NOR: Embrace Your Conjunctions
Newohioreview.org is archiving previous editions as they originally appeared. We are pairing the pieces with curated art work, as well as select audio recordings. In collaboration with our past contributors, we are happy to (re)-present this outstanding work.
By John Glowney
Featured Art: Niagara Falls by John Henry Twachtman
Break it, you own it. Honestly,
though, it was always broken,
which is the whole point, that is to say,
when this world first whirled
and popped into existence
out of nothing’s sticky grasp,
the ur-broken thing, when it had wings
that glinted wildly in the suffused
and charged plasma, when it cascaded off
the cliff of itself
a mountain waterfall in native sunlight;
when the newly minted
honeybees, still smoking a little from
the tiny forges that made their immaculate
and fragile bodies, shook the pollen dust
of a violet, left a telltale film
on the velvety atoms of air,
when the first honeybees
so insisted upon new life they went
flower to flower—back when this world wanted
to be called Volcano of the Lilies,
not Rage Monster or Resentful Lover, not Plague Addict or
Reservoir of Ashes, even then, broken, yet fresh
with new blooms,
it was yours.
By Mason Wray
Featured Art: Peach Bloom by Alice Pike Barney
An equal and opposite burst expanding
from the same particle but in reverse.
Where peaches unripen in the family orchard.
A mom-and-pop deli replaces the condos on Second Ave.
OutKast never breaks up. They only get back together.
My sister is getting smaller by the day
her outfits like pastel pythons swallowing a doe.
In the other big bang, we start
with all the knowledge we’ll ever know
then forget it piece by piece.
So even after my grandmother’s brain
stitches itself whole, vanquishes the plaque
that shows up like coffee stains in scans,
still she becomes more unknowing by the day.
But we all become naïve with her. Everyone
communes over fears of growing young:
how we’ll tie our shoes, cross the road alone.
I am planning an expedition. One day I hope
to have never known you yet.
By Jennifer Burd
Featured Art: Zinnias by H. Lyman Saÿen
While I was away the world
went on without me—
a spider completed its web
under my plant stand,
dust from an unseen wind
settled in all the hard-to-reach places,
light drifted across the walls.
The ceiling fan dipped its oars
in stillness. Zinnias in the vase
went from Technicolor
to hand-painted antique postcard hues.
The world’s bad news got worse,
the good news, better than expected.
Letters and bills fought for room
in the mailbox. Mold helped itself
to the food I hadn’t eaten,
and a late rose bloomed in the garden.
I watched myself considering each thing,
thinking, this is how it will be.
By Emily Lee Luan
Winner, New Ohio Review Poetry Contest: selected by Ada Limón
Featured Art: The Dance by George Grey Barnard
My friend lowers his foot into the stony
runoff from the mountain, lets out a burst
of frantic laughter. This, I think, is a happiness.
When I don’t feel pain, is it joy that pours
in? A hollow vessel glows to be filled.
無 , my father taught me, is tangible—
an emptiness held. It means nothing, or to not have,
which implies there was something to be had
in the first place. It negates other characters:
無心 , “without heart”;
無情 , “without feeling”;
heartless, ruthless, pitiless.
Is the vacant heart so ruthless?
The ancient pictogram for 無 shows a person
with something dangling in each hand. Nothingness
the image of yourself with what you once had,
what you could have. And the figure is dancing,
as if to say nothingness is a feeling, maybe even
a happiness—dancing with what is gone from you.
When I ask myself what am I missing? I think
of how much I loved to dance, arms awash
with air, the outline of loss leaping on the wall.
By David O’Connell
Featured Art: Figure with Guitar II by Henry Fitch Taylor
I was startled it was death
I’d been singing all morning
under my breath, scrambling
the eggs, steeping Earl Grey
for breakfast with my wife, death
I’d been carrying like a jingle
or Top 40 chorus, its melody
infinitely catchy, insistent,
vaguely parasitic, its lyrics
surfing rhythm, slotted into
rhyme, over and over, a half
hour or more, all Saturday
ahead of us, the morning sun
shining when Julie protested
with a quick laugh, though
wincing too—no, please,
I just got that out of my head.
By David O’Connell
Featured Art: Morning Haze by Leonard Ochtman
Oh, that’s right—because I’m going to die.
Sometimes I forget. More often than not.
And then, that’s right! I’m going to,
sometime. Because . . . I’m going to. Forgetting,
but only sometimes, that’s how this works
more than not. And then we wake to snow,
*
quite unexpected, the whole neighborhood quite,
you know. And you say to me, yes, that’s right,
cream, two sugars. Sometimes I forget. Or
these days, more often, because, you know,
that’s how this works. And now I remember
we’re going to. Both of us. And there’s the car
*
snowed under, looking so unlike itself. It takes
an easy faith to see it. What it truly is. I believe
this morning the whole neighborhood is a fact
refuting last night’s forecast. I’m predicting
this icicle by evening will stretch down past
the window, which reminds me—yes, that’s right,
*
last night, 2 or 3 a.m., I woke to the whole house
moaning in the wind. And I felt warmer beside you
surrounded by this sound, our house, and maybe
the whole neighborhood, the neighborhood houses
and the neighborhood trees all moaning. It was snowing,
but I didn’t know. Sometimes, I forget this
*
is how it is with us. Just as I, at times, forget
I, we, are going to, you know. They’re saying now
more is on the way by evening. It almost hurts
to look out there’s so much sun. I’m going out
to prove the car’s still here. You remind me,
yes, of course, coffee. How could I ever forget?
