Issue 32, March 2023
Newohioreview.org is archiving previous editions as they originally appeared. We are pairing the pieces with curated art work, as well as select audio recordings. In collaboration with our past contributors, we are happy to (re)-present this outstanding work.
Issue 25 compiled by Nate Wilder Hervey
One of the abounding miracles of life on Earth
is that somewhere at this moment a couple
is sitting in their backyard drinking alcohol together.
The lawn might be manicured or it might be overgrown
with Devil’s Trumpet and Lantana weeds.
The backyard might belong to one of their elderly parents
who is lying in a darkened back room watching television
as the couple imbibes India Pale Ale and mulberry wine.
Though maybe it’s ethanol, because they just got
news they can’t have children.
Or cartons of coconut water because
they just came back from the gym.
Regardless of what they are swallowing
and whether or not the backyard smells of cut grass,
Asian barbeque, or the pheromones of raccoons,
together they are watching the stars enter the sky one by one,
like teeth rising up into the gums of a toddler
as the crying of mosquitoes and horseflies
being electrocuted in the iridescent bug zapper
over-occupies the atmosphere.
To the point that when the man says
Freud would find the above metaphorical reference
to teeth sexual, the woman can’t quite hear him.
Instead she is contemplating the exacting way the man
lifts the brown beer bottle to his mouth, as if he is heralding
hound dogs through a horn; and about the way he
opened his car door last week for the neighbor woman
with olive skin and tattoos around her ankles,
because she said her car wouldn’t start
and she needed a ride into town
to return an overdue library book
and to euthanize her ferret.
What if I were not a shallow person.
Did not need an Arapaho blanket swaddled
around me in order to sleep less fitfully.
Did not need honey in my mouth.
Or a handsome man
to motivate me to shower.
What if we were all made of light.
What if I was able to mimic an aviary bird,
could hide all signs of sickness,
did not spend hours making rubber band balls.
We are all made of light.
Yet we still make excuses for our egos’ devastations.
Such as my mother preferred her polo ponies over me.
What if the seesaw were to come unhinged.
And your dog bit you in the femoral artery
while you were teaching your child to ride a bike.
What if I did not need opiates to talk to you,
could dress in a color-coordinated manner.
What if I were backseat enough
to never need to say another word.
What if the African continent lifted up from the earth,
travelled like a magic carpet, landed on North America
smothering the U.S.A. as if it were putting out a fire.
And the African continent liked its new home
did not mind being a continent on top of another continent
did not mind hearing all the dead below it crying
out for their fields of leveled corn and smashed swing sets.
Some of us begging for shish kabobs,
others of us moaning for tofu and kale smoothies
with a scoop of flax and whey,
or ribs and coleslaw and beer.
What if I never swallowed cough syrup.
And Caspian tigers were not extinct.
And chrysanthemums levitated.
What if I stopped whitening my teeth
pitched a tent in your backyard
propagated violets and cacti
did not need a communion wafer
or a man’s tongue to feel inhabited.
What if I were ordinary enough to ride the bus,
eat microwave dinners.
And what if I had been brave enough the day the sun
bore its heat down on us, browning our scalps
as we swatted away horseflies and hornets
to have run over Uncle Bob with the tractor
instead of unwittingly masticating
the den of newborn rabbits.
After a year of rehab and therapy, the country western singer
went back to writing songs; but he had changed.
Lyrics like, “Good Boundaries Make a Better Kind of Friend,”
and, “When You Say Bye, I Feel So Violated”
—they simply didn’t have the punch of his best work.
*****
In New York, Famous Joe’s Pizza Parlor on Travis Street
is suing Joe’s Famous Pizza on East Ninth Ave for stealing its name.
The battle rapidly grows vicious. The courtroom smells
of melted, burning cheese.
If he wins, Famous Joe says that his attorney will get free slices for life.
*****
“Jesus had a great career,” says one of the students, on Monday morning,
reading out loud from his assignment;
then, sensing an uneasy silence, “Well, but he was famous, wasn’t he?”
*****
The mountain climber who actually made it to the summit,
the place so many of his friends had failed to reach,
got one great photograph, plus permanent damage
to nerves in his nose and his ears, both hands and feet.
*****
“If I hadn’t dropped out of cooking school,” says Gretchen, happily,
“I would never have mastered my
Sunday morning waffles for screaming kids,
which I believe will be my greatest legacy.”
*****
Why don’t you tell me about your life for a change?
Did you carry it carefully, like a brimful cup of water,
bound for a particular flower?
Or did you keep accidentally turning around
to look at something else,
and slosh it all over the place, like me?
Sweetheart, if I suddenly flop over in the mall one afternoon
while taking my old-person-style exercise
and my teeth are chattering like castanets,
and my skull is going nok nonk nok on the terra cotta tiles
of the well-swept mall floor;
my tongue stuck out, my eyes rolled up in my head—
Don’t worry, baby, we knew this kind of excitement
might possibly occur,
and that’s not me in there anyway—
I’m already flying backwards, high and fast
into the big arcades and spaces of my green life
where I made and gave away and traded sentences with people I loved
that made us all laugh and rise up in
unpredictable torrents of fuchsia.
Dial 911, or crouch down by the body if you want—
but sweetheart, the main point I’m making here is:
don’t worry don’t worry don’t worry:
Those wild birds will never be returning
to any roost in this world.
They’re loose, and gone, and free as oxygen.
Don’t despair there, under the frosted glass skylight,
in front of the Ethiopian restaurant
with the going-out-of-business sign.
Because sweetheart, this life
is a born escape artist,
a migrating fever,
a convict tattooed in invisible ink,
without mercy or nostalgia.
It came down to eat a lot of red licorice
and to adore you imperfectly,
and to stare at the big silent moon
as hard as it could,
then to swoop out just before closing time
right under the arm of the security guard
who pulls down the big metal grate
and snaps shut the lock in its hasp
as if it, or he, could ever imagine
anything that could prevent anything.
All this passing on going on, almost
as if it were contagious. Words you’ve recently learned
spill easily from your lips:
Wenckebach, biliary, Cetuximab, granuloma,
the new bright colors of life. Just when
you were getting bored with the
pinks, purples, and greens on offer
for almost seven decades,
you’d happily now trade blasts and plasma cells for
brown or black or tan. But as surely
and hard as you know how many platelets it takes
to sustain life, you know that
more new words will show up soon.
Months ago you learned that “consistent with” means
you have it, and, last week, that “refractory” means
the treatment has quit working.
Now that you realize you’ll never learn Swedish,
in secret and as a joke
(to surprise your daughter-in-law with at dinner time),
you understand it’s not that you’re running out of
brain cells,
you’re running out of time.
You can’t learn sjuka and middag while you’re learning
leukopenia and transampullary.
You never expected this.
You never thought it would come to this!
(That’s the funny part. Has it ever not been there?)
Wake up and
you will see it even now,
gliding merrily in your direction,
not even bothering to look you in the eye,
as if you are the last thing on its mind—and if
you squint you will notice it gather a little speed
(the teensiest of fuck-you’s),
like a sailboat in languid waters
a moment after the wind has shifted.
Let me begin by offering my condolences, I said,
holding out my hand. She shook out her umbrella
and placed it open, just beside the altar. They thought
it was an ulcer, she said. They gave him some tablets.
Did he have any special requests? I asked. Favorite
hymns? Or something for Communion, like maybe
Water Music? He was worse by Christmas, she said.
He couldn’t manage the pumpkin pie. He always loved
my pumpkin pie. The King of Love is nice, I said. I
opened the book to page 64. As an alternate to Crimond,
you know. Most people don’t recognize it as the 23rd
Psalm. In January his feet turned black, she said. Toe by
toe. It took exactly ten days. The shadow of a branch
moved slowly back and forth behind the stained glass.
