NOR: Embrace Your Conjunctions
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 18 compiled by Meah McCallister.
By Gail Mazur
Featured Art: Butterfly by Mary Altha Nims
Believe that even in my deliberateness I was not deliberate
—The end words form this line from Gwendolyn Brooks’
poem, “the mother”
We’d be calm, we’d be serene, as long as we could believe
in the blue dragonflies and balletic monarchs that
hovered near us in a kind of peaceable kingdom even
while my love’s illness menaced the peace in
the summer yard, in the fragile house, in the air I breathed in my
deliberateness. My only stratagem, deliberateness:
to accept our lot in that pathless time. I
thought I’d know what he’d want; what I’d want was-
n’t any different. Wouldn’t it be, wouldn’t it finally be, not
to consider how finite our August? Not to deliberate?
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.
By Suzanne McConnell
Selected as winner of the 2015 New Ohio Review Fiction Contest by Maud Casey
Featured Art: Gardener’s House at Antibes by Claude Monet
I wake to the phone ringing like an alarm. It’s the middle of the night. I clamber out of bed, hard-won sleep, into the living room, grope for the receiver. “Isabella,” my neighbor Viv says in her throaty, demanding voice. “I’ve lost my keys. I’m at the booth two blocks away. Come downstairs and let me in.” The phone clicks off.
I light a cigarette, and now I hear her raving like a maniac coming down the street. I move to the kitchen window and stand in the dark in my nightgown, trembling with rage, waiting for her figure to catch up with her voice shattering the night, and now I see her at the edge of the streetlight.
By Bruce Bond
Featured Art: The Brook by Paul Cézanne
after Rembrandt
Why they look away is anyone’s guess,
these men apprenticed to the evidence,
gathered at the corpse the dark context
makes bright inside the surgical forum.
Anyone’s guess why, at this instant,
even the teacher looks past his subject,
the harp strings of these extended tendons
raised up from the bed of the open wound.
A spectacle, it seems, for no one there,
for though they lean in, wide-eyed, severe,
they look instead at the anatomy volume
propped up in the center of the room,
or at us, the viewer, the painter, the future
that stares back with the blindness of a mirror.
By Julie Hassett
Featured Art: The Red Kerchief by Claude Monet
after a painting by Winslow Homer, Boston MFA
Blue skirt a bell, percussive
on her calves, basket full of mussels,
unable to quell the surge,
red hair a banner,
she glares at a ship which lifts,
smacks the swell.
Spumes geyser over hull.
Black shoes plant on granite,
root to her core,
a ballast that will not crack
no matter the force
of gusts from the north,
a gush that rushes her sternum,
alone, again, by the ocean.
By Julie Henson
Featured Art: A Fisherman’s Daughter by Winslow Homer
Late in the night after my father’s memorial service, my sisters and I stopped our small caravan at a Speedway in the stretch of US-40 between Greencastle and Indianapolis. It was early November.
“Come with me,” my sister Emily said, leading me to the back of her car and opening the trunk. She pointed to a box in the corner. “You want some?” she asked sounding like a drug dealer, which at one point she had been. I saw her slipping back in easy—my dad’s ashes were valuable and sort of dangerous—I felt like it may have even been against Indiana state law to have them, let alone scatter them, though I never checked. When I said nothing, she prodded, “You want even just a little? There’s so much to go around.” Sarah, our oldest sister, was waiting in the passenger seat—she had already been dealt her ash-inheritance. It was late and it was cold; I wanted to go to sleep. Emily looked at me intently. The way the gas station lights slanted cast a shadow across the top of her face, and I could not make out her expression.
“No,” I finally said. “I’m trying to quit.”
The nozzle on the gas pump clicked, and she sighed, shut the trunk.
By Stephanie Gangi
Featured Art: Dog with pups by India, Rajasthan, Ajmer, probably Sawar school
That damn dog.
Which one, Ma?
The first one.
There is no first one, there was always a dog, Ma.
The shepherd, the one who kept the baby
from rolling in to the road down the hill in front of the house.
That was me, Ma. I was the baby.
I know that. Rex. Rex.
And what about your father’s, who jumped
out the car window at a toll booth, headed for the hills. Skippy,
ungrateful mutt.
Then we got Duchess, because of Lassie on television.
Duchess was weak. Duchess didn’t last.
The toy poodle came in a hat box. She matched the décor!
I swear to god, she did.
Your chateau phase.
What about your dogs?
My dogs? My dogs, Ma?
The fear biter who darted in the dark at the ankles of my bad choices?
The herder who swam himself spent, circling me circling me when I was at sea?
The too-happy dog, who I couldn’t keep, I forget why?
Now this one, the big one, this horse of a dog who braces himself
so I can stand? Who, the slower I go, the stronger he gets?
Who can’t rest until I rest? This dog, Ma?
This last one? Ma?
By Jackie Craven
Featured Art: Edge of the Woods Near L’Hermitage, Pontoise by Camille Pissarro
“We’d invite you in,” my mother said, “but where
would we put you?” I must have seemed enormous
squatting before her door, third drawer from center.
If not for the marble nameplate, I might’ve seen
a diorama of Jacobean chairs, tiny forks and spoons,
and my stepfather’s bonsai.
“There’s barely enough room for the two of us,”
my mother went on. Deep inside the granite walls,
my stepfather growled, “I blame the Realtor.”
Dogwoods fluttered, casting stained blossoms
into the fountain. Down the hill, a procession of bagpipes
let out a skirl. “She promised us a view,” my mother shrilled.
I think my parents imagined themselves still
at the retirement home, rolling along a tulip-edged path
from the Independent Wing, past Assisted Living,
over to Memory Care, where the Admissions Lady
touched my arm and whispered, “Don’t worry.
We’ll help them downsize.”
By Holly Day
Featured Art: A Funeral by Jean-Paul Laurens
When my father was ten, his mother died
and he went outside into the street after her funeral and screamed
at God. He said, “Take me,
you fucker!” to God, and his younger brother, my
uncle, was so scared he ran
into the room they both shared and hid. Later, when
my father came back, my uncle asked him what Hell was like,
why God had let him come back, if he had seen
their mother, what she was wearing.