By David O’Connell
Featured Art: Children at Play by Jean-Francis Auburtin
leaning back in our lawn chairs, the August constellations
crowded by a crush of stars, the Milky Way in soft focus
like a glamour shot. A couple and a couple at the end of the day
watching our kids zip sparklers back and forth across the lawn
like satellites or meteors. It’d been a story in the paper,
evidence of a supermassive black hole, and so we throw it back
like tequila shots and wade past our depth—me, deflecting
to Kubrick’s Star Gate sequence, those long light smears
on Bowman’s helmet, Julie, pulling both cords of her sweatshirt
taut, saying our bodies would be stretched to angel hair
if we were yanked into that hole. Then Janet’s telling us
how she imagines this supermassive black hole is like the hole
at the end of a vacuum cleaner. And right now—Saturday evening,
our kids growing restless, minutes from boredom, then, maybe,
those nudging arguments of who found who, who was safe,
and for us, at least, the hour’s drive home, I-95 congested
by the night-shift roadwork just beginning, Julie and I
talking quietly in front, reviewing the evening, overwhelmed
by the obvious, how we’ve all changed, how we won’t ever
be as young as we were, our daughter, grass-stained,
her hair wild with static, slouching down in the backseat
pretending to sleep as she listens in just as I did at seven,
those long drives to Maine, picking up things half-understood
in the language of grownups—this black hole, says Janet,
is Hoovering up stars and planets like so many pretzel crumbs
ground into the shag. We’re full. Everything off the grill
is hitting the spot. And Mark, back to Kubrick’s Star Child,
is leaning in to share his fanboy theories of what it all means,
though I’m not listening, not really, because it seems right,
that vacuum, because I, too, have plucked stray fuzz clinging
half in, half out of the attachment’s rim—and yes, this is how
it feels, year-by-year, to be drawn to the irresistible thing.
By Nicole VanderLinden
Winner, New Ohio Review Fiction Contest: selected by Lauren Groff
Featured Art: Beach Scene by James Hamilton
Vanessa had wanted the luau, something extravagant—never mind that we were a moon away from our original budget. But that was Vanessa, always doubling down. She swam in mountain lakes; she was the only person I knew who’d been arrested for playing chicken. “We’re in Maui,” she said, letting geography make its case. “It’d be fun for the kids.”
This wasn’t all true, because our youngest, Chloe, dreamed of puréed bananas. She was barely a toddler. She’d never tasted salt, and bubble baths made her shriek. It was the other kid my wife had been alluding to, the child of our concern, our Anna.
Vanessa bought tickets to the luau. I was suggestible—there were so many things I was trying to save then, money the least precious among them. We returned to the cool of our room by three so we could shower and put calamine lotion on our burns, our sun-chapped faces. Vanessa took Chloe with her and got dressed in the bathroom, where she’d laid out various makeup cases and where the tub had jets, and I waited for Anna, who was twelve and who, when she was ready, spun for me in a white sundress lined in eyelet lace.
At the luau, we inched toward the entrance on the resort grounds, entertainers beating drums and offering drinks made with canned pineapple juice. Chloe sat on her mother’s hip with her wild, straight-up ponytail and gave everyone her skeptical face, the one that prefaced an opinion you couldn’t predict. “Drum,” she said seriously, as if naming objects for the first time. “Drink.” Anna had put on a dark hoodie, though it was still hot, and shuffled ahead of us all.
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By Kathleen Winter
Featured Art: Girl Arranging Her Hair by Abbott Handerson Thayer
The woman in the Oldsmobile was awfully young
to have a kid, her kid would have said, if she’d had
a voice not just a body jittery inside her precious cotton
dress with ducks stitched in the smocked bodice
flat across her washboard chest. A woman’s hand
was every bit as flat when she had to slap somebody’s
face, so it wasn’t best sometimes to have a voice in case
you asked the woman one too many times how Seguin
was different from Saigon or where the dad had
gone or who was gonna fix the swing or when can we
get a collie or what’s the matter with twirling a lock
of hair around your index finger all day long it felt
so smooth & cool spooled round your finger &
released & caught & wound again, secured.
What’s wrong with messing with this living little
bit of you, a darling little thing. You couldn’t stop it
even if you wanted to.
By Darius Simpson
Featured Art: Open Lock, Akron, Ohio by James Henry Moser
complain about the weather. wait five minutes
watch the boys you grew up with outgrow you
bury your cousin. go sledding on the tallest hill you can find
keep a family warm until their son thaws out of prison
ice skate between the skyscrapers downtown
inherit an emergency exit sign from your father
spray-paint your best friend’s brother on a t-shirt
daydream your way through a semester-long funeral
watch jeans and sleeves and family portraits unravel
play soccer with the black boys who almost evaporated
with the icicles. kick it outside with the skeletons
from your childhood. go to columbus and pretend
to be a grown-up. spend a weekend at kalahari resort
and call it a vacation. go back home. leave. shoot dice
with the dead boys playing dress up. stay long enough
to become a tourist attraction in a city nobody stops in
mount bikes and ride until the sun dribbles
out of the sky’s mouth. wade through the oatmeal july makes
of morning air. swim in a public pool where everyone
is drowning and no one knows how to survive
what happened last month. stop runnin in and out unless
you got somethin’ on the gas bill. seal yourself with cold air
while the trees melt. bet the boy down the street, who’ll have
the best first day fit. come out amid orange leaves lookin fresher
than all the food in a five-mile radius of granny’s house.
eat jojos from rizzi’s on sunday after pastor guilt trips you
on your way past the pulpit. dream about a city
where headstones don’t show up to dinner unannounced
where fried chicken isn’t on speed dial and diabetes
isn’t the family heirloom. where grief isn’t so molasses
root for lebron in whatever he’s wearing. become
an athlete as a way out of corner sales. never escape.
start a pickup game that never ends. rake leaves
with a rusted afro pick your older brother left you in his will.
let the leaf bags melt into the chimney on the side of the house.
play basketball with the ghosts who don’t know what year it is
volunteer at your local funeral home. open a cemetery
across the street from the playground. mow green.
cut ties with your grass-seller. survive the summer.