I thought: When I get home I’ll check my toes. Will
there be Communion? I asked, finally.
The last three days he started to hiccup, she said.
He wouldn’t take any water. It never stopped, the
hiccupping. Not once, not one minute until he went. I
could play Pachelbel’s Canon. That’s very popular now.
There’s no reason it can’t work at funerals as well as
weddings. At the very end, she said—then stopped, her
eyes squeezed shut behind her glasses—as if the
rejected water, each wretched hiccup, and every
blackened toe formed a chain she could use to haul
herself back to September, when she would claim
him, finally whole again.
She reached for her umbrella and frowned. Play
what you like, she said. He was never fond of music.
Not hymns, anyhow. Only once in fifty-three years
did I catch him singing. You are My Sunshine, I
believe it was.
His kid doesn’t want a smartphone. His fourteen-year-old flute-playing boy is saying, “Nah, I don’t really need one.” Mitch’s wife Shelley says, “No one’s forcing you, honey.” She beams. The boy beams. Mitch feels a faint nausea. There’s something wrong with his kid, who still likes Legos and watches network TV and keeps his room clean and calls his two nerd friends on the landline.
“Well, that’s fine,” says Mitch. For some reason, he’s pitched his voice like an actor from a 1950s movie. He tries it again: “That’s just fine, son!” He’s speaking like a man wearing a fedora, a man carrying a briefcase. But nobody seems to notice. “So what do you want for Christmas?”
His kid, Ernie, frowns as if Mitch has just asked him to poke a kitten in the eye. “I can’t think of anything at the moment,” he says. “Can I go practice flute now?”
“Yes!” says Shelley. She rises from the sofa and kisses Ernie on the ear. “I’ll let you know when dinner’s ready. I’m making your favorite.”
“Brussels sprouts?” he asks brightly. “And Salisbury steak?”
“You bet,” she says. When Ernie has disappeared down the hall, she turns to Mitch. “Don’t force him to grow up before he’s ready.”
Mitch knows better than to argue, but he can tell that his thoughts—not grow up, just join the 21st century like a normal kid!—might as well be floating above his head like a comic book bubble. Not that Ernie would get such a reference, because he doesn’t read comic books, either.
“Okay,” he says, but Shelley has stomped down the hall to prepare the kid’s Brussels sprouts.
–Rome
1.
My father fills a syringe with insulin,
pushes the needle through his shirt into belly skin,
looks through the window at his dying lawn.
He writes a note to me: Summer’s early here, bud.
Your mom’s still on me to lay off the Snickers.
She means well, of course.
The oak tree’s about to go—groans all night long.
Caravaggio is one of my favorites. A sensitive scoundrel.
Go see Conversion On The Road To Damascus.
All is of Grace, Dad.
2.
Four lions stick out hollow tongues
in the middle of Piazza del Popolo.
Each tongue spews water—spilling down
stepped plinths into four collection pools
whose surfaces are mildly disturbed
but never overflow. With their perspective of stone,
the lions have remained unmoved for 200 years.
How, I wonder, can they gaze without weeping
at the sun-burned stoner strumming a distorted
“Stairway To Heaven.”
I stumble from one to another,
dropping coins until my pockets are empty.
3.
When he baptized me, my father’s robe floated
up around him like the wings of a manta ray,
revealing the soft skin of his shins to the believers.
We stood in a glass tank, with nothing to hide.
He covered my eyes with a handkerchief,
dipped me backwards into new life.
I trusted his strong arms
more than God.
4.
Fountains fill my photographs: pissing cherubs,
horses with fish tails. Granite seashells emerge
amid glistening mermaids—
breasts taut in the exquisite way
stone has of lying about flesh and time.
5.
How can I begin to soak it in?
My father has stopped watering his flowers.
Why can’t I remember the day
he became too weak to carry me?
He used to stand chest-deep,
pushing me into the muscled belly of waves
surging from a sea
that seemed to have no end.
6.
I try to dissolve in St. Peter’s Square
with other pilgrims who wish to feel something,
and almost—holding our little screens above our heads—
we become a bigger thing
and for that moment it feels as if God can see us
as an eagle is able to see fish
mouthing the bottom of the sky.
The nice teachers at the kindergarten open house
point out the Unifix cubes and color game;
they are professional in their analysis of play. Later
at Lainy’s party the operators of Jump ’N Bounce
just look away while the kids wrestle into an idyllic
sense of self. A mother tells me, hushed, how
one November morning Jason’s father parked the car
and blew his head off. Then it’s time for cake.
The kids are sweaty, tumbling over each other
for a spot at the table. I search Jason’s face
for a sign, a scar, but don’t find it—he’s waving
a noisemaker in Sean’s face, his mother chatting
pleasantly in the corner. Cue the birthday music.
Next day, we’re late, and I walk my distressed son
into school. “We might miss the eggs hatching!” he yells,
bounding down the stairs. The class is huddled
around the incubator, the glow from the heat lamp
flushing their faces. This must be a rite of passage,
watching a chick’s birth surrounded by friends.
It’s on the docket, tailored to the lesson plan, deemed
developmentally appropriate. It’s March, after all,
when the world glosses over its losses.
—after “Seven Marys,” by Li-Young Lee
I sit, Sister Mary, among the other relics
in the Mission courtyard—
a cracked vat for boiling blubber
into lamp butter,
a wood-wheeled cart to haul
bear carcass to the butcher.
Underneath the bricks,
all the smallpox bones.
And these three bells, Sister Mary,
named Joy, Sorrow, and Gloria.
What am I to do when they toll?
Cast before I was born, each sings
to me in a different key: G, E minor,
and Chumash. Joy weighs 279 pounds
and wakes roosting starlings,
launches them from the parched oak tree,
black leaves falling upward.
Sorrow makes the wooden Indian
in front of Founders Smoke & Tobacco weep.
Gloria, Sister Mary, makes me shake.
Sounding wilder as I grow old and tame,
they ring in three tongues:
red, wildfire, and October.
Three bells, Sister Mary, three roads back.
And one says you are the green-eyed devil.
And one says the bears are gone.
But one says, Glory, you are here,
open your green eyes.
There is a fountain, Sister Mary,
a fountain not deep or wide, and into it
tourists toss coins bearing the heads
of our fathers, white and solemn and gone.
A fountain with a bear and a girl and three fish
all bronzed and greening from the air.
Water spews from the paw of the bear,
and the fish leap on their metal spindles, always
inches above the troubled waters,
and the little bronzed girl sees nothing
with her blank Chumash eyes—not the fish,
the white fathers tumbling head over tails,
or me on my bench in the sun sipping
from a bagged can while three bells toll
their braided song. We are nothing to her,
because she is long gone.
And what am I to do?
Bells tolling my guilt, solitude, privilege, joy.
One, Sister Mary, sings the beauty of milkweed tufts
blown down dry creek beds.
One whispers to me the forgotten dreams
of steelhead trout, and the sins of the fathers
visited unto the third and fourth generation.
And one orders my fingerprints pressed
onto the black wings of starlings.
And I can’t tell, anymore, Sister Mary,
one from the other
The letter came back from the post office so mangled
it was as if the mailman had plucked it out of my box
before being jumped by a clot of street thugs.
