Issue 32, March 2023
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 15 compiled by Jade Braden.
By Darren Morris
Featured Art: Bird by Peter Takal
I was attempting
the old familiar,
the regular slog,
when I slipped into
missing her again,
the child my wife and I
would never have.
Sometimes she was
a girl and sometimes
a boy. But like heaven,
I held her there
in my mind, a place
of light where nothing
is done, but all is felt.
She was a multitude.
The great uncapturable
plasm of love. Often
she was only
a finch’s thin line across
a rice-paper sky, tearing
through all stations of life.
The way she might
have worn her hair,
or adorned the surprising aspect
of surface-self for appeal.
Or how the supremacy
of personality might emerge,
wriggling out as it does.
Or the first run-in with
terrible, terrible sexuality.
By Cecilia Pinto
Featured Art: Resting by Antonio Mancini
Many years ago I watched a documentary about people with mental illness. One of the patients presented was a young woman who had been institutionalized. Despite being an adult physically, she acted like a little girl and lived in a room filled with dolls. She wanted more than anything to be spanked because she equated this with love. No one would comply with her request which made her desperate and upset.
I have remembered this.
In another documentary I learned of a girl who had been kept in severe isolation and abused for most of her young life. Her deprivation left her sensitive to light and without language. Partial rehabilitation was achieved but it was noted that the girl felt it absolutely necessary to keep multiple glasses of liquids in her room.
When I think about the first young woman, I see her story line in a candy-colored palette, baby pinks, blues and soft yellows. The curtains billow, the bedclothes pool, there are fat, dancing animals with little eyes.
The second girl’s images are black, white and gray. The girl moves through her story like an animated charcoal drawing; sketchy, vibrating lines, electric black hair, skittering movements. I think of black crows flapping into the sky, the glint in their eyes, the glint in the water in all the glasses. She carries glasses of water in front of her as if she is a priestess.
By James Davis May
Featured Art: Tea Party with Open Pottery by Seymour Rosofsky
Shouldn’t it be I’m disappointed by (or because of) and not in you?
We were watching Stellar’s jays—I didn’t know their names then,
I addressed the first one as “Monsieur Mohawk”—watch us,
or watch our meal rather. I don’t know if birds feel disappointment,
but as they flitted around the perimeter of the patio
with an odd combination of aggression and timidity,
their feet on the sun-bleached railing
making sounds like a hand searching a filled drawer
for something that’s not in the drawer,
the diminishment of cereal must have been processed
as the bird-equivalent of disappointment.
When I picked up Chelsea’s bowl and took it inside to the sink,
I thought of California (it was my first time in the state),
and then of Robinson Jeffers,
and then of the time Jeffers realized
he was older than Keats when Keats died, and then I realized
I was older than Jeffers when he realized this.
He was taking firewood back to his house and had to walk over a very narrow
bridge, one that his dog seemed reluctant to cross again. So he left the bundle,
carried the dog over, and then went back for the wood when he was hit by his
age, and then the “insignificance” of what he had written.
And yet we say, “I’m disappointed with myself,”
which sounds redundant.
The woman eating dinner with us the night before told us there was no age she
wanted to go back to. Someone pointed out that she was still young.
By Sarah Galvin
Featured Art: The Art of Living by Saul Steinberg
You come out of the room where everyone is doing karaoke
and ask why I’m ignoring you.
I want to say something that suggests I’ve endured
some exotic, indescribable torture
but a completely mundane thing has happened,
which is you have stopped loving me.
So, even though your body is here, you are gone
and bodies are becoming less like a procession of individuals
than a texture like wet cement, but also like words that say,
“Why would you subscribe to such a mystery object”
and I think, it’s funny the cement forms words, especially these words
but something isn’t right about the word “subscribe” in this context
and I can’t tell if the sentence is a question or a statement—
Why is there no punctuation?
I want to run, but I’m already travelling in every direction at once.
By Jessica Langan-Pack
Featured Art: Wheatfield by Georges Braque
My daughter is nine, and she has recently grown taller and lost most of her softness. Now she’s a thin and delicate thing with very straight, very smooth hair that she wears in bangs across her forehead. She is afraid of bees. She is afraid of forest fires, and of strangers, and of a book she read called The Face on the Milk Carton, which is about a little girl who sees her own face on a missing children
poster. She is articulate and serious and very imaginative. When she finds out, at the beginning of her summer vacation, that her father is losing his memory, not slowly, or gracefully, but at a possibly alarming rate, what she decides to do is remember everything.
