Winter Online Exclusive, December 2022
Newohioreview.org is archiving previous editions as they originally appeared. We are pairing the pieces with curated art work, as well as select audio recordings. In collaboration with our past contributors, we are happy to (re)-present this outstanding work.
Issue 11 compiled by Peter Russ.
By Tony Hoagland
Featured Image: Deer from Momoyogusa-Flowers of a Hundred Generations (1909) by Kamisaka Sekka
Set in the large public hallway and various spaces of a courtroom building. Drinking fountain, a pay phone on the wall, various benches where people eat their lunch or sit, and a few nooks and crannies where they stand and speak. The play is a sequence of monologues from alternate sides of the stage. All the speakers are connected to the trial, but nothing of the trial itself is ever shown.
(professional woman wearing glasses, reading from a clipboard, her voice bu- reaucratic and oracular)
Unicom officials denied knowledge of the events of June ’95. Somehow an entire forest had disappeared.
Those erasures were committed, they said, by an irresponsible subsidiary
who didn’t know the right way to make a jungle disappear.
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By Denise Duhamel
Featured Image: “Rozen” by Margaretha Roosenboom
I can burn the pictures, but not the poems
since I published them in books, which are on shelves
in libraries and in people’s homes. Once my cousin told me
not to write anything down because the words would be there forever
to remind me of the fool I once was. My cousin
was the little dog on the Tarot card, barking at the Fool’s heels
as I headed right toward the cliff.
By Lisa Ampleman
Featured Image: “The Red Kerchief” by Claude Monet
Though already setting,
the sun in late afternoon
in late December revels
in its power—how it,
though meager, can set
red-brick façades ablaze,
By Ellen Bass
Featured Image: “Portrait of Mrs Marie Jeanette de Lange” (1900) by Jan Toorop
If I could choose my muse,
she’d have red hair, short, spikey,
and green cateye glasses with rhinestones at the tips.
She’d wear a sleeveless white blouse, ruffled
over shallow scallop-shell breasts.
Can you see how young she is?
I think she’s the girl Sappho loved,
the one with violets in her lap.
By Jeff P. Jones
Featured Image: “Paris Map in Dutch” by Guillaume Delisle
As a letter carrier, she delivered non-urgent messages to people’s houses. Her work brought her past gates, across yards, onto porches, into foyers. She never looked in windows or rang doorbells but on request would hand mail to a resident encountered outside as she exchanged small talk. She would then move on, readying the next house’s letters and advertisements, imagining fingertips releasing sealed flaps, creases tearing, messages sliding into waiting hands.
Each week her teenaged son caused some new havoc. One night he stole her car and was stopped by police forty miles away, coursing a college town’s streets with three friends and a bottle of vodka. The four boys cleaned her gutters the next weekend as she grilled hamburgers and made jokes about her prematurely gray hair.
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By Geoffrey Brock
Featured Image: “A Lone Child Walking Down the Street at Night“, Unknown Artist
Like the one where you stumble along happily drunk
after closing a bar and reach your car only to find it
surrounded by militia who take you in to question you
about why you left your son alone in the car so long
and you say I lost track of time though that’s not true
and Can I see him and they refuse and Is he okay and
By Z.Z. Boone
Featured Image: “Breton Girls Dancing, Pont-Aven” (1888) by Paul Gauguin
I don’t know what happened, but last night I just lost it. Just fucking lost it.
It’s eleven o’clock at night, I’ve been doing inventory in my store all week, I’ve barely made a dime, and this is when my fourteen-year-old daughter decides it’s a good time for defiance.
“You have no idea what it’s like!” she screams.
I’m lying on my still-made bed, full dressed except for my shoes, and she’s standing with a hand on each side of the doorway as if to prevent my escape. I’m not going anywhere. I’m just trying to hear the TV, trying to get the news about how screwed up the rest of the world is, but I can’t make out a word.
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By Scott Kreeger
Featured Image: “Flowers on a Footpath from Bijutsu Sekai” by Watanabe Seitei
Zigzag down the stairs. Yeah. Zigzag to the trash can and toss the bag in. Yeah.
Zigzag through the gate and into the pool area. Yeah. Zigzag between the chaise lounges. Yeah. Zigzag down the steps and into the pool. Yeah.
Zigzag too cold, too cold. Yeah. Zigzag out of the pool. Yeah.
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By Suzanne Richardson
Featured Image: “The Fallen Angel Spreads His Black Wings” by Odilon Redon
Heroin made Tristan’s breath sweet like mangoes. When we kissed it felt like licking the inside of a kiwi: fragrant, indulgent, the tangy saccharine rolling around my tongue. I didn’t know why he tasted like that, but I liked it. At the time I didn’t know I was sleeping with a heroin addict. He would sit up in bed and scratch his arms and face for hours. I would call his name, shake him even, but he wouldn’t answer. In all four years I’d slept with him, he had never acted that way before. I would put on a robe and pace the apartment, or sit on the couch, and think about my family. My brother. My parents. I had never felt this scared with them despite our differences. Sometimes I would grab fruits or vegetables from the fridge and nervously practice peeling, or dicing until dawn. I think I did this out of some compulsion to better myself even in the darkest of hours. My mother could always chop and dice things perfectly. I taught myself to peel mangoes in one motion so the peel piled into one long strand in the sink drain. I couldn’t think of anything that would make him act that way. One night, lying on the couch, staring at the ceiling, I recalled a conversation I’d had at a party with an EMT.