By Jen Ashburn
Featured Art: Sunset, Oxford by George Elbert Burr
I was driving. The sky was pink with sunrise or sunset.
The road banked left. We drove straight—through the guardrail
and over a valley with gray houses stacked on a hillside.
You were so calm. I didn’t understand at first that we would die.
This was much worse than forgetting to pay the phone bill.
Then you were driving. The car soared. We looked out the windows.
Around the houses, people trimmed hedges and hung laundry.
You changed gears. I don’t remember the landing. I think
there was music. We held hands. I’ve never understood
forgiveness, but this is what it must feel like.
By Lucas Cardona
Featured Art: Tongue amulet in the form of a cicada (hanchan) by Unknown
My limp body lulls through the hot, humid days
like a lukewarm dog’s tongue hanging off the edge
of time, begging for disaster, for that rotten stench
of nostalgia to drift away & be buried in the brain’s
contemporary fiascoes. Night after night,
caught gaping out the window in the same chilled,
sterile room. Only the shadows of bats flitter into
view, and the dark, lush limbs of American elm trees
groping toward evidence of further tangibility
with a desperation akin to worship. Something in me
must cherish the sound of cicadas feeding off each other
in their suburban, summertime mania, like the soulless,
asinine chorus of a fraternity chant. The girl at the
7-Eleven in the purple hijab restocks the Cheetos
and the world goes on devouring itself for no other reason
than something must be devoured if we are to continue
loving one another in this crudely selective fashion.
It’s terrible but it’s true, all heartache inevitably
resolves in that surreptitious method pain can only
accomplish with the brain’s private blessing.
I know now what I did, I did to destroy you.
I know, too, that I’m the one who’s destroyed.
But somehow that still feels like forgiveness.
By Aza Pace
Featured Art: (Children Swimming) by Unknown
Meanwhile, plastic particles
burrow in the Arctic snow
and in the sea’s deep trenches,
its legion bellies.
Meanwhile, a galaxy bursts
across my cervix—bad cells
someone will slice off
with electric wire as I sleep.
There is nothing untouched
in the whole furious world.
But the water today
in Galveston is blue,
with not a hint of tar.
In each wave, hermit crabs
and no bottle caps.
Babies in life jackets
tumble and squeal in the surf
while an older child bobs
out to the first sandbar
to fish. Meanwhile,
I think—I’m happy.
Under my tongue
sit the names of children
I will not make.
I roll them over and over
and love them.
By Lisa Dordal
Featured Art: The Artist’s Daughter by H. Lyman Saÿen
Sometimes I see her pressing her palms
against a windowpane in a house that is real
the way a house in a dream is real
until you start to describe it and all you can say is:
it was this house, only it wasn’t. It’s winter
and she likes to feel the cold entering her body.
Or it’s summer and it’s heat she’s after.
She wasn’t born, so she can’t die.
Sometimes there is a window but no girl,
and I am the one walking toward it.
Sometimes I see her peering in—
forehead against the screen of our back door—
or running ahead of me on a path that is real
the way a path in a dream is real, saying:
this way, this way.
By Sara Ryan
Featured Art: “The Bridge: Nocturne (Nocturne: Queensboro Bridge)” by Julien Alden Weir
and she is a phantom. gray blur on
gray pavement. green lights flicker
their rhythmic patterns. in the right building,
at the right angle, she becomes one
thousand coyotes shimmering in glass.
she screams and Chicago screams
back. howls. scavenges the oily corners
of the train stations. the river gulps
through its channels and feeds the lake.
she is a wild thing. she crosses high bridges.
she becomes the color blue. she becomes
the color blood. the city is haunted
now. by the trees. by women, their mouths
full—bulging, really—with fur. she is one
of the lucky ones. she runs unjailed without
worry for traffic, turn signals, speed limits.
ghosts wearing masks yell from
their windows. they’re warning her.
they’re warning her.
By Sara Ryan
it is easy enough to say it: I want
to be an orange
harvest moon. cantaloupe sky, people
driving into the dark
country just to see. bitten
by mosquitoes. burrs
clinging to milky ankles.
that dappled moon
photographers click
the long exposure for. those pains-
taking details. every wrinkle
on my face. I am not
sure when I stopped believing
that I was beautiful, but I did
& there is no going back.
I want & the wanting
just becomes easier. my body
swallows it up until my bones sing
with the stuff. I want to be a puddle
with a world living inside.
slick that never dries up,
pooling in the craters
of uneven parking lots. forever
wet & weeping things.
I want to be the small sliver
of metal in my mother’s finger.
the scorched wall
of my father’s aortic valve.
I want to be blood—
its intricate, deliberate maze.
I want to be a planet &
a canyon. splinter & a tear
in the sky. I will admit it:
sometimes I just want
to hear my name out loud.
By Miriam Flock
They come, like the dishwasher, with the house.
“No trouble,” swears the seller, and—presto change-o—
for handfuls of Layena every morning,
the pair of hens trade one or two brown eggs.
The chick, if we approach with proper coos,
will let itself be stroked. This we learned
from our new bible, Chickens in Your Backyard.
Like neighbors of a different faith, we practice
tolerance, let them grub among the bulbs,
ignore the way their droppings singe the mulch.
Meanwhile, we are intent on our own nesting.
