What Stays, What Goes

May 1, 2026.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Ruth Bardon

I want to believe that pleasure leaves
a light stain on the bones.

They say the body remembers pain;
they never mention joy.

I know that pain accumulates,
fattens like a tick.

I want to believe
in a quiet shine,

some ruffled fur, a subtle scent,
a sprinkling of light.

I told myself repeatedly
when she was busy dying

that our little celebrations
would have to do her good,

would have to leave a fingerprint,
a residue of gladness,

and now that you and I repeat
the steps we took before,

the visits and the guided tours
as if we’d never been there,

I have to hope that even though
I know we won’t remember,

the strange delights will mark our bones
and metamorphosize,

and nourish something in our blood
to help us at the end.

The Last Photograph of Laura Before We Found Out She Was Autistic

February 27, 2026.Reading time 1 minute.

By Kim Farrar

She turns twenty-seven tomorrow
so I set the old photo on my desk
to look into her blue eyes and guess.

She’s standing next to the park bench
and peering directly into the camera; what they say
about eye contact was never true in her case.

Her fingers gently grip Elmo’s well-loved neck
but he’s looking backwards at the swings
where younger mothers plot secret parties.

Perhaps they didn’t appreciate
how I had to yell a thousand times
for Laura to stay out of the mud.

The breeze lifts blonde strands above her ears,
her home-cut bangs tousled, a few wisps
curving upward at the top of her head.

The leaves must have rustled
as I snapped the picture.
That easy wind with the future on its tail.

Without a Net

February 27, 2026.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Nick Norwood
Featured Art: “Untitled” by Josiane Kouagheu

Bored, sluggish in the gray air
of a downtown office tower,
we three “junior associates”—Chris,

Ray, and I—absconded to a park
in the middle of the afternoon.
Amid the murdering heat of mid-July

it was deserted, and we slipped out
of our cheap suits and into shorts
and T-shirts in the public bathroom,

retrieved, from the backseat, a worn
Spalding, started pounding the rock
on cracked cement, balling the jack

in a kamikaze game of cutthroat.
And when, late in the action, faces
red as blisters, Chris—who would

make it to “senior associate” only
to grow glioblastoma, call me out
of the thin blue thirty years after this

epically random afternoon and
a month later greet me at his door
in Minnesota, bald head gripped

by tentacles ending in electrodes—
this same Chris, at 25, three years out
of college and still untried, untested,

unsure, cut hard toward the basket
and pulled up to hoist a rainbow
jumper. Ray—who would disappear

from our lives, reemerge, disappear
again—like myself, stopped, panting,
half-dead, to follow the ball

in its immaculate trajectory,
its slow-motion backspin, rising
and rising toward a haloed instant

of solar eclipse, then falling, falling
toward the netless iron hoop, and
passing through in perfect silence.

Or did it? Good? Or no good?
Game winner, or brick? Passing,
as it did, through nothing but air.

In memory of Christopher B. Vanatta

The Fool’s Vow

February 27, 2026.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Joshua Boettiger

Sibylle gave a toast at our wedding—
May your beloved always be like a stranger to you.
So we practiced, took turns being the hitchhiker.
It was a turn-on, but it was also a risk—
strangers can be so cruel.

I know a man who says, I don’t know,
to every question he is asked, even questions
he knows the answer to (especially those).
It’s not like I’m ignorant.
I know that every six seconds
another word is dropped from the lexicon.
I know there are tables that mark the tides—
High, then low, then high, then low.
I’d like to be that weatherman.

But better than that would be
standing here at roadside’s bend

as you come around the turn
holding the wheel with one hand,
shocked by the suddenness of me.

I remember the first day of kindergarten
crying outside the door of the classroom
in my mother’s arms. I don’t know
what we are going to learn, I wailed.
Shhh, she said. That’s why you’re here.
No one knows.

You and I took the fool’s vow—
better to believe
than to be left flat-footed
when the ram’s horn blasts.

But this, too, is a strategy.

I Learned the Small-Town Stuff

February 26, 2026.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Kathleen Loe

of trading okra for clear-eyed bass,
passed through Miss Judy’s truck window
still smelling like lake,

and of nicknames and namesakes like when Bubba’s
shut down on the blunt edge of town, the new guy
reopened as Wuz Bubba’s—what Mama called

a honky-tonk, shifting her cigarette and Scotch
for a quick spin around the kitchen with my father—
who had switched on the Glenn Miller Band

in his head. Her immaculate manicure in his
rough rancher hands, rougher with the cornmeal
and bits of fried catfish—their inspiration making us all

a little tipsy, sweeping us up in the abundance
and supper had to simmer itself for a minute.
Is it fair to say it was a setup?

All their barefoot jitterbugging and kissing
in the kitchen, late-night laughing to the light riff
of ice tinkling in their drinks. It looked . . . so easy

that rowing away from the mirror-surface
of their marriage, not without its dark spots,
its chipped silvering of drink and debt.

I never saw the mists rising—risky water
has its warnings—but tipped rock-blind over
and over the lusty falls. Still, they danced

at all three of my weddings, shimmering
in beautiful new clothes, holding
their flutes high, determined bubbles rising

behind their eyes, tired from smiling at everyone, again.

Ode to a Barracuda

February 26, 2026.Reading time 1 minute.

By Suellen Wedmore

Not the fish, but to you,
’68 Plymouth convertible,
lingering now,
rust-rimmed, dusty,
in our abandoned barn,
your once-blue enameled body
now the color
of a mud-stirred pond,
your roof cracked and peeled.
Or is that our youth
hunkered there
like a hibernating bear?
Every now and then
I run my hands across
the pitted hood.
A new valve job,
a set of tires,
a coat of paint and you
could be humming again,
my husband and I
high school seniors,
cruising the streets, top down,
friends waving as we pull in
in front of the drugstore hangout,
saunter up to the counter,
where we’re greeted with a high five.
If I touch you now,
I can sense that other life
beneath the hood: days
without budgets, appointments,
and childcare.
Some car! If I could rev
your Super 383 Commando engine,
I would hear it: immortality,
one tank of gas away.

Excerpts from Falling in Love

February 20, 2026.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Bridget Bell

The snow folded a halcyon hush over Jersey City, and I
could still make a map of all the places where we fell in
love, the snow in high drifts on the sidewalks

where I’d later find my lost keys, shiny and heavy,
a brass-toothed life on display in a wet circle of
leftover blizzard skin:

the bar, the press, the P.O. Box, car, apartment.
Praise the lord. I wouldn’t have to tell my bosses.
We laughed at my luck

back then when we could still laugh at things
like that because there is so much promise in
the opening.

Barely off the main trail, we tore off our pants could
not waste the time it would take
to cut deeper into the Pine Barrens, and later, more laughter,

a tick on my ass. This started with two
barstools dragged close, my knee pressed into
your knee, the pull so steel-strong

as my fingers swam beneath a shield of sticky counter to find
your fingers. And up against the steering wheel, my old car
parked at a scenic Utah lookout,

and after each bar shift,
I fought sleep, drove north out of the city to crash next to you
on a blowup mattress in the basement

surrounded by your parents’ packed up Xmas decor,
my beloved dog not even allowed
upstairs in the mornings, remember how she whined 

at the basement door while we fried 
eggs for breakfast? And now, Sweet Violet, how sorry I am.
I hated to lock you down there; it hurt my heart, but, god, don’t you know,
I would have done anything for him.

Unaccompanied Minors

February 19, 2026.Reading time 1 minute.

By Chelsea Rathburn

—San Francisco to Miami, 1951

My father recalls nothing of the flight itself, only
arriving, dazed, to meet the mother

he hadn’t seen since he was still in diapers.
He doesn’t know how they left the foster home,

or if his father was there to say goodbye,
or who paid for the tickets, only that they

flew alone, he and his sister, arguing
over just whose Ami they were headed for.

On the tarmac twelve hours later, he heard
two strangers yelling: his mother and new father,

shouting a name they’d coined for him. They seemed
surprised, even angry, he didn’t know

to answer to it. His memory stops there,
in that moment. Their anger never ended.

His sister swears now there was an engine fire
that she spotted, then an emergency landing.

More likely she remembers the stop in Dallas
to refuel, but my father’s given up correcting her.

Blue-handled Grabber

February 18, 2026.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Maura Stanton

Before her stroke, my mother used it to grab
a fallen tissue, or the newspaper crossword
when it slipped off her lap. Now it’s mine,
sitting in my study near an artist’s easel
unfolded for years. Squeeze the handles
and the grabber’s bite picks up anything light,
even a paperclip, with its magnetic lip.
Don’t want to stoop? The grabber pulls underwear
out of the dryer, or lifts the catch-and-release
mousetrap so I can see if it’s still empty.
It swipes the ceiling cobwebs, or picks up
an M&M or a grape rolled under the fridge.
On autumn walks I could use the grabber to yank
more yellow leaves off the trees to let me see
the architecture of winter below the froth,
or maybe, sitting by a window some dark night
I might grab a distant star out of the sky,
one of those little pinpricks from a galaxy
far from our own, where life’s more cheerful.
The tiny star would tremble on its way,
gleaming and giving off blue sparks as I pulled
it down with the grabber, and made it mine.

Lunch with Heron

February 18, 2026.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Maura Stanton
Featured Art: “Black Barn, Adjacent Land” by Thad DeVassie

After the rain, a heron’s stalking the stream,
lifting its delicate knees, neck outstretched,
and just as I pass by, it dips its sharp beak—
flash of silver—and swallows a small fish.
Shocked, I stand on the bank as the fat bulge
moves down the gray throat and disappears.

But it’s not the fish, it’s the bit of silver
that’s stung me—and then I see it—
the job committee that took me out to lunch
when I was desperate for any sort of work.
Unwrapping a big, foil-covered burrito,
chatting brightly to the closed faces,
I didn’t notice foil stuck to my first bite
until I tasted metal. Then the sharp edge
cut my throat, and I coughed and coughed,
sputtering beans and salsa as I choked.
Someone slapped my back, but I had to reach
inside my mouth with my fingers to get it out
while my hosts looked aghast at the silver bit.
Another job I wasn’t going to get, I thought,
and ordered a beer, though I wasn’t drinking.

Boxes

February 17, 2026.Reading time 1 minute.

By Rodd Whelpley
Featured Art: “Random Toothpicks #4” by Thom Hawkins

On the top shelf are coffee cups
from which I never drank
and, next to all the ghosts
of passwords, sits a stout list
of dog names I will never use.
Life is a short place, littered
with vital, misremembered notions,
riddled with porcelain shards—
spoiled gifts from a son at summer camp
or souvenirs from crispy-aired mountains
where slow steam curled past the lips
of eco-friendly paper cups. Careful boys,
careful how you finally pack my house.
Don’t miss that stuff that isn’t there.

The federal government banned lead paint in 1978

February 15, 2026.Reading time 1 minute.

By Caroline White
Featured Art: “Untitled” by Josiane Kouagheu

but, like an outlaw, that does not just make it
disappear: the act of searching, of hunting
down becomes something like adoration—
riding on horseback through the night only to
catch a glimpse of him, to describe again the
color of his hair. And so with two hands on
the roller we sealed in the lead paint with the
boombox in the center of the room, the disc
gliding around and around like Saturn’s ring.
My father painted wide and calculated
stripes. The room felt special when it was
empty, like a museum—our voices touched,
echoing into each other. This is how it feels
to be the first figurines in the snow globe
before they drown you. Before the snow falls
and won’t stop falling. It was a soft green. I
was painting flowers and leaves and then
they were sinking into the rest of the paint,
hidden; the lead, layers away from us and
dormant. Sealed off like unspeakable
memory, somewhere deep in there, the tiny
flecks staining a ripped sweatshirt. I have
lost so much inside myself. I have forgotten
what music was playing.

