I regret my good decisions while staring at digital timestamps within the carpeted walls of my assigned cubicle as November darkens to evening right after lunch. I regret them as I climb into the hybrid and track its mileage. On an after-work walk, plastic bags, candy wrappers, and beer cans sprawl. I decide to corral strips of wild sheeting massed into a wig of see-through hair. A slippery ooze crawls onto my hands. I should have fucked that guy. I should have broken my heart over him and kept breaking those gears —a clockwork that spends almost all of its time junked just for those two moments everyday, when it is exactly right.
I can’t stop listening to your dumb wonderwall cover that I asked for as a joke. I don’t know what you did to make it sound all distant and a little haunted but I want to projectile vomit when you giggle through the reverb miss a chord and sing alltheroadsanananasomething. Why do people hate this song and why do people only ever play it on acoustic, it’s so good on electric or maybe I just like you—oh fuck, do I like you? During sex I asked how long you had wanted to do this for and you said within the first ten minutes of meeting you and I said same if not even longer, maybe before I met you, does that make sense? Am I making sense? Should I seek professional help if a fucking joke cover of wonderwall makes me want to grin at every blank-faced stranger in a gas station, makes me want to stitch your name into my underwear, makes me want to backflip into the Atlantic Ocean where you are treading water— and I don’t think that anybody feels the way I do about you now.
Featured Image: Forget the Flowers by Tanner Pearson
Twenty-six years have passed since you tried out mattresses at Macy’s, hands folded over your chests as if laid out for a viewing. No, that was not how you lay on a mattress at home. You had read in the paper that couples who rated their marriages “satisfying,” slept spooning and those who rated their marriages “highly satisfying” slept spooning with their hands cupping their spouse’s breast or penis, so nightly you wrapped your hand around his sturdy cock believing that you secured a happy marriage in your grasp. But after googling “how to” diagrams of spooning on the web, you’ve learned that as the smaller spoon you should have been the spoonee all those years. So now you are shopping for mattresses by yourself and the sleep expert at Slumberland wants to upsell you a queen even though you are still weepy and lost in your own trough within a double, a sinkhole of busted continuous coils. He asks how you sleep. Badly. You need something supportive, he says, but with plenty of give. Yes, absolutely! Memory foam, he says. Oh God, no. Knock me out on horsehair or kapok, sheep fleece or pea shucks. Give me a nightcap of nepenthe. Certainly not memory.
paul says careful with the benzos & I’m like I think of you whenever my therapist brings em up & he’s like aww dunno if sweet’s the word but it’s nice to be thought of
okay sure let everyone see my cute belly let everyone know I covet some people I’m supposed to hate paul’s stupid meth’d out calls unbearable his empty bottles his days & months wild-eyed & away
once we wore each others jeans his tiny gold waist in my teen girl pants now on the phone he says what’s up ya fuckin guinea! he teaches me to play iron man he gives me that ninth step apology that making of meandering amends
me so scared of dying & him always chest deep in it I sit so quietly a very good dog in her dim little room but he gives me cocky courage he gives me warm love that boston street salt kinda love that let’s never brawl kinda love that I’ll kiss your dirt love that I’ll help you lie to chicks love that mall parking lot love that if I’m a blight you’re a blight kinda love that noogie that cackle that snakebite that augur that yeah I’ll call you on your bullshit pastures if you call me when my dumb pig jumps her sty off to somewhere cleaner than both our loud green yards
I enrolled my boyfriend in a beef jerky of the month club one Christmas. In January, we broke up, and it was a horrible breakup that still hurts a little, years beyond.
In February, when notice came that his jerky had again been shipped, I cancelled it. It was the type of breakup where the kindest thing we could do was leave each other alone forever. We hadn’t been very kind. I wanted to change.