“So that you can tell him?” I ask her. For a few weeks I have been thinking of my head as an empty room of some kind, and sometimes my voice reverberates off its walls. We are sitting in the kitchen eating cereal.
She shrugs. “Just so I don’t forget.” She is at a stage where she has trouble differentiating between other people, real or fictitious, and herself. I wonder if she is afraid of losing her own memory.
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.
By Mike Schneider
Featured Art: Gray Spots by Vasily Kandinsky
Hot roller to the shortstop,
me—lean machine
of summer, scuffling
in ballfield yellow dirt.
Off like a hound I go
with my three-finger
Warren Spahn, neatsfoot-
oiled cowhide glove
to gobble that scorched
grounder & fire it
across the diamond
to Tub McMullin’s
fat-handed mitt at First.
Little League? Shit.
This is ultimate Big Time.
Who knew that stitched
leather ball could baffle
hand & eye? Wild
chance, wicked hop,
they said, nasty chop
direct to the cartilaged
bulge of my Adam’s Apple
dropped me flat, washed
me in starlight. Nerve
& muscle inscribed
with solid-state physics,
I learned to flinch & never
could unlearn that secret.
One rainy afternoon
on Heckman’s front porch
we unraveled it, yards
& yards of yarn down
to the inscrutable rubber
pill, unforgiving hard
center of the world.
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
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.
By Charles Haverty
Featured Art: Oak Street Beach, Chicago by Terry Evans
Everyone in his new life warned Ferris not to go to Cancun. They said Cancun was to drinking what Las Vegas was to gambling. “They even drink in the swimming pools,” his sponsor Leonard told him. “No shit. They belly up to the bar right there in the water.” He’d been sober for four months, a week, and three days, but Caitlin was his only sister and he her only brother and this was her wedding. So there he stood, sweating on the beach in the wrong suit, the darkest figure in the sand-colored crowd. With the ceremony behind him, only the reception, the night, and a taxi ride to the airport separated Ferris from the plane that would carry him back to Indiana and his quiet, normal life.
It was five o’clock, with two hours to kill before the beachside reception, and as guests blew soap bubbles in lieu of throwing rice, he felt an arm encircle his waist, his father’s arm, steering him back through the bubbles toward the empty rows of white chairs. His father was a well-kept man of fifty-nine, youthful and perpetually tan, and though he’d been all smiles walking Caitlin down the makeshift aisle, he looked ashen now, diminished. “We need to talk,” he said. “Not here. Alone. Mano a mano.” They agreed to meet poolside once his father was through posing for photos with the wedding party. He took hold of Ferris’s sleeve. “Don’t fail me, Son,” he said, and that Son frightened Ferris more than anything. As he followed the concrete path that ran alongside the beach, the urge to drink, to counteract his renewed sense of dread, was near irresistible. He had to call Leonard.
Read More
By Mark Cox
Featured Art: Untitled by Vija Clemins
In your prime, shape presents itself first,
the angle and curve of one thing,
the size of something else,
or the way her hair flows volcanically
along each subtle slope and swell.
It is crazed, intense, super-heated,
even the soles of your boots feel sticky,
because she’s entered you, you know this,
she charts the very map of your blood,
and that eyelid twitch you have going,
they’ll claim is stress and dehydration,
but it’s her, pal, all her, she floods places
you’ve never named in yourself,
she proffers the pulse, the duende, the élan,
that jackhammer of lust
outside the Fiesta Ware outlet. . . .
But one day, it just happens,
a man’s eyes cloud and change,
you don’t feel with the same ardor
the way she moves, her confident posture,
no, suddenly it is color you notice,
the grays, the yellows, the bruised surfaces
tinged with a silver-green, almost a tarnish,
as if her skin were a metal,
and not such a precious one, either,
more like pewter or the common alloys
of soot-smudged medieval artisans,
something to be re-shaped, hammered thin,
become useful and used.
By Ryan Meany
Featured Art: Coffee and Cigarettes by Ken Schles
Mom called Friday to say Linda died.
At least two people I don’t like at work
I know better than Aunt Linda. I carried her
casket yesterday, because my grandmother asked,
along with younger cousins, strangers I recognize from childhood,
tough men I see only as the children they were
in bony faces, stubble. The babies they were
they’ve locked up deep: Dusty on military disability
with three kids, and Billy, who used to be Little Billy,
with a court date for driving 137. My grandmother
looked like a Treasure Troll in tired skin, white broken
hair refusing to go down. When I hugged her the life in her was small
as a niece, her lineage drained out all around her. She reminded me
I was her first grandbaby in that smoky Southern Baptist
vibrato. A few days before, on Sunday, when I’d come to her house,
she talked like she’d long ago forgiven me for mostly staying away
for twenty years. I was glad she didn’t know the trouble I’ve caused, especially
because I doubt she’d love me less. My senior picture hung in her living room
as if I were as important as all these grandkids and great grandkids
who wondered who I was. Soon she’ll be dead and I won’t be so important.