Basketball

November 18, 2025.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Christopher Shipman

Mark was two years younger.
He was 10 to my 12. But Mark had a hoop
with a chain net, the post
planted right in his backyard, its slick metal
gleaming among his mother’s azaleas
and lilyturfs. It didn’t matter
that on our block two years meant
two lifetimes. We were fast friends anyway.
Had to be. The park wasn’t
too far but it was farther than I wanted.
Besides, his mother made the best
sweet tea and gave us all we could swallow.
That summer I honed my skills.
I’d finally have the chops
to take Jimmy Blake to the hole
the next season. That was my only thought
at the top of the key. Then the next
season started and I was 42
and living in another state, married
for going on 13 years, father to a daughter
who just celebrated her 10^th birthday,
her smile gleaming among
three bouquets of assorted flowers adorning
the dining room for the occasion.
I can’t even remember what Jimmy Blake
looked like. The new season
will start up soon with or without him.
With no Mark nearby, I’ll air up an old ball
in the shed, head for the park.

Duplex (Gray-blue Staircase)

November 11, 2025.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Theo Jasper

I feel small at the bottom of the gray-blue staircase,
the one where she didn’t die, even when I visit it in my memory.

Even when I visit it in my memory, the duplex where she tried to die,
I can never reach the top of that staircase.

The light hits the blood on the floor, (why can’t God see the staircase?)
and my childhood cat has escaped, like she knew what was coming.

And in my memory I have escaped because I know what is coming.
But memory is not reality and the reality is this: there was blood on the windowsill.

Memory is whichever wine goes down the easiest. Reality is the staircase, the windowsill.
In a duplex on Orange Street, there’s blood all the way up the stairs.

In a duplex on Orange Street, I never move from the bottom of the stairs.
Maybe God sees me. Maybe he doesn’t. But in my memory, I never go up.

I keep my head bowed. My blood is like wine. I never, ever grow up.
I stay small at the bottom of the gray-blue staircase.

Lesson Plan

October 25, 2025.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Kim Farrar
Featured Art: “Greenhouse” by Mallory Stowe

What is your name’s botanical source?
I see mangroves and root forests whenever I pronounce it.  
Tell me about your superpowers.  Tell me about being small and frightened.
What do you stare at to disappear? 
Describe the sound of a push broom on stairs. 
Describe your hair.  

Do you draw those hatch marks on your notebook as a nervous habit
or is it a trapdoor to your mind’s netherworld?
I like to pretend my brain is a landscape
with silt, snow drifts, and an aurora borealis.
I like cartoons where a lion sees a man’s head turn into a giant ham steak.
I love it when the aroma becomes a beckoning finger.

What three adjectives would your friends use to describe you?
Use a thesaurus.  Use it like a Ouija board,
run your divining fingers down the page. Feel the grain.
Instead of answering—let’s call out fun words to say,
like schlep or kerfuffle.

What is your favorite book? Why?
I’ll confess my least favorite book:
Wuthering Heights.  There. I said it. 
I didn’t read it once in high school and twice in college.
Heathcliff was a candy bar.

What is your dream job?
Mine is describing the universe in mathematical formulas.
What about staring? So undervalued in today’s marketplace.

What qualities are most important to be a successful student?
This is a trick question because our hope is the same:
to get some credit in the face of our limited choices.
None of the above is never, rarely, sometimes, often,
always the best answer.

Drink it up, buttercup

June 1, 2025.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Natalie Taylor

Blue Fruit Moon: August 30, 2023

There’s a lot of hullabaloo in the woo woo
circles about this Super Blue Fruit moon, so rare
we won’t see the next one until 2037. My astrologer
friend counts on her fingers seven celestial bodies
in retrograde: Mercury, Venus, Saturn, Uranus,
Neptune, Pluto, and Chiron. A celestial goo
of retrospect and rehashing, a muck of revisiting old
stories, exes, holidays and birthdays fuzzy on the why
but clear on what wasn’t there, who didn’t show up,
what we missed. Wheels spinning under
a tree. What was plucked too small, hard
and green. Reconnecting with your inner child,
still wanting to play, to be held. Still dreaming
of some freedom attainable with gobs of money or super
hero powers or sheer will. The planets rotate in reverse,
earth shifts in its nook in the universe. We look back.

Riding my scooter after teaching a late class, I stop
at the light. I am not young anymore. I shiver in sweaty
yoga tights, chilling in night air. Once I make it home,
I will have fulfilled responsibilities of all three jobs,
another 12 hours devoted to maintaining shelter and food.
A young man pulls up next to me on his Kawasaki, dirty
carburetor popping with every wrist crank. He waves
smiling under midnight metallic helmet. In the other lane,
a Harley’s deep throat rumbles as its bandanaed rider
revs the V-twin crankpin engines. We wait for green,
a small symphony of crankpins and cylinders and buzz
and backfires under a freeway overpass. I point to the moon,
full and free as a peach, Saturn in conjunction hovering
just above, still spinning. The riders flip
their thumbs up. Just some kids on bikes
lapping up all the juicy bits they can get.

Wall of Clocks

June 1, 2025.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Kathleen McCoy

“We rarely hear ‘truth and reconciliation’—just ‘truth and justice.'”
—David Park, author of The Truth Commissioner

On this wall tick your childhood and mine, your loves
and mine, your regrets, cacophonies of memory

and harmonies in your ear, coagulations of unuttered grief,
relentless news from a grittier Belfast, our cousins

going at each other in the streets, Molotov cocktails and hurled
rocks. Rifles. Truth without whisper of reconciliation.

But this is not the Belfast we have read about. Now the streets
are clean, the bricks new. Twenty-seven percent check

the “no religion” box. Yet boxes there still be. With Barry’s tea
I toast a thing that is not a thing, a thought that is not

singular beneath rolling gray clouds that siphon the self,
that challenge perception, angle and taste, domesticity,

violence, numinousness. Dozens of clocks stand at attention,
unseeing eyes fixed on the observer, no two declaring

the same time. None advance; all compel stares: one moon-
faced grandfather clock painted blue, grannies’ broken

clocks, wooden clocks with cats or hens or roosters or sheep or
horses or farmers and their wives with mice that once spun

in small circles to children’s delight, oak clocks, clocks of ivory
irony, aluminum alarm, plastic grace, yellowed whites

like tired eyes, grays like boards left out too long in rain—all stand
in pleasing array—but this signpost points in thirty directions.

No wonder I never know what time it is!
This liminal Belfast in earliest glimmer of spring

wriggles into the raincoat and, despite its bloody past,
could be nearly anywhere within the body or the earth.

Sitting before this monument to time, its silent mellifluence of green,
its threat or promise of birdsong or the sound of striking, I note

how milky tea grows cool, limbs warm. In my absence, here. I am.

June 1, 2025.Reading time 2 minutes.

MY WIFE, IN HER ELEMENT

By Jeff Worley

Featured Art: Stephen Reichert, Untitled, 2012. Oil on canvas, 12″ x 12″. “Cirlce” series.

(for Linda’s birthday, 9/5/2023)

You were a human otter,
who loved to roll and roll
in every body of water you found
waiting. Friend’s backyard pool,
Cave Run Lake (an easy walk
from our cabin), tumultuous waves
off Ambergris, all there for you.
In Kokkari, 1981,
the Greek boys watched
every step you took from the frothy
Med because you hadn’t bothered
with a swimsuit, flinging beads
of turquoise water from the tips
of your raven hair. You laughed,
sputtering water, nearly breathless,
smiling at me taking this shot with the Nikon
from our Daisy Duck beach towel.
Does life
get any better than this? Not for me,
I thought then. Not for me, I think now.

(for Linda Kraus Worley, 1950–2021)

Kids Running After a Car

March 4, 2025.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Hee-June Choi

after the Korean War

Asphalt covered half the street; the rest was
overgrown with sunberries we ate. At the sound of a horn,
we ran to the car; in its bluish smoke, we saw
our future like a 3-D film. When my friend

JC tied his feet to the back bumper of a jeep
to sneak a ride, its engine started;
market people screamed as his bleeding head
was dragged for a hundred yards.

Our most daring venture was to the mountain cave
to dig out bullets for spinning tops’ axles.
But we had to cross locals’ territory––my forehead
still bears the scar of a thrown stone.

These road brawls ended when someone
in the cave shouted: Corpses!—soldiers in a mass grave.
Yet, those were carefree days. Dropping by any house
at mealtime, I ate with them if they laid me a place

—if not, I played next to their dinner table.
House doors were left unlocked:
what thief would steal an empty bag of rice?
In summer, we slept in the public pool’s storage shack,

no parents looking for us.
It was the children’s utopia: what we didn’t have,
we didn’t need. Even now, walking my suburban street
late at night, I snoop around for remnants of those days:

that sour tailpipe smoke must be a shimmer
in the air somewhere on Earth.

Thinking About My Father’s Erector Set from 1948

March 3, 2025.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Jen Siraganian

Rarely, my father speaks of the slow rubble piling,
before months sped hotter than his parents expected.
They thought it would pass, unaware of what aches
appear later. He was eight. This was before
walls, checkpoints, talk of two states.

Let’s focus on one wound at a time. I can only tell
a story diluted. I’ll try more softly—my father had toys,
then he didn’t. He had a childhood, then he didn’t.

Here is me at a sunlit kitchen table in California,
doubling as American and something like coarse salt.

How often I hear “it’s complicated” when I mention
my father grew up in Palestine, went to school in Palestine,
immigrated to the U.S. as a Palestinian refugee.

His voicemail last week—don’t post anything online.

For years, he lived in no-man’s-land, and I,
half-Armenian, half-daughter of a man
from half of a land that is half of me.

When I visited, could I call the wall beautiful, but only
the painted side? My grandmother’s friend spit on
for shopping on the wrong street in Jerusalem.
Jews walk on one, Muslims the other.
She’s neither. I started paying a man to do the errands.

Seeing my father’s childhood home, its walls
adorned with sniper fire and a gravity of collisions.
It consumed me, bullet holes as common as commas.

In the Armenian Quarter, the pottery store owner
said he would close before things worsened.
Palestine his home, until it wasn’t. Truths stitched
into my grandmother’s embroidery. Did I tell you
she left that too? Here is an echo no one asked for,
singing of a home in Jerusalem before Armenians evaporated.

At the airport, I, though not yet vapor,
say nothing to the Israeli passport agent.
Not telling him I visited Palestine. Not asking
for the return of the toys my father left behind

Aural Projection

December 6, 2024.Reading time 1 minute.

By John A. Nieves

I used to believe in the tang of orange
Tic-Tacs—that it had anything to do
with oranges. That three bright sugar

pills in my child-hand could shine
up a dark morning. And they did. What
little magic. What’s so easy to miss

so much. I believed rainbows on
window dew hid tiny treasures, that sneezing
while saying someone’s name meant

they were thinking of me, that everything
I loved would stay forever if I took
care of it, if I did my part. I have almost

none of that now: the purple stuffed
rabbit, my two pet Siamese cats, my best
friend across the way, my whole

family. I used to believe music could
change the weather. I’m lying. I still
do. I still believe people attach themselves

to songs they love, creep into their choruses.
This may be literally true in the science
of memory. This may also make me

superstitious. But, O, when I sing
you, I can almost reach. There is no way
there is nothing there.

Down Jersey

November 30, 2024.Reading time 4 minutes.