In March, I got another shipping notice, tracked to his front door, but my card had not been charged. I called and was assured that no more jerky would be sent. Read More
I feel the cold more I stay in bed longer To linger in my dreams Where I’m young & falling in & out of love I couldn’t imagine then Being this old only old people Are this old Looking at my friends I wonder Wow do I look like that Today I wore my new beanie With the silver-grey pom-pom & took a walk in the fog I thought I looked cute in that hat But nobody noticed maybe a squirrel Although he didn’t say anything When was the last time I got a compliment Now it’s mostly someone pointing out I have food stuck in my teeth Did my teeth grow they seem bigger & so do my feet everything’s larger Except my lips lipstick smudges Outside the lines or travels to my teeth Then there’s my neck The wattle an unfortunate word & should have never been invented These winter months are like open coffins For frail oldsters to fall in I once had a student who believed We can be any age we want In the afterlife I’m desperate to be fifty Six was also a good year I saw snow for the first time At my great-uncle’s house in Schenectady My sister & I stood at the window I can still remember the thrill Of a first time a marvel Life would be full of firsts I met my first love in winter He was a hoodlum & way too old for me seventeen I was fifteen I could tell he’d had sex or something close to it He had a burning building in his eyes He wore a black leather jacket so cool & greasy Matched his hair he broke up with me Although there wasn’t much to break All we’d done was sit together on the bus Breathing on each other It was my first broken heart I walked in the rain Listening to “Wichita Lineman” On my transistor radio I need you more than want you Which confused me but I felt it All over my body & that was a first too O world of marvels I’m entering antiquity for the first time Ruined columns sun-blasted walls Dusty rubble wind-blown husks I’m wintering there is nothing wrong with it A deep field of silence The grass grown over & now the snow
Oh, that’s right—because I’m going to die. Sometimes I forget. More often than not. And then, that’s right! I’m going to, sometime. Because . . . I’m going to. Forgetting, but only sometimes, that’s how this works more than not. And then we wake to snow,
*
quite unexpected, the whole neighborhood quite, you know. And you say to me, yes, that’s right, cream, two sugars. Sometimes I forget. Or these days, more often, because, you know, that’s how this works. And now I remember we’re going to. Both of us. And there’s the car
*
snowed under, looking so unlike itself. It takes an easy faith to see it. What it truly is. I believe this morning the whole neighborhood is a fact refuting last night’s forecast. I’m predicting this icicle by evening will stretch down past the window, which reminds me—yes, that’s right,
*
last night, 2 or 3 a.m., I woke to the whole house moaning in the wind. And I felt warmer beside you surrounded by this sound, our house, and maybe the whole neighborhood, the neighborhood houses and the neighborhood trees all moaning. It was snowing, but I didn’t know. Sometimes, I forget this
*
is how it is with us. Just as I, at times, forget I, we, are going to, you know. They’re saying now more is on the way by evening. It almost hurts to look out there’s so much sun. I’m going out to prove the car’s still here. You remind me, yes, of course, coffee. How could I ever forget?
Featured Art: Faceless ballerina resting on floor with shade by Khoa Võ
Next to the Lost and Found, our church basement folding chair circle. Ten of us, week to week, scratch words in workbooks, read copies of How to Survive the Loss of a Love.
We pass or fail stages of grief. Video clips from the other side: a smiling blonde manages her checking account, living debt-free; gray men navigate dating and children.
Stories cycle in Share Time: Billy the missionary served 25 years with Kazakhstani orphans— one day, home on furlough, his wife drove to Walmart, never returned.
Dan’s wife ran off with the superintendent, and Sharon’s husband left her at Denny’s eating Moons Over My Hammy. She hasn’t had an egg since. I don’t know why, they said. Blame always a stick to be thrown.
Not your fault, we agreed. But maybe the fault was mine, the unsupportive wife, the wastrel. I drove 1700 miles, and still his voice, obscured by barroom backnoise,
Insufferable woman, come home. Each week I shift seats on the circle’s farthest curve. I’ve lost the knack for talking, afraid the other eyes will shinny up my face then flick away.
At Trader Joe’s, before group, while cashiers flip French bread into paper bags like a magic trick, I practice words. How to say I’ve left him, that he was mean to me. So I will be believed.
