NOR: Embrace Your Conjunctions
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Issue 24 compiled by Isaiah Underwood
By Dan Wiencek
Featured Art: by Jasper Francis Cropsey
First we come to the field
where I did not hit the winning
home run, where no cheers rose
up and the game ball went ungiven
Beyond left field,
the bleachers where I did not
make out with my high-school
crush, did not taste her perfume
or dodge her brother’s freckled glare
This is the house where a family of
color did not live, there, where
that guy is hosing Chinese
menus off his car
Then of course this tax attorney’s office, once
the bookstore where I stole
Helter Skelter, which I still
visit in my dreams
Finally, this empty lot
staring up at the sun like a vast
gravel eye, formerly the school where
I never thought to imagine a future,
where no one told me and I
did not listen
that life could be a wave
beating the rocks or
a wind bouncing a kite—
taut string pinwheels,
dips and swoops groundward only
to right itself, to stay resolutely
in the air
and here we are.
By Danusha Laméris
Featured Art: by Clara Peeters
He’d wanted the persimmons
and asked her for them, but when
she gave him the brown paper bag,
brimming over, he was taken
aback. Did he really need that many?
Still, he brought them home
to his wife, and soon
there were persimmons ripening
on the kitchen counters, lining
the windowsills. Each day,
growing more and more succulent
until the air was thick
and sweet with their scent.
At breakfast, he’d break one open
with his spoon—the skin supple
and ready to give—stir it into
his hot cereal. Indescribable,
the taste. And a texture he might
have described as sea creature
meets manna from heaven. When
he ate one, he thought of her.
And when he saw her, he thought
of the persimmons. When her arm
brushed, just barely, against his,
did he imagine they both felt
the same quickening? In myth,
fruit is usually the beginning
of disaster. And the way
they made themselves so obvious—
an almost audible orange
against the white walls—
made him wish he’d never asked
her for them, didn’t have to
smell them sugaring the air
with ruin, as he sat there,
face lowered to the bowl, spooning
the soft pulp into his mouth.
By Danusha Laméris
Featured Art: Young Woman on a Balcony Looking at Parakeets by Henri Matisse
We were sitting on the couch in the dark
talking about first pets, when I told him how,
as a girl, I kept a blue and white parakeet I let
y around the house and, sometimes, outside,
where he’d land on the branches of pine
and eucalyptus, balancing between seedpods
and spines. Only, while I was telling it,
my companion began to stroke, very lightly,
the indent of my palm, the way you do when you’re
sitting in the dark with someone you’ve never kissed
but have thought about kissing. And I told him
how my bird would sit on a high branch and sing,
loudly, at the wonder of it—the whole, green world—
while he traced the inside of my arm with his fingers,
opening another world of greenery and vines,
twisting toward the sun. I loved that bird for his singing,
and also for the way his small body, lifted skyward,
made my life larger. And then it was lip-to-lip,
a bramble, and it was hard to say who was who—
thumb to cheek to chest. The whole ravening.
When I told him I did not clip my bird’s wings,
I was talking about hunger. When he pressed me
hard against the back of the couch, named a litany
of things he’d do to me, I wanted them all.
I, too, have loved to live in a body. To feel the way
it lifts up the octaves of sky, cells spiraling
through smoke and mist, cumulus and stratus,
into that wild blue. And though I knew
there was always a hawk somewhere in the shadows
ready to snatch his heart in its claws, still,
I couldn’t help letting that parakeet free.
By C.W. Emerson
Featured Art: by Arthur Lazar
Didn’t I stand there once,
nineteen, loose-limbed,
dripping water onto the catwalk
above the motel pool?
And weren’t we luminous then?—
our bodies glistening,
pale as the slice of winter moon
that hung in a Vegas sky.
Wasn’t there a door, a threshold,
one simple, white-walled room?
Didn’t we taste peyote’s fire,
christen ourselves with totemic names?—
wouldn’t I become Gray Wolf,
Bitter Oleander, Monkshead, Moss?
And you would have been
Bobcat, Lily of the Valley, my love,
Salt Cedar, Eucalyptus—
if only you’d lived a little longer.
By Suzanne Lummis
Nights, the expanse of lit streets and lights
of mini-marts sends out an avid, sex-tinged and
discontented glow for planes to drift through.
Days, the men no one would marry stand
too close behind us, in lines dangling
through Food-4-Less, Rite Aid Drugs.
Friends, we have got to get out of L.A.
Downstairs a couple yelp their seedy
bare-boned love, and then fight.
Upstairs a woman rehearses, once again,
the awful song no one will buy.
Its unlucky-with-men news wobbles
out over The Donut Inn’s clientele—
guys dressed down and broke till Friday,
unlucky with women.
We have got to get out of L.A.
It’s built on sand with stolen water.
A burning thirst got under our skin.
And these hints of oasis, the bowings
of tall wand-like palms over
the avenues, stir up far-fetched desire.
It’s the palms and that cell talk
riding the waves. We believe
stuff. There’s, like, big plans in the air.
But the greedy nibbled our greatness
and it got small. Our agents
dumped us and moved on. Lovers
rode home on a Greyhound bus.
The dream we can’t wake up from
complained it’s not getting younger—
and left without paying the rent.
It woke up from us.
By Anne Starling
Featured Art: A Holiday by Edward Henry Potthast
The dead are with us to stay
—Charles Wright
But not the living, the fallible breathing.
For a while it seemed one thing
could be righted. One small piece at the
ocean’s bottom corner
or the bottom
dresser drawer with the scuffed
baby shoes and shoeboxes
full of snapshots of kid parties, holidays, school picnics
etcetera.
A comfort, even knowing that wrong
can’t be undone, is more like oceans plural
rushing in
weighing in with their trick of
no light, unfathomable.
The idea was to inscribe
the back of the photograph taken
on our last anniversary.
Simply to write, in everyday
permanent ink
his name in the possessive
then “Mom and Dad.”
By Emily Sernaker
Featured Art: Shop Girls by Elizabeth Sparhawk-Jones
What if you haven’t enjoyed dating
for a while? You’re tired of sharing pieces
of your life story with men
in crowded restaurants
all over the city who you know
within five minutes you won’t want
to see again? What if you get too excited
when you find a guy you like
at a holiday party? Becoming very
forward while wearing a Snoopy Christmas sweater,
because you believe it’s your power-outfit
and you only have a three-week window to rock it?
What if you’re having fun on a date swapping
embarrassing stories and then somehow
you’re outside the bar and he’s shaking
your hand saying it was nice to meet you,
and you realize that you’re actually in
an embarrassing story? It’s happening to you
right now. What if everyone keeps acting like
this is simple? You’ll only find love when
you’re not looking! To find love, you have to
put yourself out there! And you don’t want
to be dramatic about it, but some days
your heart feels like an ambulance
stuck in traffic. What if you keep
trying everything and nothing?