By John Wojtowicz

Featured Art: “Pebbles vs. the world” by Leo Arkus

As a kid, I spent Saturday nights
underneath this boardwalk, poking a dollar bill
between cracks, pulling it back
after luring unsuspecting tourists.
Now I’m back around, fixing up a friend’s beach bungalow:
paint-peeling and porch-rotting
on the bay side of town.
I’ve only walked the boards a few times
mostly forgoing views of the ocean
for beer-drenched nights at the Shamrock.
Tonight, a thunderstorm rolls in
and the preacher at the boardwalk chapel
offers shelter to all but those
with a still lit cigarette.
Zombie Crusher and Terrordactyl
don’t let lightening stop them
from barreling over jumps made of beach sand
but the amusement rides have ceased to amuse.
The tram car watches me.
I like riding the Sea Serpent with its upside-down
and backwards thrills;
how for that 1 minute & 48 seconds
it’s hard to think about anything
other than staying alive.
I like the monster trucks too.
The way they flatten.
I put out my Marlboro and take shelter
in the wood-paneled chapel
next to a handlebar-mustached-man
sporting a throwback Hulk Hogan
t-shirt: Hulkamania is running wild, Brother.
I think about how Dolly Parton
made a spoof music video
in which she married Hulk Hogan
after reading in a tabloid
that she was having an affair with a professional wrestler.
“He’s got a headlock on my heart,
it was a take down from the start.”
For Dolly, it’s all fertilizer; she’s a western-
wigged buddha two-stepping through life.
For me, it’s been more of a hot-coal-
hop-skip. The rain slows, thunder booms.
I have no special someone for whom
to buy a pair of custom booty shorts.
I grab a beer before the concessions close,
toss rings on bottles, land quarters
on plates. The unbridled ocean
gives me chills. I think about how sailors
wore earrings worth enough
to cover the cost of their return and burial,
salt-slicked mariners
with no need for gold hoops.
I bend down to pick up a dollar that disappears
before my fingers can grasp it.
I think I want to be buried at sea too;
being decomposed by sea lice
seems more exotic than earthworms.

Covenant

November 18, 2024.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Baylina Pu

We were making mojitos
in the kitchen when we found
a  mortar and pestle made of

Marble. With them, I crushed mint leaves
and later, slices of lime
four or five at a time. My friend

Mixed in sugar, the water
we’d carbonated ourselves, and
white rum with a wooden spoon

In a stainless-steel bowl.
That evening, the sun was
setting through the Japanese maple

By the porch, and leaves
had slid down the car windshield
like paper cut-outs. I felt

Grown up, a real woman. At dinner,
there were eleven of us crowded
around the table, beside

A glass door which looked out
over the lake, still unfrozen
even in November. We licked brown

Sugar off the rims of our glasses.
My hands could still feel the weight
of that marble mortar, an invention of

The Stone Age. Even as early
as then, happiness had already
been discovered: simple movements of

Grinding and stirring. Somewhere, desire
was calling, but we were so deep
in the woods nobody heard it.

Baby Shower

November 16, 2024.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Annie Schumacher

Featured Art by Jordyn Roderick

We drive six hours to a San Diego swimming pool.
A padded bikini top adorns a deer
trophy, buoys balance on the mantle.

Blue balloons, stuffed pheasants
in a fishing net. I place a gift bag
on a blue tablecloth. After rehab,

my brother smiles with ease,
skewering meat on the other side
of a screen door. Star spangled

diaper cake, blue M&Ms in a wide-
mouthed jar, gun safe in the bedroom.
Kitchen towels from Camp Pendleton.

Proud USMC Wife, Proud Mother,
Proud Unborn Baby, Proud Australian Shepherds.
My hair in the frosting,

my hair in the fishing net.
I follow the nameless dogs
through blue wrapping tissue,

decide on divorce with
a paper plate in my hand.
The baby, a murmur,

folded in his mother.
He will be named after a type of metal.

Visiting the Natural History Museum with My 97-Year-Old Dad

July 19, 2024.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Michael Mark

In the photograph that my father has
me take of him with the woolly mammoth,
he’s pointing to himself. He asks

to see the selfie. I don’t correct
his terminology. Next, the triceratops, then
the sabertooth tiger. He takes the same stance

throughout the Extinction Exhibit. With the 4000-
year-old beetle, 300-million-year-old coelacanth,
the dodo. She was beautiful,

he sighs at the butterfly, and I get the sense
he’s thinking about Mom. Earlier, in his kitchen,
he posed with a jar of mayonnaise

with the expiration date from 1998, also pointing
to himself. At the cemetery, he stands on his plot,
next to my mother, because I refuse to let him

lie down. Back at his apartment, he says it’s nice
to have some company. I know
he’s referring to his defunct card game, so we go

down to the game room. He sits at their once
regular table and points around the empty chairs,
Billy, Dick, Harold, Nat, Frank, hey Joe. He deals

them in. I take the picture of him squinting at the cards, fanned
tight to his chest. He tosses a chip to the center
of the felt. In the shot, it really looks like

he’s waiting for someone to call his bet.

The World as It Is

July 18, 2024.Reading time 2 minutes.

By David O’Connell

Some believe the new math
proves reality is actually

a hologram. And who am I
to argue when I don’t know

the language? I speak pig math.
At times, finger count. Failed

this week to help my daughter
with her fractions. Don’t worry,

you’ll never use it in real life,
remember? But now it seems

this math has always been
presiding over smoke-filled

back rooms of the universe,
invisible mover and shaker

knowing what we want
are answers, and that we want

them now. Outside, the street
is darker for the light rain,

and I’ve cracked the window
to catch the scent of earth

kicked up by water falling
back to us. Nothing is lost,

explained the talking head
last night, asking that we picture

clapped erasers raising
clouds of dust. The math

he detailed says it’s possible
for every molecule of chalk

I smacked out in angry
plumes beside St. Mary’s

one afternoon in 1982
to reverse and gather again

upon the board—faint, then
clearly remaking each mistake

I’d scrawled that day in class.
Implausible, but not. An act

the nuns would’ve taught us
wasn’t math but miracle

on par with the angels
that appeared—like, what?

if not holograms—to trumpet
what they knew was right.

Driveway Toad

July 18, 2024.Reading time less than 1 minute.

By Rob Cording

A year after my brother died,
I told my daughter about
the toad that once lived
in the hollowed-out knot
of an apple tree
in the center of my childhood
driveway. My brothers and I
liked to visit it after school,
but the tree came down
in a snowstorm, and my parents
graveled-over that spot.
When my daughter
asked what happened
to the toad, I explained that
it probably moved
under a rock, or to the woodpile
along the side of the house. “Or,”
she responded, “it died.”
Then, she skipped into the house
and left me outside.

Obituaries

July 18, 2024.Reading time 1 minute.

By George Franklin

My mother used to say that only old people read them.
Now, I get an email about a classmate from high school,
Someone I might not have recognized over fifty years ago,
Much less today. I could call my friend Richard to ask,
Who was the guy who just died? And, Richard could tell me.
But the truth is that I don’t want to keep track of acquaintances
Beneath the ground—or above it. The cemetery in Shreveport
Was just down the block from a drive-thru liquor store that
Didn’t ask for IDs. The ability to turn the steering wheel and
Press the gas pedal was apparently good enough. On the same
Street, a fried chicken place sold onions pickled in jalapeños
And vinegar. They went down well with Jack Daniel’s
On summer weekends when we’d play penny-ante poker
In someone’s garage. Back then, almost none of us were dying.

Any Single Thing

July 18, 2024.Reading time 1 minute.

By Meryl Natchez

A week past the twenty-ninth anniversary of your death
I read Seamus Heaney’s poem about the kite,
and my first thought is to show it to you.

So I stumble again
into the hole death leaves,
unfillable.

Another morning
of a day that promises
to be beautiful
without your presence
except for this faint ache
because you loved kites,
their unpredictable dialogue
with the wind
transmitted to your hand.

That hand gone
and gone again
each time
I reach for it.

LinkedIn Said Your Dad Visited My Profile

July 18, 2024.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Chrys Tobey

Maybe he wanted to ask about our cats
and dog. Maybe he was curious about how many
colleges I now teach for, curious about my job prospects
as a poet in a pandemic. I didn’t send him a message—
didn’t tell him I saw you on the beach this summer
walking with your new partner, didn’t tell him how
you looked somewhat happy, how I felt excited for you—
I almost ran up to say hi, but I was in my bathing suit
and it was our anniversary, or what would have been
our anniversary, anyway. Maybe I should write
your dad, I’m okay. I don’t know if he would care that our
old man cat is dying, that I give him IV fluids, or that I finally fell
in love with someone, but she broke like the coffee
cup I once threw on the kitchen floor in front of you.
Perhaps he’d like to know that I had a biopsy in my vagina
and even though I felt like a plank of wood was on my chest
with someone standing on it while I waited for the results,
it came back fine. I could share how some days
I feel this sadness that can make it difficult
to bake a potato or how, once, I almost burned your ear
with a wax candle or how I still think about the time
you gave me a bag of socks with grips on the bottom
because I kept falling down our bedroom stairs.
You were so afraid I’d break my leg or hit my head
or worse, especially after I bruised my butt purple,
but love, I knew then what I’d tell your dad now—I’ll be all right.

The Grandmother Tree

March 26, 2024.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Pam Baggett

My sister named this venerable maple
growing at the edge of the mountain’s gravel road,
main trunk long broken, pocked with holes,
a once-mighty tree now slowly failing.
She’s lost her apical dominance, I say, meaning
that when the top broke off, side branches
shot up past the injured trunk like raised arms.
On the left, one wide kind eye, an open mouth
framed by credible lips. Step right, a second eye
squinted shut, mouth twisted up, as if she’s yelling
at us the way our father’s mother did: imagined slights,
our insufferable rudeness, which she thought
should be spanked out of us. Mom never laid a hand,
which says a lot about her mother, gone too soon
for my sister and me to have known. Grandma Baggett
and her snarling chihuahuas gone, too, when our parents divorced.
No wonder my sister imagines a tree could be a grandmother;
she’s been hiding in stories since we were small.
I anchored to the safety of science, to cold fact: Trees break.
A grandmother can call you Sugar one minute,
rage at you the next. Can die without you ever once
hearing her voice.

College Days

March 17, 2024.Reading time 1 minute.

By Rob Cording

Featured Art by Stephen Rounthwaite

Outside, a few gray snowflakes fell,
a truck rumbled onto 290, and the cold
seeped through our windows.
Our landlord had rigged our thermostat
so we couldn’t turn up the heat.
But that day, the four of us nailed a bag of ice
to the wall over the sensor, and when
the heat kicked on, we let it pump
until we’d shed our sweatshirts and flannels.
Leaning back on our futon, we shared a joint,
invincible in our underwear and T-shirts, laughing
and laughing. Twenty years ago now,
before we knew loss and grief, when we sang along
to our DVD of The Last Waltz and didn’t notice
the steady drip of the ice melting.

What It Looks Like

March 14, 2024.Reading time 1 minute.

By Emily Wheeler

Featured Art by Glenna Parry

Returning from emptying
compost out back,
I’m stopped
by a praying mantis.
Don’t you look fabulous,

I hear my mother’s voice,
Dressed to kill and
to blend in, with just
a flash of emerald
on your lower wing.

I hear her say,
Your feelers, are they new,
or are you parting
them differently?
Also, great figure!

I see her swooning
over its eyes that pop
without any makeup,
and the way its face
comes to a point

at its delicate chin:
really quite special.
To me, the mantis
just stares, nods,
possibly politely.

My mother appreciates
many kinds of beauty
and the bug’s elegant
plus alluring look
but I know

its brown egg sac
is hard as cement to protect
the eggs from heat, cold,
even the occasional maternal
appetite for its young.

