grandchildren curious
About the world they live in, a book, say,
Devoted to local trees. On the cover
A cedar stands resplendent, the very kind
She carved her initials in long ago
With a boy whose name may be resting now
On the tip of her tongue. Try to imagine her
Hoping he hasn’t wasted his time on wishes
That proved impractical, like her hill house
Bought for its vista that proved in winter
Inaccessible to a snowplow. If he made that mistake,
Let him move back to town as she did
And focus like her on keeping her windows open
So a fragrance blown from afar can enter
When it wants to enter, and be made welcome.
By Carl Dennis
Featured art: Soap Bubbles by Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin
Even in Dante’s inspired version,
Heaven and hell don’t seem like regions
Appropriate for humans, being too static,
Too imbued with notions of the eternal.
Yes, for the sake of justice, the violent
Who get away with murder on earth
Ought to feel a heat more fiery
Than the coals of rage that burned inside them;
The betrayers of friends and patrons deserve a chill
Colder than the ice in their arctic hearts.
But shouldn’t their sentences have a limit?
Won’t their victims, the pillaged and trampled
And rolled to the wall, eventually grow
Uncomfortable in the balmy realm of the blessed
At the thought of their oppressors
In endless torment? Won’t they decide
A determinate stay is long enough?
It isn’t our place to stand in the way if Abel
Throws down a rope at last to Cain,
If Jesus takes Judas by the hand.
So hell, if imagination wins out,
Ought to be slowly emptying,
And then heaven as well, as the saints
Return to earth to help the sinners
Learn what damage they can undo
If they give themselves to the effort,
And what damage they’ll have to leave as is.
By Adam Sol
Featured art: Reverie (Study for the Portrait of Frank Burty Haviland) by Amedeo Modigliani
The young man knows he’s going to die today, but he’s wrong.
The other young man figures the army is the best way to improve his life, but
he’s wrong.
They both think their weapons will protect them, but they’re wrong.
They both believe their prayers will help.
Their commanders have intentions and intelligence, but they’re wrong.
We’ve heard the story before. It’s wrong.
The news will document it, but it will be wrong.
The war on terror, the war on Islam, the clash of civilizations.
The explosion will exceed the necessity of the occasion.
The exchange of fire will be unbalanced.
The response will be disproportionate.
The reporter is factually incorrect, theoretically misinformed, morally reprehensible.
The clear typeface and perfect binding are misleading.
The reader is uncomfortably and inappropriately implicated.
The tranquil mind is insufficient to the task.
The young men, necks dirty and damp, advance.
By Jillian Weise
Featured art: Futurist Garden by Benjamin F. Berlin
Any person who is diseased, maimed, mutilated or
can I continue reading this? will it affect my psyche
so that the next time big Logos comes over
I will not be there in the room & instead I will be
wandering a Chicago street in my dress with my
parasol as a cane, on the verge of arrest, where arrest
could mean “stopping” or “to keep the mind fixed
on a subject,” where the subject is the diseased,
maimed, mutilated self of 19th-c. Chicago, the self
in any way deformed so as to be unsightly
& will I tell him to stop looking, tell him I’m tired
& I’m about to be arrested for walking in public
& I can’t possibly climax when I am an improper
person who is not allowed in or on the streets,
highways, thoroughfares or will he say we’re alone,
no one is watching, there is your bedside table
& there your mirror & who am I kidding? I won’t tell
him anything. There is no room in bed for this.
By Chelsea Rathburn
Featured art: Elephant Combat by an unidentified artist
The island seemed in permanent full bloom.
Through hairpin curves, our driver pointed—mango,
lime, poinciana—this one hanging low,
that one as bright as flames. And in our room,
a riot of blossoms. Across the bed, hibiscus
letters spelled out Congratulations. Welcome.
Bottles of champagne, pitchers of rum
punch. Why would we bring up poverty or loss
or the scorpions we pounded with a shoe
by the bathtub drain, small and densely black?
We ate golden apples, and had a view
of the mountain from the shower. On the third day,
darkness dropped from my towel. I jumped back:
a welcome-flower no one had swept away.