We buy hot dogs at a gas station of broken pumps and eat them on the pier, watching ratty shrimpers limp in for new bandages, sit there in the cold for hours, thinking sunset will fill the bay with the blood of the Brazos, do something holy to us.
This is after Ganado, and Victoria, and Refugio, and Point Comfort, and Blessing.
We’re newlyweds, willing to burn fuel on skywriting if it can make marriage feel less like living in Houston.
Sunset hangs around like a towel that won’t dry, and when we tire of waiting, we leave the dim, fuming galaxy of refineries for home, bright and deadly as a hospital circled by ambulances, the music off.
This summer afternoon on the blacktop of an elementary school playground Steve and Rachel have their guns pointed at each other, as tends to happen every once in a while between two people who have dated for months,
that is, until Chet shows up brandishing his revolver at Steve, causing Rachel to complete the triangle by shifting her gun toward Chet, at which point, Steve says, “Well lookie here. Seems like we have ourselves a Mexican standoff!” which makes Rachel say, “Wuh? None of us are Mexicans.”
“I could call my bud, Raul, if you put your guns away,” Chet says. “That would ruin our Mexican standoff!” Steve says. “Adding a Mexican to our Mexican standoff would ruin our Mexican standoff?” Rachel asks. “Have you ever even been to Mexico?” Chet asks.
“A Mexican standoff,” Steve says, “occurs when each person in a given vicinity has both a gun pointed at himself and his gun pointed at someone else.” “Or herself and her,” Rachel adds. “Sounds to me like a gun deadlock
or a James Bond-high-stakes-poker-thingy,” Chet says. “Mexican standoff is just what it’s called,” Steve says. “I could sure go for some Mexican food after this . . . Mexican standoff,” Rachel says. “Are you sure it’s called a Mexican standoff?” Chet asks.
“It sure sounds either made-up or racist or both.” “It’s not racist, it’s just what we call it,” Steve says. “You mean like how we call the Washington Redskins the Washington Redskins? Because that’s still racist even though it’s the name of our local football team,” Rachel says.
“Go Redskins!” Chet adds. Chet is an avid football fan. “The Mexican part of the Mexican standoff is literally the least important part,” Steve says. “You probably mean figuratively. People almost never mean literally,” Chet says.
Let me begin by offering my condolences, I said, holding out my hand. She shook out her umbrella and placed it open, just beside the altar. They thought it was an ulcer, she said. They gave him some tablets. Did he have any special requests? I asked. Favorite hymns? Or something for Communion, like maybe Water Music? He was worse by Christmas, she said. He couldn’t manage the pumpkin pie. He always loved my pumpkin pie. The King of Love is nice, I said. I opened the book to page 64. As an alternate to Crimond, you know. Most people don’t recognize it as the 23rd Psalm. In January his feet turned black, she said. Toe by toe. It took exactly ten days. The shadow of a branch moved slowly back and forth behind the stained glass. I thought: When I get home I’ll check my toes. Will there be Communion? I asked, finally.
The last three days he started to hiccup, she said. He wouldn’t take any water. It never stopped, the hiccupping. Not once, not one minute until he went. I could play Pachelbel’s Canon. That’s very popular now. There’s no reason it can’t work at funerals as well as weddings. At the very end, she said—then stopped, her eyes squeezed shut behind her glasses—as if the rejected water, each wretched hiccup, and every blackened toe formed a chain she could use to haul herself back to September, when she would claim him, finally whole again. She reached for her umbrella and frowned. Play what you like, she said. He was never fond of music. Not hymns, anyhow. Only once in fifty-three years did I catch him singing. You are My Sunshine, I believe it was.