So many people took turns holding her
the funeral seemed to be hers. I had no right to want to save her
from thinking, when I was helping to carry her daughter’s body,
that I’d soon be carrying her body, as I’d carried my grandfather’s body
just a couple years before, which was actually six years before.
We were not sad that, to time, we were like grass
under the feet of pallbearers. I was sad because
the time I had in common with this side of the family
we’d mostly forgotten, another thing my grandmother would die knowing.
The last time I saw Aunt Linda was outside the hospital
in the courtyard for smoking. I was there visiting someone
who’d mixed Vicodin and vodka to find out who cared. I can’t remember
why Aunt Linda was there, her heart or her brain. Her brain
would cause the most trouble later, a popped vessel, then
another, the top of her skull removed, screams
from the headaches and so many drugs, according to my grandmother
as we smoked outside Sunday morning. She’s at peace,
I said. Already we were down to our last words.
By Miles Harvey
Featured Art: A Graveyard and Steel Mill in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania by Walker Evans
Time forks, perpetually, into countless futures. . . . In most of these times, we do not exist;
in some, you exist but I do not; in others, I do and you do not; in others still, we both do.
—Jorge Luis Borges, “The Garden of Forking Paths”
“Was she a relative of yours?” the old man asks, leading me toward your grave.
“Well, not exactly,” I begin to reply. “She—”but then I pause. In the middle of my sentence, in the middle of my life, in the middle of some small-town cemetery in the middle of the Midwest, I pause, unable to explain who you are or why I’m here. What I would tell the man, if it didn’t sound so absurd, is that although I am not your descendant, although I only recently learned of your existence, although you barely left a mark on the world, and although your corpse was buried here more than forty years before I was born, I can’t get you out of my mind. What I would recount, if I could figure out a simple way to do it, is the history of happenstance that connects me to you across the years, a bond that at this moment feels almost as strong as the ties of blood. What I would confess, if I wasn’t worried he’d laugh in my face, is that I woke up this morning, a couple months shy of my fiftieth birthday, certain I had to drive more than one-hundred miles from Chicago to visit a total stranger’s grave in this tiny hamlet of Dana, Illinois.
A dog barks in the heat of this August afternoon. A killdeer swoops in on slender wings, offering its distinctive call: kill-dee, dee-dee-dee, kill-dee, deedee-dee. And still I pause.
By Sarah Barber
Featured Art: Untitled (Woman’s Arm and Bra) by Ralph Gibson
Often I have unfastened it myself
without tragedy. But I wanted you
to stand behind me—in fact
a fourteenth-century town
of needle manufacturers crocheted
loops from wire because they wanted
your hands just so terribly
close and a little bit slow
at the closure too aggressively
latched to unhook at the will
of its wearer, which is what was said
to sell it to nineteenth-century ladies,
not quite promising exactly such
an unhooking of their dresses
and all those garments, and indeed
as early as 1643 a woman in Maryland
traded £10 worth of tobacco for hooks
and eyes only because she wanted
you to stand behind me
as the fastening came undone.
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.
By Glen Pourciau
Featured Art: Mall of America, Minnesota by Melanie Einzig
We were in a Mexican restaurant at the mall, and my husband, as is his habit, was looking at everything but me. I still had half an enchilada left, but Boyd’s empty plate had already been removed and he’d ground through all the tortilla chips and salsa on the table, leaving his eyes and mind free to survey the room. His attention was drawn to the occupants of a booth across and at a slight angle from ours. He could see them better than I could, but I peeked back and saw a man and woman, presumably married, and a young intellectually disabled boy, the boy seated on the man’s side, which may have appealed to Boyd. The three of them were a picture of happiness, talking and smiling and enjoying one another. If the boy was their son they’d likely been married at least ten years, and I admit I couldn’t help comparing how they seemed to how we were after fifteen years. Read More
By Bruce Bond
Featured Art: Broken and Restored Multiplication by Suzanne Duchamp
Somewhere beneath the crematorium
of stars, the mystery and the boredom,
the vacuum that every space abhors,
you might stop to listen to no one there
and hear the words of a dead man, a Greek,
who measured nights in increments of music.
