2021 Summer Exclusive
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 12 compiled by Natalie Dupre.
By Suzanne Carey
Featured Art: Lorette with a Cup of Coffee by Henri Matisse
After my swim, I sit at a small table at Peet’s
with my medium sugar-free, low-fat, vanilla freddo
that the barista started as I walked in.
I push the whipped cream deep into the cup and worry
about my daughter, who drives
a perilously small car on the freeway,
and my son in New Orleans, too poor to drive,
whose illness frightens me most of all.
My father worried about us until the day he died.
When I came home from college, he insisted
I take the dog or my ten-year-old brother with me
when I drove at night. At eighty-six, he called me daily
from the nursing home to make sure I was okay.
I remember how my mother savored
half a nickel-box of licorice bits and a single cigarette
as she read each evening, waiting for us to come home,
and years later, how she devoured the Hershey bars
and Cokes Dad brought her every afternoon,
long after she had forgotten us all.
Suzanne Carey is a poet, photographer, and artist. Her poems and short prose have appeared in numerous literary journals and anthologies, and her chapbook, George Washington Is Dead, was recently published by Finishing Line Press. Her visual art has been exhibited in northern California and is in private collections throughout the country. Carey has BA and MBA degrees from Stanford University, where she worked as a financial manager for twenty-nine years.
By Fleda Brown
Featured Art: Fruit and Flowers by Orsola Maddalena Caccia
My father has a new woman. He’s 93, the old one is worn out.
They used to hold hands and watch TV in his Independent Living
cottage, but now there is the new one, to hold hands. The old
one is in Assisted Living not 50 feet away but barely able
to lift herself to her walker. He sits in her room after dinner,
her mind wandering in and out. What if she escapes
By Adrienne Su
Featured Art: A Vase of Flowers by Margareta Haverman
We’re at it again. It’s hard not to rewrite
the years, though we couldn’t have known
they were wrong, if they were. Life
isn’t longer than it is, so off we go,
picturing how it might have happened,
though one of us would have been taken,
or both, and one of us lived up north, one
by the warmest sea. We had no common
travel destinations, we rarely read
the same books, there wasn’t one same
friend, and either might have fled
if it started to matter. Apologies, if made,
might not have been accepted. In truth
we could only have met on the street,
on one of your trips to the city. We’d both
have held back. The courage to speak
would’ve yielded “Excuse me,” no more,
all vision cordoned off by the sun.
So we might as well indulge in the words
for their sound: You would’ve been the one.
Adrienne Su’s fifth book of poems, Peach State, is forthcoming from the University of Pittsburgh Press in 2021.
By Daiva Markelis
Featured Art: Stroll with Balloons by Hughie Lee Smith
We came across the camels every time we picnicked that merciless autumn, huge herds grazing on sparse vegetation. Camel comes from jamal, the Arabic root word for beauty. From a distance they did look lovely, their curvy silhouettes mimicking the contours of the dunes. Up close, however, they seemed slightly ridiculous, like bad female impersonators, batting their Scarlett O’Hara lashes to keep the sand out of their eyes, their long necks sloping toward us, then coyly withdrawing.
That we saw them so near the city surprised us. We’d heard stories of naive Westerners who’d driven for hours looking for adventure—for camels—and then stopped to explore the landscape with their pitifully small water bottles, supplemented, in some cases, by flasks of 100-proof siddiqi. Some were lost in the Empty Quarter, the largest desert in the world, never to be heard from again. I wrote a friend: If I were to start a literary journal here, I’d call it The Empty Quarterly.
Sometimes we’d see a row of black tents with goats tethered to a nearby post. Once, an old Bedouin waved a gnarled hand back and forth like a weathered stick. I thought we were in trouble, trespassing on his property, but as he ambled closer all he said, in a slow, proud English, was “See my camels.” He invited my husband into the largest of the tents. I waited in the air-conditioned Mazda, fiddling with the radio. Masculine voices jabbered in endless variations of the little Arabic I knew: Assalamu alaikum wa rahmatullah, Allah akbar, Inshalla. The sounds seemed to emanate from deep down the throat, a rush of rough and phlegmy h’s, a conspiracy of k’s.
By Michael Derrick Hudson
Featured Art: Circus Clown and Dancer by Marc Chagall
So what happened? I used to be a lion, crashing
the herd and yanking down stampeding
zebras on the hoof. Days spent pissing hot gold
across the Serengeti! The ground gone tawny
with my scat! Those long afternoons
of fly-blown torpor, those gristly jawfuls of prey
By Brock Guthrie
Featured Art: Leg in Hammock by Edward Weston
One is what one looks at—well, at least partially. —Joseph Brodsky
All morning in my hammock burning
a tight one, poised with pencil and notebook
and seven-week beard, I look to the pines
outside my cabin, seeking inspiration
from the birds and the squirrels
whose singing and foraging, whose
exclamations, no, arguments, reflect
my inner my inner my inner . . .