By Chelsea Rathburn
Featured art: Girl in Checkered Dress by George Benjamin Luks
I blame that little village in Spain,
the one with the whitewashed houses
in a crescent along the sea,
a fleet of pastel fishing boats,
and that celebrated coffee with brandy.
A sour wedge of apple lurked
at the bottom like a tea-leaf fortune.
Because we couldn’t afford the fish
we ate pizza with peaches and oregano
on the beach, the sun and breeze conspiring.
Seeing us there beneath the cliffs
and the postcards of the cliffs,
who wouldn’t have predicted luck and beauty?
Can I be blamed for loving it all
and thinking it was you I loved?
By Maria Kuznetsova
Featured art: Seated Female Nude in Profile, Bending Forward by Arthur Bowen Davies
I met a man in Russia, after my father’s funeral. It was only appropriate.
Papa always knew how to make things harder for me and I didn’t see why his death should be an exception. This is how it happened: after the service, I was taking a walk through the cemetery, hoping to get lost. The throng of admirers and chemistry colleagues had left long before, and it was just me there, staring at the grave of this little girl who died on her second birthday. I don’t know how long I must have been standing there, considering this, when I heard a voice say, “Excuse me, Miss. You dropped this. And this. And this.” A man came up from behind, holding my wallet, my passport, and the headphones from the airplane. He gestured toward my purse, which was hanging open.
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By Kevin Stein
Featured art: Europeans Embracing by an unidentified artist
Cursing the stubbed-toe 2 a.m. call—my father?—
I picked up a woman’s feather-brushed gush, “Wilbur,
it’s a grandson! Jamaal José O’Bryant.”
And I, unhappily not Wilbur, croaked Wrong number as one does
when plucked frog-eyed off sleep’s lily pad.
She was old. Who else misdials the pay phone’s tiny numbers?
Who else marries a Wilbur, their grandchild an American blend?
Outside rain misted not cats and dogs but litters of kittens.
Her lavender sachet apology, my bed-headed threnody, my
No problem, and click. Lightning cracked night’s black egg
in halves I couldn’t tap back in place:
My father’s dead. I’m next.
Revelation arrives like that, thunder trailing the flash.
I rode the open window’s wet carpet awakening,
storm flipping its toggle above the wind-blown yarrow,
electric as any newborn. Shaggy, late autumn, nearly gone-to-seed-
bloom, naked ecstatic.
I floated my trial run out a window the rain had come
in. When the dark made light of me I was.
By Sharon Dolin
Featured art: Dancers by Edgar Degas
I let him go. I complied. Adjusted. Saw. Did not see his disappearing
act of staying while leaving the body. It felt so familiar.
My zombie-mom (on Stelazine, Thorazine to tamp
her paranoia down), would be there/not there to make
macaroni and cheese, do the wash, help me with my Spanish.
I knew she was sick, I knew she loved me though she lay in bed until noon,
again in the afternoon, comatose with the New York Post, her arm bent
at the elbow to cover her face. This was what love could feel like—
somnolent, absent. Why be paranoid when he slept in the same pose.
Sometimes cooked dinner, did the wash. Who knew a blunt face
could hold so much hate. The child in me saw his numbing out,
going to bed early, not as aversion but a version of my mother’s love
and all I had to do—as when she’d be taken away, hospitalized, shocked—
was wait for his return. (Is there a Penelope inside every troubled wife?)
Didn’t my mom always come back?
By Todd Hearon
Featured art: Purple Stylized by Hannah Borger Overbeck
What was the tongue we spoke when the lotus first
unfolded from the navel of the god, the one who dreams
the universe, and in whose ear we must have whispered
our hunger to hold each other? What were words
must now be reflex, shudder, blood, be impulse, pulse
a palimpsest of longing written over
eons, eons ago. If we could scrape
back bone, back blood, back breath to the original
dust the dreaming god himself has long
become, the universal dream a drift of ash
settling in some dark corner of the sun,
would we find ciphered there the DNA
relation to the tongues we speak today
when we want words to say what words can’t say?