The sky then was a calliope of numbers
whose tune was everywhere and therefore far
away as dead men are. No such thing
as solitude among them. It takes a string
of intervals on heaven’s monochord
to pull the sounds from one another, the choir
of which must be silent, surmised, and yet
each ghost note dies into the next to hear it.
By Mikko Harvey
Featured Art: Forest by Werner Drewes
Walking through the woods / at midnight / we were on our way / to the pond / where we
would skinny dip / when two yellow eyes / appeared on the path / we froze / they didn’t
blink or move / the body was / hidden by the dark / there was something / sinister in its
stillness / we turned back / you said it was probably / a bobcat / but better not / to take
that chance / we shared a bed / untouching as usual / you fell / asleep first and I wondered
what kept us / apart really / that night / and the others / the distance between us / maybe six
inches / felt like a shadow / I couldn’t step out of / my two open eyes / the only light
in the room / I thought of the animal / blocking our path / and it occurred to me / she was
only a hostess / welcoming us / to the world of risk / smooth and lovely / water hugging
your naked body / the animal said / are you ready / but we walked away / I had an urge
to shake your body / awake and take you back / to the animal and say / confidently yes
table for two / but instead I just lay there / in the perfect / quiet / country / darkness / and
imagined the outline / of your chest rising / and falling / rising / and falling as you slept.
By Ellen Devlin
Featured Art: New York (Couple on Steps of Metropolitan Museum of Art) by Garry Winogrand
I once saw a Persian sword, in a museum,
glass-boxed, lighted. Warriors on winged
horses charged, lifted scimitars, hundreds of them,
carved in the blue white breath inside the hilt.
I leaned my head on the glass, helpless.
By Anne-Marie Fyfe
Featured Art: Art Institute of Chicago by Thomas Struth
Opens its doors one Sunday a month
in winter. The queues back up for decades.
If you’re lucky and your number’s called
you can have any tour: Your Charmed Life,
Your Regrets, The Prodigal You, every second
slip-road at the intersections of the possible.
The exhibits are stark and infinite
under strip neon, long hallways
of lost opportunity, slow clocks,
stopped clocks, rooms where even now
a thought might wither: the attic storeroom
is out-of-bounds to all but the curators,
though artifacts are still donated by the hour.
Standing in line is no guarantee
of admission: some days
word spreads that when you
reach the queue’s head, pass through
the double doors, it’ll be stripped out,
even lightbulbs, with only packing materials
and discarded drapes left. Yet critics insist
The Multiple-Choice Foyer, The Roads-Not-Taken
Gallery, The Back Burner Café are stunning.
Every room’s a tasteful shade of apple-white
apparently. Waxworks and living statues
rehearse at intervals for The Balcony Scene,
The Shining City, The Reconciliation, over
and over, night by night. As in the finest operas.
By Carl Dennis
Featured Art: Shore Line by Howard Giles
Having lingered, on my first trip to Europe, longer
In Paris than I expected, I had to forgo
Walking in Wales. But that didn’t keep me
From becoming deeply indebted to Wales
When I phoned the hotel in Cardiff
To cancel my reservation and save my deposit.
“There’s a letter for you,” the desk clerk said,
In a rich contralto. “Would you like us to send it on?”
“Better read it to me, if you have time,
Since I keep moving.” And that’s how it happened
I heard, as I sat in a booth at the Gard du Nord,
Awaiting the train to Brussels, my mother’s sentences,
Penned in Missouri, delivered with Welsh intonations.
That’s how her usual mix of family news,
Tips about healthy eating, and encouragement
To visit any noteworthy local garden,
Took on an undercurrent of mystery.
That’s why they seemed imbued with the suggestion
My travels were more than a summer’s entertainment,
Were in fact a quest for something just as meaningful
As whatever a knight went searching for
When he rode out from a castle in Wales.
Some truth more practical than a grail
And more surprising would soon be mine
Once I learned to listen to people whose words
I regarded before as predictable and forgettable.
And I had questions about the desk clerk,
Who’d read the letter as if she’d composed it herself,
Inspired by a sincere concern for my well being.
What did it mean, her convincing performance?
If it wasn’t part of her job at the hotel,
Was it part of some other calling
Defined in a legend I didn’t know yet
But would want to learn if the chance were offered?
By Linda Bamber
Featured Art: House by a River by Edward Hopper
1. Chevy Chase
Choked up to see the in-ground cellar door
behind the house
I was born in long ago
then had doubts, cell handy,
called older sister far away.