By the third martini, he’ll ask her to marry him. She’s a tourist, he’s a captain, home by chance. I stand at the window, watching. I want to walk into that bar, order an ouzo, and tell them that, together, they’ll create a new generation of pain. I want to tell him to court the island girl, the one who, forty years later, will see him, run to the restroom, and return with a fresh coat of lipstick. I want to tell my young mother, in the words of the great North American philosopher, Pamela Anderson, “Never get married on vacation.” But this is long before Pam and Tommy Lee, before I existed. Before Reagan reigned over his long line of wreckage, and couples shot themselves, together, in their cars. The Vietnam War has ended, but here I am standing at the window, watching while they meet, both oblivious of wars they’ll wage. They’ll move from Greece back to the Midwest—she’ll drink, alone, in her kitchen. He’ll return to the island every chance he gets. When he’s back in Illinois, he’ll stare into the aquarium and long for water. She’ll look at him, frozen, behind her highball glass. Still, I stay at the window of the bar, wanting to use Pam’s biting wit. But this is long before Baywatch, and they’re gazing at the bay. I tap the glass like Morse code. Sealed in my own tank of silence, I say, Please let go. But as they take each other’s hands, I softly touch the pane and turn away. Because they, too, have the right to plunge. Even if they’ll swim out too deep: holding onto each other until death.
Every Thursday, on his way to therapy, he drives past the house of the woman he’s having an affair with. What interests his therapist isn’t the sin, which she views as a symptom, but the root. So they dig, or seem to, and today he talks about his wife— how, before they take a trip, she makes him connect those timers to lamps in certain rooms, and how much this annoys him, even though it didn’t used to. As if their belongings were of value. As if an automatic light might stop an addict from breaking in. As if the thief, awake beside her, had not already come and gone.
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.
Move to a different country. Take a new spouse. Make beautiful different-country babies with soft, different-country hair
and only speak your old-country language late at night in between dreams. Your new husband will ask the following morning who this person is; you keep repeating his name.
Oh, you say, in your new language. Don’t worry about it. Just an old friend.
Option Two
Build a house. Bake your late spouse’s remains into the walls. Like the spectrophiliac Amethyst Realm, feel paranormal hands on your legs and back as you rub yourself on the corners of the foyer.
Moan the name your ears haven’t heard since you reopened the coffin and saw silver bones.
Option Three
Meet a woman with dark hair and patience longer than yours. Tell her a lie: you’ve never done this before.
She’ll grin and say, “Sure you haven’t.” Later, in her shower, pressed against the pink tile wall, you can’t help but notice she uses his same shampoo.
He’d wanted the persimmons and asked her for them, but when she gave him the brown paper bag, brimming over, he was taken aback. Did he really need that many? Still, he brought them home to his wife, and soon there were persimmons ripening on the kitchen counters, lining the windowsills. Each day, growing more and more succulent until the air was thick and sweet with their scent. At breakfast, he’d break one open with his spoon—the skin supple and ready to give—stir it into his hot cereal. Indescribable, the taste. And a texture he might have described as sea creature meets manna from heaven. When he ate one, he thought of her. And when he saw her, he thought of the persimmons. When her arm brushed, just barely, against his, did he imagine they both felt the same quickening? In myth, fruit is usually the beginning of disaster. And the way they made themselves so obvious— an almost audible orange against the white walls— made him wish he’d never asked her for them, didn’t have to smell them sugaring the air with ruin, as he sat there, face lowered to the bowl, spooning the soft pulp into his mouth.
Featured Art: Young Woman on a Balcony Looking at Parakeets by Henri Matisse
We were sitting on the couch in the dark talking about first pets, when I told him how, as a girl, I kept a blue and white parakeet I let y around the house and, sometimes, outside, where he’d land on the branches of pine and eucalyptus, balancing between seedpods and spines. Only, while I was telling it, my companion began to stroke, very lightly, the indent of my palm, the way you do when you’re sitting in the dark with someone you’ve never kissed but have thought about kissing. And I told him how my bird would sit on a high branch and sing, loudly, at the wonder of it—the whole, green world— while he traced the inside of my arm with his fingers, opening another world of greenery and vines, twisting toward the sun. I loved that bird for his singing, and also for the way his small body, lifted skyward, made my life larger. And then it was lip-to-lip, a bramble, and it was hard to say who was who— thumb to cheek to chest. The whole ravening. When I told him I did not clip my bird’s wings, I was talking about hunger. When he pressed me hard against the back of the couch, named a litany of things he’d do to me, I wanted them all. I, too, have loved to live in a body. To feel the way it lifts up the octaves of sky, cells spiraling through smoke and mist, cumulus and stratus, into that wild blue. And though I knew there was always a hawk somewhere in the shadows ready to snatch his heart in its claws, still, I couldn’t help letting that parakeet free.