And when you look up at the sky
and spot a perfect hole-punched moon
you want to tell someone
that, if they hurry, they can see it
completely, all that brightness at once.
By Karen Benning
Featured Art: Landscape with Two Poplars by Vasily Kandinsky
Did you have any fun? Tell me.
What did you do?”
—from The Cat in the Hat, by Dr. Seuss
Never speak aloud the thing that first
pops into your head, pops like a balloon, black,
bursting in a shock, pops like your bubble burst,
pops like a blister of blood, a BB gun at a bird,
a red blot on a white backdrop, thought precedent
to mismatched utterance precedent
to the stare, the crash into
silence, the inevitable turning
away as you stand there (again) staring into
your wine glass and facing newly open space
between yourself and a back. Never speak
to strangers, never say that first thing
(defined as material object without life
or consciousness; as inanimate object; as cannot be
precisely described) thing thing thing
no matter how often you say it, nothing
comes to mind except Dr. Seuss
creatures cursed with dumb grins
and bad hair and toys that crack walls
and priceless heirlooms now look
what you’ve done and though they meant no
harm harm they did and ruined everything
and they are the only specific things you can conjure but
you should definitely never speak of Thing One or Thing Two, much
less their leader who should not be about
much much less that first BUMP
of a thing that popped
into your own social klutz of a mind, that
perpetual source of embarrassment, that
maladroit blundering thing.
By Christopher Brean Murray
Featured Art: by Alfred Stieglitz
Sometimes I talk too much. I tell myself
it’s good to socialize so I say almost anything
to get the conversation going, something
like “What’s your favorite crime film?” or
“The media really needs to tone it down.”
Then we’re off and talking about what
kind of dog to get or whether garlic
belongs in guacamole. I might not know
the person I’m talking to but we can
work that out on the fly like rolling a car
down a hill to get it started but what if
it has no brakes? Sometimes that happens
and you have to steer away from the river
rushing over the black rocks and turn
onto the lane that snakes through the trees
beside the reservoir and I’m still talking
trying to get a sense of this person
who tells me about her grade school
and the re drill that turned out to be real
but no one knew until years later
and in the room below the gymnasium
was a wallet-sized photo of a woman
who went missing and I wonder whether
the person telling me this is the person
in the photo or if there ever was a photo
how would I know? Then I’m telling a story
I’ve told many times but it’s going to be
good this time with the part about
the voices on the dunes and the man
waving from the other shore and I realize
the person I’m talking to reminds me of the girl
I went to camp with but can hardly remember
except for the birthmark and that night I heard her
crying in the tent while everyone slept.
She seemed fine the next day and I don’t
mention any of this but I wonder how my story
has changed over time. You’d think I would know
but I don’t. Anyway, I’m still on the road
that snakes through the trees. Here comes a tunnel.
By Christopher Brean Murray
I first heard his name in passing. Someone
was rinsing coffee from a spoon, saying, “That’s just
how Merriweather is . . .” I was new to the city.
I was emailing my CV around and smiling politely
at new faces. I noticed that people really deferred
to this Merriweather—his first name? A man I met
at a potluck had camped with Merriweather in Patagonia.
Merriweather had gotten him and his friends
out of a jam when the stove gas ran low and a sharp sleet
hemmed them in for days. Another guy explained
that Merriweather had secured for him and his fiancée
a cherry farm where they could have the wedding
they’d dreamt of. Merriweather’s band played,
and his bass solos shook bits of hay from the dusty catwalk.
People danced and cried out to Merriweather for more,
then laughed as a bale tumbled from the loft,
just missing the sweat-drenched drummer. Couples
snuck off to the guest cabins, and a young woman
claimed the pomegranate punch tasted like starlight.
A boy found a silver dollar on the freshly laid macadam.
Merriweather’s band debuted a Sam & Dave tune
they’d rearranged so that people looked at each other like
What the fuck, how can they be this good? During the break,
Merriweather spoke to a woman about her father’s death.
She was moved by how closely he listened,
and by the questions he asked that showed he understood.
She inquired whether Merriweather was married.
No one knew. Someone had glimpsed him at the wharf
with a much younger woman. The two stared
across the bay toward Bronson Island where
wild boar still roam and clusters of purple lichen
hang from the limbs of the vast spidery trees that vivisect
the tarnished sunlight. Tears filled Merriweather’s eyes
and the unreal eyes of the young woman beside him.
By Catherine Carter
Featured Art: Under the Lamp, c. 1882 by Mary Cassatt
It’s made to make you glad
on dull cold days, keep you
from crying over car insurance,
made to stop the visions
of flogging your flesh with barbed
wire, gouges gone rust-brown,
swelling with tetanus.
Full spectrum, mock sun;
maybe it helps.
At least it makes nothing
any worse. Until you realize
there’s pressure. Even the lamp
is anxious as a border
collie, wanting work
and reassurance. Leave it on
while you go to lunch and afterward
its white radiance
is trembly. It whispers, I shone
and shone and no one came,
no one saw. Aren’t I bright
enough? Are you glad
now? And you don’t know
what to say.
Its light quivers like unfallen
tears. You sit still, regarding
the light like a dangerous
lunatic, like you’ve never heard
of barbed wire, trying
to look happy.
By Peter Krumbach
Featured Art: by Claude Monet
I was sent a how-to-carve-a-whistle book.
I thought of whistles.
I thought of carving.
I bought a whistle-carving kit.
I stuffed tobacco in my pipe and sparked it.
I opened a buck knife, put a willow stick in my lap.
I carved a whistle.
I blew.
I tossed it in the fire and looked at the flames.
I carved another whistle, then another.
I carved nineteen whistles, the ground strewn with chips.
I carved the last one to sound a quarter-step above high C, a tone only
I and my soulmate could hear.
I blew it every morning, then listened.
I heard soulmates blow back from their graves.
I heard whistles from the Mariana Trench.
I heard them sound from Pluto’s moon.
I blew the other day, but no one blew back.
I blew louder. Still, no reply.
I filled my lungs with all the air of the garden.
I blew the loudest. And nothing. Only the neighbor calling if
I could keep it down.
By Faith Shearin
Featured Art: by Emil Carlsen
I open a box
in a closet and here I find us,
stuck in scenes long forgotten: my uncle
disappearing down an oak alley
in a horse-drawn carriage,
my grandmother dressed for a garden party,
gloves to her elbows, posed in a stiff
southern parlor, 1953. Here is the trip
to Disney World where we drank from
plastic oranges, held balloons
with ears; oh, we grow younger
on beaches, until we are babies, naked
on blankets, and my grandfather
rises from the grave to sit
in a wood-paneled living room,
on a plaid couch, in a fedora.