She said, wrong house!
Original had front yard oaks,
big porch . . .
found right house, had no
response at all. Used up tears on
house that didn’t know me from Adam! Read More
By Barbara Hamby
Featured Art: Study of a Baby by Fredrick Goodall
When I tell my mother that a man I know pickets the local hospital
about what his wife calls “his topic” that is, circumcision
and its evils, she tells me this was my grandmother’s specialty
as a nurse, and I say, “You’re kidding.” “No. The doctor
she worked for couldn’t stand it, so she did all his circumcisions.
She loved it!” Loved it? I think—cutting the tips off
boys’ penises? Loved what? The precision? The power? The cries?
I remember sitting with my mother and grandmother
when I was seven or eight, pretending to play, so I could listen
to them talk in front of my grandparents’ house
in Washington, 328 Maryland Avenue, and down the tree-lined street
you could see the Capitol dome looming. A couple
were walking on the sidewalk, and they waved at my grandmother,
who smiled and waved back. “Are they married?”
my mother asked when they passed. “No,” my grandmother
answered, “they’re just shacked up.” The cups of my ears
gathered around those words like ravenous Venus Fly Traps,
because this was just what I had been waiting for,
though I had no idea what it meant, and I knew I couldn’t ask
or my doll dressing and tuneless singing would be exposed
for the subterfuge they were, and I’d be exiled into the house,
and this was before my grandfather died, who didn’t think
a woman should drive, but my grandmother taught herself,
her two little girls in the back seat screaming
as the car jerked over the dirt road behind their house in Kentucky,
and then after he died, she went to school and became a nurse,
but fifty years later I’m chatting with a man on a plane, who’s returning
home after spending the day in New York because
he is a mohel and has made this long trip to snip the tip off
some little boy’s penis, and I think of Mantegna’s painting
of the circumcision of Christ at the Uffizi and kosher laws which
forbid eating crustaceans, which would mean a sacrifice
of gumbo, boullabaisse, cioppino and fish soups the world over,
and it was the fried Apalachicola shrimps that broke
the back of my vegetarianism, what in Louisiana they call
“sramps,” and I’ve heard them called “pinks,” “prawns,”
and sometimes when I’m standing over the stove making a roux
my life seems to be a kind of gumbo, and if you don’t burn
the water-and-flour paste, then it doesn’t much matter what else
you throw in, but okra is a must and a couple dozen
oysters, andouille sausage, all your dark mistakes mixed in
with the brilliant medals and diamond tiaras,
and my grandmother told me she went to her wedding
in a horse and buggy, a seventeen-year-old girl,
probably a virgin, and little did she know where that road
would lead her, from canning tomatoes and corn
to snipping the tips off thousands of penises to the nursing home
where she died, shacked up with all her selves,
that particular gumbo stewing in a body withered by 93 years,
not knowing anything but that she’d rather be eating
ice cream, driving to Memphis, frying chicken, mashing
potatoes, baking a cake with blackberries
her daughters picked that morning before walking to school.
By Conor Broughan
Featured Art: Canal Street, Chicago by Harold Allen
The Statistics played three shows in four days and Chris McCann—all of sixteen and the founding member, lead singer, guitarist and de facto manager of the band—wasn’t ready for the tour to end. All summer, Chris had only wanted to get out of his Springfield, Virginia house and on the road. Unsolicited, Chris’s father had told him that his mother’s erratic behavior over the past six months hadn’t been his fault. Until his father brought it up the night before the tour, Chris had never considered the possibility. Stray raindrops cried across the windshield when he drove over the Turnpike and into Asbury Park, New Jersey for the final show of the tour. The Bowery Club on Ocean Avenue.
Kyle—rhythm guitar—was the first to step out of Chris’s father’s 1989 Dodge Caravan. At the beginning of the tour, he announced that he’d grow out his beard. Deemed a failure on all fronts, Kyle still considered it a work in progress.
By Billy Collins
Featured Art: Dove in Flight by Pablo Picasso
On my morning walk along a cinder path
that follows the shore of a lake,
I saw a good-size, solitary rabbit,
seven mourning doves who rose to the top of a fence
at my approach,
two anhingas, one drying his extended wings
like a pope on a balcony,
the other not doing anything at all,
also, a loud bird who refused to identify himself,
then ten young ducks in a huddle
by the vegetation near the water,
some sleeping, others preening their feathers,
all not quite old enough to be on their own,
oh, and a squirrel who headed up a tree
when he heard me coming down the path.