Then, still carrying his mail bag, stumbled into a bar
because it was the third time this year that he’d gotten jumped
in my neighborhood, and why do guys gotta pick on him
just because he’s short (under five-six don’t make a man,
his father always said). Then drank scotch and soda
until the bartender made him stop, walked the dimming
summer streets in search of his truck, slept in a doorway,
woke up and vomited into his mailbag, found his truck
and skulked home to his wife, who had sent all four children
to the neighbors and was waiting up in yesterday’s clothes,
with a suitcase and a left hook brewing. Because she hated
the late hours the USPS forced him to carry, and by “late hours”
they both know she meant his cheating with the tiny
Castilian woman two zip codes over, and this thought
that poisoned her days now propelled her to stomp on his mailbag
and kick it off the porch for all that the mailbag stood for:
the overtime, the philandering, the childless Castilian
with the twenty-two inch waist. But then when she saw his face
with his eyebrows tipped and sorry, and she knew
that he hadn’t been sneaking around, but had gotten into trouble,
she sat him down, fed him coffee, and washed his wounds
before sending him back out for his morning shift,
because they both needed him to keep this job
(there was a pension attached, she had secretly started divorce
proceedings, was hungry for the alimony).
And so he got back to work and wiped off the fouled, wretched letters in his bag, feeding them through the system
before getting called into the supervisor’s, and because
the letter was wet, it got mangled in the maw of a sorting machine,
the address smeared and clotty, the stamp curled and dystonic,
and three weeks later, once the mailman was off probation,
the letter came back to him, smelling like machine oil and vomit,
clawed and shredded, stamped “Return to Sender,”
and he shoved it back in my mailbox with bite marks
from the beast that had mauled it, this letter to my father
on his deathbed, explaining why I wouldn’t be going to see him.
As my father hands me a bouquet of roses
dyed the shade of a dozen sinking suns, my mother grasps
his steady arm, teetering. Her body
has begun its slow revenge for what it begrudged
all along, and she’s afraid to walk since her last fall, which
snapped her hip in half. My father is tired
of holding her up. He scolds, Just take it. Her hand shakes
as she holds the iPhone to get a photo
of me in my mortarboard and hood. Let go
and take it, he says, and she tries a one-handed
snapshot, her trembling arm still looped through his.
I stitch a smile across my face. The phone flashes.
As she grips his wrist, I can hear him in Greek,
the language reserved for anger and, once, for sex.
The language they speak and still think
I don’t understand. Can I live this way, Tia? he asks.
I clutch my bouquet to my chest, trying
to pretend these flowers aren’t lopped off at the stems.
Trying to move into the next phase of realization
that love is unsteady on its feet. That two people
can resent each other, but care for their daughter
and each other enough to stay put.
Refusing to wilt
into that place I’d go as a child—when I’d hear
their fights and retreat to the backyard to play
with cats, praying to make something else of myself, however
small—I stand tall.
How can I live like this?
he says to her again. Still, I’m posing, smiling
into the face of their slow decline.
And all three of us trying, best we can,
to hold each other shakily, and steadily upright.
—after Sharon Olds’ “I Go Back to May 1937”
By the third martini, he’ll ask her to marry him.
She’s a tourist, he’s a captain, home by chance.
I stand at the window, watching. I want to walk
into that bar, order an ouzo, and tell them
that, together, they’ll create a new generation
of pain. I want to tell him to court the island girl,
the one who, forty years later, will see him, run
to the restroom, and return with a fresh coat
of lipstick. I want to tell my young mother,
in the words of the great North American philosopher,
Pamela Anderson, “Never get married on vacation.”
But this is long before Pam and Tommy Lee, before
I existed. Before Reagan reigned over his long line of wreckage,
and couples shot themselves, together, in their cars. The Vietnam War
has ended, but here I am standing
at the window, watching while they meet,
both oblivious of wars they’ll wage. They’ll move
from Greece back to the Midwest—she’ll drink, alone,
in her kitchen. He’ll return to the island every chance
he gets. When he’s back in Illinois, he’ll stare
into the aquarium and long for water. She’ll look
at him, frozen, behind her highball glass. Still, I stay
at the window of the bar, wanting to use Pam’s biting wit.
But this is long before Baywatch, and they’re gazing at the
bay. I tap the glass like Morse code. Sealed in
my own tank of silence, I say, Please let go.
But as they take each other’s hands, I softly touch
the pane and turn away. Because they, too, have the right
to plunge. Even if they’ll swim out too deep:
holding onto each other until death.
I was one of those kids that spent a lot of time on the internet. Chat rooms, message boards. ASL, S2R, and some gender tricks too. That stuff was normal in the Nineties. And it was all good clean fun until I fell in with some gun nuts when I was fifteen years old, the type of people that encrypt shit. Way down in the web. Amateur blacksmiths and whatnot. I got so into it I ended up putting together a makeshift muzzle loader out of Schedule 80 piping, cold American steel, something I saw on the blacksmithing forum. I tried it in the basement but it didn’t work so I got a slightly bigger ball bearing for ammunition, about the size of a marble. I took it to the backyard, propped it on some dunnage, put a flame to the fuse. And by god, it worked. There was this huge discharge, a cloud of smoke. It shot wildly though. Fucking hit my kid brother square in the leg. He was clear across the yard. Dad came running from the house. There was so much blood that none of it seemed real and after Dad stopped the bleeding he came at me and that’s the deepest fear I’ve ever felt.
Read More “Swing in the Right Direction with OxyContin”
—marketing slogan from Purdue Pharma
All day the rain spills onto the backyard deck.
The narcoleptic hours, darkened and dim, rewind and nod off.
My mother walks five miles to the emergency room on a Sunday.
She complains of a toothache, tells the doctors she needs something
to get by. It is predicted the temperature will rise 30 degrees in the next
twelve hours, then drop 20 more tomorrow, which means more talk
of global warming or the next ice age, more waiting for the Earth’s
fever to break like a sick child.
On television, people are dancing in a field of wildflowers.
The sun hits their faces, their pupils confetti.
A man appears in a lab jacket, claims he has found the cure for all pain.
He crushes the flowers, alkaloids running white across his chin.
You too can be like them, he says. And maybe we can.
But then, without pain—
What will the monks chant? What shrouded
music, what raspy voice will rise from the A.M.
radio, move like heat lightning against our spines?
Who will hear our minareted cries, our tangled
whispering, lowered breath pleading with
the moon? What hand will rock us
to sleep, float through our hair
like bath water, bring us to our knees,
lift our awkward heads
toward the frayed dawn?
The first time I watched Braveheart
was in the basement of Lucky’s dope house.
I remember the soft cone of light
reaching out from that small box TV
as if asking for spare change from the dark
and how that little glass frame made
blue-faced Wallace look so much
like an action figure (back when Mel
was somebody’s idea of a hero).
And in the downstairs bathroom hung
a cage with Lucky’s bird, a gray parrot
he took from a woman who couldn’t
pay him and that bird would pull
every dull feather from its back
and curse in Spanish as I watched.
I was nine or ten and alone with Braveheart,
that bird, and basement boxes I imagined filled
with a life before Lucky, when his name
might have been Greg or Brandon or even Mel.
This is how my brother babysat—
upstairs and horizontal with a needle
sleeping in his bowtied arm
like some guardian angel taking
work naps among hallway sleeping bags
swollen with strangers
practicing how to be dead
and Lucky’s bird downstairs
screaming chinga tu madre.
Read MoreTo apologize for your vanishing
you brought me a loosey
and a rolled-up Hustler and we sat
in your new car trading smoke.
This happened every few months,
a kind of church service for holiday
Catholics. In that steel cathedral
you preached what you thought
I’d absolutely need: how to cheat
the cylinder inside a lock,
what words undress a virgin,
why I can’t confuse the compass
with the cross and how to blame
heaven if you went to hell.
From the passenger seat of that
stolen Cutlass you were a ruined
simile—the way the back
of an empty tow truck looks
like a crucifix and how in the small
light of that blinking patrol car
you blushed like a martyr
In Denver all days end standing up
packed like dried fish dry-humping
each other on the H Line. Some
passengers in their drunken wobble
or even in their haze of sobriety
pull down hard on the rubber handles,
the ones meant for standing,
the ones that swing dumbly above
our heads. They think this action
stops the locomotive but the train
is automated, stopping itself
at Broadway then Osage, Lincoln Blvd.