My husband paints the nursery; I quilt
a golden goose with pockets shaped like eggs.
We hardly register the added squawking
from the coop or look for more than tribute
when we rob the nesting boxes. Then
one dawn, I’m roused by what can only be
a cock-a-doodle-doo. And in the breaking light,
our chick-turned-rooster struts, ruffed as Raleigh,
shaking his noble scarlet comb. What waits
inside me to astonish like this male?
Such sudden majesty, sudden red.
By Miriam Flock
Not the baby but the baby’s clothes defeat me—
the cunning socks, the piles of onesies.
A descant to the washer’s thrum, the strains
of Pagliacci drift in from the study,
dislodging a memory: a stormy weekend
stranded at my cousin’s, the window wells filling
with snow like the heaps of dirty laundry
my aunt was sorting in the other room.
Around us spread the scraps of paper dolls
we’d wangled in the market, peeled now,
and finished like our tangerines.
We’d tired of mimicking Corelli
whose whooping rose above the drone of the dryer
where my aunt and uncle’s shirts embraced.
“There isn’t anything to do,” I whined
until my aunt emerged, a bar of Naptha
gripped in her raw hand. What struck me
was not her slap, nor even the stunned giggle
before my cousin got hers like a portion,
but the tenor’s voice dissolving in sobs,
and the Clorox, smelling as a perfume might,
if she had splashed it against her wrist.
By Pichchenda Bao
This poem has already been written.
The nausea, familiar.
You’ve been left, bobbing
bereft, in water, watching
flames eat home and hearth.
Or vicariously felt
that dread suck of time
elongating the slim barrel of a gun.
You’ve picked your steps
through a landscape of corpses,
fumbled through each level of grief.
This poem, your companion.
But who will read this poem?
Not the ones with the guns.
Nor the ones cheering them on
or silently assenting
to their menace.
Not even the ones who are carrying
their children away from their fears
toward your fears
of what you know
about this country.
This poem does not
traffic in saviors.
By Chris Ketchum
At ten, I meet myself in the mirror of my sister’s vanity, squeezed into the tiny
corset of her pale blue dress, Cinderella’s image printed on the breast like a
brooch. My little-boy pecs puff out like cleavage. The tulle skirt brushes against
my thighs, rising above the knee, billowing around my Fruit of the Looms as I
prance down the staircase to the dining room where my mother lights a candle
before dinner. She laughs to see me skip across the hardwood floor, turning and
twirling on the ball of my socked foot—and when she does, I know I want to
keep her laughing. I’m not sure why, but I speak in a higher voice, with a lisp,
and she laughs harder, and as I’m preening, brushing my cheeks with the back
of my hand, leaping into the air like the hippos in Fantasia, I notice the tears—
how they run down the corner of her nose, wetting her upper lip. I don’t know
why she’s crying—maybe I’m really that funny. So I keep dancing.
By Susan Browne
autumn leaves glitter in their brittling
someone plays the french horn on the shore
beneath the blue flame of sky the sound
like silver glinting across air like tinder
dear california
when I’m gone
will you still be here
will there still be a shore
someone stomps out of the reeds
holding a fishing pole
commands the horn player to stop
I walk by into silence
missing the music
wondering what else I want
on this hot november day
a cloud spilling rain
a voice that’s kind
not so many demands
not so many desires
I imagine mother earth is tired
our tumult & trash
our french horns & fishing poles
our eyelashes & elbows
our hands wanting to hold
dear humans
beautiful & dangerous
what will we do next
I keep thinking about love
about a man
who wrote to me years later
to say he was sorry for loving badly
By Robert Cording
After our son died, my wife found him
in coincidences—sightings of hawks, mostly,
at the oddest of times and places, and then
in a pair of redtails that took up residence,
nesting in a larch above our barn, and how
their low, frequent sweeps just a few feet above us
before rising over our kitchen roof
made it seem as if they were looking in on us.
In a way, it all made sense, our son so at home
in high places—the edges of mountain trails,
walking on a roof, or later, after he became
a house painter, at the top of a forty-foot ladder.
So many mornings we woke to the redtails’
jolting screeches and, even if I was a casual believer,
their presence multiplied my love
for the ordinary more every day. We never thought,
of course, any of those hawks was our son—
who would ever want that?—but, once,
watching one rise and rise on a draft of air,
I thought of Icarus soaring toward the sun—
as if an old story could provide the distance
I needed—waxed and feathered, his arms winged,
and remembered a babysitter’s frantic call
to come home, immediately, after she’d found
our ten-year-old nearly forty feet up
in an oak tree. I can almost hear him again, laughing
high up in the sky, throned on a branch,
his feet dangling, knowing nothing but the promise
of heights as he waved to me—
and I must have looked very small
calling up to him, staying calm
so falsely as I pleaded with him
to come down, to come down now.
By Robert Cording
“How’s business?—
Slow as a white man in slippers.”
—The Wire
Listen, nobody wants another overworked sky
of Beethovian sun and cloud,
or starlings loop-the-looping as they gather.
You’re standard issue, friend. Where’s the market unrest,
the ups and downs of soybean and pork belly,
the tango of selfie and brazen litany of self-invention?
Where’s your Twitter handle and your presence
on Facebook? OMG, you’re an old white man in slippers,
still daydreaming about Truth and Beauty,
still earnest even, taken up once again
by a titmouse just outside your study window,
(who still calls it a study?)
lifting one translucent wing in the afternoon light,
its beak cleaning and rearranging a downy under-layer
of feathers. You’re incorrigible, a puppy splashing
in dirty puddles, unaware of your puppy-ness,
happy as your silly puppy-feet plunge.
