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.
New Ohio Review 