Since the train, as it always does, stops—
the travelers learn to keep tugging
& I can’t help but think this is how
prayer works. Like when I prayed
to a god I don’t believe in that your
morphine drip might soothe the wounds
that chemotherapy would not
& how I swear it worked sometimes
but didn’t others & yet in my drunken
sobriety I believe that it was me
who eased your pain, that it was my
failed pleas that bleached your blood.
This all began because Mother was making tortillas. This all began with mothers and kitchens. We live in Crowley, Colorado, or maybe Rocky Ford, Colorado, a place where there are not a lot of doctors. We live in a place where there are always mothers in kitchens and daughters who wait nearby to watch their mothers watch the tortillas.
The year is 1949 or 1950 or 1951. I am nine or ten or eleven and not allowed to touch the stove. We have a wood-burning stove with a large at surface for cooking. I stand on the pile of wood at the edge of the stove to see the tortillas. I like to stand close to watch Mother. Father has a habit of kissing me on the back of the neck and I fall. It is the middle of winter and water from the well is cold.
I want to be like Mother. I have a rolling pin Father made me, small enough to fit inside my hands. Father is always making things with his hands. He makes things for me out of wood. Father has a habit of kissing me on the back of the neck. I am the youngest of nine and they say I am his favorite.
Mother hands me a small mound of dough and I flatten it with my rolling pin. I watch Mother put dough on the stove. I stand on the pile of wood at the edge to see the tortillas. I stand close to watch Mother place dough, perfectly round, on the stove. I am not allowed to touch the stove. Father has a habit of kissing me on the back of the neck and I fall.
Read MoreManuel relayed buckets of moist earth to the concrete stairwell. It was Héctor’s job to hoist the buckets up and ferry them over to the dumpster. They had to work quickly to keep the buckets moving or the Bangladeshi contractor, a slight man with a beard, would start yelling at them, “Taratari koro.”
The workers down below had broken up the existing basement floor of the six-story building with jackhammers and then used pickaxes to pry out the concrete. Now they were excavating eight to ten feet of earth to increase the height of the basement.
Héctor was grateful to work in the open air instead of underground like a mole with the thick damp air and the artificial light from lamps. It was also safer up here. The men in the basement would dig themselves into three-foot-square holes up to eight-feet deep and there weren’t even any planks of wood to brace the sides. Suddenly someone would look up to see the sides crumbling in on him. He suspected that the contractors didn’t know what they were doing. It was only a matter of time before a worker was buried alive.
Still, it was regular work, something Héctor hadn’t had in a while. He had spent several months going to the parada on Roosevelt Avenue, getting picked up occasionally for one- or two-day stints in demolition or renovation. He found this job through Jesús, a slim Oaxaqueño, always clean shaven with dimples and a broad smile. Jesús used to talk big on the corner about his influence in the construction world. The men would rib him. “So why are you here at the parada, dumbass?” It didn’t bother Jesús.
The person who took this picture took it
well above the parking lot across the street.
“Malted Milk with Ice Cream” cost five cents
once. Leroy’s on the corner sold “knishes
frankfurters and root beer,” and the cars
and everyone stopped moving for a moment
so this proof could be snapped of the way
a few things stood at the corner of Essex
and Delancey sometime between the Fall
of Rome and now. Which is also falling.
In the upper-right-hand reaches of the shot,
a line of laundry sags out of a tenement window.
The other end seems suspended in air,
like everything else, both in and out
of the window, the photo, the cowl of dust
that wraps the earth in its own heat. Damn,
said Napoleon, and he turned his horse
and started back across the steppe toward Josephine.
The half dozen newly planted trees lined up
in their iron jackets along Essex were leafless,
so winter must have been on its way, in
or out, we can’t tell. The little lie the picture tells
is that, though everything is about to change, it brought
life to a halt, so someone could open the door, now,
and let in a large whack of dust and noise,
the kind they make no room for in pictures,
passing them on to the woman in the next booth
who is giving, maybe the air, maybe her mother,
a colorfully athletic lesson in Spanglish,
involving, from what little I can make out,
most of what we call history, as it’s apt to look
when the future gets here, and “that fucker
Reynaldo.” I have no idea what Reynaldo’s crime is,
but, if you are listening, Reynaldo, get over here,
quick, if you don’t want to be history.
Every Thursday, on his way to therapy,
he drives past the house of the woman
he’s having an affair with. What interests
his therapist isn’t the sin, which she views
as a symptom, but the root. So they dig,
or seem to, and today he talks about his wife—
how, before they take a trip, she makes him
connect those timers to lamps in certain rooms,
and how much this annoys him, even though
it didn’t used to. As if their belongings were
of value. As if an automatic light might stop
an addict from breaking in.
As if the thief,
awake beside her, had not already come and gone.
I run,
palms like paws on the earth,
muscles, long and sinew.
I smell wet clover,
the musk of home,
cooking meat.
I do not think about tomorrow
or yesterday,
but I remember the cactus
and the snake,
and the music of your voice
even when language fails.
And when I wake, I roll
to the nest of your shoulder.
Your arm does not reminisce
when it first wrapped my waist,
yet it comes to me;
heals even as you sleep.
I feel the peace of gravity;
the subtle spin of planet;
the rise of the mountain.
In Dog Dreams,
I have known no other hand;
no other time
when I wasn’t yours,
or you, mine.
Whoop! you call in the deepening forest.
Whoop! my descant back.
You taught me how hands could be laid, how they could touch
a head and heal, but all of those hands eventually fell limp
like a field bent by threshing or a lit match dropped in water. Once,
we used to dance in The Corner Tavern’s neon light
where the pickup exhaust wafted inside like harvest dust.
Life in the Midwest is like one long goodbye because it is the same
every day, and I didn’t realize you had left until there was nothing
but hard work and long days ending with the wind’s silent dirge
that sounds like trying not to die but always dies in smaller ways—
screen doors that slam closed but don’t shut all the way
because the house has settled and the roof is warping from the sky
boiling over with thunder and rain. I wake up now to the flashing
falling from the gutters and the water dripping through the holes
in the ceiling. All I do is recall your voice like a prayer thrashing
my skull that mines the night begging our fathers our fathers
our fathers in prayer, but they are off begging other women
in other towns. This town is not the memory I want, but I know
how sadness works. It’s like a kettle-bottom collapsing onto
the details of every thought. I shouldn’t have, but I stayed in town
to try and keep what I love alive, but no that never works. We were
a long time ago and a long time ago is too hard to get back.
The last time we talked you said, We will end up like our mothers—
waiting for nothing. Then you didn’t come back. No. Not ever.
Vesuvius will claim a day like today—
serene September winds
blowing ashen siren songs
through each sail,
disintegrating each white triangle
as they make their way
across Li Galli Islands,
through the Gulf of Sorrento,
and into this perfect bowl of carbonara,
this excellent Brunello,
sky blues replaced
by the dark dollop of death’s digestivo—
claiming the check
the café
the city of Positano;
the accordion player
pausing only at the thunder of eruption,
then slowing his tarantella
to the flow of lava.
Let them dig us up, love,
10,000 years from now—
with a full belly,
and a third glass of wine,
our legs entwined like spaghetti,
our charred hearts
served up to the gods
at the very same time.
She took him as one would take a deep breath
or a second chance, though some days she doubted
her own judgment, as when his silence held them
hostage at the dinner table or rode with them
like a soldier sent to notify the next of kin.