Pal, the Four Horsemen are riding in, the planet’s
burning up, and there’s enough lies going around
to fill Baltimore’s dumpsters. And what are you
proposing to do?—give a good Wordsworthian Hark
at some celandine or lark to lighten your mood?
Go on, schlep down to your rural mailbox—
you’re a fountain pen and letter guy, aren’t you,
and maybe someone’s written you, or at least
sent a birthday card rather than an email.
And, if not, there’s always this poem—
place it in its little stall, pull up the red flag,
and shuffle back tomorrow in your slippers
to open the door on yourself.
By Matthew T. Birdsall
A cerulean warbler scrambled up and down the shaggy spine
of an elderly bitternut hickory whose reach darkens half of my backyard
and I tried to follow it, but it became impossible as the bird
vanished and appeared in the shadows numberless—
the futility of finding the bird again sharpened my focus
because I’ve always longed to experience the impossible
because looking for the impossible in blotters of LSD during high school classes
and staring out the window at the animated, neon leaves on oak trees
didn’t just make me look at leaves differently, it made me want
to whisper tales of anarchy in the waxy ears of greedy marketing majors,
to digitally protest the World Bank, to distribute loose doobies at Christian chemo clinics,
to dole out dollops of ranch dressing at the homeless shelter on Saturdays,
to slide in and out of varied segments of society looking for pieces of my dull brain
searching for winding, mossy ways to get into the Hegelian principle
far enough to see the overarching irony of oppositions and how
they are the mortar between the bricks of what I really want
to say since mostly my truth is tucked into an ellipsis
holding together fast-flying flippant phrases,
however,
my focus fled when a red-shouldered hawk alighted
on an adjacent ash tree and I lost the warbler entirely,
but I still readied myself for another round of watching
the viewless fringe of fantasy and chasing shadows I imagined
only Keats and I could see, because O, John, I want to hold on
to my trippy teenage faith that there is fractally-hued life
beyond interpretation, to believe in full-throated ease
and sunburnt mirth, that I’m awake and above ground,
which is only possible until it isn’t.
By Danusha Laméris
I see the word egret, but read, instead,
regret. A trick of the mind. Its reversals. One,
a white slash, rising from the marsh. The other
a stone, strapped to the heart. The way I’ve carried
all the would-haves, all the ifs. Each alternate
exhausts. The egret wades in the dark water,
seeking fish. The heart, constancy. I doubt the egret
has regrets. Hatch, fledge, breed, hunt.
And besides, a lovely name that comes from French.
“Aigrette,” for brush, after the long feathers
that stream down its back. How do its legs,
bent reversed, move ahead? Who wouldn’t want
to walk like that? There are days I step
outside my body, arise, fly over the field
of my life, and glimpse—not error—but river,
rock, and oak, a wide expanse. Here and there
a meadow, dry grass dotted with—could
they be poppies?—some bright-blurred, orange flame.
By Therese Gleason
One week after
the clock in your chest
clenched and froze forever
at half past fifty,
a crow careened through the door,
grazing my temple
like a stray bullet.
In the aftermath
of shock and startle,
irony registered
bitter in my craw.
I used to think a bird
crossing the threshold
was a harbinger of death,
but by the time
this transgressor
cut a crooked line
through the living room,
our windows
were already draped
in black crepe.
The old wives,
their feathered omen
arrived late, clucked
their tongues
and rent their garments.
By Owen McLeod
I’m up at 6 A.M. to write, but all I do is stare
at the rain and the trees and watch the wind
strip away what remains of November’s leaves.
Somewhere in Virginia, my father is dying.
Not on the sidewalk of a sudden heart attack
from shoveling snow, or in a hospital room
monitored by nurses and beeping machines,
but at home, alone, and almost imperceptibly
from a sluggish, inoperable form of cancer.
That man was never satisfied with anything.
When leaves were green he wanted them red,
when red then brown, when brown then fallen
and gone. Once, after making me rake them
into a curbside pile, he tossed in a cinderblock
meant for the local punk who’d been plowing
his 1982 Camaro through the heaped up leaves
of our neighborhood. Two days later, the kid
blew through our pile without suffering a scratch.
My father didn’t realize that I, fearing for him
as much as for the boy, had fished out the brick
and chucked it in the ravine behind our house.
As punishment, I had to climb down in there,
retrieve the cinderblock, and bury it in the leaves
after I’d raked them back into a mound. My dad
said that was nothing if I dared to take it out.
I can still see him, stationed at the window,
watching and waiting for that boy to return—
but he never did, because I tipped him off
the next day after spotting him at 7-Eleven.
Decades later and hundreds of miles away,
a malignant brick buried deep inside him,
my father still waits at the living room window,
listening for the death rumble of that blue Camaro.
By Steve Myers
Sundays they’d meander down from surrounding hills
to the watering hole
just south of French Creek, where it joins the Allegheny, maybe twenty,
thirty on a good day in summer, the fog in no hurry to lift off the river,
& if I were visiting,
my father-in-law would take me along, because
this was the rhythm of Venango County men, week after week, season
on season, for the members who hadn’t lost wives to dementia, cancer,
or a cheating heart,
a chance to get away from the women, bullshit, maybe
win some money in the big drawing,
the Iron City flowing & Wild Turkey,
not yet noon, a thumb-flicked Zippo, cover clicking back, scratchy rachet
of the wheel, flame-sputter, flame, head bowing, a face
sudden, illuminated,
the long fhhhhhhhhhhh, with smoke stream, & a story would begin:
an Army jeep bouncing into a bombed-out Rhineland town, & in an old church
cellar, great shattered wine casks, you drank as you sloshed through it, dark,
fuck-cold;
someone’s uncle down the Mon Valley, the Gold Gloves boxer
who lost an arm; a lieutenant’s first whorehouse.