Featured Art: Two Human Beings. The Lovely Ones by Edvard Munch
Not the zebra but the horse; not buffalo but cows, maybe camels, who traded the wild for the stable, a stall lined in straw, the house with wee gables and eaves, their name over the door— Biscuit, Coco. Snowball, Ranger. Traded the hunt for the daily bowl and dish, predators for owners, collar and leash; agreed to be a tool—plow or cart or confidant—to breed in captivity.
So when the man in the elevator at the Venetian holding his cardboard tray of coffees and muffins heading back to his room says to no one in particular, but most likely to the other man, the three of us strangers, I better get something in return for this, he means fetching breakfast so his wife can sleep, I better get something for all of this, gesturing with his head, meaning the hotel, the dinners and shows, I think about women who prowl the midnight streets in their staggering heels, breasts like missiles because they’d rather be feral than kept. And about men who gave up wilding to name their offspring, their known code continuing on forever.
I’m carrying my own tray of coffees and muffins, will soon press the card against the lock, open the room, rip off my clothes, throw back the three hundred thread-count sheets, waking my husband. He’s met someone new and now wants both of his lives at once. He can sleep later. These untamed weeks, we’re savaging, flesh against flesh, ravishing our marriage.
after The Way Things Go, by Peter Fischli and David Weiss
I give the boot on a stick a push. The boot circles round and kicks the light switch on, which, as the open bulb grows hot, melts the balloon full of red red paint, which drips down to fill up the glass precariously balanced until it tips over and breaks, tripping a wire on its way down, and the wire sends a spoon attached to a little weighted car down a ramp, and the spoon hits against strategically placed tuning forks in different notes as it travels down, and the tuning forks are each pointed toward a red and white megaphone set at full volume, and the megaphones serve to amplify the little 12-note tune that I can’t get out of my head, and when the spoon car gets to the bottom of the ramp, it smacks into a striped target, which knocks a red bowling ball onto an oversized inflated black plastic bag, which releases its air into a long silver tube in a burst, causing the white canvas windmill at the other end of the tube to turn, which tips the wooden seesaw structure so that it releases its 1,000 one-inch rubber balls in various shades of red and pink and gray and black down a 25-foot wooden plank, and then into a metal chute, where they line up and twist and turn their way, roller-coaster-like, to the bottom of the track, picking up speed all the while, and at the bottom, they split into two tracks and collect in two separate tubs attached to two separate strings that will only pull once enough balls have accumulated in the tubs, given enough weight, one string attached to a trip wire attached to an oversized match, which quickly strikes against its measure of sandpaper and lights on fire, and the other string attached to the safety catch of a tightened, loaded bow above it, and the string slowly, slowly, as the waiting match burns down, as the tub fills with one-inch balls, slowly pulls at the safety catch until it, quite suddenly, releases, letting loose the paraffin-soaked arrow, which passes through the flame of the oversized match and lights up as it shoots just feet above the heads of the seated spectators in the outdoor garden of the art museum, over, across the open space, grazing on the other side of the crowd a wick attached to the paraffin-soaked cardboard mannequin, which bursts into a flame that lights all the attached oversized sparklers from their shortened bases, and they burn in reverse, outward, and the mannequin sags, and the mannequin gets infinitesimally lighter, as the sparklers drop their ash to the ground and as the chemicals react and burn away, so that the enormous and sensitive scale holding the sparklered mannequin on one side becomes outweighed by the enormous pile of inflated red balloons on the platform on the other side of the scale and slowly lifts into the air, and a metal ball rolls in a track along the edge of the platform and catches in a pocket on one end of a wooden plank, causing the giant catapult full of red-dyed baking soda on the other end of the wooden plank to fling its contents in the air and, upon hitting the vat of red-dyed vinegar in the center of the giant papier-mâché model of a volcano, to bubble up over the edge and through a rugged papier-mâché channel painted to look like rock on the side of the volcano, and the fake lava flows into a water wheel, which turns and turns, and the turning untwists a 50-foot length of rope from around a pole high above the crowd, out on the end of a crane, and the pole is attached to the side of a bathtub full of confetti made from hole-punching-to-pieces every letter or postcard you ever sent me every photograph I have of you every scrap of film every original thing every only-copy-that-exists and that might hurt to lose, and the bathtub turns, and turns on its pole, and upends its contents onto the crowd as 12 pianos each tuned to a single note drop in succession, a literal kind of surround sound, playing the little tune I can’t get out of my head, as confetti cannons shoot red tissue-paper flowers into the air, as the tissue-paper flowers pass through the blaze of the four flamethrowers, strategically placed, as they light one after the other and burn completely to ash before landing gently and harmlessly alongside the confetti on the heads and shoulders of the crowd in the art museum garden 50 feet below.