She wondered then if she could ever know him
beyond the familiar stirrup of his collarbone, moles
forming a perfect Cassiopeia on his back, fingers
tying intricate knots in monofilament line. And what
could he possibly know of her? Dust, a whirling skirt,
between the windmill and the barn? Scent of juniper,
wild onion beside the garden shed? Her mother’s curls
pinned tightly against her scalp, or her father’s glacier blue
eyes gone milky with forgetting? How could these mean
anything to anyone but her, divorced as they were
from the lazy swing of the pendulum? And what
of those other lives smoldering now under dry grass?
Their stars are still there, she tells herself, even in daylight.
Even at night, their suns continue to circle and burn
in a world of space and time. We all should be so lucky.
Sarah worked with Beth at a public library downtown. Chris was a biology professor at University of Louisville. They met at Beth’s birthday party.
At the party, Chris quoted Winston Churchill and Hemingway in the same conversation, and Sarah couldn’t tell if she liked him. When she went to smoke a cigarette on the back porch, he followed. Muted voices came from the re pit at the side of the house, but they were alone on the porch. He took the lit cigarette from her fingers and flicked it over the railing. When he kissed her, she blew the last of the smoke into his mouth. They ended up at his apartment. The sex was drunk and sloppy. They kept laughing. Everything seemed hilarious back then.
Sarah woke up buzzing the next morning, as if Chris had flipped a switch somewhere inside her. Driving home, she had the thought that she would put up with a lot from a man who made her feel this way.
Option One
Move to a different country.
Take a new spouse.
Make beautiful different-country babies
with soft, different-country hair
and only speak your old-country language
late at night in between dreams.
Your new husband will ask the following morning
who this person is; you keep repeating his name.
Oh, you say, in your new language.
Don’t worry about it. Just an old friend.
Option Two
Build a house. Bake your late spouse’s remains
into the walls. Like the spectrophiliac Amethyst Realm,
feel paranormal hands on your legs and back
as you rub yourself on the corners of the foyer.
Moan the name
your ears haven’t heard
since you reopened the coffin
and saw silver bones.
Option Three
Meet a woman with dark hair
and patience longer than yours.
Tell her a lie:
you’ve never done this before.
She’ll grin and say, “Sure you haven’t.”
Later, in her shower, pressed against
the pink tile wall, you can’t help but notice
she uses his same shampoo.
Option Four
Take his ashes to sea
as written in the will.
Throw yourself overboard
with the urn in your arms.
Clutch a pewter cloud
and confuse the stingrays.
Option Five
Shave your head,
smoke Cowboy Killers,
and take lovers. Flocks of lovers.
Murders of lovers.
In the wan, silent kitchen light
after the trampling herds leave
for the evening, you will pick up
your wedding ring from the dish by the sink
and contemplate, once more,
throwing it into the garbage disposal,
how it would spark and grind
slick in the coffee grounds.
I went on a date with a girl who knows how to live her life.
On the restaurant patio where we sat, I told her I needed to
finish my novel. And “Do you really?” she asked. She runs a
kindergarten business from her house. And she put up a
chicken coop out back. In overalls and workman gloves. I saw
the process later in pictures online. Dirt on forearms, easy
smiles. A stack of notebooks sits on a table in one shot, and
she peeks from behind with smiling eyes. Her book is
complete, she writes. She’s writing a book too? I am surprised.
And then the shot of the back windows of her house, and
suddenly I am looking out. At scraggly bushes and trees far
back. And I picture her standing before that glass, mug in
hands, in a sweater she knitted from yarn. And daylight wanes.
She turns off the lamp. The crickets chirp wild.
With a blunt knife, cheap, he slices the out-
of-season apple, applying reasonable force,
thump, thump, and the hiss of cells torn open.
Window beside him a polite shade of blue,
not too, too, and the maple gracefully
conveying leaves so tender and appropriate.
This is a civil kitchen. No need to explain itself.
Gritty clouds of fur beneath the fridge vibrate
in silence. Onions too chilled to express themselves.
No news of what’s mortgaged. Who ripped
that marble counter from what ground. Where
the apple grew. The grievous rain that swelled it.
The magnolia drops its anger pink by pink.
Eighteen-wheelers loaded with it rumble down interstates
aroused by their own dark momentum.
Cats rake claws through anger then nap on shredded upholstery.
Cables fizz high above gutters, looped and twisted, twanged by doves.
Flags snap in it. It propels the old woman and her encumbered cart.
A suburban circular. A city racket. A maritime breeze.
Some people give it away, but when they drive off
the cur of anger follows, homing unerringly.
You don’t love me, it snarls, but I will always want you.
Each cloud an anger of its own, dimming the alfalfa fields.
Some people exorcise it, smudging sage through anger’s rooms,
rinsing walls with vinegar and bleach. They claim
to have forgiven anger. Burned it off. God or Clorox granted peace.
Look, no anger here, I’m not angry, that’s not how I feel.
But you can detect the scent even on the street,
rising from his wool suit’s weave, caught in her hair, samara’s wing,
even in sighs, sick and sweet, because anger is born in the gut, feeds
on your nourishment, and you’ll never in life starve yourself clean.
Cathy sat at the bedroom vanity and used a comb to separate a few of the dull curls in her hair. They always tightened up into something ugly by the afternoon. She thought about what she might buy when she and Bill got to Flower World. Maybe some flowers for the kitchen, fresh flowers, something red or orange to shock the dull ivory Bill had insisted on painting the kitchen walls, counters, trims, cupboards—what was it, twenty years ago? “Ivory is universal,” he’d said, as though their kitchen needed universality. The kitchen had faded now into a boring beige and all the flowers that came to mind were out of season—tulips, lilies, stuff like that. It was mum season and mums smelled like the dead. Maybe she wouldn’t buy anything. She would just accompany her husband like she promised. Smile when he put a garden gnome in the cart. Question whether he really needed two bags of fertilizer. She hoped they could just slip in and slip out without talking to a soul. Cathy could push an empty cart down empty aisles, unnoticed by anyone, some old tune from The Mamas & the Papas echoing from above. “Monday, Monday.” Was that the title?
But they would probably see someone. Likely the whole world.
In the garden I cup a hand
before you, strain my wrist,
willing you to perch.
A nearby woman grips her cane.
“Young lady. If you touch them,
they die.”
Born again from a gauze
coffin, you’re blackwinged,
fragile on a wax leaf.
In the heat
of a weeklong life
you batter between
fluorescents and dahlias, legs
thinner than wires,
and float over tendriled
chrysanthemum heads.
Tease everything—hands,
canes, stem, with a feathery
suggestion. I want
to chew you.
Taste the metallic
powder of each wing.
If only to become
so beautiful
that being
touched just once
would kill me.
In Texas, near the Gulf, a man wakes up
and pulls on coveralls and heavy boots.
He drives his truck along a narrow road
to the strip where jets line up for fuel,
heat already shimmering near the ground.
He works alone all day in the exhaust
and roar of jets, as planes take off and land.
He’s paid to save their engines from the birds.
All day, the heat accumulates; his clothes
go dark with grime and sweat, while sickening
fumes waver in the air. He knows this dance;
the quail softly tumble in his net.
He closes it to carry them across
the runway to where the tarmac ends, then
frees them in the sedge where he knows they nest.
Some mornings, when I would rather sleep
than go to work, I remind myself that
in Texas, near the Gulf, a man wakes up
and pulls on regulation boots, then goes
to sweep the quail gently in a net.
Squint at the barred owl, then race down
the steep hill of your childhood. You lost
the dog but found your grandmother
who drank a bottle of rubbing alcohol. Shake
her ten times. Prepare a fine cheese, sliced peach,
hazelnuts. Drizzle with honey. Slide it under
the bed to the monster. Hear the crack in a mother’s
voice who says it would be so easy to go down
to the garage, turn the ignition on. What will you do with all this
moonlight on the pond, at once galaxy, scattered photons,
shards of glass? If you want to know Truth, see
the Pope’s Swiss Guard cursing at tourists,
throwing stones at pigeons in the square. Play a game
of Chase the Trees for leaves like wine in a human
heart—darker than the blood it pumps, the beating silence
in those hours cleaning after they took away
your father’s body. I tell you, we cannot say love
enough times. The vacuum’s defective, so it sings.