By Stephen Dunn
Featured Art: Genesis II by Franz Marc
As a child, some of his prayers were answered
because he prayed out loud for a kite or bike,
which his mother would overhear, and pass on
to her husband, his father, the Lord.
Later, he understood that when he prayed
he was mostly talking to himself—albeit a better,
more moral part of himself—which accounted
for why he heard nothing back from the void.
Lord, he’d begin, because he was afraid
to alter the language of prayer, Lord, deliver
me from envy and mean-spiritedness,
allow me to love people as I love animals.
Then his father died, and he became the sad Lord
of himself, praying for pleasures immediate and grantable.
Let me tango the night long with Margot the receptionist,
he’d say to no one. Let me do unto others.
Selected as runner-up for the 2015 New Ohio Review Fiction Contest by Maud Casey
By Susan Finch
Featured Art: Early Morning After a Storm at Sea by Winslow Homer
When Bob Miller slipped and fell from the rooftop deck of his ex-wife’s houseboat into the inky black of Rock Harbor, it almost appeared as if he’d done it on purpose. The fall took him feet over head, his flailing arms tightening into a V like he was performing a cartwheel. His fingers spread open in sunbursts, his legs stretched wide and long like a dancer’s, and his toes tensed into sharp points. As he tumbled the twenty-five feet into the shadowy water, his whole body seemed to expand and explode into a star.
The entire party saw Bob’s fall or, at least, when the police conducted the official investigation, partygoers would claim they had. And in truth, the spinning and twisting of Bob Miller’s body end-over-end was so spectacular that in hearing the story later in whispers passing across the marina from slip to slip, everyone felt they had seen it. Those who knew Bob assumed he’d been dared to do it. He had always been a bit of a showoff and couldn’t say no to a challenge. When he was thirteen, he’d purchased a dirt bike and had performed stunts for his friends on the weekend, vaulting over a campfire, navigating the narrow wall between the cornfield and the river, and once, after a double-dog-dare, he’d launched the bike from the hayloft of his father’s dilapidated barn and taken a nasty spill on the landing, fracturing his femur.
By Sally Bliumis-Dunn
Featured Art: Submarine Series Introductory Lithograph by Eric Ravilious
When they read the metal tag
on her pectoral fin—
a surprise of dark Cyrillic letters
on this Gray Whale
who had swum some fourteen thousand miles,
inter-braiding continent
with continent—
strange that I think of you now, father
though you too had lived
mostly below a surface,
the breadth of which we could not know—
until they read her tag,
the cetologists had thought
the gray whales off the coast of Baja
were of a different species
from the ones in Minsk.
When I found your lacquer boxes,
so small they fit into my hand,
with their depictions of our home,
the pots above the stove,
their odd discolorations,
the cheerful curtained window
that looked out at the pines,
I felt sad I had not known your heart
would swim such distance for us—
you had never shown us one.
And how small you had to make yourself
to see each scene and paint it
like an ant stepping carefully along
one of those dark passages
in its hill of dirt that nobody sees inside.
By Sally Bliumis-Dunn
Featured Art: The Burning of the Houses of Lords and Commons, 16 October 1834 by Joseph Mallord William Turner
“Aesthetics to Change the Way You Live”
—Growth Magazine
For instance wabi sabi,
a Japanese view of life
that celebrates the imperfect,
the light-hearted sound
of the two words
like figures balanced on a seesaw,
behind them, cloudless sky,
and in the spread, the photograph
of nicked and tarnished silver spoons
arranged in rows on lilac velvet—
how perfectly imperfect.
But separate from the printed page,
the air around me darkens—
and then the sound
like thunder pressing closer
as I think of my own flaws—
and then they all
come charging toward me
like a herd of bison,
so dense it’s hard to see
from all the kicked-up dust.
So loud I cannot think.
How much easier to be won over
by a living room’s worn rug,
the reds and blues, faded,
even threadbare in those places
I have most often stood.
By Christopher Flannery
Featured Art: Reading by Berthe Morisot
I was reading Plato
and thinking about you.
So I wasn’t really reading.
I was thinking.
And I wasn’t thinking about reading,
if you get the idea.
And that’s the thing.
With Plato,
it’s all about the idea.
By Kyle Norwood
Featured Art: Crescent Moon from Album of Paintings by the Venerable Zeshin by Shibata Zeshin 柴田 是真
“This contract,” this machine with knobs
to be pulled, buttons to be pushed, inexorable gears
leading from A to B, but so easily sabotaged,
mucked up by a fallen coin or shirtsleeve or
dangled lock of hair caught in the works—
“is complete,” encompasses entirely the world
of its transaction, has an inside but no outside,
everything else is forever foreign and beneath notice
in the penumbra of this dazzling light,
“and all promises, representations, understandings,
and agreements,” theories, whispered assurances,
messages in code, three-martini lunchtime conversations,
husky-voiced proposals to meet in back of the bank by moonlight,
“have been expressed herein, and all prior negotiations
and agreements are merged herein,” forgotten, a haze,
only this document remembers, everything else is indistinct.
Nonetheless, “no change, modification, or assignment hereof”
shall surprise the sociologists, or Erda the earth-spirit
who knows how all things end,
and no contract, no music or poem worth the paper,
no valedictory address or deathbed testament,
no blood sacrifices, voodoo rituals, fire sales,
or promises spoken out of a burning bush,
no house finch spilling its enthusiasm into the gutters,
no final snow covering the earth like a last sigh,
“shall be binding against the Company unless in writing
and signed by one of its officers.”
By Bryan Owens
Featured Art: Ananas (Pineapples) by Charles Martin
Is it against school dress code for a student to wear sweatpants
that say PINK across the rear? I have CC’d the school director.
Please advise.
Though it is not stated explicitly in the student handbook,
I think it is safe to say this article of clothing
is not school appropriate.