I find my cousins beneath cypress trees,
in a river at sunset, and my sister,
age eight, dressed as a mosquito,
on her way to a costume party.
The van that floated away
in a hurricane reassembles itself in our
driveway and my father’s dog,
ten years dead, rides over the lagoon
where she will someday drown,
in a canoe: October falling,
my father’s hair black, his paddle
still in his hands.
By Alan Sincic
It wasn’t the voice that woke me, but the jolt of the trailer. It was Dad. He’d lurched out of bed. Fumbled upright as if in a dream, as if he’d skippered a boat upside a pier in the dark, struck a piling and—pow—off the pitch of the deck and onto the dock he stumbles.
Not that the camper was what you’d call terra firma. Less like a home on wheels and more like a traveling dollhouse, everything pretending to be more than it really was—parlor the size of a bathroom, bathroom the size of a fridge, fridge the size of a toaster, toaster the hearth around which we’d huddle when the rain shattered and the dark thickened and the cold rose up to stab us in the ankles. The Cookie Tin’s what Mom called the trailer. Dad and Mom in the fold-out bed at the back, at the foot of which you got a curdle of flannel, Ben-Ben, not a toddler anymore but still squat enough (Tater-Tot we called him) to wedge in cross-wise. Up top of that the rack for Cece—canvas on a pair of poles, like a stretcher. Down below a carpet runner rolling out a luxurious four feet to the front-end boudoir—Len and me bull-dozed into the same bed together, head-to-toe across a table-top that, every morning at eight, we’d pop back up into place.
Oh. And Sal. Little Miss Bon-bon. Seems like the second a girl gets a couple of—what would be the polite word for it?—bosoms—you got the whole damn troposphere torqueing up to accommodate the blessed event. The VW van should’ve been for Len and me but no, Sal’s gotta have her privacy, her womanly solicitude, as if a girl who burns a whole afternoon spot-welding a girder of curls into a confectionary (what would be the word?) spectacle could give a damn about privacy.
By Kirsten Abel
Featured Art: by Hilaire Germain Edgar Degas
Bright squares of sunlight slosh across the ferry’s deck,
seesawing as the ship sways.
A pool of water flecked with coal threatens to seep up to our feet.
It drifts a little closer with each westward tilt.
You are sitting next to me reading.
The boat rocks worse than ever.
The window frames cast a bar of shadow
across your lap and book and I want to say something
to show you that I’m not freaking out
about any of this: us, the rough seas, the bad thing
my roommate told me about otters the other day.
I used to think it meant I was settling if I wasn’t going around
in a constant state of impassioned panic.
But it’s okay if you don’t like the hat I bought you
for your birthday. And it’s okay that I love you
at the speed of a slow ship full of cars.
The dirty water finally reaches us. It wets the soles of our sandals.
It swells around the bolts holding down our chairs.
By Kirsten Abel
Written on the side of a payphone
lashed to the wall of the bathroom in a Montreal café
is Annie Oakley’s telephone number.
I see it while I’m peeing.
That’s how close the payphone is.
Annie Oakley in black marker and then her number.
I’ve only touched a gun once.
Or maybe I didn’t touch it, I just thought about touching it
and then said, No, thank you.
It was my father’s gun. It was small, perfect
for fitting into a lady’s hand. Is that called a .38 Special?
Annie Oakley would know.
I didn’t grow up with guns.
I didn’t grow up with my father.
People sometimes think that is a great tragedy.
I did grow up near a little lake, beside
which lived two goats and a horse.
In spring and summer I would walk with my sisters
the dirt trail overlooking the mountain to the gravel path to the stables.
If the goats were out,
we’d pass them cabbage through the fence.
Back then I thought the greatest tragedy was August
ending or my eighth-grade crush dumping me
for a girl with nearly my same name.
I’ve always had trouble locating the appropriate level of sadness
about the father thing.
I’m not saying it doesn’t register.
I’ve just known from a young age there was nothing to do about it.
Here is me.
Here is my father.
The distance between us could be as close as me to this payphone
or as far as the mountain felt from the lake.
Either way it changes things.
Either way it’s done.
Annie Oakley shot a squirrel’s head clean off at age eight.
It was her first shot.
Here is me, I hear her saying.
Here is the squirrel.
Right through the head or right through the thigh or right through the gut.
Either way it’s done.
By George Kalogeris
Featured Art: by Piet Mondrian
It’s ’68. Whatever he saw, whatever he smelt
In that smoky, dripping handful of purple entrails
Just thawing out from the freezer, the news from Athens
Was ominous, and he wouldn’t haruspicate
On how and when the Colonels might react—
But the gobbets of offal keep piling up in the pail.
It’s not that he fully trusted the lordly voice
Of the BBC, but hearing Vietnam
He drops what he’s doing, and cranking up the volume
On that crackly plastic Panasonic—
That’s when I hear it too: Khe Sanh. It’s what
Comes through the speaker’s throbbing bamboo mesh
As I’m stamping prices on jars of baby food:
A staticky hiss like burning jungle grass . . .
My father wiping his hands on his butcher’s apron,
Oblivious to his customers as he listens
To a transistor radio broadcast the blood
Of a world in shambles. And then he’s back at his block.
Khe Sanh. My older cousins, Kosta and Jimmy,
Are loading up the van they’ll drive around Winthrop,
Delivering groceries and checking out girls.
I’m stamping the little glass jars of applesauce.
Nobody knows whose number will come up.
But our Calchas isn’t taking any chances.
Already he’s built another hecatomb,
And now he’s scrutinizing some gristly turkey
Intestines unfurling for all I know like the coils
Of giant lianas he saw in Guadalcanal
As a young recruit. But through that throbbing bamboo
Mesh I hear the Hydra’s serpentine hiss
He heard as a village boy way up in the Peloponnese.
By David Kirby
Featured Art: by Gustave Caillebotte
They’re so meticulous, aren’t they? They take such care
that I am ashamed for my country, that impatient farm boy,
that factory hand with the sausage fingers. First there’s
the fragile object itself—vase, jewel, ornament—then tissue,
stiff paper, bubble wrap, tissue again, tape, a beautiful bag
made from something more like gift wrap than the stern brown
stuff we use here in the States, then the actual carry bag
that has a little string handle but which is, in many ways,
the loveliest part of the package except for the object
you can barely remember, it’s been so long since
you’ve seen it. In America, we just drop your trinket
in a sack and hand it to you. Oh, that’s right. We have cars
in this country: whereas Stefano or Nathalie has to elbow his
or her way down a crowded street and take the bus or subway,
you get in the car, put the bag on the seat next to you,
and off you go, back to your bungalow in Centralia or Eau Claire.