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By Tarfia Faizullah
Featured Image: “Tête-á-Tête” by Edvard Munch
I admit that when the falling hour
begins to husk the sky free of its
saffroning light, I reach for anyone
willing to wrap his good arm tight
around me for as long as the ribboned
darkness allows. Who wants, after all
By George Kalogeris
Featured Image: “Two Cockatoo and Plum Blossom” by Ohara Koson
It must be the shade that draws them. Or else the grass.
And it seems they always alight away from their flocks,
Alone. It’s so quiet here you can’t help but hear
Their talons clink as they hop from headstone to headstone.
By Robert Cording
Featured Image: “Australian Pelican” by Elizabeth Gould
Last evening, another sunset party:
drinks, laughs, ironies, hidden desires.
All of us tanned and glowing, we exchanged
jokes and gossip, fresh and stale, self-conscious
that something larger was missing
when we turned to best watches, shoes, cigars.
By William Kelley Woolfitt
I’ve been told Crow’s story so many times I remember it better than my own memories. It was my bedtime, naptime, and story-time story. I think my parents told it to each other too, in whispers, in each other’s arms, striped with moonlight coming in through the blinds, too tired to say anything new.
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By Eric Torgersen
Featured Image: “Study for “Le Bain”: Two Women and a Child in a Boat” by Mary Cassatt
You’ve got to act, and soon, but you don’t dare yet.
There’s one big load you don’t think you can bear yet.
You chose to dive this deep; it’s not for me
to tell you why you can’t come up for air yet.
By Richard Schiffman
Featured Image: “Rendezvous in the Forest” By Henri Rousseau
Already morning ignites
the high wicks of the pine.
A few birds trilling,
don’t ask me their names,
or my own as I stumble
out of bed on sea legs,
rub my eyes until stars appear
like ships still foundering
on the reef of night.
But when I open them again, day
is fully rigged and sailing off
with me on it.
Richard Schiffman is an environmental reporter, poet, and author of two biographies. In addition to the New Ohio Review his poems have appeared on the BBC, in the Alaska Quarterly, the Christian Science Monitor, the New York Times, Writer’s Almanac, This American Life in Poetry, Verse Daily and other publications. His first poetry collection “What the Dust Doesn’t Know” was published in 2017 by Salmon Poetry.
Originally appeared in NOR 11.
By Richard Schiffman
Featured Image: “Houses of Parliament, London” by Claude Monet
“It is not known why they were not finished,”
the curator noted of two hundred later canvases.
Turner’s work becoming increasingly unhinged—
cyclonic sunbursts, hills skipping like rams, crepuscular
curtains, reeling cliffs and brimstoned cities.
By Devin Murphy
Featured Image: “Shoes” by Vincent Van Gogh
One night a month, people in my hometown outside of Buffalo, New York, put their large trash items on the curb for the sanitation department to pick up the next morning. Our neighbors would drag out old Whirlpool appliances, ironing boards, and whatever else the weekly garbage route couldn’t take. On those evenings, my Dutch immigrant mother loaded me into her rusted-over white 1970 Chevy Caprice station wagon with its vinyl side panel, and we’d slowly cruise the streets picking through the refuse.
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By Deborah Casillas
Featured Image: “Standing Bull” by Jean Bernard
The days dragged on, steady ticking of the clock.
My mother’s cancer; surgery, injections, drugs.
Long afternoons I sat in my grandfather’s library
looking at books. Shelves of books about bullfighting—
la lidia, combat; la corrida, the running of the bulls.
By Anamyn Turowski
Featured Image: “Woman with a Butterfly at a Pond with Two Swans” by Jan Toorop
She bought the swans because of the empty pond. Lonely; that’s why, really. She saw two swans in profile in a poultry magazine she’d picked up at the dentist’s. She paid $1500 for a pair. As if swans could change anything. Her husband says she needs birds like she needs a hole in her head. A lobotomy, she thinks, that’s what I need. Every time she stares out the window toward the pond, the empty water makes her cry. She charged the pair on a new credit card that came in the mail that day. What’s the interest on that card? You never read the fine print.
Read MoreBy 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.
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By Amos Jasper Wright IV
Featured Image: “The Repast of the Lion” by Henri Rousseau
Forty days passed without landing a sale. For a while, I felt sorry for myself, and then self-pity shifted gears and boiled into a rage that curdled everything I touched. The BP spill down in the Gulf had put a damper on auto sales. The economy in general was in shambles, but this town hadn’t prospered much since the Red Mountain cut. Meanwhile, we’re dumping good, hard-earned USD into foreign countries and our Harvard-educated Kenyan president was doing all of jackshit about it. Instead of buying new cars, people just drive them longer. Used to I could sell forty cars in a month. You don’t need a Harvard degree to do that.
Read MoreBy Liz Kingsley
Featured Image: “Pattern from L’ornoment Polychrome” by Albert Racinet
First he slept with someone else and later while he was busy sleeping, she slept
with someone else. No, before he slept with someone else, she slept with the
lawyer across the street who gave good oral argument. She did not tell him
about the lawyer. Their time together was privileged and she knew her rights.
By Spencer Wise
Featured Image: “Poppy Fields near Argenteuil” by Claude Monet
We’re on our way to meet Charlene’s family for the first time, listening to Townes Van Zandt in the car, and Charlene’s saying, “‘Pancho and Lefty’ is me and my Daddy’s song,” when I suddenly smell fire. All along Highway 33, the smell of wood burning. She laughs. “Don’t laugh,” I say, “might be a forest fire.” She says, “First time south of the Mason-Dixon, and now you’re Woodsy Owl.”
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