If we do not adhere to the dress code policy
as it is stated explicitly, we are doing these kids
a tragic disservice in their preparation for the real world.
I agree, given the suggestiveness of the images it raises
& its placement in relative context with that which
it is alluding to, this article of clothing should not be tolerated at school.
Well, to what extent do we implement
school policy based on our individual theories of how one article,
not explicitly referred to in the handbook, defies or complies
with the fundamental principles of the guidelines?
So does that mean we let slide what is merely not stated
in the handbook?
How is PINK suggestive it’s just a brand name
I have my own pair at home super comfortable
Of course we don’t merely let it slide!!! but if every member
of the faculty is meant to uphold the dress code policy
through individual subjectivity, how can we have any consistency
throughout the faculty? The student has gone the whole morning
with no faculty sending her to the office!!!
PINK is suggestive as sexual innuendo or metonym
for female reproductive parts. Our dress code is in place
to protect our female students from themselves,
thinking it is good to provoke what teenage boys are already thinking.
Comfortable??? I’m so glad for you, but would you wear them to school???
I would if I could! : )
By Samuel Ligon
Featured Art: The Large Plane Trees (Road Menders at Saint-Rémy) by Vincent van Gogh
We killed Kitty’s husband with a harpoon her grandfather had given her, but it could have been a skillet or the steel ashtray from her kitchen table. The band would sit around that table at night, smoking and drinking and filling the house with music, and as it got late, Billy Wayne would make Kitty feel bad about who she was and what was best in her, calling her ignorant hillbilly trash and blaming her for everything that was small in him. He married her when she was fifteen, two months after he discovered her in Spokane, though everybody knew she didn’t need to be discovered. She only needed to sing the sweet, sad songs we wrote, and America’s heart would melt.
Our first single, “A Stone of Ice,” told the story of Billy Wayne trampling Kitty’s love with whiskey and womanizing, leaching all the goodness from her once pure soul. Every song we sang was about him. We wrote “This Bed You’ve Made” a month before he died, with the chorus that would make Kitty famous:
This bed you’ve made of cheating nights
This bed you’ve made of sin
This bed you’ve made of drunken lies
Is the bed I’m in with him
By Jesse Wallis
Featured Art: Dancers by Edgar Degas
I don’t know how, but I knew as soon as he said it, he would get lost
after the bridge. “I’m still working on this one,” he began, tightening
the strings. “Hope I make it through.” It was the third song the young
man played. He was really quite good, if new. His tenor voice earnest,
fingers deliberate in finding the chords along the neck of the acoustic.
But exactly where I had thought, he forgot the lyrics, shook his head
while he strummed on in circles. Until he whispered under his breath,
“I’m sorry,” and I called out, Muriel plays piano. With a broad smile,
he nodded, “Very good. Thank you.” Then picked it up, Muriel plays
piano every Friday at The Hollywood, and brought it home as strong
as he’d started. This was at a small coffee shop in Carefree, Arizona.
On the patio strung with white lights, maybe a dozen people, a night
in November cold enough to recollect. My wife and I had separated
recently. A friend was trying to get me out in the world, to keep me
busy. And at least for that moment, I felt like I belonged someplace
again. I had something someone needed. Realized anyone could get
lost, even in Carefree. Yet every now and then, the invisible chords
connecting us—even with a complete stranger—sway in the breeze
like silk filaments of a web and catch the light. And you can follow
that flashing back, the path familiar as a song. You know the words.
By Laura Read
Featured Art: Seated Man and Woman by Célestin François Nanteuil
At the middle school meeting for parents of children
in Accelerated Learning, I sit at a lunch table across
the cafeteria from him. At first he is just
part of the scene, like the board listing prices
for soda and chips, or the English teacher addressing us,
famous for tearing up a kid’s paper if it wasn’t
double-spaced. She is talking about the importance
of Latin roots, this new language made from taking apart
what they already know. On the first day of school,
my son recited them to me from the back seat,
wearing his new cool sweatshirt and no longer carrying
a lunchbox, his lunch jammed instead into a plastic
bag like the ones he told me the other kids would have.
Port. Carry. Co com con. With. The man’s face
is starting to look like two faces, like that optical
illusion of an old woman and a young woman,
the same line for the chin and the nose.
The teacher tells us, They’re going to struggle.
They’re going to fail. They’re twelve. Let’s face it—
no one here wants to go back to seventh grade.
By Fleda Brown
Featured Art: Swan by Mary Altha Nims
1
I am full of irritation this morning
which makes folding the fitted sheet
a disaster, wrinkles smashed inside.
Down at the dock, the swan hissed
at me and I thought, good for you,
swan, what business do we have
in your life, anyway, making up myths
in which you rape, or die?
Beautiful things often hiss if you get
too close. Or if you try to neaten them up
like clothes. A swan’s neck is tough
enough to twist you into knots.
Beauty, I don’t know how to feed it
without getting bitten.
2
Swan’s wings are heavy enough to kill you.
Eleven swans at once have traveled our lake
in perfect synchrony in the boat wakes,
their heads so far from the wild bucking,
they seem to have forgotten their bodies.
Terrible flowerings, they are going
somewhere else, to do what they do.
3
A male swan is a cob, the female a pen.
Who thought those up? They make a kind
of sense, though, the same kind of sense
that turns a swan’s neck plus its reflection
into an ice-hook.
4
If a challenger comes too near the nest
the cob climbs on him and shoves
his head down until he drowns. Not shoves.
He rests his beak quietly, relentlessly
on the neck as if it were the challenger’s
decision to bow under, and he were
helping him stay there. His big body
covers the other, except for one wingtip.
There’s a leisurely quality, like love.
When swans mate, their heads and necks
form a perfect valentine. Or, they intertwine
necks. Last night I wanted to watch
the movie unencumbered by your hand
on my breast. I was touchy. You were all
winding; I, all hiss.