By Jeffrey H. MacLachlan
Featured Art: Vendémiaire, plate 34 from Alcools by Louis Marcoussis
On my way home from an empty happy hour, God shoved me so I punched his
chin with a half-formed fist. He laughed and asked me if I knew who snapped
dinosaur tails like breadsticks. God was all effort like old dudes at pick-up
games. Leg-kicks striking thighs and elbows to the windpipe. My uppercut let
out a Hallelujah choir from the sky. He punched my liver and said I should get
some rest for once. You can’t keep this lifestyle forever. He pointed to his chin
and dodged a knockout swing. Why not go visit your kids? God headlocked me
like Mom’s boyfriends did after parole. I’m behind schedule so just fix your life.
He was right but that didn’t stop the stomping he had coming for not showing
up till that night.
By Danny Caine
Featured Art: Drugs by Richard Estes
Oh shit I love “Landslide.”
I was going to get up to piss but then I heard me some Fleetwood Mac.
Hey that’s a pretty farm, too. Farms are dope.
Wait, oh goddamn it it’s a baby horse lying in some fucking sawdust.
That baby horse is so cute I can’t even handle it right now.
I am literally unsure how to proceed.
And now the horse is being fed from a bottle?
The hell am I supposed to do with that?
Dammit now the horse and the dude are playing and stuff.
Fuck me if I don’t love a playful goddamn horse.
Look! A Budweiser truck. Budweiser!
I should like this brand on Facebook.
I should follow this brand on Twitter.
I really should make an effort to engage
with this brand on social media.
Wait, that’s a horse trailer. And our dude
is shaking hands with the driver? Is he—
DUDE YOU CAN’T SELL THAT FUCKING HORSE!
YOU’RE GOING TO MISS HIM SO MUCH!
Somebody get me a Budweiser.
By Dustin Nightingale
Featured Art: New York Lunch Counter by Walker Evans
Needs and Hopes
I want $50,000 a year with insurance, incentives such as stock
options, 401K, paid paternity leave, sick days, two months off
in the summer, and a company car with a gas card. I expect a
healthy work environment, void of inspirational quotes like
Inspiration overtop of an eagle in the snow. My colleagues
will not try and josh me, nor will they throw potlucks or invite
me to 4th of July cookouts and then think I’m an uppity jerk
when I don’t attend. They will not show me pictures of
something they recently pushed or pulled out of their uterus.
Nor will they tell me about the book they want to write based
on their own life. What they will do is mumble lines of Emily
Dickinson to themselves while staring out a window. They
will bring in a bag of cayenne peppers they grew this summer,
leave it on the break-room table with a sign that says Free
—take what you want. And I will take three. I will let them
dry, grind them up, and place them in the plastic of a cigarette
wrapper, which I will pinch into stir-fries during a very
long and cold winter. And I will try to do the same for them.
Previous Experience
Oh I’ve done that. I’m not proud of it, but I’ve done that.
Have you? Well you should try it sometime, just to see what
you’re capable of and for how long. I mean, why not see what
it takes to make you wake up crying. And then of course, what
it takes for you to stop. So when can I start? Or have I already?
By Matt Morton
Featured Art: Time Transfixed by René Magritte
It will be raining. You will be watching
TV when your son walks
into the room. He will be crying
and holding the stuffed gazelle you bought.
What’s that noise? he will ask,
sounding scared. On the screen,
an armadillo singing show tunes. To humor him,
you’ll pretend to listen:
Outside, down the street, coming closer,
a sound like a train. It’s just a train
you’ll shrug. Here, look at this armadillo.
A flashing red banner scrolling from right
to left across the screen. Such tiny print.
You will squint. Undoubtedly,
you’ll have left your glasses in the other room
with your credit cards and shoes. Turning
your attention back to the show,
you will gather up your son. Front door
rattling against the jamb. All of the windows
black. But you said there aren’t any trains.
He won’t stop sobbing. You said they—
Hush you will say, annoyed
at missing your show. Where is your wife?
By now, the sound has become a roar. The gazelle
lying on the carpet, your son’s mouth
stuck open like a doll’s. When the portraits drop
to the floor and break, you will shake
your head: He is so small for his age, the world
will be hard on him. T-R-A-I-N
you’ll mouth, as if he’s deaf, when the windows
start to blow out. You’ll be shouting
It’ll pass, it’s just a train
as the roof is ripped from the house.