Write until the sage & fir candle kills the smell
of the wall’s rotting mouse. Look over your
shoulder for the child you never had, the sibling
you left in the front yard, the dog returning, bread
in her mouth. Revisit title. Now your words are the
loose parts of a rocking chair, the longing for meadow—
some ground of consciousness, what the philosopher
called the dialectic of inside-outside. And when you’re
close, smear the shapes of ghosts. Draw grief a warm bath.
Lately, there is little spring or fall, but keep the large bright
mum in its pot until the flowers are dull, their necks broken.
Editors’ Note:
Ohio. How is the state, the landscape, the word itself used in literature? As a community to be idolized or escaped, as a locale of unexpected mystery? Or, simply, as a bouncy amphibrach (unstressed-stressed-unstressed) to end a line?
In stories and poems, Ohio often seems to stand for America itself, or at least a certain slice of America. It is sometimes meant to indicate Industrial and Rural and Suburban. It can be gritty or pure, used for nostalgia, or to create a par- ticular kind of speaker. And its history has certainly contributed to its literary import. But we were curious about the speci c ways writers have employed our home in the past, and how they might use it today.
Certainly, it is a place that characters love and hate, an idea that must be contended with. And we are convinced, having read thousands of poems and stories mentioning particular spots, that Ohio is one of the most versatile (and sonically pleasing) of all of them.
For the following feature, we asked five writers to reflect on the state that’s often referred to as “The Heart of It All.”
In his preface to The Marble Faun (1860), Nathaniel Hawthorne infamously recounted the limitations of America as material for art and artists, citing the “difficulty of writing a romance about a country where there is no shadow, no antiquity, no mystery, no picturesque and gloomy wrong, nor anything but a commonplace prosperity, in broad and simple daylight, as is happily the case with my dear native land.” Hawthorne’s words were and are astonishing in their obtuse, perhaps willful ignorance of one particular “gloomy wrong” shadowing America’s “commonplace prosperity” as the nation careened toward the Civil War. But they also set up the persistent idea that America is a contented and peaceful country, one without a shadowy past that is ripe for romantic literary exploration.
The notion of America as a young, fresh, tabula rasa had its inception long before Hawthorne set pen to paper, and even then, in its earlier colonial and Revolutionary-era iterations, it was a lie. While Hawthorne’s description of America suggests a blithe happiness that characterizes the nation and its inhabitants, the specific literature of Ohio, for instance, would suggest otherwise. In fact, literary portrayals of Ohio seem particularly in tune with the tension between shining surface and hidden shadows. It is as if Ohio is, as Bill Ashcraft notes on returning home to the fictional New Canaan in Stephen Markley’s novel Ohio (2018), “the microcosm poster child of middle-American angst.”
In an interview with Claudia Tate, Toni Morrison had this to say about her home state of Ohio:
The northern part of the state had underground railroad stations and a history of black people escaping into Canada, but the southern part of the state is as much Kentucky as there is, complete with cross burnings. Ohio is a curious juxtaposition of what was ideal in this country and what was base. It was also a Mecca for black people; they came to the mills and plants because Ohio offered the possibility of a good life, the possibility of freedom, even though there were some terrible obstacles.
In Ohio, there’s a distinct feeling of being in the middle—not only in the physical middle, mostly landlocked near the center of the country, but also in the ideological middle, politically, morally—having been on the right side of history regarding the question of slavery, but, even during the same time period, often in the wrong on questions of justice: at least as supportive of fugitive slave laws as of the underground railroad. Morrison not only grew up in this contradictory state, it pervades her fiction. “In my work, no matter where it’s set,” she once told an Ohio audience, “the imaginative process always starts right here on the lip of Lake Erie.”
Read More
In poems, Ohio—as word, as a set of landscapes, as a cradle for psychological, emotional, and cultural exploration—exists with significance and versatility. Derived from the Iroquois word that means “beautiful river,” Ohio, as a name, is vowel wealthy, bookended by o’s, assuring that its mention brings a sonic vitality and depth. Ohio, in terms of topography, is rolling plains, glacial plateaus, Appalachian hills, stretches of bluegrass. Due to its proximity to the Great Lakes, and its general position on the continent, Ohio has hosted all of the following: major, ancient routes used by Native American tribes to travel and trade; pivotal exchanges between Native American and European fur traders; the ruthlessness and violence brought on by the heightened European demand for exportable goods and by the grueling process of colonization; numerous battles fought during extended, armed confrontations or wars (Pontiac’s Rebellion, the American Revolutionary War, the Northwest Indian War, the War of 1812, and the American Civil War); hubs and final stops for freedom- seeking slaves along the Underground Railroad; early industrialization; and destinations for African Americans leaving the Jim Crow south during the Great Migration. To many poets and readers, the mention or involvement of Ohio can at least subconsciously educe some of the locale’s extensive identity. Looking closely at two poems by Rita Dove and Ai, we will examine a few of the elements and forces that the incorporation of Ohio brings to the texts.
Read More
Ohio and Science Fiction. Perhaps unexpectedly, given the overwhelming norm- ness of Ohio, the two have become inextricably linked. So, for the bene t of colonizing aliens and future AIs, busy consuming every spec of human information in an effort to understand us—where we went wrong, what were our occasional successes, what is meant by “Cincinnati Five-Way”—I’m happy to set out on a kind of fantastic discovery of my own, seeking to answer: Why do an inordinate amount of authors and directors set sf works in Ohio? What could the place represent that makes it such rich soil for these stories? And how might sf itself be enriched by Ohio-ness? Dust off your ray gun and wearable OSU memorabilia, I’m going to need some help.
Read More
Here in the backyard of our mutual friend in San Diego, holding a beer while a balmy twilight coats us in aquatic hues, a woman talks about Norway. Norway by way of Bulgaria.
“Bulgaria is awful,” she says. “But Norway is expensive.” She’s a systems analyst for a cyber-security company.
Another woman says San Francisco by way of Hong Kong by way of, originally, Thailand.
Among others in this six-week writers workshop are a couple of New Yorkers, two Baltimoreans, L.A. folks (with stints in Poland), a South African, and an energetic woman from Lake Charles, Louisiana, whose pale hands utter like scared doves when she revs up for a joke.
Chatter. Writers talking shop, life, travel. I say Ohio. “I’m from Ohio.”
Someone says, “Oh.”
Like the abbreviation of the state itself.
Oh.
A sip of beer, eyes downcast, searching the dirt for a lost thread of conversation.
I should have said San Antonio (current), or Las Vegas (three years), Pacific Northwest (one), or even Japan (a few months).
Because Ohio is a vague place. A conversation ender. A fly-over state. Rows of corn and plains and farms and factories. The Midwest (though a vehement Iowan once denied me even that: “Ohio is in the east,” he declared, “not in the middle, and definitely not west of anything”).
Sometimes Red. Sometimes Blue. Blue collar. A swing state. Strictly non-icon.
The license plates read, “Birthplace of Aviation,” when we all know, strictly speaking, that isn’t true.
David Armstrong has authored two story collections, Going Anywhere (Leap- frog, 2014) and Reiterations (New American, 2017), and a chapbook, Missives from the Green Campaign (Omnidawn, 2017). His stories have appeared in Fantasy & Science Fiction, Narrative, Iron Horse, and Best of Ohio Short Stories, and have won the Mississippi Review Prize, Yemassee’s William Richey prize, and the New South Writing Contest. He is a professor of creative writing in San Antonio, where he lives with an amazing partner, a loquacious four-year-old, and a grouchy rescue dog. Website: davidarmstrongwriter.com.