Featured Art: Hot air balloon by James Nisbet & Co.
Perhaps you’ll find it strange you no longer appear in my dreams, but on the other hand it may serve to fuel your belief that I never loved you at all, that we were little more than a scattering of pixels in the ether, the kind of momentary disturbance a thrush will make stabbing its bill into the leaves and tossing them about in search of food, shaking its head to clear away the debris and take whatever sustenance the god of thrushes has promised before the world settles back again, asleep in the wake of a need more primal than heaven and hell; yet even when I think of us in that sense, as only the leftovers at some Olympian event where we were not guests, but mere canapés, nibbled at and tossed aside, left in the dead grass for worms to eat, still it seems that even birds and grubs, yea, our very comminuted dust, are cursed with the memory of a time when nothing could ever go wrong, and we knew all the words to every song.
Listen, while you were over ogling ogives and trefoils, chancels and bays, the things you left behind were quietly giving up, flying to pieces, falling apart almost together. That grinding whine up front you thought was brakes failing? It was, but that’s not all: the last shred of resistance is gone from the shocks, every bump is now like the thump of a flawed heart, but that’s not all: the tires have gone slick and bland in your absence, unevenly worn like the martyr that marries a slob, wait, there’s more: not only can’t you stop at will, you can’t get started, the juice is dead some slackness in belt or disc something not flowing the black box caked with inertia. Listen, you cried at the Royal Wedding and swallowed the cream, meanwhile the tube lost its sight: snow, garbled snow in its face and a twisting of speech unknown in Babel, O things have been going to pot, the paint peeling off your house, leprous, obscene, what about that? The food has vanished under the weed, the path has forgotten where in the world it was headed, the mower that might begin to set things aright is all smoke and flame and missing parts, shorn of its function. Maybe you thought as you turned away toward exotic joys the objects you’d secretly started to hate would await your return unchanged loyal and fixed in their whatness? You forgot the revenge of decay, you forgot how even immobile things, unloved, blindly careen and plummet, how care is a constant curing, our bulletin first last and always: Aid.
Okay you’re back: the fat and languor are through. The wind has shifted to pelt what’s left of the garden. Strange birds are swarming the shorter days. You dreamed and the world dissolved but already the perfumes of distant sugars begin to escape from your larder, and you open your eyes to the list of your derelictions, whelmed with the staggering costs of restitution. It is time you accept your share in the damage and spend what needs to be spent. Repair.
Featured Art: Horse Race, Siena, Italy by Walter Shirlaw
I asked about the old days, when they were my age—my mother scrambling eggs, Dad and I at the table. He aimed a glance sidelong at her, then took a shot toward me:
We’ve been very lucky, Son.
He must have meant their gamboling, teenage marriage after weeks of jitterbug jokes and getting-to-know-you’s in the Abilene Lady Luck pool hall in 1941.