By J. Anna Luz
Featured Art: The Builders by Jacob Lawrence
Observing my boyfriend’s
niece and nephew
kick each other
under the table
at Thanksgiving dinner,
blasting each other
in the shins
and knees,
bone against bone
drawing bruises
and welts,
done in such fury
and with such power
yet no sound,
faces not affected,
not a hint
of a wince
of pain, so little
movement at all,
I thought
that’s how my sister
and her husband
love each other,
and how my father
regards his job
and how my mom feels
about all of us,
and how
I see my body.
These children
with pink Keds
and black and
green striped Nikes
underneath a crisp
ironed tablecloth
of fall colors,
didn’t
lie once.
By Denise Duhamel
Featured Art: Frozen Foods with String Beans, New York by Irving Penn
We stopped at a restaurant that advertised steak dinners for $3.99. My father
was excited—he loved red meat. We were on vacation. My sister, my mother, my
father and I were all going to splurge. My father double-checked his billfold and
said, “Let’s go!” The waitress asked if we wanted the special. Yes indeed. Would
we like potatoes? Sure, why not? And creamed spinach? And bread? You bet.
When the bill came, my father blanched. He whispered to my mother he didn’t
have enough in his wallet. He called the waitress to our table and reminded her
of the sign outside. She explained that each steak was indeed $3.99, but that all
the sides we ordered were another dollar each. My father said she should have
been more forthcoming. She brought us a menu. My father asked to see the
manager, who pointed to the phrase à la carte. My mother dug in her purse, but
my father told her to stop. He stood up and put sixteen dollars (a ten, a five, and
a one) on the table—not even covering the tax and certainly no tip. “I’m not being
swindled for a baked potato,” he said to the managerand walked out. “I’m
sorry,” my mother sulked, pulling my sister and me out of the booth. I looked to
the floor, the swirly carpet. “Sir, you can’t do that,” said the waitress. “Ma’am,
I’m serious. You can’t do that,” echoed the manager. “Hey, come back, we’ll
take a personal check.” All the way to the Cape, I thought the police would
pull us over, the unpaid-for potatoes and spinach making me full and groggy.
My mother and father fought—“I’ve never been so embarrassed . . . ” and “Too
bad. I’m no chump.”—before all went silent. My sister and I dug out the steak
from between our teeth with our tongues. After a day or so, the shame turned
to laughter. My mother said, “I guess you showed them.” And my father said,
“I sure did.” By the end of the week we were proud, our story about standing
up to touristy rip-offs, about snobs only pretending to be French, about how we
were living le rêve américain.
By Elton Glaser
Featured Art: Parking Lot, from The Plain of Smokes by Kenneth Price
I can’t stand here all day, glands in a wrangle,
Like some brimstone preacher
Beating the bejesus out of his ratty Bible.
Parvenu and undermensch, slave to enabling vices,
I’m lost in a lanky rhetoric,
Simplicities on the fritz.
But you can’t make laws for monkeys, or poems
From some eruption in the nuts,
Every complication its own Vesuvius.
Poems: or as the Chinese warn,
Disasters that come from the mouth.
Sometimes there’s no wild honey at the end of the beeline,
Only these terse tercets
With no mercy on the rubes
Or the lithe appreciators of gilded tea sets.
There’s always some bother in the Balkans,
And tantrums among the voluble Italians. There’s always
A dent in the fender where the force fields meet.
By Caitlin Horrocks
Featured Art: Steps in Swimming Pool at Main River, Badeanstalt, Frankfurt by Ilse Bing
I originally read this story in the 2006 Summer Fiction Issue of The Atlantic, a magazine whose student writing contest I had won the previous winter. I was wandering the aisles of a grocery store in a strange city, where my boyfriend had just abandoned me to run an errand to an ex-girlfriend’s house. I perused the magazine rack, scanned the table of contents of The Atlantic. My winning story had been considered for publication, but had not made the cut. The famous authors listed I could forgive for bumping me, on grounds of their fame. But who was this “Lauren Groff”? I’d never heard of her. A newbie, like me. Surely, she was the one who had taken my spot.
Of course, editing doesn’t work like this. I knew that even then. But my jealous, shriveled heart still commanded me to buy the magazine, take it to the seating area of the grocery’s little coffee shop, and sniff out the supposed inferiority of this Groff-person’s fiction. I am not proud of my attitude. Writers hope that readers will approach our work with excitement, with patience, with a willingness to be moved. My state of mind, when I began Groff’s story, was instead darkly, nakedly adversarial.