Of course, this doesn’t mean you’re culturally inferior
to Jacques or Magdalena just because, as Henry James
said in his book-length essay on Hawthorne, we have no sovereign
in our country, no court, no aristocracy, no high church,
no palaces or castles or manors, no thatched cottages,
no ivied ruins. No, we just do things differently here:
whereas Pedro and Ilsa take the tram or trolley,
you have your car, and now you’re on your way home
to Sheboygan or Dearborn, probably daydreaming
as you turn the wheel, no more aware of your surroundings
than 53-year-old Michael Stepien was in 2006 when
he was walking home after work in Pittsburgh, which
is when a teenager robbed him and shot him in the head,
and as Mr. Stepien lay dying, his family decided
“to accept the inevitable,” said his daughter Jeni,
and donate his heart to one Arthur Thomas
of Lawrenceville, NJ, who was within days of dying.
That’s one thing you can say about life in the U.S.:
we have great medicine. Mr. Thomas recovered nicely
after the transplant, and he and the Stepiens
kept in touch, swapping holiday cards and flowers
on birthdays. And then Jeni Stepien gets engaged to be
married and then thinks, Who will walk me down the aisle?
No cathedrals in America, says Henry James,
no abbeys, no little Norman churches, no Oxford nor Eton
nor Harrow, no sporting class, no Epsom nor Ascot.
By Brock Guthrie
Featured Art: by Paul Gavarni
My father’s in town for a quick couple days
and it’s early morning and not much to do
and he needs some smokes and I need
a few things from Lowe’s. We walk to my car
and he says, “Man, you need a car wash,”
and I say, “Yeah, I’ve just been so busy,”
which isn’t really untrue, but I tell him
there’s a place on the way. We get in my car
and he says, “Go to McDonald’s, I’ll buy,”
and we wait in the drive-thru and he says,
“You need a vacuum too,” and I don’t reply
because the food is ready. I pass him his
Egg McMuffin and drive down the road,
carefully unwrapping my breakfast burrito,
and this commercial I’ve heard a dozen times
comes on the radio, some guy with a nasally
New York accent, but only now do I gather
it’s an advertisement for snoring remedies.
My father says, “If there are two vacuum hoses,
I can do one side and you can do the other.”
We drive past strip malls. I wave vaguely
toward a Mexican restaurant I kind of like
but I can’t think of what I want to say about it,
so I kind of mumble and my father does too
except his is more reply, like, “Is that right?”
The car wash kiosk has eight confusing options.
By Kyle Minor
Indianapolis, Indiana. Somewhere near Keystone Avenue and 62nd Street my iPhone pings. A college student from Hyderabad, India. He is pleased when I tell him he’s my first customer. He tips me two dollars.
*
I pick up my second customer in front of a bar in Broad Ripple. He gets in the front seat. His hair is grown to thigh length, and he is on some kind of party drug that makes him want to touch things.
“Please stop rubbing my arm,” I say.
He apologizes.
Near Rocky Ripple, he takes off his shoes and socks and rubs his bare feet
on the windshield.
His feet leave little rabbit marks. He is a large man with very tiny feet. When
I drop him off at the donut shop, he doesn’t leave a tip.
*
Read More
By Alan Shapiro
Featured Art: The Poet’s Garden by Vincent van Gogh
Swept up so suddenly in parabolic
spasms like a starling flock
or curtain swelling, billowing out
while all along the edges
this or that leaf frays
from the pack the force
keeps driving forward
over the courtyard bricks—
while in ear muffs and face
mask he points the havoc
this way and that as if
to see what happens because
he’s in no hurry, he’s peaceful,
calm, Laplace’s Demon
out for a stroll, cool source
of all that whirling, lost in
contemplation of the incalculable
force of every movement from
the greatest body to the smallest
atom, holding it all in mind—
working it out, in ear muffs
and face mask following behind
what whirls before him, fleeing,
which is why he strolls.
By Alan Shapiro
Since my dad was blind by then,
when David and I led him from his apartment
to the tee of the shrunken one hole
golf course that served as kitschy
courtyard for the complex
of retirees only well-off
enough for this unironic
aping of the rich, it was by habit
only that he looked down
at the ball he couldn’t see,
then up and out into the void
of stunted fairway and green
while first this foot then that
foot patted the fake grass, almost
kneading it cat-like till the tight
swing arced the ball up high
as the second-story windows
and I swear it was like a trick
ball the pin on an invisible line
reeled in straight down
into the hole—his first and only
hole in one, on the last swing
of a club he ever took, though
we didn’t know this then, and how
we whooped my brother and I
as we jumped and capered throwing
the other balls up into the air
while the old man baffled said what?
what happened? what? already wistful
for this best moment of a life it was
his luck the blindness made him miss.
And now it’s my luck, isn’t it just
my luck, to be the last one
remembering, as if I’m not just
there with them but also far
removed above it all and watching
as through the block glass of an upper-story
window high enough for the ruckus
not to reach me but too low
not to see the filmy blur of
bodies hugging one another
pumping fists as arm in arm
the three of them head out across
the fake grass of that single hole.
By Alan Shapiro
Featured Art: by William A. Harper
How the great closer—when the batter lunged
and swung through the curve for strike three—
turned his back to the plate as if there were no batter,
and his one concession to the moment
(that there even was a moment) was
to hitch one shoulder as if to shrug off
a slight annoyance while his face unbothered
by expression measured its mastery by what
it wouldn’t feel, or show, was like and not like us,
our faces, lips, how, when I tried to kiss yours,
they shut tight against what up to then, it seemed,
they’d opened to so eagerly I never thought
they ever wouldn’t or imagined you might ever
turn away not just as if I wasn’t there but
never had been. And weren’t we, maybe, like
the batter too, and not, the way he flipped the bat and
caught it and as he strolled back to the dugout,
holding the bat up, seemed to study it
with such rabbinical amazement
you could almost think he’d failed on purpose
so he could finally see within the bat
whatever lack the bat, not knowing it was lacking,
had hidden in the grain to show him now.
By W.J. Herbert
Featured Art: Boys in a Dory by Winslow Homer
1.
Wind hits the cliff face and climbs the palisade
as three men at a slatted table play cards.
Two wear hats. A third faces the sun and smokes.
All three are gray-haired, but none is my father.
He wouldn’t have played without scotch
on a Sunday or sat on a park bench, anyway.
2.
A man holding a child speaks to her in Mandarin
as he touches a small seat attached to the back of a bike.
He pats handlebars and points to spokes, saying bike
every twenty words or so, then taps the front wheel gently,
the way you would touch the shoulder of an old friend.
3.
Some Sundays even if I’m not near the bay,
I imagine my father playing solitaire at a slatted table
as I lean over the cliff rail, watching waves
that grapple with the beach as they leave it.
On the bike path below, grit spins under a stream of cyclists
as a man wipes a child’s tear with the edge
of his sleeve and speaks to her in a language so soft and low
the bay curves like an ear to hear it.