Should You Choose To Accept It

November 23, 2023.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Emily Blair

I couldn’t wait to leave town when I was young.
After that, I’m not sure I have much of a story.
It’s true I met someone. We had a child together.
In between I walked across a frozen lake.
I drove over a frozen mountain.
I ran up a hill to find a pay phone.
I closed down the city for extended action scenes
to the tune of 290 million dollars. No—
I’m thinking of the latest Mission Impossible movie
with Tom Cruise. I get confused.
I should be writing domestic poetry,
but I don’t want to. What more do you need to know?
Our family of three live in a third floor apartment.
Sometimes we also meet up outside. I guess leaving town
is still the most exciting thing I’ve done. The other day
I asked another mother on the playground how to clean
bathroom grout. I said Stephanie, what’s your secret?
Then we ripped off our latex masks,
revealing our true identities. No—
that mask thing happened in the first Mission Impossible movie,
the one I saw with my friend Michelle. I leaned over
to say something snarky, but she was fast asleep.
It must have been the whirring of the helicopter blades.
There’s nothing duller than an overblown action sequence.
The secret to having an exciting life is the people you meet.
The secret to battling a helicopter in a tunnel
is explosive chewing gum. The secret to cleaning grout
is a magic eraser from Mr. Clean.

The lone wild goose sticks out his tongue at me

November 12, 2023.Reading time 1 minute.

By Joyce Schmid

half-heartedly, not like the one last April— fierce,
protecting pear-green goslings. But this year, no little ones.

It’s been so long since I have seen a baby—
even seen one—not to speak of holding one,
or watching a tiny face reflect my smile.

I’m not demented yet, not like the woman who begged to see
her stolen babies as they loomed above her, grown.

I’m not asking to be young again, back in the tent
with everyone asleep but me and the baby at my breast—
warm baby in the chill of night— or in the back seat

of my daughter’s Ford Escape— the “baby-whisperer” she called me
as I gentled her son to sleep.

I tell myself there are advantages to being old:
no longer wondering

if God exists, or what life’s meaning is
(He does, there’s none),
acquiring bits of wisdom

such as everything takes longer than you think
except your life.

Has this happened to you

October 20, 2023.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Rebecca Foust

Selected as winner of the 2023 New Ohio Review Poetry Contest by Denise Duhamel

Featured Art by Claire Bateman

You realize you know something
you didn’t know you knew,

like in what modern-day country
lie the ruins

of ancient Troy, or the name of the boy
Achilles loved, or the Trojan

who speared him, or the former Beatle
or first drummer for The Stones

or your sister’s first flame, who drank
milk straight from the carton,

whose name she now—60 years later
& brain-wiped by ALZ—

cannot herself recall. He was a strapping,
young crewcut man, who came

to court my sister & then left with her more
winsome twin—our other sister

now in an ICU after swallowing a full vial
of Tylenol. I knew

before it happened, it would happen like this
& nothing to be done.

There is foresight, & then, its impotence.
Anyway, it was Pat Nicodemus

who courted my sister, not to be confused
with Patroclus, Hector,

Pete Best or Tony Chapman, each doomed
in their way as my sisters are,

as we all are doomed, but each name still
a small ping of pleasure

when I blurt it out, surprising everyone,
especially me, still playing

the game. In the days before Google,
it felt powerful & oracular,

what we didn’t know we knew welling up
on our tongues,

coursing its way out & through, like the body
of a baby after the head is born.

Aristotle demanded surprise & recognition
from good writing,

plus pity & horror, much of which presumes
foreknowledge,

for a time occluded but still operating behind
the scene, unseen,

as a kind of sixth sense, or is it non-sense,
like when you know

without knowing your husband is cheating
again, or what sometimes

pulls your pen across the page like automatic
writing, or your cribbage peg home

ahead of the rest when you’ve all along been,
with immense concentration,

wondering did I close those car windows?
now that you’re hearing rain.

How unknown are we to ourselves, unreadable
code in the end. I never thought

that after nine years of drought it would rain
like the Amazon inside my car,

nor that one sister would wind up living every
hour of every day in the same

Bonanza rerun, nor another so enwombed
in despair, nor that I’d be the one

to leave my marriage after four decades of fear
my husband would leave,

but somehow, I was not surprised
that my car, a sauna inside,

would continue to run, even after I found
that floormat profusion

of mushroom, each pink cup turned up
& open like a wish

or a tiny satellite dish set to receive.

Étude en douze exercices, S.136

October 12, 2023.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Weijia Pan

*
In Liszt, I hear an old man stumbling across the fields to meet me.
He starves to save bits of bread for my pocket.
*
My own grandpa is different in a senior home in Shanghai:
He’s polite. Asking about my age & name & marriage & age.
*
Time’s time’s timestamp. Which means that time keeps its own records
like a metronome, or a fountain blooming every 25 seconds
*
unlike the skyline that fades when the clouds loom large,
a flock of your imagination dropping on a book’s dead pages.
*
In the early 19th century, Japanese samurais from the South
would gather every spring to discuss insurrection. Now! they would say,
*
finally; it was 1868, the Americans were banging on the door
& the last shōgun, a bony young man, would wisely concede.
*
Being an introvert, I concede every day to my own messiness.
I read in my study. I love the fact that you’re out there, reader.
*
But glad you were not here is not what a poet should tell another poet, as if
to imagine the world, we should only write about selfhood, the feathers of birds
*
on parchment, & cold, 13th-century nights. How destructive
were Stalin’s pencils, marked in blue ✘s & ✔s on death warrants,
*
a color not visible when photographed?
He started off as a poet. A job I now have.
*
I remember another poet in Flushing, NY who told me
that I shouldn’t let my poems end too easily, how I’d always
*
despised him a little, yet accepted when he rummaged for cash
& broken English, a fatherly way to say stay alive and goodbye.

Empty Chamber

May 4, 2023.Reading time 1 minute.

By Mark Neely

Featured Art: Ageless Darkness by John Sabraw

the newspaper tells
the childrns story
the mayors heart

swells and then explodes
near the end of the parade
I read Dickinsn

as flies flash drkly
against the blue wall
in spring my blood runs dank

I have these lttle spells
shout back at the news
cast pills

into my throat
sin my high school song
disappear into the moated

rooms the shooters eyes
sink forever in my memry
my kids hold signs first

grade fourth grade class
of twnty twnty too
class of those

who God held in the light
though we did nothing to deserv
though we didn’t believe in hem

Ode to My Father’s Body

August 22, 2022.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Jeri Theriault
Selected as winner of the 2022 NORward Prize for Poetry by a panel of previous poetry contributors

Featured Art: Lost Moment by Mallory Stowe

I lose my way in the low-note harmonica
of my father’s absence & unfold the map
of his body in the big window of his barbershop

at the corner of Summer
& Gold    where he    slow    stood all-day
poised to conduct    the chorale    clip-clip

of his trade    shears    razor    hot-towel
talc    brush & tonic    Red Sox radio
my father vaguely tidy & distant    not

dissonant. My everyone-knew-him father.
My year-round-bicycle father. My father’s
body at school nights

or Sunday mass    silent    always
silent but singing in the cellar attic
garage & whistling    as he built back-yard

swing-set    lean-to    edged
garden rows    or hosed night after sub-zero
night    the ice rink where I soothed

afternoons    cold & would-be
wild.    His body hunched in the chair
of my mother’s hospital room that time

we thought she would die    thirty years after
they divorced. My father’s corpuscles
& liver    shins & scapula

his semper fi     tough-guy body    his ear
his good eye my self-taught father in the city
of his body my beige & pastel checked-shirt

father in serviceable shoes & trench coat    who left
his copy of Camus’ The Stranger face-down
on the bed in English though his tongue

his lips    his throat    were French.    He left    too
his body    that night    left
what was left of his body    left

his Iwo Jima    his broken birth family
left his untold    his mystery    left me
his daughter    the wilderness

of my own body    that is to say    left me
half-him left the quiet why or who he was
might have been    what he most

loved    so that sometimes    I still walk
the hallways of my father’s body
half the doors gone    half of them still here.

Cursing Lessons

May 13, 2021.Reading time 1 minute.

By Jackie Craven

Featured art: look, quick by Emma Stefanoff

I am learning to bake curses
the way my mother did
with paprika and clotted cream.
Her recipe book lists fifteen steps
and she’s added three more,
her instructions scrawled
on pages brittle as phyllo dough.
I trace my fingers over every word
and try to understand the significance
of Simmer on Low. I’ve heard
that if you heat a kettle gently,
a frog can’t feel the water boil. But
what to do about the grumble
from the dining room, the hungry command
to hurry up? Nothing my mother served
could please my father,
who poured Tabasco into a slow-cooked stifatho
and called her a stupid cow.
I lean against the round shoulders
of the old refrigerator and listen
to her murmur. I’m grown now
and married and need to know––
When is it time to whisk, when to fold,
when to toss with newts and toads?

Reminiscences

May 13, 2021.Reading time 1 minute.

By Matthew Valades

Featured art: Sunflowers by Janet Braden

It became possible to say anything:
that was the delusion. A melting tree,
a painted deer—the books sat useless
as guides to understand such thoughts.

Holes at the elbows quickly drew
attention, but bothering to bother seemed
no longer worth the trouble. With walls
and brooms folks got better acquainted.

A summer of branches joining field
and sky swelled with lost promise.
It was good to stay, that’s how it felt.
People got older and younger. They’d sit

composing elaborate salad plans.
“Forget about tomorrow” became
a common phrase, but few took comfort
in what it meant. Distance fraught

with waiting, a blank consistency,
infused the hours as if each day
had been left on the table to fill the house,
rising through the rooms like steam. Read More

The Other Big Bang

November 15, 2020.Reading time 1 minute.

By Mason Wray

Featured Art: Peach Bloom by Alice Pike Barney

An equal and opposite burst expanding
from the same particle but in reverse.
Where peaches unripen in the family orchard.
A mom-and-pop deli replaces the condos on Second Ave.
OutKast never breaks up. They only get back together.

My sister is getting smaller by the day
her outfits like pastel pythons swallowing a doe.
In the other big bang, we start
with all the knowledge we’ll ever know
then forget it piece by piece.

So even after my grandmother’s brain
stitches itself whole, vanquishes the plaque
that shows up like coffee stains in scans,
still she becomes more unknowing by the day.

But we all become naïve with her. Everyone
communes over fears of growing young:
how we’ll tie our shoes, cross the road alone.
I am planning an expedition. One day I hope
to have never known you yet.

Love Song

November 15, 2020.Reading time 2 minutes.

By David O’Connell

Featured Art: Morning Haze by Leonard Ochtman

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?

The Measuring

November 8, 2020.Reading time 1 minute.

By Veronica Corpuz

Featured Art: Vintage notebook among photo cameras on table by Rachel Claire

A married life is measured:
each grain of rice, coffee bean, and tea leaf,

ice cubes crackling in a glass of water upon the nightstand,
even the pinheads of steamed broccoli,

every hour of sleep lost when the baby is born
each hour you slept in before him,

the time you say, I am going to remember this walk forever—
the neon color of lichen after a long, hard winter,

how your son wobbles, falls down,
how you swoop him off the ground.

Until you walk into the Social Security office,
until you see the words printed in dot matrix—

the date your marriage begins, the date your spouse dies—
until you see what you did not know declared in writing,

then, you have new language for this feeling—
how your heart has become a singularity:

Your marriage has ended in death.

As Always

June 13, 2020.Reading time 4 minutes.

By Robert Lynn

on the first not quite warm day of March the park filled with the delusion of spring

our friends napped by the half dozen against a tree dogs gathered loose

bikini tops from sunbathers made maenads by 53 degrees we gave time away

in handfuls to the ducks pairs of men emerged from winter to wave lures

at the water an excuse to love each other without looking I read your

cheekbones’ anger at how I got more time than you before the good earth was

over fed you grapes the closest I could get to an apology for something I didn’t

choose someone sitting at our tree and very high asked Is this the Golden

Hour? and the light answered with yellow silence the way it does all questions

so obvious later walking you home I told a story how my parents fell in love

first drunk then again sober only after I existed I didn’t think you were

listening until the moment you stopped mid path mid sentence a way of making

me turn around you told me There isn’t time to do anything twice How

come? you let the light give its yellow reply I don’t want the world to end

you said when it does I will remember it this way the sun picking mulch from

your backlit hair your fresh burnt shoulders making the gesture for All this?

and I give up at the same time this last first day before the good earth was done

The World We Wanted Shone So Briefly

June 9, 2020.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Gail Martin

Featured Art: Cicadas by Scott Brooks and Wendy Minor Viny

Real life was finally about to begin.