By Maxine Scates
Featured Art: Star Flower by Mary Altha Nims
“It’s only a matter of time before eternity,”
reads a sign in front of a church, turning the day
epigrammatic. But rather than think of the time I have left,
I think about all that goes wrong. For instance,
how did that cow, an Angus, red tag in its ear, die
by the side of the road? Did someone shoot it
because it stood as still as the time I’ve already spent
does not? Its coat was still shining, sleek as that coat
I’d only dreamed of buying all those years ago
until a boy asked me out on a date and I finally
had somewhere to go. I’d already saved the money,
and did not consider whether or not such a coat
was too hot for L.A. I thought instead of the stars
I ushered to their courtside seats in my hip-length toga
at the Fabulous Forum, the stars who followed the ass
I’d only gradually understood I’d been hired for,
the stars who wore leather coats, shiny and supple
as their skin when they stepped from the lengthening dusk
of fall days like the gods they were without ever
breaking a sweat. So on my day off I opened the door
to Discount Leathers, which smelled of barnyards
and fields I had never seen though now I think
of that smell as more like the roadside of lingering death
where I hope the cow’s carcass has mercifully
been picked clean by vultures leaving nothing behind
but bones and a dull hide. I picked my coat
quickly, laid my cash on the counter and got out, but
not before I saw the smirk on the salesman’s face,
not before he saw how I believed that cloaked
in my coat my skin would be soft, my hair glossy,
saw how I knew nothing about anything, all of it
a mystery in whose maze I was certain I wandered
alone. I don’t remember the boy or how the date went.
The coat was too hot. It was heavy and felt like the hide
that it was, stiff and unyielding. I took it to the cleaners
up by Sears Liquors and whatever they did turned it
whitish, marbled as a slab of meat. I stood at the counter
and paid for it and never asked what had gone wrong.
By Vincent Poturica
Featured Art: View of the City and London Bridge
About nine or ten years ago when I was not yet twenty, my friend Carlos asked me if he should sell his soul to the Devil’s best friend in exchange for a better world—I am not kidding, son. I told Carlos that selling his soul sounded a little hardcore, even for him, and that he should probably meditate on the potential consequences for at least a week. I also suggested that he contemplate his motives, i.e. whether or not he was really doing it for a good cause—though I confessed that I distrusted anyone who thought they knew what was best—or because he felt desperate regarding the recent death of our dear friend Ivan. I then told him—and he agreed—that he also probably needed to consider whether the Devil’s best friend was the best person or demon to sell his soul to, whether the Devil’s best friend was even certified to buy his soul—I admitted that I had never heard of someone selling their soul to the Devil’s best friend, but I was, of course, ignorant of many things. I then questioned the extreme subjectivity of better world, encouraging Carlos to make sure to specify as much as possible the criteria for what made this world better, for instance its natural resources, its climate, its historical record of oppression, among other factors, before he signed any contracts with his blood or whatever you did these days to officially seal transactions involving that most precious and contested conception of the self.
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Selected as winner of the 2015 New Ohio Review Poetry Contest by Robert Pinsky
By Keith Kopka
Featured Art: Spring Flowers by Claude Monet
Knowledge of crime is a crime
even if one is not committed
by participation. At this cookout,
in a parallel universe, a version
of me lifts the gun, considers
its weight a handful of peanuts.
Another variant lets off a shot
into Godless sky, a traditional
celebration of manhood, in
the dimension of Texas oil barons.
I have a self who understands
breech-bolt action, another
who can separate grip cap
and butt stock, put them back
blindfolded, turn shotgun into
sawed off. In our current rotation
of speed and light, his pump
action is between us on the table.
The cookout has been great,
and I’m glad his sister, my date,
invited me. His mother is grilling
cow tongue. The whole gang’s
here to celebrate Marshmallow’s
release after three years in prison,
he’s at the grill asking for a fourth
helping. The word Rascal carved
in his chest like a pacemaker scar.
In the universe of wooden nickels,
I am best friends with this blunt
instrument. Of course, this isn’t
the universe where we live. My date’s
brother is asking if I’m interested
in a job, simple robbery, I get a part
of the product, but he needs me
because I’m white, because it won’t
get back to his gang, or the black
gangs, if a white man robs a white
man of some drugs. I’ve noticed
I’m the only guy at the cookout
wearing a shirt. Her brother
has a tattoo of two devils balanced
on the top of a mountain range.
It covers his whole stomach.
He tells me if I shoot the guy,
when I rob him, it’s okay, but if I kill
there’s nothing in this world
he can do to help me. Marshmallow
settles himself in a deck chair,
eyes closed, the meat on the grill
smells like warm wood. Hungry
is the only word I can think of.
By Keith Kopka
Selected as winner of the 2015 New Ohio Review Poetry Contest by Robert Pinsky
Featured Art: The Race Track (Death on a Pale Horse) by Albert Pinkham Ryder
Young John Wayne leaps, without effort,
onto the back of a Palomino, and I know
he’ll catch the leader of the Taylor Gang
for what he’s done to his woman. He’ll swing
for this one. Wayne is ruthless, but it’s hard
to forget him cut open for cancer research,
the forty pounds of meat wadding through
his colon like a saddle strap. You and Wayne
have a lot in common: doctor’s hands
searched the mineshaft of your stomach,
catalogued what they took, then fastened
you with a wandering stitch. Still, nothing
extracted from anyone can explain why
the body takes revenge on the body.
***
Hanging is the ninth most popular
suicide method behind gunshot to chest;
it has an almost seventy-eight percent
success rate, and takes seven minutes.
In the west, thousands gathered
to watch hanging judges size bight
and neck, and after the bags dropped
some took pieces of the scaffold or rope
as keepsakes. You hung, too.
I still have the pair of shoes you loaned
me in gym class on a nail hook
in the back of my closet.
By Darrell Spencer
Featured Art: Twilight in the Wilderness by Frederic Edwin Church
Our joke was either Molly sells a kidney—under the radar, off the books, $40,000 cash up front in England we discovered online, no questions asked, wink-wink, and also, I came to this understanding in my bones, not really all that funny as an option—or reality was we hock our gold.