Her silence like the hush of a tournament match, the cue’s tip skittish at the ball, probing for angle and spin, velocity, the all-important leave and follow-on.
By now—both gone so long, both unlucky— I understand his game, how words can travel in disguise, their spin covert, as on that morning when his mumbled plea
caromed off me—sharply, as off a felted cushion—and spun toward her, determined at the stove:
Come on, Honey, let’s play. Let’s keep the run alive.
Selected as runner-up of the 2014 New Ohio Review Poetry Contest by Alan Shapiro
In the museum of sex, the video loops its cycle of common bonobo behavior: penis fencing, genital rubbing, whole groups
engaged in frenzied pairs, their grinds and shrieks playing for the edification of each patron passing through the room. We all summon
our best poker faces. One woman speaks softly, reads from the sign that describes all the various partner combinations,
the multitude of positions, how relations lower aggression, increase bonding within tribes. We linger over this way of making peace,
wonder to each other if we would cease our litany of guns, bombs, missile strikes if we spent more time in wild embrace.
The exhibit doesn’t mention our other cousins, chimpanzees, who form border patrols, chase strangers in their midst, leave mangled bodies as lessons. That’s the story we already know
and want to forget through the release of these erotic halls, where we seek the thrill, the bliss
of these animals who hold us captive while we lament what traits we’ve found adaptive.
In your prime, shape presents itself first, the angle and curve of one thing, the size of something else, or the way her hair flows volcanically
along each subtle slope and swell. It is crazed, intense, super-heated, even the soles of your boots feel sticky,
because she’s entered you, you know this, she charts the very map of your blood, and that eyelid twitch you have going, they’ll claim is stress and dehydration,
but it’s her, pal, all her, she floods places you’ve never named in yourself, she proffers the pulse, the duende, the élan, that jackhammer of lust outside the Fiesta Ware outlet. . . .
But one day, it just happens, a man’s eyes cloud and change, you don’t feel with the same ardor the way she moves, her confident posture,
no, suddenly it is color you notice, the grays, the yellows, the bruised surfaces tinged with a silver-green, almost a tarnish, as if her skin were a metal,
and not such a precious one, either, more like pewter or the common alloys of soot-smudged medieval artisans, something to be re-shaped, hammered thin, become useful and used.
Walking through the woods / at midnight / we were on our way / to the pond / where we would skinny dip / when two yellow eyes / appeared on the path / we froze / they didn’t blink or move / the body was / hidden by the dark / there was something / sinister in its stillness / we turned back / you said it was probably / a bobcat / but better not / to take that chance / we shared a bed / untouching as usual / you fell / asleep first and I wondered what kept us / apart really / that night / and the others / the distance between us / maybe six inches / felt like a shadow / I couldn’t step out of / my two open eyes / the only light in the room / I thought of the animal / blocking our path / and it occurred to me / she was only a hostess / welcoming us / to the world of risk / smooth and lovely / water hugging your naked body / the animal said / are you ready / but we walked away / I had an urge to shake your body / awake and take you back / to the animal and say / confidently yes table for two / but instead I just lay there / in the perfect / quiet / country / darkness / and imagined the outline / of your chest rising / and falling / rising / and falling as you slept.