That was the talk,
and everything was Eddie, almost whispered, a shibboleth:
duck boots, fly rods, the Eddie Bauer Ford Bronco—Elks Masonic
to the nth degree.
Laugh, move among them, wear the flannel, stand them
a round—still, I carried the scent of a distant country. One slight shift
of wind & heads would lift, the circle tighten.
By Ed Falco
Arthur is, look, you don’t want to, fine; and Bee’s, good, I’m glad.
It’s about a billion degrees out. They’re on a clothing-optional beach. Arthur had to practically drag her.
He gets up and walks away, which makes her mad. She’s all about how men retreat to their caves. Arthur stops and puts his hands on his hips and looks out over the Atlantic Ocean. There’s a half dozen guys on blankets to the left and behind him chattering. They’re all young and nude, built like Greek gods. One guy’s putting sunblock on another guy like he’s practicing the art of sensuous massage. Next to them’s what looks like a straight couple, the girl’s young, topless, with a bikini bottom. She looks good. She’s in fact gorgeous. The guy’s probably at least twice her age, well into his forties. He’s tanned a golden bronze and built solid, stretched out, arms under his head, got on one of those skimpy bathing suits Olympic divers wear. No belly at all if not quite a six-pack. The girl’s sitting up looking off at the horizon, her hand wrapped around his kneecap like she’s holding a stick shift. Arthur goes back to their blanket.
You’re back.
Look, if you don’t want to, okay, but I’m going to.
Go right ahead. Who’s stopping you?
All I’m saying is, we’re here, right?
Read MoreBy Maggie Glover
—West Hollywood, November 2019
I get a whiskey. I do not call my father back. I text you. I try on my new dress
in the bathroom among the western decor. I get another whiskey. I write a poem
about cowboys. I text you. I finger out the cherry from the glass. I take the cherry
the bartender offers me, red-glow-glop in a bare palm. I don’t text you for 24
minutes (I count it). I let someone down. I smoke a cigarette. I think of my mother
smoking: outside restaurants, department stores, in the kitchen on Sunday mornings,
late-at-night while typing, the cigarette dangling from her mouth with its long,
tender arm of ash. I order a whiskey. I don’t answer my phone. I ask the bartender
for another cherry but I’m way ahead of you, he says, offering a dish of alien
jewel-fruit. I like the dish: shaped like a cowboy hat, porcelain. I am being
trusted with breakable things. I joke: I don’t need to eat dinner now thanks
to all these snacks. I know I’m not joking. I don’t text you. I write a poem in
which I am the cowboy and you are the O.K. Corral and I make good choices
and my father is sober and my mother remembers me. I smoke another cigarette
and the bartender joins me. I know what this is. I say it out loud: I know what
this is. I pretend I mean something different from what I mean. I order a whiskey.
I listen when he explains his tattoo. I text you. I let him touch my shoulder. I
go to the bathroom and change into my dress. I ask him to clip the tags from
the hem. I write a poem in which I know exactly what I’m doing though I don’t
know it yet, do you?
By Gregory Djanikian
Death in his dark cowl is testing his scythe
against the roses in my garden named Hope-to-Be.
He says there is a mountain within you
that is shifting and the river is slick with feathers.
He says the way inward is always more frightening
than any simple migration.
Sometimes I don’t know what he means.
He is all nuance and innuendo.
Sometimes he grins, showing his lighter side
as if he’s told a once-in-a-lifetime joke.
Sometimes he makes a sad face, pursing his lips,
his fingers sliding down his cheeks like imaginary tears.
I’ve spotted him driving around the neighborhood
in his rattletrap with a cracked windshield
and a bumper sticker that says
My second car is always available!
I’ve seen him rummaging through garbage cans
picking out slices of pizza.
I’ve seen him dining at Chez Philippe
sipping mignonette sauce from an oyster shell.
When my father lay curled on his bed,
he was there, spooning him, his body being of two bodies.
Once, I found him lying by my mother, cooing,
until she woke and swatted him off with her cane.
By Marcia LeBeau
Featured Art: Bonfire on Green Grass Field by Gantas Vaičiulėnas
I can’t promise you I know how to sit across from a man,
as he lights his campfire heart, without letting it
warm me. And I won’t pour water over it before it glows
down to embers in the lambent hours of the morning.
As shadow flames sashay across my face, I might throw in
the branches I’ve gathered from my forest. Make it blaze.
By Marcia LeBeau
Featured Art from rawpixel.com
We communicate like animals. I bark, he recoils.
I howl, he waits, howls back. It’s been like this
for over a decade. Sometimes our offspring try
to separate us. Last night the youngest guided me
into the dining room. The three working bulbs
of the chandelier spotlit smashed peas and a jack
under the table. We never learn. No, sometimes
we learn. A moment lying in bed ripples
for a week. We burrow into each other’s eyes, faces
slippery with tears. I have made him proclaim to himself
the scariest of truths: I am perfect. He has made me
do the same. Our perfection hangs in the air.
By Marcia LeBeau
Featured Art: Colorful carpets hanging on wall by Meruyert Gonullu
The Lucky store a few towns over is going out of business.
That doesn’t seem so lucky to me. Every year, my husband and I hit
their After Christmas sale. We try on jeans with zippers that tell us—
Lucky You! when the teeth unclench. I once got a sweater
with LUCKY that stretched across my breasts. We pile clothes
in dressing rooms facing each other. Yay or Nay outfits.
With conjugal knowledge, we are ruthlessly honest. Whoever finishes first
takes a seat and watches the other model consider and reconsider.