We hocked it.
Okay, Molly did. Her gold. Every last effing piece of it Molly’s. Earrings. Necklaces, long and dangly and three-tiered, one of them leaf-like, all the chains intertwined and hard to separate. You know how they get twisted up in their boxes like they have a secret life. None of the jewelry rolled or washed gold. Molly did her online research at the library. Brooches, one an open hand, palm out, standing for generosity and giving, one a butterfly whose catch was missing. It had been her mother’s. There was a heart Molly liked to wear on her sleeve. Only one ring. Her grandfather’s on her father’s side. It had a pair of serpents circling an in-set ruby. Brewster was his name, and he had been an M.D. The kind of G.P. parents named their newborns after. The man part of a long line of doctors stretching back to the Civil War. Molly had photos back home in Ohio. The old-timers a bunch of bearded hacksaws, grim butchers.
By James Lineberger
Featured Art: Card Rack with a Jack of Hearts by Jack F. Peto
I’d never seen her before that day when
she came knocking on the door and I thought at first
I must owe postage on the package in her hand
but no, she said, this was an official visit to advise me
that unless I stopped parking the Malibu in our circular drive,
I would have to mount a new mailbox out on the street
rather than the one by the door that we’ve been using since
the house was built back in the Fifties.
“Say what?” I said,
“excuse me lady but that is my drive not yours.”
But she was not to be dissuaded,
advising me that new regs from the Postmaster General
would not permit her to put her Jeep in reverse
and turn around in the drive,
and she only shook her head no when I said,
“Look, okay, if we mounted it out there on this dead-end street
you would still have to back up
when you get to my neighbor’s house next door
because hers is on the front porch too same as this one
and you have to pull in her driveway to get there, and tell me
how you’re going to get out, and besides,
the reason we park the car out front here is because
my wife broke her hip and had to have screws put in it
and she’s still not too certain on her feet, not to mention
she’s got Alzheimer’s, unless you’ve got regs about that too
but the regular carrier never told us anything like this
and he doesn’t seem to mind backing up at all.”
“Well, sir,” she said, “that is him, this is me,
besides which where is your handicap placard?”
and walked away even as I was saying
“Just you wait lady, we’ll see about this.”
By Z.Z. Boone
Featured Art: Vase of Flowers by Odilon Redon
Nobody was really surprised when Rosemary Villano turned up pregnant. It was like my dad said at dinner the night Bernadette Fischer, a receptionist at Staten Island Physician Practice, walked across the street and dropped the news.
“The girl had it coming,” he said.
This was in August 1995, when Rosemary was eighteen. She was my buddy Chegg’s sister, and had quit high school in January in order to work full-time at Frosty’s Italian Ice Creamery in the mall. Some genius had stuck her in this short, skin-tight beige uniform, and it seemed the area’s male populace—my dad included—had all of a sudden developed this insatiable craving for spumoni.
Rosemary had been dating this oversized pinhead named Eddie Dowd ever since her freshman year, another dropout who thought nothing of punching a kid like me in the stomach, or shoplifting liquid Tylenol from CVS, or talking about Rosemary with his fellow goons and saying stuff like, “This girl could suck the bark off a maple tree.” He drove around in a white van that had an amateurish painting of Daffy Duck saluting the American flag painted on the side, under which the words, “Where the Women At?” were printed.
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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,
By Michael Cooper
Featured Art: Murol in the Snow by Victor Charreton
The new girl from Vermont said that a woman lived in her shed. The new girl from Vermont brought in a pair of boots to prove it. The boots looked ancient, green suede in a previous incarnation, full suede probably before any of the children in Ms. Gwynn’s class had been born. Now the boots were gray and stiff with duct tape layered up to the edges, leaving only the mossy-looking tips exposed. Terry Wilkins, whom the other children called Terry the Terrible, said it looked as though Sally, the new girl from Vermont, was holding a pair of elf shoes from Middle-earth. The entire class erupted in laughter. Before the show-and-tell session could regress entirely, Ms. Gwynn told the children to quiet down. She told them that they should respect Sally and her story.
The last of the laughter subsided and Sally continued speaking, the shoes nestled in a forearm like pets.
“My father keeps a woman in our shed and these are her shoes.”
By Andrea Hollander
Featured Art: L’Heure du silence by Henri Georges J. I. Meunier
After I confessed, all I’d hear
was the scratch of my father’s ballpoint
against his prescription pad
as I stood before him at his office desk
on the first floor of our house. Yes,
I’d say, I did it, I left the mower out
all night, forgot
to turn the sprinkler off, lied
about the party,
the pack of cigarettes,
the exact hour I got home.
His hours or sometimes days
of silence entered our house
like an unwelcome guest,
an intruder we agreed
to treat with kindness,
each of us saying Sit here
when we didn’t want him
to sit anywhere.
After I apologized and promised
never to do it again, whatever it was,
after I made his coffee
in the morning, served it
with two Lorna Doones on the saucer
beside the china cup, sometimes
he would thank me.
But even then I didn’t know
if it would take one more
silent dinner or two
before I’d hear forgiveness
in his voice, that other guest
who arrived unpredictably
while I wept myself to sleep,
that guest whose safe return
I prayed for, the one
my mother prayed for, too,
she told me later, that guest
she thought she’d married
in the first place.
By Martha Silano
Featured Art: Mount Sainte-Victoire by Paul Cézanne
the Bible’s a Mount Everest of metaphor—
the seventh day more likely the seven
trillionth, the Holy Spirit about as real
as Casper the Friendly Ghost. My mother
who never once definitively sang
in the tune of Judgment, the lexicon
of flames. My equivocating, not-sure-he’s
the-Savior mother, who calls with an urgent
message: Billy Graham’s 95th birthday special.