Read More
By Marjorie Celona
Featured Art: Street by Romare Bearden
It is, at first, a linguistic seduction:
On an otherwise unremarkable September morning, long before I learned
to be ashamed of my mother,
If you’ve ever lived near the ocean, perhaps you, like me, equate one or more dependent clauses at the beginning of a periodic sentence to a wave gaining amplitude before it crashes on the shore. It’s a rudimentary metaphor: the wave builds, and by the time we get to the period at the end of the sentence it has crashed. There is a rhythm to the periodic sentence, and it’s near impossible not to be pulled into it. With its sly promise to deliver something remarkable, that first dependent clause—On an otherwise unremarkable September morning— is a somewhat seductive lead in its own right. But it is the second dependent clause—long before I learned to be ashamed of my mother—that gives us our first glimpse into the story’s retrospective, mournful heart. If you’re anything like me (lousy metaphors aside), even at this early point the story has you in its grasp. The rest of the sentence, in conjunction with the story’s title, fulfills the tension by providing a simple explanation for what the story will be about:
. . . she takes my hand and we set off down New Jersey Avenue to begin
my very first day of school.
By Maura Stanton
Featured Art: Summer Breezes by Gustave Baumann
William Maxwell’s great short novel, set in the farm country of central Illinois, where I, too, grew up, pulls us into the story of a murder with such force that we can’t stop reading.
The first chapter is called “A Pistol Shot.” Maxwell begins with the setting: “The gravel pit was about a mile east of town, and so deep that boys under sixteen were forbidden by their parents to swim there.” This sentence tells us that we’re out in isolated country. But it also suggests that this is a novel about “boys under sixteen.”
The next sentence introduces the narrator. “I knew it only by hearsay” he says of the gravel pit. And then we get to know something about his imagination as he tells us why boys like him are forbidden to swim there—“It had no bottom, people said, and because I was very much interested in the idea that if you dug a hole straight down anywhere and kept on digging it would come out in China, I took this to be a literal statement of fact.” Read More
By David Lehman
Featured Art: Ventana de Radiografías by Manuel Alvarez Bravo
The first paragraph of “Under the Garden,” Graham Greene’s finest story, consists of just two sentences:
It was only when the doctor said to him, “Of course the fact that you
don’t smoke is in your favour,” Wilditch realized what it was he had been
trying to convey with such tact. Dr. Cave had lined up along one wall a
series of X-ray photographs, the whorls of which reminded the patient of
those pictures of the Earth’s surface taken from a great height that he had
pored over at one period during the war, trying to detect the tiny grey seed
of a launching camp.
With the indirection that passes for a physician’s professional “tact,” the masterly opening sentence reveals that the protagonist, a man named Wilditch, has just been handed a death sentence. Greene’s opening dwells on the doctor’s discomfort with speaking the bald truth (“what it was he had been trying to convey”), his determination to skirt the subject, with the result that the bitter prognostication of the man’s demise dawns on the reader in the same way that it dawns on Wilditch: belatedly, like the answer to a riddle or trick question. Or so it feels: Greene gets us right into the mind of his protagonist at the moment of revelation. Read More
By Maud Casey
Featured Art: Falling by Aaron Siskind
A man with small eyes and a ginger moustache came and
spoke to me when I was thinking of something else.
I have thought about the first line of Barbara Comyns’ novel The Vet’s Daughter since 1993. I was in graduate school and my wonderful professor, the writer Mary Elsie Robertson, suggested I read Comyns. I did and I have been forever grateful for the recommendation. Comyns is that variety of obscure writer who is a secret literary password. To love her is to enter into a speakeasy filled with levitating teenagers, floods, plague, and the occasional monkey. She authored eleven novels between 1947 and 1989 before her death in 1992, with notably captivating titles, such as Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead and Our Spoons Came From Woolworths. When, in the late Fifties, her original publisher—Heinemann—sent her odd fairy tale of a novel, The Vet’s Daughter, to Graham Greene for a blurb, he responded, “Please, send me no more lady novelists.” I’m not sure precisely which part of The Vet’s Daughter Graham objected to, which part he found too lady-ish—its concern with things domestic? Its girl protagonist? In any case, I’m happy to report, he came around because there’s his effusive blurb on the most recent effort to save it from obscurity, the beautiful edition put out by The New York Review of Books with a foreword by Kathryn Davis and a painting by Louise Bourgeois on the cover that, at first, you might mistake for lovely red stockings hanging on a clothesline but, look closer, those aren’t lovely red stockings, that’s bloody sinew and bone. (The painting’s title is Untitled (Legs and Bones).) Read More
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