The other day, a woman I barely know told me how much she loves
my husband, the way he always refers to our life experiences with “we.”
We have decided. We went there. We bought that. She tells me how lucky I am.
When my husband and I leave the store, we clutch shopping bags,
we are satiated. Sometimes we hold hands, if we have one free.
By Marcia LeBeau
When he read it out loud in the small orange basement
on the street lined with old trees that fell
too early in storms, the wind lost its breath,
the molten core of the earth slowed slightly, and someone
poured a Slurpee down at the 7-Eleven. It might have been
just a poem meant for the whole group, who all playfully
fanned themselves and over-swooned after he’d lipped the last word—
but she sat knowing that everything she’d done
had brought her to this beige suede basement couch
to hear, to embody, to take these words
and press them into her—first shaking, but later softly
and with more force. Until they walked, ran, and flew
with her. So when she rose above that suburban town,
its baseball fields and slate-gray schools, on the days
when the screaming and demands and the mac-n-cheese dinners
became too much, they would be with her. He would be with her,
whether she wanted him or not.
By Kimberly Johnson
Featured Art: Lightning coming from the Sky by Johannes Plenio
I saw you coming from a mile away,
Thunder. You play
Coy, sly your pretty in winks
Around the cumulus, but up close what colors
You show, all shazam
And tantrum while the Wham-bam
On the wireless crackles with static. What the swagger
Are you after?
Whose the heart you do not stagger
When you rattle through the bracken, knocking
Branches at the casement?
I betook me to the basement
When you batted first your lashes, flashed
Your distant
Dazzle—I’ve been whiplashed
By your type before: you come on easy
But want me on my knees,
Want to flutter my transformers
And shut off all my lights. You throw a glam show
And then you blow
Along to the next hapless,
Leaving blank fuzz across the radio dial—
No tune, no storm
Warning, no Thank you ma’am.
By Kimberly Johnson
Featured Art: Water Bubbles by Pixabay
Oh, my quantum soul—restive, sizzling
In its nimbus
Of need. How it dizzies
In the orbit of another’s passing
Fancy, fickle
As it flirts its vacant shells
Hey there sexy fella can you fill
My spinning empties
With your any loose electrons?
How in relentless ciphers it scrawls
On any bathroom wall
My atomic number.
It is a light element, an errant
Sphere with strong wants:
Come Lover, let’s charge ourselves
A spark, a star, a dark and secret
Supernova, let
Us cleave ourselves: attract,
Repel, attract, repel, let us fall
In common gravity,
By which I mean love, and then fall
Out.
By Mary Jo Firth Gillett
Featured Art: Female making manicure to ethnic woman with tattoos by Skylar Kang
See how I clasp it to me, thunderclap
my way through. Oh constant invisible,
oh emperor of the unruly, tell me—
do I consume you or you me?
Downcast, you stain me indigo
but I love the blues—lapis lazuli
and Billie Holiday and the neon tetra’s
iridescence—is it biology?—
I the algae, you my luminescence?
But no, that’s too much—
a fleshless excuse for excess.
Hyper heart, you tattoo me,
every inch of skin inked,
but you are not indelible—
see how I embrace the pleasure
of erasure, the fleeting this, then this,
the smudge and blur,
the quickening pulse of swerve,
of word, the veiled, the reviled,
the revealed. And so, lost song
of nightingale, swoop of lark,
you are the ghosts of night,
the smidgen of hope,
the low-hanging, the high-flying—
my wisteria, my hysteria,
my gilt-edged book,
my glint in the dark.
By Lara Palmqvist
Their fights had always been drawn-out and passionate, thrilling in their possibility. The subjects of their arguments ran the gamut; Malcolm and Clare could employ almost anything as flint to spark the heat between them, setting their hearts leaping and their sharp tongues running wild: the empty soda can rolling around the Subaru, the knife marks grooved in the laminate countertop, the lack of remaining hot water in the morning, or that time, years ago, when the dog bowl had been left dry on a sultry day. The rhythm to their relationship was marked by peaks of tension, a pulse that proved their marriage was still alive—unlike those of some of their friends, whose flatlined politeness was so painfully false, resentment straining up beneath pert compliments and cute smiles. Malcolm and Clare were authentically in love, four years married and still willing to weather the turbulence of melding two lives together. Yet it was also true their latest fights seemed rote, their jibes more personal. The cause was lack of material, Clare felt. She blamed their unchanging surroundings.
“Your manner of blinking,” she said, interrupting Malcolm as he sat reading the golf report in his favorite recliner one February morning. “It’s bothersome.”
He glanced up, eyes fluttering, bewildered. “Excuse me?”
Clare set her turmeric milk on the coffee table. “There’s some kind of stutter to the way you blink.” She flicked her fingers off her thumb in two short bursts. “Like this,” she said. “I’m not sure you’re aware. It’s making me anxious.”
Clare spoke from her heart—she was genuinely bothered by Malcolm’s mannerisms, more so with each passing day. He’d developed a habit of repeatedly clearing his throat in the mornings that made her grab fistfuls of her dark hair and pull until her scalp felt strained. Just last week she’d noticed new strands of gray growing in along her part.
“I see,” Malcolm said. He creased the paper, eyes now flat and focused, strained wide.
Clare didn’t want this—she didn’t want him to suffer.
Read More
By Jana-Lee Germaine
Featured Art: Faceless ballerina resting on floor with shade by Khoa Võ
Next to the Lost and Found,
our church basement folding chair circle.
Ten of us, week to week, scratch
words in workbooks, read copies
of How to Survive the Loss of a Love.
We pass or fail stages of grief.