Mother of Peace, mother who sanctioned
my Sunday school exodus when my teacher
refused to define adultery, who rolled her eyes
at shiny offering plates, who yadda yadda’d
the Lord’s Prayer, mother too busy browsing
The Female Eunuch to read to us from the book
of Jonah, to reason a man could live three days
in the belly of a whale, mother lacking sufficient
conviction to share the story of the loaves and fishes,
inciting me to fall to my knees as I did one day in 1974,
the man on the screen having told me I must.
By Billy Collins
Featured Art: A Caravan in the Desert by Narcisse Berchère
The camel felt nothing
as it stood outside the encampment,
its nose lifted in the thin desert air.
And no one in the caravan
even noticed the straw,
or if they did, no mention was made of it
that evening as they sat in a circle
inside a colorful tent
talking quietly under the numerous stars.
By Christopher Kempf
Selected as runner-up for the 2015 New Ohio Review Poetry Contest by Robert Pinsky
Featured Art: Ruins of an Ancient City by John Martin
At mile twenty, roughly, the muscles
of the legs will collapse. Calves
twitching at random. The hamstrings’
sacked meat seizing. Scarry,
in The Body in Pain, explains
that language too, tasked
with conveying affliction, fails. That pain,
she argues, obliterates
discourse. I limped
past the drunk undergrads
of Boston College, my body’s stock-
pile of glycogen finally
exhausted. The wall, runners
call it. The bonk. The blowing
up. & after,
the body in pain will make
of its own fat fuel. I followed
the shimmering column of runners right
onto Boylston Street. In three
hours two
coinciding explosions would themselves
leave the city—except
for its sirens—speechless. The limes, Latin
for boundary line, signified
to ancient Romans the most remote
walls of the sacred Empire. Lie-
meez Arabicus for instance.
Limit.
The legions
Caesar trusted most though & therefore
dreaded, he kept
stationed on the Plain of Mars a mile only
west from the city walls. He watched
from the seventh hill the drilling
columns, consulted
each morning in the sky above him
the wheeling birds. A body,
he knew well, will
at sometime or other, hungry
for blood, break
in on itself & eat.
By Christopher Kempf
Selected as runner-up in the 2015 New Ohio Review Poetry Contest by Robert Pinsky
Featured Art: Interior of the Pantheon, Rome by Giovanni Paolo Panini
So too on Troy’s final afternoon
the doomed children of the city sang. Such
was their joy, Virgil tells us, such
was their simple awestruck wonder
at the great beast even
the Achaeans, cramped, standing
on each other’s shoulders inside
the close wood, wept. What
he means, of course, is that inside
of the other’s suffering, one
can imagine always aspects
of a wild beauty refusing
negation. Or no. Not
that it exists, this
beauty, but that
it can be made so. Rome
Virgil says, springing
from Ilion’s ashes. Elsewhere
Orpheus. This
is not my home. Here
for the weekend only, I float
out into the hot tub’s bubbling, bleach-
& salt-scoured water. I watch
the few stars the city permits
still flicker on, the long
avenues of light below them—Cienaga
& Sunset, Ventura—burn
& spangle in the mountains’ dark bowl. The bottle
of La Marca prosecco sweats. To secure
for their desert metropolis water
enough to nourish all this, city
developers—circa
the arrival, reports suggest, of something
By Christopher Kempf
Selected as runner-up for the 2015 New Ohio Review Poetry Contest by Robert Pinsky
Featured Art: Storm Clouds by John Henry Twachtman
Birds fled. The city fell
quiet. Across
the night the neighbors raised
their glasses & together, gathered
on our porches, forms
in a Japanese landscape, we stared
up. Or was it
Turner the sky resembled? How every
late seascape became
for him, given
to opium & with his father’s
death, depression, a tempest
of motion & color. Clouds
roiling. The oils
of his tiny boats bleeding
out. Only,
he knew, the frame’s gilt edge
splits beauty from terror. Airplanes,
that night, climbed
from the city & steeply, fleeing
too the ruinous
wall of rain, banked
south. Schools, a step
ahead of the looming cataclysm,
closed. Newscasters
leaned forward into the wind & we, raising
our own glasses to the neighbors
drank. Dark
& Stormies. Sazeracs. We imagined
the city flooding. Mudslides
on Foothill Parkway. Prospero, fallen
from his dukedom, does it
all for pleasure he says, every
shipwrecked Milanese aristocrat, every
extravagant clipper cast
up in the pitch & tumult his rough
magic fashioned. That,
we know, is mostly
what the groundlings came for. To fancy
a world they would never see struck
low, & so
close, sometimes, as to feel even
on their faces the great
king’s spit. There is,
in catastrophe, a satisfaction
exceeding sex, psychologists
believe. Before
the storm the city
bristled. Bells
tolled. Before
the last helicopters cleared
Saigon, operatives
burned in a rooftop incinerator
the state’s documents. We watched
from our porches the planes
shudder & mount. On Merritt
Lake, the pelicans, frenzied,
fed.
By Mary Angelino
Featured Art: Japanese Iris (Large Blue Iris) by John Edwards
His dad did coke. His mom died young.
We watched porn so I could learn—
he was my first. I didn’t know enough
to do things right like other girls.
We watched porn so I could learn
to say what I did and didn’t want,
to do things right like other girls.
He filmed me almost naked once.
To say what I did and didn’t want
was a trap, an argument that didn’t stop.
He filmed me almost naked once—
he lost the tape when we broke up.
A trap, an argument that didn’t stop:
he was my first, I didn’t know enough,
he lost the tape when we broke up,
his dad did coke, his mom died young.
By Ryan Ruff Smith
Featured Art: The Blue Passion-flower by Robert John Thornton
Laura’s brother has been crashing on my couch. He’s an addict—a recovering one. The hardest part of recovering is to keep doing it. Laura’s brother recovers for a while, and then he stops recovering, and then he runs out of money and picks it back up again. As of today, he’s been recovering for two months straight, which is a big milestone. Laura’s really proud of him. I’m proud, too, but I’d never say it, because I’m afraid that it would sound condescending and weird. I’m afraid that I would say something like: I’m really proud of you, Jim, and I believe in you, and I wouldn’t be surprised at all if you kept this up and, one day, maybe you’ll even find your way off my couch.