Amber Wheeler Bacon is a writer, teacher, and literacy specialist. She has an MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars and is on the board of directors of the South Carolina Writers Association. Her writing has recently appeared or is forthcoming in Epiphany, CRAFT, Post Road Magazine, and Crazyhorse. She also reviews fiction titles for Ploughshares. She is the recipient of the 2018 Breakout 8 Writers Prize sponsored by Epiphany and The Author’s Guild. She grew up in the Atlanta area and now lives on the South Carolina coast.
Ansie Baird taught for forty years at The Buffalo Seminary and is the former editor of Earth’s Daughters. She is the author of three collections, including In Advance of All Parting (2009), The Solace of Islands (2016), and Porch Watch (forthcoming from The Foundling Press, 2019). Her work has been published in The Paris Review, The Southern Review, The Denver Quarterly, The Quarterly, Western Humanities Review, among others.
John Mark Ballenger lives in Mount Vernon, OH, with his wife and two children. He received an MFA in creative writing from Ashland University in 2012. Ballenger grew up in rural southern Ohio, and the landscapes and lives and voices of northern Appalachia are the primary forces which have shaped his imagination and writing.
Max Bell is a writer and used-bookstore enthusiast from Santa Monica, CA. He received his MFA from California State University, Long Beach, and his love of fiction from his parents. His nonfiction has appeared in print or online for Noisey, Billboard, Bandcamp, and the LAnd, among others.
Janine Certo is the author of In the Corner of the Living, first runner-up for the 2017 Main Street Rag Poetry Book Award. Her poetry is published in Mid-American Review, Crab Orchard Review, The National Poetry Review, Italian Americana, and elsewhere. She is also author of the book Children Writing Poems: Poetic Voices in and out of School (Routledge, 2018). She is currently an associate professor at Michigan State, and she lives in East Lansing with her husband and rescued lab-weimaraner. Website: certojl.wixsite.com/mysite.
Robert Danberg’s poems have appeared in Ploughshares, The Sun, The Cortland Review, and other journals. His book of creative nonfiction, Teaching Writing While Standing on One Foot, was published by Sense Publishers in 2015. He lives with his two children in Ithaca, NY, and he teaches academic writing at Binghamton University.
Dawn Davies is the author of Mothers of Sparta: A Memoir in Pieces (Flatiron Books, 2018), which recently won the GLCA New Writers Award for Creative Nonfiction and was a 2018 and 2019 Indie Next List book. Her essays and stories have been Pushcart Special Mentions and Best American Essays notables. Her work can be found in McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, The Missouri Review, Poetry Northwest, Arts & Letters, Narrative, Fourth Genre, and elsewhere. She lives in weird Florida. Website: dawndaviesbooks.com.
Steven Dawson is an MFA student at Purdue, where he serves as poetry editor of Sycamore Review. He was raised in Los Angeles and Denver. This is his first publication.
Joanne Dominique Dwyer lives in northern New Mexico and is the author of the poetry collection Belle Laide (Sarabande Books). She is a recipient of a Rona Jaffe Award, an American Poetry Review Jerome J. Shestack prize, a Massachusetts Review Anne Halley prize, and a Bread Loaf scholarship. Dwyer’s work will appear in the upcoming Best American Poetry 2019.
Dustin Faulstick is a Senior Lewis Lecturer in the Lewis Honors College at the University of Kentucky. His critical essays have appeared in Studies in American Naturalism, Literature and Belief, Edith Wharton Review, and Religion and the Arts. He is working on a book about Ecclesiastes and early-twentieth-century U.S. literature.
Sujatha Fernandes is the author of several books, including a memoir on a global hip hop life, Close to the Edge, and Curated Stories: The Uses and Misuses of Storytelling. Her essays and short stories have appeared in The New York Times, The Nation, and The Maine Review, among others. She teaches sociology at the University of Sydney and the City University of New York. Find her work at sujathafernandes.com.
Kate Fox’s work has appeared in Kenyon Review, Pleiades, Valparaiso Review, and West Branch. She is the author of two chapbooks: The Lazarus Method, published by Kent State University Press (Wick Poetry Chapbook Series) and Walking Off the Map (Seven Kitchens Press). She earned her Ph.D. from Ohio University and lives in Athens with her partner, Robert DeMott, and their dogs.
Mary Jo Firth Gillett’s Soluble Fish won the Crab Orchard Series First Book Award and she’s published four award-winning chapbooks, most recently Dance Like a Flame (Hill-Stead Sunken Gardens Poetry Award). Poems have appeared in The Southern Review, Salamander, Third Coast, Green Mountains Review, and other journals as well as on the Verse Daily website. She’s won the N.Y. Open Voice Poetry Award and a Kresge Artist Fellowship in the Literary Arts.
Becky Hagenston’s three story collections have won the Permafrost Prize, the Spokane Prize, and the Mary McCarthy Prize. Her stories have appeared in Ploughshares, the Oxford American, New England Review, and many other journals, and have been chosen twice for an O. Henry Award. She teaches creative writing at Mississippi State University.
Paul Hansen lives in Tallahassee, FL. His work has appeared in Juked and online at the Fanzine. He is a Ph.D. student at Florida State University and earned his MFA from McNeese State in Lake Charles, LA.
Janice N. Harrington is the author of the collections: Even the Hollow My Body Made Is Gone, The Hands of Strangers, and the newly released Primitive: The Art and Life of Horace H. Pippin. She curates “A Space for Image,” a blog on poetic imagery, and teaches creative writing at the University of Illinois.
Tony Hoagland’s latest collections of poems are Recent Changes in the Vernacular (Tres Chicas Books, 2017) and Priest Turned Therapist Treats Fear of God (Graywolf, 2018). His book of essays, The Art of Voice: Poetic Principles and Practice (Norton), was published in March 2019. “Sunday at the Mall,” included here, was also known as “Last Poem for Kath.” Tony Hoagland died in October 2018.
Bobbie Jean Huff has published short stories, essays, and poems in various Canadian literary journals and newspapers. She has been the recipient of a Canada Council Arts Grant as well as an Ontario Arts Grant, and she received first prize in a cross-Canada fiction contest sponsored by Queen’s University. She has just finished her second novel and has begun the process of getting both published.
Marcus Jackson’s second book of poems, Pardon My Heart, was released by Northwestern University Press/TriQuarterly Books in 2018. His poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, The New Yorker, and Harvard Review. Jackson lives with his wife and child in Columbus, and he teaches in the MFA programs at Ohio State and Queens University of Charlotte.
Stephanie Johnson is the recipient of an Asheville Regional Artist Grant and the first-place winner of the 2017 Lumina Magazine Poetry Contest. She is the Editor-in-Chief of The Passed Note. Her work has been published by Beecher’s Magazine, Jabberwock Review, and QU, among others. She lives in Asheville, NC, with her husband and their seven bookshelves. Her website is srenae.com.
Judy Kronenfeld is the author of four full-length collections and two chapbooks of poetry, including Bird Flying through the Banquet (FutureCycle, 2017), Shimmer (WordTech, 2012), and Light Lowering in Diminished Sevenths (2nd edition, Antrim House, 2012)—winner of the 2007 Litchfield Review Poetry Book Prize. Her poems have appeared in Cider Press Review, Cimarron Review, Natural Bridge, Rattle, Valparaiso Poetry Review, and other journals, and in more than twenty anthologies. She is Lecturer Emerita, Creative Writing Department, University of California, Riverside, and Associate Editor of the online poetry journal, Poemeleon.
Lance Larsen, former poet laureate of Utah, has published five poetry collections, most recently What the Body Knows (Tampa, 2018). He has received a number of awards, including a Pushcart Prize and an NEA fellowship. His essays have made the Notables list in Best American Essays six times. He teaches at BYU.