Video clips from the other side:
a smiling blonde manages
her checking account, living debt-free;
gray men navigate dating and children.
Stories cycle in Share Time:
Billy the missionary served 25 years
with Kazakhstani orphans—
one day, home on furlough,
his wife drove to Walmart, never returned.
Dan’s wife ran off with the superintendent,
and Sharon’s husband left her at Denny’s
eating Moons Over My Hammy.
She hasn’t had an egg since.
I don’t know why, they said.
Blame always a stick to be thrown.
Not your fault, we agreed.
But maybe the fault was mine,
the unsupportive wife, the wastrel.
I drove 1700 miles, and still his voice,
obscured by barroom backnoise,
Insufferable woman, come home.
Each week I shift seats
on the circle’s farthest curve.
I’ve lost the knack for talking,
afraid the other eyes will shinny up my face
then flick away.
At Trader Joe’s, before group,
while cashiers flip French bread
into paper bags like a magic trick,
I practice words.
How to say I’ve left him,
that he was mean to me.
So I will be believed.
By Veronica Corpuz
Featured Art: Vintage notebook among photo cameras on table by Rachel Claire
A married life is measured:
each grain of rice, coffee bean, and tea leaf,
ice cubes crackling in a glass of water upon the nightstand,
even the pinheads of steamed broccoli,
every hour of sleep lost when the baby is born
each hour you slept in before him,
the time you say, I am going to remember this walk forever—
the neon color of lichen after a long, hard winter,
how your son wobbles, falls down,
how you swoop him off the ground.
Until you walk into the Social Security office,
until you see the words printed in dot matrix—
the date your marriage begins, the date your spouse dies—
until you see what you did not know declared in writing,
then, you have new language for this feeling—
how your heart has become a singularity:
Your marriage has ended in death.
By Rick Viar
Featured Art: Bees on Purple Flower by Pixabay
My sister says I greeted the swarm
along the backyard slope, crawling, fat mouth slack,
sodden Pampers saggy with supplication.
Evidently, she scooped me up while they chased us
through our father’s lavender azaleas
where he dropped his shears and smashed yellow
jackets against my skin, yanking off the diaper
and waving it around his head like a lasso.
We won’t get spanked again until winter.
Everyone watches my sister declaim
the tragic tale at family gatherings for decades
as if she’s Dame Judi Dench. They love her
nuanced performance, the lively hand gestures
and operatic voice, how she tousles my hair
before her triumphant finale: I got stung
on my mouth, but he got stung in his asshole!
I’m always grateful Dad isn’t here to witness
this, or my marriage, or my career,
or my incompetent gardening, the limp cosmos.
I can’t believe you, a cousin smiles, shaking his head.
Me neither, I reply. I don’t even know what I did.
By Paula Harris
Featured Art: Light Inside Library by Janko Ferlic
it will be the day after our fifteenth anniversary
we started late, so we were already middle-aged at the start
so after fifteen years we’ll be what others call old
we will have lasted a solid fourteen years, ten months, and most of a day
longer than I expected
and so for fourteen years, ten months, and most of a day
I’ll have been confused by our continuing existence
how will you go through fifteen years and most of a day
without realising what a fuck-up I am?
during that time you’ll have been to more book launches
than you ever expected you would,
and since you never thought you’d ever be at a book launch
your showing up at each of them will be a personal gift;
you loiter at the back of the room with a bottle of whatever
cold beer is your current choice, maybe Heineken that day;
you don’t say much to the other people there,
you sit quietly through the post-launch celebratory dinners
when I’m buzzed and hyper or exhausted and freaked out
and we hold hands under the table;
once we get home we strip down and have sex
and you still look at me like I’m the best thing you’ve ever seen
I won’t watch a single rugby game
but I ask who won and if the All Blacks did alright,
if it was a good game, and you give me your thoughts
in a surprisingly detailed yet concise analysis
because you know this shit bores me
and from time to time I even remember
one of the players’ names and you smile at me
like you would a child trying to show off their knowledge of the alphabet
despite always misplacing the q
we still live in separate houses
because I’m smart enough to have figured out that living with someone
isn’t something I can cope with;
we spend time at each other’s homes
but more at yours, even though your kids hate it
when they drop by unannounced
and we’re naked on the kitchen floor
or I’m sucking you in the living room
or you’re going down on me on the dining table
so your kids always knock on the door, loudly,
then wait fifteen seconds before walking in
we always laugh at this
Read More
By James Lineberger
Featured Art: Children Playing on the Beach (1884) by Mary Cassatt
As I get you down from the closet shelf
and unwrap the brown shipping paper
to the square white box inside
I lift the lid for the first time and stick my fingers
deep inside you /
What does she feel like Barbara says and I say go on
see for yourself but she shushes me
and leads the way out back
to where the creek used to run
and we just do it quickly without any words
because words are a foolish way of asking forgiveness
for these five years we’ve left you
up there stacked amid the empty shoe boxes
and children’s playthings /
But now with both hands
I swing the box like sand in a pail
and scatter you
into the overhead cave of the old Judas tree
where your tiny parts
glow for a flickering moment
like early snow /
And Barbara whispers
yes Patsy I know
still trying to find your way home again
just like the whole rest
of your life
without somebody’s arm to hold on to
By James Lineberger
Featured Art: A Pond Near Rousillon by Adolphe Appian
it glows in frozen streaks
each of its feathered limbs curved gently upward
and i find myself pausing
at the edge of the drive
to stand very still in the needles of rain
as if anchored here too
stretching my arms overhead
like some arthritic unpainted mime
not because i need to make
a statement about anything
just that every now and then
like the silent unfolding wings of the tree
something stirs within me trying to say
it believes
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