Don’t get me wrong. I am proud of him. Because I know that it’s really hard for him not to slip up. I mean, it’s hard for one. For anyone who is struggling with addiction. Which is what he has. Which is hard.
I get that.
The thing is, there’s this smell. I would never say this to him, but my whole apartment smells a bit funky. Not because he’s an addict—a recovering addict— it’s just a person smell, but since he’s on my couch every night, and most of the day, it accumulates, and it’s not the most pleasant. He bathes and everything, maybe not as often as he could, and usually pretty late in the day, but it’s not like he’s trying to smell. He makes an effort, but I do wonder what kind of soap he uses. Here, I have mixed feelings, because I don’t necessarily want him using my soap—not that I’m stingy, if you come for the weekend, go nuts, use all the soap you want, it’s just that he’s been here for two months—but at the same time, I’m afraid that he’s not using any soap at all, in which case, maybe I’d rather have him use my stuff than have this stench in my apartment all the time.
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By Shane Lake
Featured Art: Fifth Avenue Nocturne by Childe Hassam
A Red Cross bus gets hit by a truck
and lands on its side, the driver unconscious.
Blood spills from the broken glass,
coats the pavement in bubbling rust.
It is 1977 and the theme for summer is .44 caliber.
It is one hundred fifteen degrees.
A crowd forms in the contagious heat,
pulls back as the red pool expands.
I watch from the ailing shade of a palm tree,
the sweet taste of blood in the air, on my tongue.
Someone tries to rescue the driver
but the mix is slippery. He lands on his back.
His impact speckles the closest few,
who scream and cover their mouths with their hands.
Sirens sound, and soon the fire trucks are here,
hosing donations into the street drain.
Secretly, we all enjoy this,
being here at the scene of the crash
where news vans make stars of us all.
We want our trauma to trump everyone else’s.
We want to be able to say:
“You weren’t there. You wouldn’t understand.”
By Tamie Parker Song
Featured Art: Flowers of a Hundred Worlds (Momoyogusa): Ivy (Tsuta) by Kamisaka Sekka 神坂 雪佳
Our house is a toilet full of shit and fistfuls of toilet paper, long past flushing. It is the bones of kitchen cups smashed with cigarettes. It is the way we don’t turn on the lights anymore. The way we do not light the fire. It is dead flies in the windows; a pantry with food cans several years old. The house used to be Mom, music on the record player; hair cuts in the kitchen, blueberry pancakes for breakfast, light. Now it is cupboards we keep opening, hoping. Then fishing grabs for us, pulls us under, and we stop even opening the cupboards.
We are commercial salmon fishermen on an island in Alaska seventy miles by plane or boat from the nearest town. Only our family lives on this island, and the crew who works for us, and even though everyone is watching me no one is watching out for me. I have been fishing my whole life, the only girl on an all-male crew. I am fifteen.
Dad eats tubs of frosting and bowls of raw cake batter. He wears the same clothes for six weeks at a time and does not bathe. Mom has stopped coming to the island, and Dad can’t or won’t cook, so I start eating with the crew. DeWitt eats with us sometimes, and sometimes with Dad. DeWitt fishes almost exclusively with Dad, while I trade around and fish with different crew. I try not to think about leaving DeWitt at home. He is only thirteen. But something in my body is trying to pull itself away.
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By Devon J. Moore
Featured Art: Miss Loïe Fuller by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec
Gwyneth Paltrow is on the air again
saying something about the difficulty of being
a mother on set is more difficult than being
a mother in an office, on a train, commuting
to those 9 to 5s. She says you have it easier
when your life is synchronized to the needs of mouths
that are not your mouth, to the needs of bosses
that don’t know your name. You have it easier when
you’re alone in a room with a baby,
when the sun hasn’t risen and your chest is dripping milk
and you wonder if today is the day the paycheck
or the 7 o’clock bus or the sun won’t come.
Gwyneth, I don’t have a baby,
but my dread is bigger than your dread,
my breasts are bigger, heavier, than your breasts.
Do you still feel the need to compare?
How about this? My cat would be cuter than your cat
if it hadn’t been for that sick neighbor and his box cutters.
My lover left and his back got smaller,
more quickly, than your lover’s back.
My dad dying sucked more than your dad dying sucked.
I could do this ridiculousness all day. But, Gwyneth,
the memory of my mother needs me
to say, that novel she always wanted to write
never got written. I was a needy daughter,
maybe even needier than your daughter.
I demanded
she look at me instead
of a book or the movie on the TV,
and maybe, Gwyneth, you were
in it, being thinner than my mother
but not prettier. There were days
my pretty mother didn’t look at me
because she couldn’t see past the dark
space in herself and I hated her.
There was a day my mother cried in the laundromat
when a woman, another mother, asked her what she did
for a living, and when my mother said she was a home
health care aide, the woman said that meant
my mother was nothing
but a maid.
The color of blood is more vivid and harder to clean
in my daydreams than in your daydreams,
and a powerless life is harder to describe to the powerful
than the sound of my mother crying on the rug.
But I’ll try.
By Craig van Rooyen
Featured Art: Pine Tree by Giovanni Segantini
The History Channel’s playing “The Gold Rush” again.
All those bearded men looking at reflections
of themselves on the surfaces of creeks and rivers and lakes.
They’re so beautiful coming out of ramshackle cabins,
thumbs tucked into suspenders, wading into streams
the color of cheap whiskey. That golden light
on their shoulders, in their beards, dripping
from the brims of their hats, high on
“howdy” and “rough and ready,”
around every bend in the river, expecting
life to begin. The flash of light in a silver pan
full and overflowing. All that hope. Out of
the river, there’s always more earth.
There’s always the scooping and sifting and
throwing away. Everything left behind—out of
frame: The women in their calico, waving goodbye.
The steaming cows in their barns. Now just
the sloshing desire of this moment and the next.