Mercedes Lucero is the author of Stereometry (Another New Calligraphy, 2018) and the chapbook, In the Garden of Broken Things (Flutter Press, 2016). She is the 2017 winner of the Langston Hughes Creative Writing Award for Poetry and her writing can be found in Puerto del Sol, The Pinch, Heavy Feather Review, and Curbside Splendor, among others. You can see more of her work at mercedeslucero.com.
Jane Marcellus’s essays have appeared in the Washington Post, Gettysburg Review, and Sycamore Review. Her essay “My Father’s Tooth” was a Best American Essays 2018 Notable, and she received the Betty Gabehart Award for non ction from the Kentucky Women Writers Conference in 2018. A former journalist, she is the author of Business Girls and Two-Job Wives: Emerging Media Stereotypes of Employed Women (2011) and a co-author of Mad Men and Working Women: Feminist Perspectives on Historical Power, Resistance, and Otherness (2014). Twitter: @janemarcellus. Online at janemarcellus.com.
John McCarthy is the author of Scared Violent Like Horses (Milkweed Editions, 2019), which won the Jake Adam York Prize; and Ghost Country (Midwestern Gothic Press, 2016), named a Best Poetry Book of 2016 by The Chicago Review of Books. His work has appeared in Best New Poets 2015, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Passages North, Sycamore Review, and Zone 3. He lives in Illinois.
Owen McLeod’s first book of poems, Dream Kitchen, won the 2018 Vassar Miller Prize in Poetry. His work has found homes in New England Review, Ploughshares, FIELD, The Southern Review, and many other publications.
Fleming Meeks’s work has appeared in The Yale Review, The American Poetry Review, Kenyon Review Online, and Brevity. He can be seen in PBS’s Bombshell: The Hedy Lamarr Story, which is now streaming on Netflix. He worked as a financial writer and editor for thirty years. He lives in New Jersey.
Kelly Michels received her MFA from North Carolina State University. Her honors include the Rachel Wetzsteon Poetry Prize from 92nd Street Y, the Spoon River Poetry Review Editor’s Prize, the Robert Watson Literary Prize from The Greensboro Review, and an Academy of American Poets Prize. Her poems have appeared in Poet Lore, Third Coast, Best New Poets, Green Mountains Review, and Nimrod, among others. Her most recent chapbook, Disquiet, was published by Jacar Press in 2015.
Roger Mitchell’s Reason’s Dream was published in 2018 by Dos Madres Press. His new and selected poems, Lemon Peeled the Moment Before, came out in 2008, The One Good Bite in the Saw-Grass Plant in 2010. He lives in Jay, NY.
Emily Mohn-Slate is the author of FEED, winner of the Keystone Chapbook Prize (Seven Kitchens Press, 2019). Her writing has appeared in The Adroit Journal, Indiana Review, and elsewhere. Her manuscript, THE FALLS, has been named a finalist for the Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize (University of Pittsburgh Press) and the Brittingham and Pollak Prizes (University of Wisconsin Press).
Karla K. Morton was the 2010 Texas Poet Laureate and has written twelve collections. Her work has been published by Alaska Quarterly Review, Southword, and Boulevard. She is currently on a Words of Preservation: Poets Laureate National Parks Tour with fellow Texas Poet Laureate, Alan Birkelbach, visiting the National Parks to help culturally preserve them. A percentage of sales from the forthcoming book will benefit the Parks System.
Maria Nazos’s writing been published in The New Yorker, The Tampa Review, Mid-American Review, and elsewhere. She is the author of A Hymn That Meanders, (Wising Up Press, 2011) and the chapbook Still Life (Dancing Girl Press, 2016). She has received fellowships from the Vermont Studio Center and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and scholarships from The Sewanee Writers’ Conference. A recent graduate of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln’s English Ph.D. program, she can be found at marianazos.com.
Kathleen Radigan grew up in Rhode Island, then got a BA in English from Wesleyan University and an MFA in Poetry from Boston University. She is interested in the intersections between theater, poetry, and community engagement. Her poems have been published in The Antigonish Review, The Adroit Journal, Dialogist, The Academy of American Poets, and several other journals. She lives in Brooklyn, where she teaches English. Her website is kathleenradigan.com.
Kristin Robertson is the author of Surgical Wing (Alice James Books, 2017). Her poetry has appeared recently or is forthcoming in Ploughshares, The Southern Review, The Threepenny Review, and Kenyon Review, among other journals. She teaches creative writing at Tennessee Wesleyan University.
Jeremy Schnotala has an MFA from Western Michigan University, and he lives with his husband in Grand Rapids, MI, where he teaches English and directs theater in the public schools. He recently won rst prize in the Saints and Sinners 2018 Literary Festival fiction contest and for The Tishman Review 2018 Tillie Olsen Short Story Award. He was nominated in 2018 for a Pushcart Prize. Other recent work can be seen in Temenos Literary Journal, Chagrin River Review, and New Rivers Press. More information at schnotala.com.
Ellen Seusy lives and works in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Her work has appeared in From the Other World: Poems in Memory of James Wright, The Christian Science Monitor, The Atlanta Review, Blue Earth Review, and other anthologies and journals. She has been an Associate Artist at the Atlantic Center for the Arts, and she currently volunteers as a poet in schools.
Lauren Shapiro is the author of Easy Math (Sarabande Books, 2013), which won the Kathryn A. Morton Prize and the Debut-litzer Prize. With Kevin González she co-edited The New Census: An Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry (Rescue Press, 2013). She translates poetry from Italian and Spanish into English and is an assistant professor of English at Carnegie Mellon University.
Christopher A. Sims received a Ph.D. from Ohio University. He lives in Columbus and teaches at Columbus State Community College. His scholarship explores the representation of technology in literature, focusing on the business of being a human in an increasingly inhuman world. Perhaps surprisingly, he is grateful to be alive and loves his life, his family, and the experience of being.
Lana Spendl’s chapbook of flash fiction, We Cradled Each Other in the Air, was published in 2017 by Blue Lyra Press. Her work has appeared in The Cortland Review, Hobart, The Greensboro Review, Notre Dame Review, Baltimore Review, Bayou Magazine, Zone 3, and other journals. Lana is originally from Bosnia and is working on a collection of stories that take place in southeast Europe.
Jana Tigchelaar is an assistant professor of English at Marshall, where she teaches classes in women’s writing, literary regionalism, and textual analysis. She is at work on Neighborly Encounters: Women’s Regionalist Literature and the Project of Neighborly Reconciliation, a monograph examining neighborliness and reconciliation in the work of nineteeth-century American authors. Her scholarship has appeared most recently in Legacy, and in Community Boundaries and Border Crossings: Critical Essays on Ethnic, Women Writers.
Craig van Rooyen holds an MFA in poetry from Paci c University. He lives and works in San Luis Obispo, CA. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in 32 Poems, Narrative, Rattle, Southern Humanities Review, Southern Poetry Review, Willow Springs, and elsewhere. He is the winner of the 2014 Rattle Poetry Prize, and he was runner-up for the 2018 Auburn Witness Prize.
Dan J. Vice earned his MFA at Eastern Washington University and teaches at the University of Indianapolis. He lives with his wife, their son, and two Toyotas.
Lesley Wheeler’s books include Radioland and Heterotopia, winner of the Barrow Street Press Poetry Prize, and the chapbook Propagation. Her poems and essays appear in Cold Mountain Review, Ecotone, Gettysburg Review, and elsewhere, and her novel, Unbecoming, is scheduled for publication in 2020. Poetry Editor of Shenandoah, Wheeler teaches at Washington and Lee University in Virginia and blogs about poetry at lesleywheeler.org.
New Ohio Review 