By Arlyce Menzies
Featured Art: by William Guy Wall
Slipping through the shadow of trees
at dusk to the old strip mine, we took off
our clothes under the wide catalpa’s
strung slender pods. The lake
shone with the last evening light,
cicadas casting their long call over the water.
We both dove and you didn’t come up
for a while. Then, you broke out, fist first,
and shouted for me to come look.
I sheared the dim surface with dark strokes
and found you gripping a watersnake
that curled and whipped your wrist.
You were delighted, and I tried to imagine
the impulse, impossible for me, that made you
grab the slither against your ribs
underwater. And the jolt you rose with,
the triumph of your quick hands,
and the body with which you felt the world.
By Nicole Hebdon
Lorna tells her fiancé that we met in the cemetery. “Chloe was writing a paper on the War of 1812 graves,” she says. “And I was taking photos for my photography class. It’s a haunted site. Paranormal investigators have looked into it and everything.” This is partially true.
The Riverside Cemetery is known for disappearing children and hovering orbs, but I wasn’t writing a paper. I was writing an article for the supernatural edition of the school magazine.
And we didn’t meet there.
Lorna’s fiancé, Caleb, tells us how he and Lorna met, and she folds her hands in her lap, like a child at Sunday school. Whenever one of Lorna’s roommates stands to get a wine cooler, or giggles purposelessly, he starts his sentence over, so I’ve heard his story approximately three-and-a-half times when he finally lets someone else talk.
They met in high school. They met in high school. They met in high school. They met . . . Lorna and I met at an abandoned mini-golf course. The castle’s peak looked like a crumbling monument, and I was sure it would lead me to another gravesite for my article, but past the thick cattails, there were toppled bridges, a sputtering stream that emptied into a square-shaped pond and Lorna wearing a university T-shirt.
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By Pamela Davis
Featured Art: by William Trost Richards
It’s dead August, a go nowhere night, and I take
Mom’s Chevy Monza, pick up a girlfriend,
head down to the Nu-Pike amusement park
at the shore. We’re sixteen and sunburnt,
peasant blouses, short-shorts, ready.
Dad taught me to swim in the park’s domed pool,
ankles glitter-kicking past mosaic tile,
but only the Cyclone Racer’s left now,
a tattoo booth, dime-toss swindles, some freak shows.
Mary Lee says the senior boys hang out by the roller coaster
and heads that way. A hand holds me back by the arm,
hoarse voice coaxes
Hey girlie, wanna see a man hard as a rock?
Shoved from behind—I stumble—almost fall
onto a body, ageless, naked, diapered like a baby
on a table. It’s airless as a crypt. His face narrow.
Is he real? The barker’s dank breath, a nudge
toward the table,
Touch him.
I reach my finger to the dry, shinydrab thigh.
Nothing moves but a black electric clock jerking
second-to-second, hands vacuuming time
from the room. The carny demands a dollar, I pull
a crumpled one from my pocket,
back out like a low-slung cat.
The Bearded Woman leans
against a wall, cigarillo loose
on her bottom lip. She spits,
Look, it’s the girl who touched the Petrified Man.
I’m sixteen, sunburned, picking my way
along the gritty beach, screams falling
from the shuddering coaster. The moon
stares me down, the sand swallows
my steps, and the tide rushes forward,
slick with neon.
By Craig van Rooyen
Featured Art: by Edouard Baldus
—After Matthew Dickman
Parked next to its German cousins,
the van’s a message to the office bourgeoisie:
Hey look, not me. I’ve got a 4-cylinder pop-top
escape pod back to 1983 with a picnic table in back,
motherfuckers. I could be a tortoise, tent in shell,
ambling away from a mortgage.
The kind of tortoise that shows up in Tallahassee
after ten years of grazing on roadside dandelions.
Driving home, I keep an eye out for Gandalf
like maybe he’ll have his thumb out at the city limit sign.
If I saw him I would stop like it’s no big deal
and tell him to throw his staff in back.
I need to believe there’s still time for me
to take a bro trip in a van with a wizard.
No questing anymore. No destination.
Mount Doom’s done its thing. Sauron’s dead.
Just a sort-of-old guy and a wizard in a VW van,
sharing a bag of Cheetos and a Dos Equis six-pack.
Maybe we’d drive back East where
things are still green this time of year.
It could be a little like rewinding time,
headlights unwinding the two lanes up ahead,
“The Grey One” pointing out a barn owl
flashing through the highbeams.
Maybe after three beers and a full moon
I’d finally see the really big picture—
how we’re all just hydrogen
squashed into other stuff by stars.
It could be the KLUV-in-the-desert-
Jesus-is-your-friend-drive-until-dawn road trip.
All my life I’ve tied my ties,
polished my shoes, said my vows,
then let my people down.
But Gandalf doesn’t care. The road trip
would be all honesty and wonder:
The you’ve-made-your-bed-and-slept-in-it-for-too-long-
now-drive-away-with-it-in-a-van road trip.
Road trip of acceptance. My arches
have collapsed and occasionally I shave my ears.
Who cares? No one’s coming to rescue us
because we’re way past rescuing. I loved you.
I hurt you. I changed the tire and drove away
in a VW van. And maybe just before dawn,
the wizard would elbow me and point with a shrug
to a Waffle House like why the hell not?
Inside, the night-shift waitress would be taking off
her apron and moving to a window
to watch the sun come up.
Maybe she’d call me Love and serve me bad coffee
in a chipped mug. Maybe her name would be Grace.
And maybe she’d pull off her hairnet and take out
the bobby pins one by one, shaking her head,
letting her long hair down at last.
By Craig van Rooyen
To adopt a highway, say
between Kettleman City and Coalinga,
you don’t need to love
the shorn stockyards or the Holsteins
drowsing in the haze of their own stink. But it helps.
You don’t have to sing
to the rows of uprooted almond trees
next to the angry sign about the “Dust Bowl”
Congress has created.
You don’t even have to believe
“Jesus Saves.”
To adopt a highway, you need
only walk its shoulder, bending from time
to time for a plastic lid
skewered by its straw, a pair
of pantyhose with reinforced toes
and a crotch thicket of goat head thorns.
When you come upon
a ruptured suitcase at the center of its galaxy
of intimates sprayed across two lanes,
look both ways before stepping
onto the scarred asphalt to harvest
the cloth pieces, worn soft on a stranger’s skin.
To adopt a highway, say
between Avenal and Chowchilla,
you don’t have to listen for the inmates
on their side of the gun towers or
even remember their names, the ones
whose sins you spoke aloud to cover your own.
If you walk the shoulder long enough,
stepping over roadkill gore and
tire carcasses, your face may dry up
and Haggard may rise from the heat shimmer
to sing his creosote songs; and still
you need not let the lonely in.