Sure, you have to be willing to kill a few Indians.
But as long as you’ve got a pan and a river
to dip it in, you can forget the rest.
At least that’s what I tell myself before the first
commercial break. Before those attractive
late-middle-aged people clutch each other
in honey light and the baritone voice-over tells me
to go to the emergency room if I experience
an erection that lasts more than four hours. I wonder
if anyone ever panned for gold in terrycloth—
my fabric of choice for watching “The Gold Rush”
in bed at 10 a.m. on a Wednesday. I wonder
if any of those bearded men had a bottle of
Prozac back in the cabin next to the straight-blade
razor underneath the cracked mirror—something
to take the edge off all that failure, something
to dull the regret of walking out on their women
and cows. Of course they’d have another name
for Prozac, like maybe “nerve pills,” as in:
“Durn near forgot to take my nerve pills this morning, Jake.
Christing Jesus, sure don’t want to start sawing
at my wrists again, now do I?” I love the way
there’s no word for shame in the language
of gold miners. All that hope is contagious.
In fact, I believe if I really tried, I could get up
and shuffle to the bathroom and brush my teeth
during the next commercial break. I love
the History Channel! It’s so inspirational.
Right now, the sad banjo music is playing—
the plinking of catgut string over doe-skin,
a sound so Californian it makes you weep for
the all-night diner in Auburn where it’s 6 a.m.
and the sun is lighting up the foothills and
the American River is still frothing to get wherever
it’s been trying to go all night long. All the gold’s dug out
of the hills but the waitress is calling you “love” as she
puts down a cup of awful coffee and sits in your booth—
night shift done. It’s as if she knows you. As if she’s
made the same mistakes and she’s telling you it’s okay.
Now she’s taking out a bobby pin.
Now she’s letting down all that golden hair.
By Craig van Rooyen
Featured Art: Flowers of a Hundred Worlds (Momoyogusa): Wisteria (Fuji) by Kamisaka Sekka 神坂 雪佳
In a strange city this afternoon, I looked for myself
on a cart of bargain books. I recognized
my mother’s faith and thrift in “Macrame for Dummies,”
and bought the book for 50 cents.
I recognized my father’s dark devotion
in a tattered copy of “My Utmost For His Highest.”
I fanned the pages with a thumb, felt
the dank breath of the Holy Ghost,
and put it down. I was not there. Not in
“Seven Habits Of Ecstatic Gurus.” Not in
“How To Pick Up Pretty Women With An Ugly Dog”
or “Twitterpated: An Instruction Manual
For Self-Discovery In 140 Characters Or Less.”
On the corner, a quartet of starving students played
“Let’s Get Lost,” faking it in the way of the talented young
winking with their instruments at the business casuals
waiting for a bus. Art is about loss,
they seemed to play. Can you dig it, man?
And I can—suddenly 47 and away from familiar signs,
too old to be discovered; too young to be invisible,
sitting in Union Square under
the lifted tail and muscular haunches of
George Washington’s horse—its neck arched under rein,
fighting to cross East 17th to Forever 21.
Valley Forge behind, knowing not
where he’s going next, our country’s father
(in this bronzed moment) is surely unable to predict
his journey’s end: in bed with a cold, bled to death
by four doctors earnestly trying to save him.
I’m happy to sit in his moon-shadow for now,
park lamps blinking on, smell of goat cheese and ganja
finding my nose, trying not to listen to the soft clicking
next to me as two young people introduce
their oral piercings in the dark. Across the way,
the girl with the Mohawk stops playing her bongo drum
to tell a friend about a rainbow brother who saved her
in the Bronx. Took me in and we smoked a bowl—
no questions asked, no strings attached. On the corner,
a street preacher finds his voice, improvising his holy rant
on a theme of goats and sheep, dividing us into lost and saved.
We’re all both, I want to tell him, cycling through a life-long
game of hide and seek. Even me—sitting under Washington’s
horse’s ass, smoking the flare of my guilty Marlboro
to the filter and feeling the city turn on around me—
a lost coin burning to be found.
By James Miranda
JM: One of the things I’ve always admired in your fiction is the way you’re able to use taboo and transgression so deftly and intelligently as a source of narrative tension. From your earliest stories in Come to Me (such as the much anthologized “Silver Water” and the gutsy “Sleepwalking”) right up through your complicated protagonist Lillian in Away, or Iris and Rose in your newest book Lucky Us, you seem to have an intense interest in characters that push the bounds of what is socially acceptable. Yet their acting out never feels contrived or overdone. The prohibited takes on a sacredness that’s always palpable and quite beautiful in your writing. Are you conscious of the place that taboo and transgression have in your fiction? Do you find such socially constructed forces to be great fodder for compelling narrative?
AB: I don’t really ever think of myself as breaking taboos and transgressing. It’s also true that although good manners matter to me a lot social norms do not. Good behavior is not usually a subject that fascinates me.
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Brad Aaron Modlin: In the past, you have written in the persona of both Eve and Mary the Mother of Jesus. While Eve speaks anachronistically—of driving a car on ice, for example—Mother Mary does not clearly do so. In the new poetry, Mary Magdalene does. When you (re)write a pre-existing character, how do you know when to stick to what we’ve already heard and when to change it? What do you hope to add to these characters?
Marie Howe: Midrash is a form of rabbinic literature, a storytelling that fills in the gaps in stories from the Torah. I always wished that Christian literature encouraged that kind of imagining. Growing up with the characters of Eve, Mary, and Mary Magdalene, I was moved by the deep silences within their stories. These are women in extremity, and also women who go on living, through those extreme states, into days and months and years—as we all do. What is their experience? And what is it the day after? And the day after that?
Many others have written through these voices—Rilke in his “Life of Mary,” W.H. Auden in his Christmas Oratorio called “For The Time Being,” Eliot, and recently so many women have brought their consciousness to these stories: Lucille Clifton, Jorie Graham, Brenda Hillman, many women writers. Each writer receives the poems according to her sensibility.
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New Ohio Review 