Remember the romance of the silver cigarette case

in college? The integrity of your firstborn’s eyelashes?

We discarded alternate destinies like tired cards

in the Flinch deck. We were only looking forward.

Of course, like the teeth of beavers and horses, there

are parts of the past that never stop growing.

Garage – tree house – vacant lot kinds of cruelty–

how we took turns being mean.

And later, some serrated evenings, dinners

of bluster and recoil, dodge. Flowers sent

or not sent to someone’s funeral.

Mostly there are the years you watch

your neighbors’ cars slide in and out of their garage.

Between blue herons and tumors, you change

the sheets.

We were all surprised to find ourselves old

but really the signs were everywhere, and we

acknowledge we’d been told. Name one

important thing that has not already happened.

Self-Portrait as Minor Prophet

May 11, 2020.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Craig Van Rooyen

Not the one who foretells
our city become a jackals’ haunt
or our silver turned to dross.

Rather, the one who needs a grocery list
from his wife with the precise level of yogurt fat
underlined and the aisle number

for the hypo-allergenic soap
so he will not wander, masked, into
the floral section to be with orchids,

their double stems of moth wings
looking nothing like fields stripped by foreigners
or hands hinged in prayer.

Woe to you with more than 10 items
in express checkout, he may think.
Woe to you who do not stand six feet apart.

But he does not proclaim their downfall
or predict their cattle slaughtered, their
gardens trampled underfoot.

I have seen enough buying and selling by now
to know I am a product, packaged
for someone else’s comfort, and to know

in this too I will fail. The truth is, my people,
we were always sheltered alone
and for mysterious reasons never knew it.

After 24 years with one woman
I still wonder with whom I will awake:
Sword or plowshare; flint horse hoof

or threshing floor, wasteland or vineyard
where grape skins crack from the pressure
of flesh and juice answering sun.

What I Meant to Say

April 1, 2020.Reading time 1 minute.

By Emily Alexander

friends I am not in love these days I wait
for the bus when it’s cool enough
I bake little treats in muffin tins for fun
I say sea urchin squash blossom

vacuous oh no I’m afraid
I don’t know

what this means and many others the usual
fears plus some uniquely mine balloons popping
in a small room needing immediately

a tooth pulled in a city I’m only visiting strange
coffee shops parking lots
I’m not sure
the rules here maybe these are
usual after all I don’t mean what I say

always what’s the difference these days
before going anywhere I out loud
say phone wallet keys

yesterday I said it and still
forgot all I needed then from the freeway

the ocean right there among everything oh

friends I’m just undone you know
what I mean truth is these days I find myself
occasionally full

of rage other times beer sitting with Halle
on her bedroom floor what’s new

oh man did you hear
about whoever I’m hungry are you
a little flimsy
drunk now the city rumors its width around us

and sometimes over it we just say
very quietly yeah

Stolen Hard Drive

March 29, 2020.Reading time 1 minute.

By John Moessner

Featured Art from rawpixel.com

It contained home movies where he wore
goggle-sized glasses, a toweled shoulder holding
a small redhead at a birthday party, three hours

of ripped paper like static on a radio, the sun flaring
off the ripples of the neighborhood pool. What do
those thieves think of your soccer games,

the Go girl! and the rain that drove him cursing to the car?
What about last Christmas? He was too tired, so you held the
camera instead and closed in on his drooped head

nodding while everyone opened gifts. Would they tear up
thinking of their fathers, would it convince them to call more?
Ripped from your life, just a plastic box in a bag of stuff.

Maybe before wiping it clean, they will browse your home
movies and say, What a good father, what a good life.

Ode to My Pink Bathroom

February 28, 2020.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Julie Danho

Featured Art: by J.L. Mott Iron Works

How long I’ve tried to love you, the way
you still blush and gleam like a teenager
in a poodle skirt, unblemished as the day

you were pressed against wire and mortar
in the shower, on the walls, even the floor,
its concrete flecked with pink. The Nolans,

who chose you, are long gone, their daughters
now grandmothers in their own houses,
the blueprints they left behind moldering

in the basement. How can I blame them?
I didn’t live through the War, the Boom,
this neighborhood rising up in neat rows

as if each Cape had been pining for sun.
In those years, you were prosperity, pedigree,
First Lady Pink named in honor of Mamie

Eisenhower, her White House bathroom pink
from the walls to the tub to the cotton balls,
so that all over America, millions like me

wake up and stumble into a past that waits
with toothbrush and soap. In you, I saw history
running like a faucet, building to a flood

unless stemmed. But when the contractor
gave me a price, he said you were lead,
and with my daughter . . . it might be better

to let you be. So I’ll own your purr and poison,
though I may dream still of reinvention—
blue trim and Harbor Gray—even as I hang

the pink polka dot shower curtain, lay down
that cranberry rug, act as if I chose you,
as if you were everything I ever wanted.

Free Association

February 17, 2020.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Henrietta Goodman

Featured Art: by Katsushika Hokusai

“Free associating, that is to say, is akin to mourning; it is
a process of detachment that releases hidden energies . . .”
—Adam Phillips

Always the smell of Windex brings me back to Martin Shelton
in first grade, his memory atomized from some forgotten source.

It’s wind and window when I see him late for school through double
doors of tempered glass, then rushing in on the lovely trochaic

feet of his name, shirt buttoned wrong, blond hair blown in a gust
of oak leaves, smoke, and frost that swept away the simmered meat

and rubber smells, the green litter that soaked up accidents. The wind
recorded and erased. I was afraid to sit with him, or speak—

my first crush a boy who packed his own lunch and walked alone
through dark stairwells hung with Bomb Shelter signs, arrows

aimed at the basement lunchroom where we bowed our heads
to wait for fallout’s drift from the split atom, the invisible anvil

that could fall no matter where we hid. Even when the speakers
hummed and Mr. Wells announced that we were safe,

his name said the earth would swallow us. And now I spray
the glass to wipe away the prints, the trace, but traces gone,

the glass I see through stays. How, then, could mourning set me free,
if Windex leads to Martin leads to beauty leads to bomb?

After Hours

June 14, 2019.Reading time 4 minutes.

By Maria Nazos

Featured Art: “Illusion of My Studio” by Yan Sun

When I exited the stall, she was standing at the sink.

I knew her best from one night at the bar, when she’d said

my ex was handsome. Then asked whether I’d mind if she

called him later that night. I’d pressed my lips together

and said, go ahead, certain she held an unspoken malice

which young women carry into small towns. I’d moved

to the Cape to escape from my talent for tearing through

love, only to follow a trail of broken glass into every bar.

Only to find every fisherman with a penchant for failed

marriages and pot, and myself, again,

staying up too long and late.

As I stood beside her in the bathroom, washing my hands,

I thought of another night when she’d told me, as if casually

draping a dark blouse across a stool, that her father had just died.

I’d squeezed her hand. She pushed her blonde hair off her face,

said, that’s okay. But I’d seen her at the bar every night since,

drinking with a red-haired fisherman who’d tried to strangle

his ex. I shook my hands dry. Tear my shirt, she urged, interrupting

my reverie. Why? I asked. Did she want to show off

her seashell-curved cleavage or simply feel something

besides her heart splitting down the middle?

My Life Is Like This

February 18, 2019.Reading time 1 minute.

By John Mark Ballenger

Each night I keep trying to say something
specific before sleep, something about time
or the horizon. How time unwinds
like a copperhead or the fear
of a copperhead or the spaces between
hay bales, under porch steps.
                                                   I try to say something
about the ash of memory, a farmhouse
firm in my mind and burned to the ground
of my childhood, standing and consumed
every moment.
                             About the distance light
travels from the glacier-crumpled
Southern Ohio hills to the shadowed
valley bottoms. The horizon
that weighs down the eye, reduces the world
to a hollow, a creek, a hardwood canopy,
ivy overcoming ancient leaning barns,
a half-sunk Ford Pinto and the speckled blue
of a robin’s egg in the grass. I want to say
something of men talking under a great
sugar maple in the late summer dark, a mud dauber
tapping against a window, my mother speaking
her mother’s name.
                                  In my dream the words are exactly
the thing itself: time, horizon, copperhead, dark, robin’s
egg in grass, my mother, at last, a revelation.

Then and Now, the Essex Street Market

January 24, 2019.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Roger Mitchell

Featured Art: Hollywood Africans by Jean-Michel Basquiat

The person who took this picture took it
well above the parking lot across the street.
“Malted Milk with Ice Cream” cost five cents
once. Leroy’s on the corner sold “knishes
frankfurters and root beer,” and the cars
and everyone stopped moving for a moment
so this proof could be snapped of the way
a few things stood at the corner of Essex
and Delancey sometime between the Fall
of Rome and now. Which is also falling.

In the upper-right-hand reaches of the shot,
a line of laundry sags out of a tenement window.
The other end seems suspended in air,
like everything else, both in and out
of the window, the photo, the cowl of dust
that wraps the earth in its own heat. Damn,
said Napoleon, and he turned his horse
and started back across the steppe toward Josephine.

The half dozen newly planted trees lined up
in their iron jackets along Essex were leafless,
so winter must have been on its way, in
or out, we can’t tell. The little lie the picture tells
is that, though everything is about to change, it brought
life to a halt, so someone could open the door, now,
and let in a large whack of dust and noise,
the kind they make no room for in pictures,
passing them on to the woman in the next booth
who is giving, maybe the air, maybe her mother,
a colorfully athletic lesson in Spanglish,
involving, from what little I can make out,
most of what we call history, as it’s apt to look
when the future gets here, and “that fucker
Reynaldo.” I have no idea what Reynaldo’s crime is,
but, if you are listening, Reynaldo, get over here,
quick, if you don’t want to be history.

Confirmation

January 22, 2019.Reading time 3 minutes.

By John McCarthy

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.

My Hometown, the Hypothetical Guided Tour

December 1, 2018.Reading time 5 minutes.

By Dan Wiencek

Featured Art: by Jasper Francis Cropsey

            First we come to the field
where I did not hit the winning
     home run, where no cheers rose
            up and the game ball went ungiven

     Beyond left field,
            the bleachers where I did not
    make out with my high-school
         crush, did not taste her perfume
                  or dodge her brother’s freckled glare

      This is the house where a family of
                color did not live, there, where
         that guy is hosing Chinese
                              menus off his car

     Then of course this tax attorney’s office, once
            the bookstore where I stole
                        Helter Skelter, which I still
                     visit in my dreams

                 Finally, this empty lot
          staring up at the sun like a vast
                   gravel eye, formerly the school where
     I never thought to imagine a future,
         where no one told me and I
             did not listen

that life could be a wave
beating the rocks or

           a wind bouncing a kite—

                       taut string pinwheels,
               dips and swoops groundward only
    to right itself, to stay resolutely
                                                               in the air

and here we are.

Bird

November 29, 2018.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Danusha Laméris

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.

To Inscribe

November 26, 2018.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Anne Starling

Featured Art: A Holiday by Edward Henry Potthast

The dead are with us to stay
—Charles Wright

But not the living, the fallible breathing.

For a while it seemed one thing
could be righted. One small piece at the
ocean’s bottom corner
or the bottom
dresser drawer with the scuffed
baby shoes and shoeboxes
full of snapshots of kid parties, holidays, school picnics
etcetera.

A comfort, even knowing that wrong
can’t be undone, is more like oceans plural
rushing in
weighing in with their trick of
no light, unfathomable.

The idea was to inscribe
the back of the photograph taken
on our last anniversary.
                        Simply to write, in everyday
permanent ink
his name                in the possessive
                then “Mom and Dad.”