Featured Art:Fruit and Flowers by Orsola Maddalena Caccia
My father has a new woman. He’s 93, the old one is worn out. They used to hold hands and watch TV in his Independent Living cottage, but now there is the new one, to hold hands. The old one is in Assisted Living not 50 feet away but barely able to lift herself to her walker. He sits in her room after dinner, her mind wandering in and out. What if she escapes and comes over while my father is “taking a nap” with this new one? My mother is two miles away beneath her stone, relieved. I bring artificial flowers to her with my sister, who likes to do that when we visit. I am not much for demonstration. I would just stand there and say, oh, mother, he’s at it again. And she’d say, I am sleeping, don’t bother me with him anymore. And we’d commune in that way that knows well enough what we’re not saying. And I’d be lamenting my self-righteous silence in the past, my smart-aleck-motherjust- go-to-a-therapist talk. What I should have said was, was, was, oh, it was like a tower of blocks. Pull one out and all would fall. She would get a divorce and a job and marry some balding man like her father, who would be my ersatz father and would take her dancing and let her wear her hair the way she wanted, and she would cut it short and get it permed and life would quiet down and my father, to her, would morph into the handsome and funny Harvard Man he was in the old days, the way he posed her for his camera, tilting her head to the light with his devouring-passion fingertips and her days would begin to feel like a succession of pale slates to scribble on and erase before the new husband came home from work, while my father would spin off after whoever would “put up with him,” as he says, and would follow his new one around carrying her groceries and complaining that she spends too much, but biting his tongue and thinking how soon she would let him, well, you know, and I would be, what? The same as now, writing this down so that none of the shifting and sifting could get away cleanly without at least this small consequence.
Featured Image: “Blossoming Cherry on a Moonlit Night” by Ohara Koson
Married in Beijing, they had their names carved on a grain of rice. Mai wore a yellow silk gown. He wore a black suit. Embraced in the photo turned sideways they resemble a tiger scrambling through strewn mums. That evening they ate salted mango and shrimp. He can still taste that, see the tortoise-shell clip sun- splintered in her hair. That evening continues, stalled like the sea-filled drapes in their room. For twenty years he worked at a lab that accelerated protons. Here are photographs of their two girls on Lake Michigan, then in Zermatt, standing before the Matterhorn, whose moraines, cirques, and ravines resemble those through two names magnified on a grain of rice, or of that shadow looming through the CAT scan of her brain.
Featured image: Utagawa Hiroshige. Swallow and Wisteria, mid-1840s. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Everything has already blossomed: my neighbor’s wisteria has gone hog-wild across the ragged frontier of our mutual fence, the soft green tendrils of it violating international borders
and breaking treaties. Achtung! So let me tell you about
my neighbor’s wife: she’s delicious! And every morning I hear all the birds in Fort Wayne, Indiana, go
Yippee-yee! Yippee-yee! Which is how spring jibber-jabbers while her husband blows the leafy detritus
off their depilated lawn. Something’s missing. I want to be indigenous with her, something somehow prehistoric—
I want her in Brazil. I want a quiver full of spindly arrows to fetch our breakfast’s blue-tailed skink or
supper’s three-toed sloth. I want ritual scarification, coherent rites of passage. I want grandpa’s thighbone whittled down to a splinter
and dangling around my neck. I want to help her stitch banana leaves, scorch grubs against a rock. I want her to smile at me like a jaguar,
each incisor filed to a point. I want poisonous frogs, seashell currency, enemies who make sense, a copper plug through my lip. I want
a shameless squat. I want mumbo-jumbo witches to shun and screeching ghosts to appease. I want her to take me
down to the river where we’ll knot and inch our way across. I want her to trust me to be the lookout
for piranhas. I want to know when it’s that time for piranhas.
Selected as runner-up of the 2011 New Ohio Review Poetry Contest by Nancy Eimers
Feature image: Sir John Everett Millais. Study for the Head of the Rescuing Lover in Escape of the Heretic, 1857. The Art Institute of Chicago.
It’s any two strangers’ conversation. The proportions of the tall one’s face make him look like an Owen. The other one, easily a Paul. Owen makes a face, a gesture— his forced half-smile squints one eye, as he barely shrugs in a way that falsely means tentative, in a way that pejoratively leans and says, I’ll give you that much, a gesture which says entirely, You know, it’s like this. Maybe I’m wrong, but it’s something to think about. The maybe I’m wrong suggested by some softening of his eyes that kept him from a face that said, nice try or dubious— something he had to lose.
I catch my eye just beginning to imitate the gesture, try it out, here in this coffee shop. Maybe I’ll start wearing this look after saying things like, Yeah, I’m pretty sure that’s the city rock ‘n’ roll was built on. Or after anything ending in most people don’t know that.
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.
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.
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.
New Ohio Review 