By Brock Guthrie
Featured Art: Painting with Troika by Wassily Kandinsky
Seven in the morning laying insulation
and wiring electric with a friend and his friend
who make money building houses.
By Claudia Peirce
Featured Art: The Big Red Ball by Ellen Lanyon
Recently I’ve become a “regular” at an especially sub-standard diner called Sam’s World. Although I have no special fondness for the soggy potatoes, greasy burgers or limp lettuce leaves they dish up, Sam’s World is within walking distance. This is important because I have no car and my apartment has no kitchen. There is an old, barely functioning refrigerator in the narrow hallway between the bathroom and the only other room. I don’t hold out much hope for this refrigerator since I can’t bring myself to defrost it. A solid block of ice has formed over the opening to the freezer, and at some point I expect the whole thing will just blow up.
One day I might be out of debt and able to afford an apartment larger than one hundred and fifty square feet. Then again, I may not. When I consider the size of my indebtedness I realize I could quite easily be dead before I pay it off.
Anyway, it’s Tuesday evening at Sam’s World; I’m not very hungry but am in need of comfort so I decide to skip actual food and have ice cream and coffee.
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By Maya Sonenburg
Second Prize, New Ohio Review Fiction Contest
selected by Charles Baxter
Featured Art: The Eventuality of Destiny by Giorgio de Chirico
I am this heart, this brain, only these, right now—no other. This is what Susan (that’s her name now) tells herself every morning upon waking. She opens her eyes and sees the flaking ceiling above her, sees the wash of sunlight coming through leaves. She touches her chest, feels her heart beating steadily—no rush of fear—and exhales. She’s alone. She touches her head, hair just starting to gray
and she’s not bothering to color it. “This can be my new disguise,” she thinks, “my new self.” One of the million selves she’s been in the last twenty-odd years. She rubs her eyes and before she can silence herself again, she remembers days when she thought more, remembered more: a million legs all running toward the Pentagon or induction center or federal courthouse. Flowers in the barrel of a
gun. A Viet Cong flag. Giant puppets of Kissinger, Nixon, McNamara. Or their heads atop the bodies of gigantic hawks, perched among the blackened trees of a burned landscape. Bring the war home. A placard of a napalmed child. If people see, they will join us and this atrocity will have to stop. A million hands waving. A million arms, fists raised in salute. They were the million legs and
hands of her—her legs and hands—the million-limbed body of resistance, then revolution. Why does she allow these things to come back to her today? Because it’s spring and her curtains are the color of a daffodil she handed to a child once at a demonstration? She remembers when the remembered voices were always with her, singing off-key but loudly together. She never felt alone. But then suddenly she was alone, amputated from everyone and everything she knew. Most mornings she silences these memories of memories, she manages to.
By Amy Pickworth
Featured Art: Chrysanthemums by Pierre-Auguste Renoir
1880: John Stine proposes to his dead wife’s sister, Eliza. He is a farmer, about forty, she is a spinster midwife. She accepts, telling him, “I will marry you for the sake of the children, but I will never sleep with you.”
This sounds strange—would she have said sleep with in the nineteenth century?—but these are my grandmother’s words. It is 1993 and we are sitting in her house, which smells like cigarettes and meat. The curtains are drawn. Her second husband has been dead for fifteen years. She hasn’t gone blind yet.
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By Alex Myers
Featured Art: Trees Against the Sky by Alfred Hutty
In the spring of the year, the time when kings go out to battle, David sent Joab with
his officers and all Israel with him; they ravaged the Ammonites, and besieged Rabbah. But David remained at Jerusalem. (2 Samuel 11:1)
11:6
He was halfway to Ramstein, the dust of Afghanistan still on his boots, when it finally hit him: home. In April no less. The cherry blossoms would be spinning down from their trees, sweet, light, floating. It was a military jet—noisy, hard, and sidewise—that took him to Germany, him in his camis, sand still hidden in the folds, hardly believing he was out of the desert. Four months into his first deployment to Afghanistan and, after the training and orientation at central command near Kabul, he’d spent his months out in the mountains, riding Humvees along what they called the main corridor, though it was pockmarked and potholed and barely paved, and humping alongside mules to little villages. Escorting the arrival of humanitarian aid, waiting while some brain from intel, some secret squirrel, interrogated the village elder.