Box in a Closet

November 18, 2018.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Faith Shearin

Featured Art: by Emil Carlsen

I open a box
in a closet and here I find us,
stuck in scenes long forgotten: my uncle

disappearing down an oak alley
in a horse-drawn carriage,
my grandmother dressed for a garden party,

gloves to her elbows, posed in a stiff
southern parlor, 1953. Here is the trip
to Disney World where we drank from

plastic oranges, held balloons
with ears; oh, we grow younger
on beaches, until we are babies, naked

on blankets, and my grandfather
rises from the grave to sit
in a wood-paneled living room,

on a plaid couch, in a fedora.
I find my cousins beneath cypress trees,
in a river at sunset, and my sister,

age eight, dressed as a mosquito,
on her way to a costume party.
The van that floated away

in a hurricane reassembles itself in our
driveway and my father’s dog,
ten years dead, rides over the lagoon

where she will someday drown,
in a canoe: October falling,
my father’s hair black, his paddle

still in his hands.

Calchas Reading the Signs

November 14, 2018.Reading time 2 minutes.

By George Kalogeris

Featured Art: by Piet Mondrian

It’s ’68. Whatever he saw, whatever he smelt
In that smoky, dripping handful of purple entrails
Just thawing out from the freezer, the news from Athens

Was ominous, and he wouldn’t haruspicate
On how and when the Colonels might react—
But the gobbets of offal keep piling up in the pail.

It’s not that he fully trusted the lordly voice
Of the BBC, but hearing Vietnam
He drops what he’s doing, and cranking up the volume

On that crackly plastic Panasonic—
That’s when I hear it too: Khe Sanh. It’s what
Comes through the speaker’s throbbing bamboo mesh

As I’m stamping prices on jars of baby food:
A staticky hiss like burning jungle grass . . .
My father wiping his hands on his butcher’s apron,

Oblivious to his customers as he listens
To a transistor radio broadcast the blood
Of a world in shambles. And then he’s back at his block.

Khe Sanh. My older cousins, Kosta and Jimmy,
Are loading up the van they’ll drive around Winthrop,
Delivering groceries and checking out girls.

I’m stamping the little glass jars of applesauce.
Nobody knows whose number will come up.
But our Calchas isn’t taking any chances.

Already he’s built another hecatomb,
And now he’s scrutinizing some gristly turkey
Intestines unfurling for all I know like the coils

Of giant lianas he saw in Guadalcanal
As a young recruit. But through that throbbing bamboo
Mesh I hear the Hydra’s serpentine hiss

He heard as a village boy way up in the Peloponnese.

My Babysitter Karen B Who Was Sent to Willard Asylum

October 21, 2018.Reading time 2 minutes.

Winner, New Ohio Review Poetry Contest
selected by Kevin Prufer

By Jessica Cuello

There are only two photos of me as a child.
She took them, she had no child.

She had Kool Cigarettes and a job at the drugstore.
She gave me the Crayola box with the built-in sharpener.

Four hundred suitcases were stored in the attic
of Willard Asylum for the Chronic Insane.

She joined her twin brother there.
She wore her black hair down.

A child could admire it.
She bought me an Easter basket,

a stuffed rabbit whose fur rubbed off.
She walked everywhere.

She painted circles of blush on her cheeks.
Loony, people said so,

I mean grown-ups who saw signs
who passed her on our street before she

started to call and say Remember,
on the phone she said Remember,

Remember the date we killed her brother,
forgetting he’d been committed.

I took her hand and tagged along like an animal.
She was perfect to a child.

An Education

October 19, 2018.Reading time 1 minute.

By Molly Minturn

Featured Art: Still Life with Cake by Raphaelle Peale

It was spring and I walked
the streets in the late afternoon
with the best poet I knew.
She was tall with a severe face
like an early New Englander.
Her ancestors survived genocide.
We didn’t discuss our work, only
the weather, how the blossoms
were upsetting. The war was on.
We bought a hefty slice of cake
and walked slowly under a murder
of crows back to my apartment.
This seemed too evocative,
almost to the point of embarrassment.
The cake was coconut. We split
the slice, sitting at the small
table in my living room, away
from the sun. At the time,
it was the present. Here
in the future, I sometimes forget
to breathe, waiting
for the next catastrophe. That cake
was pure in its sweetness, the poet
alive with me, her eyes scanning
my face, both of our histories
neatly bound in our throats.
I wanted to ask if she was frightened
by living, by the change
in the light. Instead, she slid the plate
across to me, a Ouija planchette,
insisting I take the last bite.

Trees in March

October 12, 2018.Reading time 1 minute.

By Linda Bamber

We were seated near the back of the Chinese restaurant, and waiters were
rushing in and out of the swinging doors to the kitchen. At the time we had
not as yet so much as brushed shoulders. Resting on the formica table top, my
hand began to feel odd. Not bad-odd; but most unusual. Trees in early March,
aroused, their branches slightly reddened by the slightly stronger sun, may feel
something similar. They have a new sense of their importance in the scheme of
things; they remember (if I may say so) they are divine. He was looking at my
face, not my hand, so I don’t know how my hand, resting near the remains of
the General Gau’s chicken, intuited its sudden access of significance; but it did.
It had aura you could cut with a knife.

Shortly thereafter he took my hand.

A Race Car Made of Sand

May 28, 2017.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Margot Wizansky

Featured Art: “Beach of Bass Rocks, Gloucester, Massachusetts” by Frank Knox Morton Rehn

Everything made my mother nervous:
the baby crying, sand on the floor, the flies.
So we went out to the beach.
I took my bucket and shovel.
My mother sat my little brother up on her shoulders
and carried the towels and a canvas chair for my father,
who was too weak to carry anything.
He wore his cabaña suit, light green with white palm trees,
his legs, pale like the sheets in the hotel room.
He hadn’t shaved.
His face had been blue for weeks,
the circles under his eyes, dark as his beard.
Mother said I was too heavy to sit in his lap.
All afternoon I dug a string of frantic little ponds.
Nothing was right; my back was sunburnt;
my father hardly moved.
Uncle Robert came, like a bus from the city,
to build me a race car of sand, with jar lids
for hubcaps and for headlights, clamshells,
and he found a quoit on the beach for the steering wheel.
He dug me a driver’s seat that just fit,
and a rumble seat for my little brother.
My father peeled me an apple with his penknife,
in one long piece, that didn’t ever break.

Advice

May 28, 2017.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Emily Sernaker

Featured Art: by Fran Hogan

Don’t ever make him a take-me-back
mix CD. But if you do, open with Sam Cooke’s
“Bring It On Home To Me.”
If Kim from high school wants to wait
in the really long line for the panda
at the zoo, don’t complain.
That panda is going to be so cuddly cupping
its paw around the bamboo, your heart
will do a somersault. Besides,
you’ll miss Kim when you’re away
trying to tell her updates
before the metro goes underground.
“I’m going on a date and wearing eyeliner.”
“You’re going on a date with a minor?”
Distance can be so hard. If you take
a dance class at the gym don’t stand
in the very back. Halfway through they turn
around and that side becomes the leaders
of the choreographed dance
everyone knows but you. You want
a middle-back spot for minimal shame.
One more thing about boys—
sometimes they’re sending a message
by not sending a message. There are many
films and books about this. If you need
an easy Halloween costume
go with Clark Kent. You just wear
glasses, a button-up shirt, a loose tie,
and show a Superman logo
underneath. You can even make
a Daily Planet badge if there’s time.
That noise you hear in the morning
opening the coffee shop isn’t
the other barista sneezing.
It’s the espresso machine warming up—
you don’t need to say bless you.
Ask your mom how she’s doing. Early
in each phone call ask her and really listen.
If you don’t, she’ll let you talk and talk
and what kind of person
do you want to be? You should
probably read Dante, that gets referenced
a lot. Anyone who hates Bob Dylan,
especially the Blood On The Tracks album,
is wrong. He’s given us a road map
to life, they should be grateful.
One last thing—don’t be scared
when the Georgetown cross-country team
is running toward you full speed
on the bridge. I know
it’s the bridge with the narrow walkway
close to traffic, where there’s nowhere
for you to step to the side.
Just raise up both of your hands.
Sixty people will give you high-fives
and keep going.

The Resort

May 28, 2017.Reading time 1 minute.

By Preston Martin

He paces, half naked,
across his second-floor balcony,
phone against his ear.

A translucent mist moves on shore,
the swoosh of high tide hardly heard
across mannered dunes.

As the day moon hangs
over his building fresh sunlight sinks
low in the moist air like a lemon slice in soda,
sparkling dewy marigolds, dollar weeds.

The man paces, turns, punctuates
thoughts with a free hand, either
pleading or singing into the phone.
Please

let it be to an old love,
who loved him on this beach, loved him once,
on a tender morning like this morning.

Still now, he stares at the phone,
as if it were sentient, caring,
as if the conversation still goes on,

as if the greater part of life
isn’t our suitcase of memories,
handled everywhere,
the calling back

of times slipped through fingers,
the calling back
what can’t come back.

Sunny Day

May 28, 2017.Reading time 1 minute.

By Joyce Schmid

Featured Art: ‘Woman Lying in the Dunes near Noordwijk’ Jan Toorop

Verweile doch, du bist so schön.
—Goethe

I grab the young, unruly day
and say, Stand still, stand still.
I want to comb her hair and dress her up,

but she just laughs and wriggles in my grasp
and breaks away. She dances mockingly,
just out of reach, the little imp,

and runs ahead of me. I’m running
out of energy to try
to catch her in my arms,

warm, fragrant child,
her changeling eyes lit up
with winter sun.

Come here, you darling day,
and stay with me
a while, a little while.

We Remember You for Now

February 12, 2016.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Stephanie Rogers

Featured Art: Figurative Abstraction by Unknown

Now when my heart beats, it sounds like
crunched leaves skittering, the revving up

of a broken-down Honda. I can’t visit him
at a cemetery, or even the park. Scatter

my ashes there, he asked, and then injected
god knows how much, enough to warrant

a coroner call. Hahaha. Joke is Heather said nope,
stuffed and stored him in the back

of our mother’s closet. He lives there now,
sucking up the radiator heat. Joel, damn,

man. Come back and lick the spilt fizz off
the Budweiser can again. No one here

is going anywhere if I have a say, and how
didn’t I have a say with you? You plunged,

you syringed, each time needling—gentle,
I hope, as my grandmother crocheting

a winter hat for your oldest girl. I won’t
for long torture myself for you, I thought,

biting into a string of candy hearts around
my neck, your kid insisting, eat it, the sick-

sweet sticky hands of a two-year-old with
a dad resting inside a shoebox next to

a bowling ball. You did it. Congratulations.
I’m elated. I’m devastated. I’m a copycat

singing your songs to your girls to sleep.
Listen, creep: we remember you for now,

but now is a ragged dog, dragging its bum
leg along the buzzing halls of a new house.

My This, My That

February 6, 2016.Reading time 1 minute.

By Sarah Brown Weitzman

Featured Art: Paris Bridge by Arthur B. Carles

To live in the moment is probably good advice.
What else is there but the now
of which nothing will remain but memory
already fading and unreliable.
My past is a pile of losses: parents, pets,
childhood, a hometown, ideals, and god.
Born to a countdown yet I make claims
to “my this” and “my that.”

But what can we ever possess?
Last night’s symphony, the blurred faces
of our dead, the way the wind slid
through the dogwoods of youth
are what we may possess just as the sun
possesses the windowglass it shines through.