By Neil Shepard
Featured art: Portrait of a Man by Wilhelm Morgner
I write at night when the old hominid
climbs up to the highest branch of the brain
and crouches there in a leafy crotch
listening to the night-sounds snarling below . . .
his heart outracing the big cats of the savannah.
He’s glad I’m civilized and live indoors,
far from the tooth and claw. Glad my central
plumbing works, my TP dispenser full,
so he doesn’t have to shit off a limb,
wipe his butt against rough bark or let it cake.
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By Scott Nadelson
Featured art: Disturbed by Henry Keller
The summer I should have hit puberty but didn’t, I went to a Jewish sleep-away camp in the Poconos. It was an uncomfortable summer for me, full of insecurities, and not only because of my = slow physical development. Most of the kids in camp came from Westchester and Long Island, and even if their families weren’t much wealthier than mine—we were solidly upper-middle-class—they
showed off their wealth in ways that mine never did. Their parents dropped them off in Mercedes, BMWs, even the occasional Ferrari. Around their necks they wore 24-karat gold Chais and Stars of David. They were obsessed with brand-name clothing—Guess, Polo, Benetton. They talked about vacation homes on Nantucket, Cape Cod, Hilton Head. They had rolls of cash to spend at the camp store, which sold shampoo, toothpaste, soda, and candy.
Now, of course, I can see that such displays of wealth were signs of insecurity in their own right. These parents were the tacky rich, desperate to prove how high they’d climbed, and their children were spoiled and snobbish, nothing to envy. And how rich were they really if they had to ship their kids off for eight weeks of every summer to a camp subsidized by the Young Men’s Hebrew Association?
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By Joshua McKinney
Featured art: Maine Landscape by Preston Dickinson
Folks said it was about the worst thing anyone in our town had ever done.
Afterward, friends stopped calling and wouldn’t answer their phones. Coworkers
avoided me. My accounts folded and the VP asked for my resignation. I moved
out, rented an apartment on the bad side of town. Had my food delivered. Only
went out at night. That was months ago. Lately, I’ve taken to going out days.
But in disguise: dark glasses, Raiders cap, knee-length trench coat. I sit on a
bench in the park and feed popcorn to the pigeons and squirrels. I never have to
wait long. Somebody will amble by and make small talk. Ask if I’ve heard about
it. An old man tells me my wife cried so hard a vessel burst in her eye. A girl in
a tracksuit says a neighbor chased me down the street with a tire iron. A red-
haired woman, who looks vaguely familiar, says she heard that after it happened
we had to put our German shepherd to sleep. That the crepe myrtle by our front
gate blighted and died in the span of a week. I’m not sure how much is true.
“One thing’s for sure,” she says, “folks around here aren’t going to forget any
time soon.” I tell her I probably don’t want them to forget. I say that I probably
feel more alive than I did before, and some people will do anything to feel alive.
A pigeon flutters to rest at the end of my bench. I tell her I’ve heard I lost my job
but still live in town. I say I’ve heard I have taken to venturing out during the
day. That I might be wearing a disguise.
By Tom Noyes
Featured Art: Two Nudes in a Room by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner
Fresno, Fargo, Toledo. Albany, Tallahassee, Boise. I hit every town in a tux. When the crew and I crash the wedding—I try to time it so I’m rushing the aisle just as the bride and groom lean in for their kiss—the church erupts in confused gasps and worried whispers. Eugene, my best friend and agent, himself a three-time groom, holds the opinion that, in terms of nerves and anxiety, weddings are worse than funerals. With a funeral, what’s done is done. With a wedding, futures are at stake.
E’s theory of weddings could explain why things get hairy sometimes for the show and me. Three seasons ago in Dallas, the bride’s stepfather, an off-duty ATF agent, stood and drew his service revolver just as I reached the altar. Last season at a synagogue in Baltimore, one of the groomsmen, a former D-1 linebacker, took a running start and squared me up, yarmulke to sternum, knocking me flat and breathless. Usually, though, the spectators, ushers, bridesmaids and clergy recognize me, and relief sets in, and then euphoria. Kingsley Carter and his show New Digs for Newlyweds is in the house, and it’s all good.
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