But it helps. To adopt
a highway you must walk
through the fumes of a spent afternoon
looking for its leavings. And if you’re lucky
a red-tail will swoop ahead of you in the dusk,
a hawk-flame lighting post after post.
By Craig van Rooyen
Featured Art: by Thomas Cole
Oh blind digger, furred borer,
miner of nothing at the end of a tunnel
to nowhere. My nocturnal brother,
I can report up top
the screech owl sounds like
he’s ripping holes in a paper sky.
Tonight’s scent salad:
honeysuckle-jasmine served under
a thin glaze of starlight. Nothing
between me and Venus
but goosebumps. What gets you
through the long hours down there?
Now and then when I go inside
to pour coffee or smash graham crackers
in warm milk, I read a few lines
of William Carlos Williams
who can get high on open scissors, or
a waste of cinders sloping down
to the railroad. I’m looking
for things to tie myself to. Maybe
the chain-link backstop that, right now,
is making diamonds of the backlit clouds,
or the trembling peppercorn tree.
Anything to stay topsoil-side
for a few more decades. Do you fear
the sky as much as I fear the press of earth?
Do you stay awake imagining
the unbearable lightness of air?
The imagination, intoxicated by prohibitions,
rises to drunken heights, says Williams,
and I walk outside again. Everywhere
new leaves, so thin the moon
shines through. My neighbors cling
to each other in their sleep.
A three-legged stray totters out from shadow
to beg with a lopsided wag. Dig
oh warm-blooded rodent.
Bore your tunnels though no one sees
their dark patterns. Come morning,
the three-legged dog will hobble
from fresh mound to fresh mound,
quivering at the scent of your passage.
By Craig van Rooyen
Featured Art: by Joachim Beuckelaer
—After Marie Howe’s “The Star Market”
And they did all eat,
and were filled: and they took
up the fragments that remained,
twelve baskets full.
—Matthew 14:20
Today, my people—the people Jesus loves—
are shopping at Costco.
Membership checked, we’ve entered
the light-drenched Kingdom of More.
We’re sampling Finger Lake
Champaign Cheddar morsels nested
in tiny paper cups. We’re watching golden
chicken carcasses ride a Ferris wheel to nowhere.
Our carts are full to overflowing
with applesauce squeezes and shrink-wrapped
Siamese twin Nutella jars. Take. Eat.
Take some more. But it’s not enough.
Here you can buy a theme park
for your master bath, on credit.
You can buy buckets of pain
killers, boxed sets of princesses, a
Rebel 4-Pack of Star Wars Bobbleheads.
The crushed-ice battlements of the seafood kiosk
frame Wild Cooked Red King Crab Legs so big
it looks as if a dragon has been dismembered
by retirees in hairnets and aprons.
Though abundance assumes satisfaction,
maybe this is a place of famine.
But why shouldn’t a miracle happen
at Costco? Up the frozen-food aisle now
comes a woman on her electric “Amigo Value Shopper”
with a cow-catcher-sized basket up front and
an orange safety flag in back.
By Jennifer Christman
Like the dry, hot winds of Santa Ana itself, the sound came in waves. Pop-pop- pop-pop-pop. Weanie Tender didn’t know from where. Weanie Tender didn’t know from what. Staccato bursts of varying lengths and speed, then brief respites. Now, however, is a different story. There’s a constant vibrato. Take any moment—take this moment—Weanie can hear it, by God. Pop-pop-pop-pop- pop. He can feel it. He need only focus his mind to detect what’s on the order of a cosmic palpitation. Pop-pop-pop-pop-pop. Weanie is a low-level PO. He wants to be a detective someday.
“Force’s under attack,” says his partner, Dom, wolfing Chick-n-Minis from his own private 20-tray, steaming up the cruiser. Bag-of-bones Weanie is crumpled in the passenger seat.
“You hear it now?” says Weanie, drawing in a sharp, short breath.
He and Dom are on break outside the Chick-fil-A on Bristol. Weanie can’t sit still lately. He jiggles his legs and wrings his hands, listening, deeply, to what he’s now thinking must be an engine running—that’s it, an engine running rough, like an outboard motor, and snappy, pop-pop-pop-pop-pop. But that would require a boat, and water. And the city, the entire county, is landlocked. And the seismic index is low. Weanie checks daily.
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By Lisa Bellamy
Featured Art: by Evelyn De Morgan
I shudder when I think of the giant beavers—
tiny-brained, squinting Pleistocene thugs—
they bared rotting incisors longer than a human arm,
they infested ponds and rivers, smothered
gasping sh with their acid-spiked, toxic urine,
they slapped their murderous tails—bleating,
they dragged themselves up the riverbank,
spied sweetgrass; they charged the crawling babies,
the tiny baby bones, trampling, they didn’t care—
hurray for the naked, fierce, yelling Stone Age grannies—
they dropped their hammer stones, they grabbed
sharp sticks. Who can forget their skinny, bouncing breasts?
They beat the giant beavers, they speared; they smeared
hot, thick beaver blood over each other’s faces,
their bony, serviceable buttocks—who can forget the grannies—
By Lisa Bellamy
Our fathers never spoke to us of their wars.
Each morning, they girded their loins with tool belt
and slide rule, according to their appointed trades.
In the summer, as they backed out
our driveways, we ran after them. In the winter,
they left, whistling, as we slept.
They created Japanese–style goldfish ponds,
built backyard gazebos, sang barbershop harmony
and strummed the ukulele, but they refused
to call themselves makers of beauty.
They woke us at midnight to see
the Aurora Borealis, carried us out
to the rose and white light-waves streaming,
named for the goddess of dawn who brings life,
and the god of the north wind who brings death.
Our fathers grew restless. They started to pace,
walked outside to gawk at the stars.
When we asked, Can we come, they said, No.
When we asked Why, they said, Hush.
Our fathers stopped kissing our mothers.
They came home midday: red, laid-off, warned
for swearing at the foreman, said they were sick
unto death. They slammed screen doors, bedroom doors,
storage shed doors. They started to drink. They stood up
from couches, pushed dogs that nosed them, stumbled
outside, yodeling. Said they felt bigger
than the sky. They drank in bomb shelters,
at the Legion Post, watching TV. They drank
driving us to Scouts, bottles between their knees.
They drank when we begged them not to and when
we tried to ignore them. Sometimes
they slammed us against walls, sometimes
said they were sorry. One by one, they left:
in their sedans, vans, the pick-up, walking to the bus stop.
They left in the morning as we sat, silent,
at the kitchen table, eating cereal before school.
We watched them leave with their suitcases.
They left a goodbye note for us to find
after track practice. They left at night after fights.
Some stayed, but stopped talking, or faded
fast, eyes rolled back, clutching their heart.
Others left over time, from their wasting diseases.