Jenny Perowski is Ahead of Me in the Grocery Store Line

January 15, 2016.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Julie Danho

Featured Art: (Untitled–Flower Study) by Mary Vaux Walcott

If an Amish family can forgive the man who burned
their land, surely I can say hello to Jenny Perowski,
who used to call me “fattie fat” in seventh grade math
and had boys call my house, pretending to ask me out.
That was twenty years ago. Now Jenny, if not fat exactly,
is puffy as a slightly overstuffed chair. I’m thinner than her,
and my pleasure feels more whiskey than cream, makes me
want to pour out her Kors bag to rifle for candy, then slowly
eat it in front of her like she once did to me. I know
her cruelty was, at best, a misdemeanor. But anger
is like a peppermint in a pocketbook—everything inside
takes on its smell and taste. I could break it in my teeth,
make it disappear. Instead, I savor the mint, let the sugar
line my mouth like fur, linger far past what can be called
pleasure. How good it would be to be better than this.

Grammar School

January 13, 2016.Reading time 1 minute.

By Mark Belair

Featured Art: Project for an Overdoor by Carlo Marchionni or Filippo Marchionni

Through the municipal green, overpainted wire mesh
obscuring the grammar school basement windows

comes the spank of a basketball not engaged in any game,
just pounded in place in an empty, echoing cafeteria, then

an outside metal door gets gut-punched open to release
gruff-voiced janitor, belt keys jangling, cursing at the world

while from a first-floor office a stretch of plastic packing tape
screaks off a roll as a phone rings and a copy machine whumps

as if providing a bass line to a class that, upstairs,
bursts into a trebly, mocking laugh, after which,

yet farther up, in a distantly reverberant bathroom, a toilet
flushes and keeps running even after a door slams shut and

all the old, hard memories flood
back enough for me to know

that if a documentary film was made
about daily life in grammar school—

with shot after shot of small, solemn faces
taring out at us—

its scoreless soundtrack
would be this.

Sintra

December 12, 2015.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Gail Mazur

Featured Art: Composition by Otto Freundlich

In your office, you, mastering the art of Photoshop,
scanning a crumpled snapshot, 3 inches square,

of your father, poolside, jaunty in a blue swimsuit,
his straw fedora at a rakish angle,

carrying two splashing cups of bica toward your mother.
Beaming, gallant, tanned, grinning for her camera.

That was in Portugal, in Sintra—
the village Byron called “most beautiful in the world.”

In the old cracked photo,
part of his naked chest had flaked away:

under the glossy surface an ashen patch.
Forty years later at your desk,

filial, in a fantasy of surgery,
you worked your laptop to repair the wound,

dragging pixels of skin tone, of mortal coloration,
from his right side to his left.

A new skill mastered, new language, new tools
that restored but couldn’t save.

I watched you transplant a blush of skin—
a tender ministry, your digital touch

lighter than a kiss—not unlike a kiss—

exactly where his heart four decades
earlier began to falter. As yours, invisibly, did now.

—One of those days we both still thought that somehow
with the proper tools, there was nothing you couldn’t fix.

Tag Sale

November 9, 2015.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Scott Brennan

Featured Art: The Rose Cloud by Henri-Edmond Cross

A Barbie with gum in her hair, a Lite-Brite that may or may not turn on,
and Monopoly played once or twice then stowed, the Chance cards

missing, the Scottie dog lost, the dice gone. Here, the Boggle bubble,
cracked. In a milk crate beside the games, we have the tools: a hacksaw,

a cordless Black and Decker drill, a Stanley hammer, a rat-tail file,
a Phillips screwdriver. Here’s a Schwinn bicycle with dry-rot tires, and,

Looney Tunes

May 12, 2015.Reading time 6 minutes.

By Nathan Anderson

Featured Image: Summer Morning by David Lucas, 1830

Nah, it’s not that, I wouldn’t call it that, I mean molested
that’s like TV stuff, and Brenna
she’d be real nice sometimes like flesh and blood should.
Bring me back a chocolate frosty just because.
Anyway, I’d just as soon say we’re done,
or you want I should go through it all like I did in June
with the last one? Twice now—and this just goes to show
the system’s jacked—twice I’ve waited, asked the front desk ladies
and waited, I said people I need a little help and you’re telling me two hours?
In all this hospital you’re telling me there’s no one I can talk to now?
I said what about the dude mopping floors? Is he around?
Can I talk to him? Or do I go ahead and slit my wrists right here?
So they hauled me up to you, another white coat
working the psych ward. A woman. What’s up with that?
No offense or nothing. That’s just how they do me
down on first-floor, where everyone else on earth is. You ever one of those
ER docs I see running around? The way I figure it, a woman like you
doesn’t need to run. You’re all put together—you know, like a car
that’s just come off the line . . . . But okay, this isn’t about you.

That’s Me Smiling in the Back Row

May 6, 2015.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Elton Glaser

Featured Image: The Parthenon by Frederic Edwin church, 1871

The day warms up fast,
Like leftovers in a microwave, odors of dawn
Still rising from the dead lilies,
From dry grass bleached to blonde and now
Heading toward platinum.
In the slow burn of midsummer,
The nose takes you where the mind won’t go.

There’s bad juju all over the place.
Light clings like cellophane
To the limp leaves. Nothing will budge
That carpet of shadows on the back porch.
I’m watching a spider
Rappel from the blades of a broken fan.
Somebody needs to fix it soon,
Somebody who knows how to work a miracle
With Juicy Fruit and a steak knife.

Photograph Albums

October 18, 2014.Reading time 3 minutes.

By George Kalogeris

“We finally got all of our family photos
Onto our home computer,” Quentin was saying,
Just as we entered the Asian fusion place.

And that’s when it hit me: all those leather albums
With their matted pages and bristly hides,
In their mundane way as archly ceremonial

As the Golden Dragon preening against
The restaurant window. All those cumbersome tomes,
In a decade or so defunct as the dinosaur.

But once their images have all been scanned,
Why should it matter? By then the cherished snapshots
Will have all gone into the world of light—

Or at least into cyberspace. Ancestral faces
That once unfurled from trays of salty water
As dark as Lethe, and then were pinned on strings,

Ex-voto like, and left to dry, will seem
A little less spooky-stern without the shades
Of their twentieth century negatives to haunt us.

And pantheons of illumination so vast
They promised we’d see ourselves reflected in
Their image forever—Olympus, Polaroid, Kodak—

Will shrink to the candle-watt stature of household gods:
Preservers of birthday parties and graduations,
Penátes of pointed hats and obnoxious horns.

Whatever I Might Say

September 14, 2014.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Sydney Lea

Though to touch its flame would surely be as painful as when it burned brighter, the candle’s low now. On the table, just prior to guttering after dinner, it vaguely illuminates friends.

The glow takes me to Creston MacArthur, one son’s and one grandson’s namesake, and to our many evenings as a campfire ebbed. Just now I’m remembering a particular night, the two of us seated next to a favorite river, swapping stories. His were better.

A bleakness sinks into me despite the patent pleasures of this later interlude with other people I care for and admire. I’ve long savored their camaraderie, their conversation, their gifts for wit. The lateness of the hour has turned our talk to rote murmuring, something like the water of that river, which always flows right below my consciousness.

I should do more now than merely prattle with these good companions, just as I should have said more to Creston, gone almost forty years, and perhaps he to me. Or maybe not: deep in the woods, barred owls started to chatter that night. “Like a good pack of hounds,” Creston said, and that woodsy locution seemed perfect, seemed pinpoint accurate.

Still I’m unsettled. It’s as though I were looking on these people here, on my children, on my children’s children, on my past—I’m looking from above. Having failed to put the right words together, I’ve risen over our group like smoke. The chill in my spirit has something to do with feeling removed, and feeling removed because I’m tongue-tied, tongue-tied for fear that any speech of mine will sound formulaic.

It’s late. The guests will leave. The candle’s wick whispers. I must hope I’ve found a way of being with loved ones that’s better than any talk I could grope for, than any I craved as those old fires grayed, a way that bespoke me better than whatever I may have said, whatever I might say now.

The Professional

May 20, 2014.Reading time 4 minutes.

By Michael Bazzett

She arrived in a dark suit and a mask-like smile, explaining
her services in a manner so polished it almost put us off.
This is my specialty, she soothed. Both mind and house
will be empty as a mountain wind once I’m done. I sensed
she’d said those words before. We sat at the kitchen table,
you and I, looking at one another, hoping the other felt more
certain, more assured. Once we signed, it would take years
before we acknowledged our mistake. She’d left the whole day
open, and could begin immediately. Was there perhaps a guest
room where she could change? Her assistant arrived with
a black duffel, fresh white towels, and a stainless-steel basin.

I didn’t know the basin would be so big, I murmured. We looked
at one another uncomfortably. It is not always a clean process,
she reassured. You do understand, once I’m sequestered, it is
very important that I not be disturbed. We nodded. She closed
the door with an audible click. For the first few hours, it seemed
okay. Her assistant sat out in the van, with the windows down,
reading. We sat in the living room and tried to do the same,
ignoring the sounds coming from the guest room, sighs that
sharpened into cries. When a few faces started disappearing
in the photographs above the piano, you leapt to your feet.
This isn’t right, you said. These things shouldn’t be removed.

But what about the pain? I asked. Don’t you want it gone?
No, you said, pointing to the image of a child, suddenly frantic.
The eyes had faded to nothing. From forehead to cheekbone
was just smooth skin. I ran to the window. The van was gone,
as was the tire-swing that had been there an hour earlier. I looked
and saw the elm losing its limbs, one by one. Maybe we can still
get some of our money back, I said. And then you said: I want her
gone. The assistant had sealed the door shut with tape. It came
off with a spattering sound, and the shrieks from inside paused.
Then the voice came, a strangled croak as I opened the door
and saw her, smaller than I remembered, perched on the dresser,
her suit pooled on the floor beneath her. Her face had become
a sort of beak, hinged open and hissing. But it was the children
that were upsetting, sitting in a circle at her feet, quietly singing.

Still Listening

May 14, 2014.Reading time 7 minutes.

By Robert Cording

Featured Art: Confusion of Christmas by Julia Thecla

I. Hospice Jumble

The Jumble in the paper too hard for him to read,
my mother suggested we make up our own: Dear,

she said to her husband, your first word is life.
Reduced to words we jumbled, he joked file

it. My brother offered another, mean,
thinking perhaps of his diabetes, a name

like cancer to our family. Then, lamp,
lit at his bedside, and the one palm

visible outside his one windowed room.
My father got them quickly, the last, moor,

said with all the sadness of being far from shore . . .
A grandchild solved that one—horse,

she blurted, noticing that he had left
us for a while. By his bed, my mother felt

his hands and face and eyes. Bob, please,
she said, but he was already asleep,

snoring, not dead. My mother sighed, O God.
My brother, in the spirit still, said dog. Read More

My Dead Father Remembers My Birthday

May 12, 2014.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Lesley Wheeler

Featured Art: Birthday Party by Margaret Burroughs

Dream-phone rang and I thought: that’s exactly
his voice. I haven’t forgotten. Then: but I could
forget, because he’s dead. Hi, sorry it’s been so long,
but I was sick and the doctors messed everything up.
He made that shrug-noise, dismissive but pained,
meaning he’s lying or leaving something out.
It’s snowing here, and then a click, click, over the line,
and a neutral woman’s voice, slightly officious:
This recording was intercepted. If you wish to replay
this message, dial this number now, and she recited
a blizzard of digits while I flailed
for a pen then found myself tangled in blankets.
The window a bruise beginning to fade.

Here mist wreathes the trunks. In a few months
snow will crisp the grass, insulate and numb the oaks
with feathery layers that would soak and freeze
a human being. When and where is he? Snug,
maybe, watching weather through double panes.
Or wanting to be. I heard a bead of doubt
suspended in his voice, a cool guess he’d missed
something, before my operator intervened,
reason declaring: This is memory. The line is cut.