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By Molly Ficek
Featured Art: Bath of Venus by Sir Edward Burne-Jones
My mother is immersed in membrane when I find her. Eggs cover her body, some cracked and spilling their spoils, some whole, resting on her belly, her breasts. White flecks of eggshells gravel her skin and the runnings of yellow yolks have dried, look like the peelings of a summer burn. Her head is underneath this mess when I look over the side of the tub.
“Mom?”
She surfaces, wipes film back into her hair, the glossy middle of the egg from her cheek. She blinks.
“What are you doing?” I ask.
She looks at me as if it’s quite obvious, which I guess it is. She is taking a bath in chicken eggs, dozens and dozens of them.
“I heard it’s good for your skin,” she says.
“Um…for your hair, maybe. Egg whites are supposed to be good for your hair.”
“Hmm,” she says, inhales a big gulp of air, and sloshes down under the eggs, the water beneath them. She waves her hand up at me. Eggs spill over the sides of the tub and drop onto the bathroom floor, cracking open.
By Maya Jewell Zeller
Featured art: Morning, Interior by Maximilien Luce
Winner, New Ohio Review Poetry Contest
selected by Billy Collins
It’s all there—the stuff
no one wants to say is theirs anymore,
the single-slate pool table, the six-person
tent, a complete professional tattoo set
complete with analog power supply.
By Lee Upton
Featured Art: Answer Me by Anri Sala
—after Peter Porter’s “Let Me Bore You With My Slides”
I’ll say it and I’ll say it and I’ll say it again
and here it’s said for us, illuminated. Do you like my wave effects?
The technology will be bypassed any day now. I know. So?
How did that get in? That’s my kid.
Ha ha. That’s a goat Brenda and I saw blocking the road in Brixton.
Look at the head on that.
By Michael Davis
Featured Art: Calf Startena by Robert Rauschenberg
It was hot. That was foremost in my thoughts. A sheer, raw, violating hotness that wobbled on the cement quad and in the still dry air above it. I focused on getting across without fainting. I fixed it in my mind. I didn’t have to ask why there weren’t any birds in the Flushing sky. I knew they all had heatstroke, carpets of passed-out sparrows under the campus trees. Even the shade pulsed with heat. I’d accepted the hottest day in Michigan history the way one accepts an incurable disease or a prison term or a bad marriage. I stopped fighting. I let it own me.
As I reached the rusted double doors of Animal Science, the world seemed to tilt. Darkness rushed into the edges of my vision, and the numbness of heat prostration began to twist through my skin. Panting, I sat down on one of the benches in the building atrium, wondering if my three-mile hike from the adjunct lot was destined to put me in the hospital. The central A/C was broken, but there were box fans every thirty yards, and I felt truly grateful to the Animal Science secretaries for providing the hot air current. Hot air that moved felt better than hot air that didn’t.
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By Tom Whalen
Featured Art: Nan and Brian in bed, New York City by Nan Goldin
The Solution
For the life of me, I can’t understand why The Solution has been marketed as a crime novel rather than simply one of a failed marriage; not a single head is severed from its body, not one of the novel’s protagonists dies. He loved her, it seems, and she loved him and then didn’t, while his love lingered like a bad dream. She worked in the business sector of a nameless city in southern Germany, he spent his days writing a treatise on Hegel’s early years and thought. When they met by chance in Vienna seventeen years earlier coming out of a revival of In the Realm of the Senses, she was studying Wittgenstein in Munich, he finishing an MBA in Bern. As he remade his life to accommodate hers, she remade hers to accommodate his. But where is the crime in that? I find here no commission of an act forbidden by public law. Neither she nor he stole one another’s innocence, as far as I can tell, much less raided each other’s savings. Pages of meticulous detail about the German financial industry, reams of notes about Hegel and Napoleon, Napoleon and Hegel, first a paragraph about Napoleon, then a paragraph about Hegel, then a paragraph on both. Once, yes, at a company party, he believes he sees her flirting with her manager, her hand remaining perhaps a bit too long on his shoulder, his eyes glittering with a sort of bemused rapture, and then his hand on her shoulder, followed by the tilt downward of her head, quickly upraised. Had she only been steadying herself, having drunk too much champagne? The husband doesn’t seem to know any more than I do.
And how pitiful the novel’s climax! He returns without any advanced warning to an apartment vacant of all her things, including the furniture she had inherited from her grandmother. Room after room, closet after closet, cabinet after cabinet, drawer after drawer emptied of all that once was hers, no farewell note on the kitchen table or left on a pillow, only the stale, sour scent of an emptiness
grown suddenly emptier. Good God, what unfathomable creatures we are. Why do we even bother to marry?