They said they would never forget us.
Our fathers said they loved us, and we believed them.
By Chrys Tobey
Featured Art: by Vincent van Gogh
Woman is not yet capable of friendship: women
are still cats and birds. Or, at best, cows.
—Nietzsche
Love, I’m sorry for the time we were walking home with groceries in our
arms—you carried the chicken and potatoes and I held the chocolate. As we
laughed about something I can’t remember, our dog barked
at someone, and I just bolted, ran off. Also, love, there were all
those mornings you’d wrap your arm around me—your hand
spread across my spotted stomach. Good morning, you’d whisper
and I’d reply, Moo. I’m sorry for that. I also hope you’ll one day
forgive me for the time you were weeping, your mom had just died,
and I charged as though you were red. Love, I regret
all the evenings I’d drive home from work and open the door to smell
roasting squash and garlic. We’d sit at our tiny kitchen table, and you’d
say I love you, but then I’d regurgitate the ratatouille. I’m sorry about that, too.
Love, I apologize for my aversion to leather and how we’d snuggle on
the sofa, my nose in your neck, but then you’d cry, Ah, my back
because unfortunately, I weighed 1,000 pounds. And Love, what remorse
I have for leaving you, for wandering away to graze in another pasture.
By Chrys Tobey
Our parson to the old women’s faces
That are cold and folded, like plucked dead hens’ arses.
—Ted Hughes
An old woman thought her face was a dead
hen’s arse. Maybe it was all the years
of plucking and waxing. The woman had no idea
what would make her think her face
was a dead hen’s arse and not a live hen’s
arse, and why the arse and not the beak, but
she did. It couldn’t be my age, the woman thought.
It couldn’t be the men, not when everyone knows men
love older women, especially much older, especially
with all the grandma porn, all the old women sex
costumes, all the men who ogle elderly women in walkers.
She had read so many books where men longed
for older women, where old women seduced helpless
wide-eyed men. She saw billboards where old women
modeled teenage clothing, modeled Brazilian
bathing suit bottoms. And she knew the trend: folding
wrinkles into one’s face using a Dumpling Dough Press.
People would stop her and take selfies. You look
like a movie star, they’d say. They wouldn’t leave her alone.
She’d shrug. Maybe it was the way she’d sometimes cluck
when she made love to her husband? This could be the reason
he’d whisper, One day I may trade you in for an older model.
Or maybe it was all the eggs she ate. Or her penchant for feathers.
Or how her mother used to call her my little chickadee. The woman
was unsure why she thought her face was a dead fowl’s
feces-extruding cloaca. She only knew she was tired
of seeing twenty-year-old men with women who could
be their grandmothers, old women who treated the men
like so many dimpled birds.
By Robert Hinderliter
Featured Art: by Owen Jones
Coach Oberman watched from his office window as a group of students prepared the bonfire by the south end zone. Two kids stacked tinder while another knelt beside a papier-mâché buffalo they would throw on the fire at the end of the pep rally. Oberman couldn’t wait to watch it burn.
He’d just gotten off the phone with Mike Treadwell—coach of the Ashland Buffaloes—who’d called to wish him luck in tomorrow’s game. Mike had been Oberman’s assistant for three years before taking the job at Ashland High. And now, after back-to-back state titles in his first two years, he’d been offered the defensive coordinator position at Emporia State University. This would be the last time they’d face off.
“I’ll miss seeing you across the field,” Mike had said. “Although I sure won’t miss trying to stop that Oberman offense.”
This was pandering bullshit. In their two head-to-head contests, Mike’s Buffaloes had routed Oberman’s Hornets by at least four touchdowns.
“I just wanted to say thanks,” Mike had said. “I couldn’t have gotten this far without you.”
He’d said it like he meant it, with no hint of sarcasm, but Oberman knew there was venom behind those words. In Mike’s two years as assistant, Oberman had treated him badly. Mike had a good mind for the game, there was no denying that, but he was a scrawny wuss with thick glasses and a girlish laugh. He didn’t belong on a football field. Oberman had banished him to working with the punter and made him the butt of jokes in front of the players. When Mike’s brother-in-law became superintendent at Ashland and handed Mike the coaching job, Oberman had scoffed. And now Mike was moving on to a Division II college while he was stuck muddling through another losing season with an eight-man team in Haskerville. He knew the irony wasn’t lost on either of them.
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By Theresa Burns
Featured Art by Dante Gabriel Rossetti
Why had I not noticed them
before? The women in treatment
on every block, it seems, leaving
the library, walking their dogs.
Once they hid themselves
beneath wigs, fashionable hats
in the city, or entered softly
in Birkenstocks and baseball caps,
stayed out of the way. Now they
show up, unannounced.
In offices, in waiting rooms,
in aisle seats with legs outstretched,
the women in treatment
flip the pages, reach the end,
bald, emboldened. One
outside a florist today arranges
lantana in time for evening
rush. A bright silk scarf
around her pale round head
calls attention to her Supermoon.
And one woman my own age,
in my own town, takes up a table
right in front. She nurses a chai latte
in a purple jacket, her hair
making its gentle comeback.
What she pens in a small
leather notebook: a grocery list?
Ode to her half-finished
French toast? The kind of poem
living people write.
Winner, New Ohio Review Poetry Contest
selected by Kevin Prufer
By Jessica Cuello
There are only two photos of me as a child.
She took them, she had no child.
She had Kool Cigarettes and a job at the drugstore.
She gave me the Crayola box with the built-in sharpener.
Four hundred suitcases were stored in the attic
of Willard Asylum for the Chronic Insane.
She joined her twin brother there.
She wore her black hair down.
A child could admire it.
She bought me an Easter basket,
a stuffed rabbit whose fur rubbed off.
She walked everywhere.
She painted circles of blush on her cheeks.
Loony, people said so,
I mean grown-ups who saw signs
who passed her on our street before she
started to call and say Remember,
on the phone she said Remember,
Remember the date we killed her brother,
forgetting he’d been committed.
I took her hand and tagged along like an animal.
She was perfect to a child.
By Linda Hillringhouse
Featured Art: by Julia Margaret Cameron
We’re waiting for our copying jobs
at Staples, so she starts chatting me up,
says she’s a retired math teacher.
When I tell her I taught English,
she says that English teachers
are the worst and she always kept
her mouth shut at the book club
because they always wanted
evidence and she just wanted
to talk, have a cup of tea,
what’s the big deal?
And I’m being too nice as usual
making it clear to her I’m not
one of those book bitches.
Now I’m hearing about the math museum
in New York and I can tell she wants someone
to go with. I’m brainstorming excuses
but it’s my turn to say something so I say
how much I like zeros and that I even
tried to read a book about them.