Rome in Us

April 22, 2014.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Thomas Grout

Featured Art: The Fountain, Villa Torlonia, Frascati, Italy by John Singer Sargent

It’s funny isn’t it—the way Rome still comes at you
fast like a bat breaking past your head from memory.
At the Roman pace the body takes the city better than the mind.
A cathedral ceiling’s fireworks shoot up
once the sermon’s fireworks stop. And when
the ceiling finally stills, the piazza outside overfills
with new fruits and vegetables and etymologies.
Stimulation’s cheap as wine and your horse
is more than happy to take it in by trough.
But it flies by so fast—

only just now it’s slowed enough to hatch a feeling
similar to how it is to listen through the dark over our bed
for a half-caught sound to sound again.
That given one more chance I could make easy sense of it.

It’s often that I sleepwalk down our subdivision’s version
of the Spanish Steps thinking I left something unnamable
inside the Trevi. Is that it at the end of the tube-slide?
I never know. It all gets hazy after the Flaminian gate
though I’m absolutely certain I wake up at the refrigerator.
Rome is in us like unfinished business—

that’s why half of me is still sauntering the cobbles.
I guess we’ll always live our lives possessed
by the ancient Roman sense that down any old left turn
suddenly one of our dreams might find its title.

Back Then

October 19, 2013.Reading time 1 minute.

By John Brehm

Featured Art: Miss M. of Washington by Rose Clark

Everything was better back then.
Even my nostalgia was better,
more piercing, more true.
I miss missing things that much,
but not as much as I missed
missing things back then.
Even my anxieties about the future,
which have indeed come to pass,
were more vivid back then,
more real. Reality itself seemed
more real back then—this clanking
stage-play only a fool could find
convincing—I fell for it all,
and it killed me, again and again.
Ghosts of myself wander
the cities I’ve lived in, thinking
of other cities, imagining me
here imagining them.
We nod to each other across
the years, the way the last line
of a poem will sometimes
look back, wistfully,
at the first.

1974: The Raspberries

May 25, 2013.Reading time 6 minutes.

By Campbell McGrath

Featured Art: Jung You (Chu Yu), from the series “Twenty-four Paragons of Filial Piety in China (Morokoshi nijushiko)” by Utagawa Kuniyoshi

If it’s true, as they teach in elementary school,
that ours is a secular republic, not gods but men
do our temples and sacred monuments adorn,
then how to explain the immediacy with which I recall
my baptism into the cult of American identity,
my consecration as a democratic individual,
the very first things I bought at a store by myself—
a cherry Slurpee in a collectible plastic superhero cup
and a pack of baseball cards, hoping to find Bob Gibson.
This was at the 7-Eleven on Porter Street,
and soon the five-and-dime on Wisconsin Avenue
cycled into orbit, musty aisles of G.C. Murphy & Co.
where I might spend my allowance on plastic soldiers,
a balsa wood airplane, a rabbit’s foot keychain,
trinkets of no intrinsic worth ennobled by commerce,
aglimmer with the foxfire of mercantile significance,
toys of thought that blazed in the imagination
every step walking home. Not to jingle pocket change,
not to carry a crumpled dollar bill was to drift untethered
from the enormous comfort and safety of the system,
like the astronaut who crosses Hal in 2001: A Space Odyssey,
like a Stone Age tribe wandering into civilization
from some last unmapped Amazonian tributary.

Last Night Ferguson’s Caught Fire

November 11, 2012.Reading time 3 minutes.

By. Laura Read

In the paper you can see the red booths

turned on their sides, their stuffing

leaking out. The fire spread next door

to the Milk Bottle, which is shaped like one

so you think of the bottles that clinked

on the porch in the first blue light

of morning, at the end of milkmen,

at the beginning of your life.

I went there once with a boy too sweet

for desire, after the Ferris Wheel

and The Octopus and trying not

to throw up on the grass and trying

to be sweet too, the kind of girl

you want to win a stuffed bear for,

one of the big ones that she’ll have trouble

carrying, so you keep handing

the skinny man your dollars and his eyes

glint and you wonder what he’s thinking

when he folds them in his pocket,

where he’s going when he gets off,

not the Milk Bottle for scoops of vanilla

in small glass bowls. His heart is a book

of matches, his mind clear as the sky

in the morning when it’s covered its stars

with light. In the winter, he’ll hang

a ragged coat from his collarbone.

He’ll think only of this year, this cup

of coffee, as he sits alone in his red booth.

If he walks along a bridge,

he might jump. And the river will feel

cold at first but then like kindness.

Last night a boy named Travis

killed himself

like young people sometimes do.

He told people he would do it.

They tried to stop him.

Now he’ll have a full page in the yearbook,

his senior picture where he’s wearing

his dark blue jeans and sweater vest,

leaned up against the trunk of a tree.

I wonder if he felt the bark

pressed against him

when he had to keep staring into the lens,

his cheeks taut from trying.

I wonder if he thought about the tree,

how could it keep standing there

without speaking,

storing all those years in its core.

Laura Read has published poems in a variety of journals, most recently in Rattle, Mississippi Review, and Bellingham Review. Her chapbook, The Chewbacca on Hollywood Boulevard Reminds Me of You, was the 2010 winner of the Floating Bridge Chapbook Award, and her collection, Instructions for My Mother’s Funeral, was the 2011 winner of the AWP Donald Hall Prize for Poetry and will be published this fall by the University of Pittsburgh Press.

Originally appeared in NOR 12.

Standing on the Desk

June 8, 2012.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Donna L. Emerson

I am twelve years old in Mr. Ody’s art class and he’s teaching me to use an
eraser on my watercolor of rain and sun. To make the sun stream like spotlights
through the clouds. He moves the eraser by placing his hand over mine. He rests
his hand on my wrist a little longer.

I start to back away.

He asks me to be a model for the class. He lets me stand on his desk. He says,
Don’t take your eyes off her. Let your pencil try to draw her without ever stopping
your looking and drawing. I’m glad I wore my new turquoise skirt and
flowered blouse. Mr. Ody pulls his chair out to see better.

While Danny Sessa makes jokes, I can feel Mr. Ody’s eyes. He’s staring. I turn
red, start to joke back and Mr. Ody says, Just stand still and be quiet.

This was the beginning of the first time.

At the Mall

April 24, 2011.Reading time 2 minutes.

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.

Early Life

March 21, 2009.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Sydney Lea

All the pastor’s years of serving God
and humankind—they’re nothing now.
His congregation has long resigned itself
to anecdotal, meandering sermons.
But how forgive his mixing the liturgy
of welcome to a new church member
with the ceremony—however it may be related—
of baptism? The poor young parents

blush and fidget while veteran members feel
something between impatience and rage.

The minister and infant, robed and sleeping,
appear serene, above it all,
the one too young, even awake, to know
what’s going on and the other unable
to keep intact his thinking. Painful pauses.
Autumn rain on the roof like gunfire.

How She Lost Her Mind

February 15, 2009.Reading time 2 minutes.

By April Lindner

Featured Art: Drawing – Collage by Joan Miró

Slowly at first, the arteries
in the brain’s finely spun net
narrow one by one
_____________to dead ends;
like the hand’s delicate motion,
__________a series of strokes

erase what took decades to write.

Difficult tasks forgotten first:
_______________how to merge onto a highway,
___________________knit a sweater,
_______________________buy a stamp.
Then the simpler ones,
___________________how to turn on an oven,
_______________________what goes in a cup.

’69

November 22, 2008.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Kathy Fagan

Featured Art: Alfred Sisley by Pierre-Auguste Renoir

If it’s been ten times it’s been forty-five
I’ve checked the man out in the car behind
mine, teeth bared, laughing in my rearview.

I cannot stop myself from watching him,
sun full on his face. He’s all alone—
we are, among our fellow rush commuters—

and then it dawns on me: it’s Mr. Cahill
from sixth grade, my first male teacher (heart, be still!),
who taught sex ed to us in ‘69,

in Catholic school, till someone narked and he
was gone for good. Those days, we venerated
the venereal, reciting sex words right

Constant Craving

November 20, 2008.Reading time 5 minutes.

By Kathy Fagan

Featured Art: Café Concert (The Spectators) by Edgar Degas

When Peter Byrne of the 80s synthpop duo, Naked Eyes, played for me his acoustic cover of k.d. lang’s “Constant Craving” in his studio over-looking Los Angeles, the peacock—not the NBC peacock but a real peacock among the many on the grounds—opened his fan as if the music were a potential mate. He strutted and shirred. He shimmied his many eyes. He’d been drawn to the music, then spotted himself in the sliding glass doors. He leaned in and turned for us like a Vegas show girl. He brought tears to my eyes. When the song was over I could barely muster, “What a tender version, Peter,” though tender wasn’t the word for the primitive if aimless seduction on the lawn.

The History of Forgetting

November 12, 2008.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Lawrence Raab

Featured Art: Eve by Lucas Cranach the Elder

When Adam and Eve lived in the garden
they hadn’t yet learned how to forget.
For them every day was the same day.
Flowers opened, then closed.
They went where the light told them to go.
They slept when it left, and did not dream.

What could they have remembered,
who had never been children? Sometimes
Adam felt a soreness in his side,
but if this was pain it didn’t appear to
require a name, or suggest the idea
that anything else might be taken away.
The bright flowers unfolded,
swayed in the breeze.

It was the snake, of course, who knew
about the past—that such a place could exist.
He understood how people would yearn
for whatever they’d lost, and so to survive
they’d need to forget. Soon
the garden will be gone, the snake
thought, and in time God himself.

These were the last days—Adam and Eve
tending the luxurious plants, the snake
watching from above. He knew
what had to happen next, how persuasive
was the taste of that apple. And then
the history of forgetting would begin—
not at the moment of their leaving,
but the first time they looked back.

Nothing Stays Buried, Hector Flores

March 28, 2008.Reading time 1 minute.

By Andrew Michael Roberts

Featured Art: Daedalus and Icarus by Giulio Romano

Not your sad little sister nor the boy of your youth some doors down who shot himself twice. Not even dirt. It churns for years and surfaces as something alive. We name it old names we know by their taste on our tongues. Humus and bone, a song in the blood. Hector, we’re all descendants of conquistadors and graveyards. If you were thrown a sword, you’d know how to hold it. Know which tombstones to walk behind, whistling. Which mountain to climb and when to take flight. How heavy your tired arms. Hector, look down on us tenderly before crossing over and descending into the desert. Remember us as the sand swallows and sings you. Before the sun takes you, cast your winged shadow across it. We are the grains in your grave. We are buried there with you.

In which I first discovered

March 25, 2008.Reading time 1 minute.

By Emily Pérez

Featured Art: Woman Writing by Zabitz

Quite suddenly, at least it seems in retrospect
Though I still seek a complete

My relationship to my past
It was as if my past had taken

Without warning, understand,
Had slipped in such a way that it uncovered

No, that’s not right, for it suggests a lack of deliberate
It wasn’t that I didn’t try

Notre histoire sinister

October 1, 2007.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Michael Joyce

Here is our lurid history, the days that were before us once
have slipped behind now and press against us as in a crowd
stumbling from the circus. The circus again! How it haunts
their memories, the afternoon at the Tibetan resto juste en face
where the young clown reminisced about life as a dominatrix
in San Francisco and how gentle it all was finally, her smile
truly angelic, framed in a corona of spun gold hair, le coiff’
paillé, soft, vaguely leonine, the archangel with golden hair
at Petersburg perhaps or Raphael’s lost “Portrait of a Boy”
pillaged by the Nazis from the Musée Czartoryski. This she
recognizes in herself, how in the snapshot from her troupe
she had them guess which one she was, eyes giving her away:
the boy in the pale blue jumper, a play upon Pierrot, fey,
younger, at that age where gender is permeable, apt to slip
hermaphroditic back to girlish, qualis ab incepto processerit
et sibi constet, as Horace had it, i.e., let him stay what he was
at first, but what that was hardly any of us can remember.
And now the children come pouring out from the matinée
into rue Amelot as dans le coin de la salle the three of them
whisper softly lost in each other over tea and dumplings