Now she’s telling me how she used to prove
to her students that she can get 2 to equal 1
and keeps saying, Let A=B and it’s like
God’s saying it, but now she’s saying, Anything
can be anything and this is starting to sound
like patent bullshit and she’s droning on
and I’m so glazed out I can only nod and say hmmm
like I’m Bertrand Russell finally grasping the true nature
of mathematics when all she wants is some tea and company
and it’s her bad luck that it had to be me she ran into,
the Queen of Zero.
By Molly Minturn
Featured Art: Still Life with Cake by Raphaelle Peale
It was spring and I walked
the streets in the late afternoon
with the best poet I knew.
She was tall with a severe face
like an early New Englander.
Her ancestors survived genocide.
We didn’t discuss our work, only
the weather, how the blossoms
were upsetting. The war was on.
We bought a hefty slice of cake
and walked slowly under a murder
of crows back to my apartment.
This seemed too evocative,
almost to the point of embarrassment.
The cake was coconut. We split
the slice, sitting at the small
table in my living room, away
from the sun. At the time,
it was the present. Here
in the future, I sometimes forget
to breathe, waiting
for the next catastrophe. That cake
was pure in its sweetness, the poet
alive with me, her eyes scanning
my face, both of our histories
neatly bound in our throats.
I wanted to ask if she was frightened
by living, by the change
in the light. Instead, she slid the plate
across to me, a Ouija planchette,
insisting I take the last bite.
By Shauna Mackay
So, as I understand it, none of your children have died?
They die all the time, she says. Over and over.
The doctor, young as ever-dying sons, suggests a short course of medication and refers her to someone who might help her to change her thoughts.
On the way home her walk’s different: rocking, dodgy. This is how the embarrassed go. Shanks’s pony won’t trot nice: one two, onetwo, no, one, two, for God’s sake. She keeps a Bonaparte hand to pat the phone in the pocket of her shirt, there, there; can’t let it lie at the bottom of her bag, roofed over by crap and the birthday card for Lance. Her middle lad hasn’t answered the text she sent from the doctor’s reception area: he’s got an away game today, rugby, that bloody rugby; he must be injured, quadriplegic, on a ventilator, brain dead. How can she go on? She smoothes out the prescription in her hand, crosses the road to the chemist.
A text comes as she waits for the tablets to be dispensed. Her son is fine, all good, they won. She pictures him downing celebration pints, shots, being a daft sod, succumbing to fatal blood alcohol levels. She makes the pharmacist bide there for payment, stood like a plum, while she texts back. Well done son but mind you go canny x. As soon as the first text has gone she sends another to say on the coach journey home he should sit in a middle aisle seat opposite the driver’s side for she’s heard it’s the safest place in the event of a crash.
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By Owen Doyle
Featured Art by James McNeill Whistler
Words in an old notebook
prove (I was twenty-ish, then)
that mind-mud and dismally
tangled brain material
have causes other than old age
or illness. At the time,
they might have been explained
by the rum or beer in mind-
blowing excess the night before.
I don’t remember.
But surely those episodes
of binge and babble
are far outnumbered
by drier spells of helplessness:
me, frozen
over the neat rectangular form
of a blank page, compelled
to write totus to avoid
writing nothing.
It’s reason enough for terror
or self-pity, the thought
that those very things—the booze-
blasts and blackouts—were then
and are now the efficient
cause of wex and taggle:
furrows of gray matter, tilled
for art and wisdom, laid
waste, and the flood of those young
insults cascading still. But no,
I’ve heard that it’s very common:
this empty gaze, the pen loose
between a finger and a thumb,
its tip hovering
over absolutely nothing. And so,
as tragic as it all may be, finally,
I won’t let it bother me too
too much. Why taggle over wex
totus? I’ll pour myself a glass
of wine and see
what comes spilling out.
By Abby E. Murray
Featured Art: A Rose by Thomas Anshutz
You should know
there is no coffee
at the Wives’ Coffee
There’s prosciutto
and cream puffs
and conversation starters
printed on glossy paper
And here’s a tip
from the commander’s wife:
Wives who forget
to wear the crest pin
will be fined a dollar
because these pins
aren’t free ladies
and immediately
I’m a stump
rolled into the river
before a flood
I am uncooperative
a hollow log sheltering rebel fish
a disruption of roots
But the conversation starters
are required and my question is
What discussion topic bores you to sleep every time?
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By Jeff Walker
Featured Art: by Martin Johnson Heade
Nobody, speaking of fluency, would remember
that party where I told the young woman
seated on the floor: this food tastes good. Nothing untoward.
She surprised me by crawling on all fours, her blouse fairly open
at the top by way of happy gravity, to gently
take the food from my hand with her teeth; alarmed me
because I was not young and
what could she be thinking by doing that?
Around us on sofas and out under the trees hummed
the language I would not understand after years of trying
and also of trying to understand why I couldn’t,
an easy-to-employ tongue with few options and simple
structure but when they speak to each other it’s unintelligible,
a giggle-babble, a bubbly stream of what I guess are words,
vain emptying of thought from one head to another,
like all language, really.
Why not give it up and run silent miles
through the mud and rice paddies with my jogging buddies,
or ride miles on a motorbike alongside a mute, jiggling citizenry,
my face contained and content behind its polycarbonate shield,
my mouth behind its filter mask, and who on the back
not speaking, only chewing?
Winner, New Ohio Review Fiction Contest
selected by Mary Gaitskill
By Analía Villagra
He was gone for eleven years, and Jackie is still getting used to the idea that Victor is out. Exonerated. His release had warranted a few sentences on the local NPR station, so Jackie knows that he has been at his mother’s place, three blocks away, for a week. She has not yet run into him on the street. Each time she leaves her apartment she scans the sidewalks, and when he does not materialize she feels equal parts relief and disappointment. Thursday afternoon she goes out of her way to walk past his building, willing him to be on the front steps or looking out the window. She slows down. Would he even recognize her now? Her hair is short, with a few stray glints of gray, no longer halfway to her waist and shimmering black. Her eyes have shadows beneath them. Her hips have spread. She’s thirty years old, in good shape she thinks, unless you’ve spent a decade fantasizing about a nineteen-year-old body. Jackie blushes. This is the first time she’s admitted to herself that she wondered—hoped? assumed?—that Victor thought about her while he was away. Eleven years. Maybe he’ll recognize her, maybe he won’t. She can’t decide which is worse, so she stares down at the sidewalk and hurries past the building.
She goes to the Y to pick her daughter up from camp. Graciela is running around the outdoor play area with a group of other kids, their hair wild, their clothes and faces filthy.
“Mama!” Grace shrieks when she sees her.
Jackie waves. She locates the teenagers wearing staff T-shirts, and they hand her the sign-out sheet without pausing their conversation. Jackie half-listens to the latest counselor drama while Grace gathers her things.
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New Ohio Review 