Winter Online Exclusive
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 Susan Blackwell Ramsey
Featured Art: Untitled by Joseph Taylor
Sock drawer with its moth husks, limp mismatches,
rank refrigerator’s stink of shame, closet
whose back wall I don’t remember . . .
In Sanskrit abhyasa means practice, discipline,
not giving up, but starting over
and over and over again. Just start. Abhyasa.
So when I unroll my yoga mat
and it promptly rolls back up, I flip it over,
fling myself down on it, grunt “abhyasa.”
Veteran of fresh starts. I’ve trained myself
to believe there will be dustless bookshelves,
push-ups, French refresher courses, kale.
This time will be different. It always is.
Maybe the trick is shorter and shorter gaps
between the restarts until they run together,
like rolling out the lawn mower in May,
working to get a cough, another, three, and with a roar
it starts again. Once more that green smell rises.
By Elton Glaser
Featured Art: Apartment With a View by Tyler Thenikl
Will this be one more summer spent
Among the ornamental mailboxes and garden gnomes,
As if I’d come down with a dose of lassitude,
Too much muck in the bloodstream?
That’s better, I guess, than a long month in Lubango,
Not far from the hovels and dead dogs,
With something strange steaming in the heat
And a bad case of the squitters,
And no worse, in its own way, than hearing someone
At the next table praise the taste of
Extra virgin truffle oil on the rutabaga fries,
Parsley butter sliding down a bison steak,
When what I crave is cruder: ecstasy of the unraveled,
Loose elations in a rumpled bed.
I’ve got nothing against sampling a farmer’s stand,
All those honeydews nestled in straw
And peaches fat and pink and above reproach,
Or an afternoon rocking on the front porch,
Sipping a tall cool glass of julep and watching
The dappled daze of sunlight on the leaves.
Ambling through the season, in a moveable feast,
Suits me like balm on a busted knuckle,
But when this life winds down I’d like to leave
Clean and alone, like a bone
Scrubbed free of the misery it went through,
And with a knob at the end
Big enough to knock some sense into
God On the messier side of heaven.
Here, in this bulging summer, too stuck or lazy
To rent another place to roost,
Let me at least reach out to what remains,
Anything still succulent and touchable.
By Kate Fox
A glance held long and a stolen kiss,
This is how I remember you best.
—Richard Shindell
Little fires light themselves in the hearth, like tongues
of flame that reclaim the Holy Spirit, like pitchforks
in this clapboard house where mayflies swarm and crackle
against the porch light. On down, a gas station, a five-and-dime,
and your house, which I can see from the kitchen, where
clothes on the line billow and collapse, billow and collapse.
This small town holds everything I will ever know and have
to leave behind: bidden and forbidden glances,
voices from the second-floor landing that warn, Go no further.
Night will fall and you will fall with it. Which is what I want,
for the universe to take up where I leave off, this longing
so deep it can hold entire planets in its bottomless pocket,
yet shrink to the size of a finger at the hollow of your neck,
heart drawing blood from the branchwork of your breathing.
By Jon Fischer
Featured Art: Above San Gimignano by Tyler Thenikl
The 3D printer made a man and gave him a beard
to rub thoughtfully. It printed a book on mortality,
a pamphlet on sin, a monograph on time, and many other
fine things to keep in mind. Then it spun out two
of each animal and a boat around them. It printed rain
so long we thought it was broken, then
it printed an olive leaf. Its final act
was to print a 4D printer, which printed a memory
for the man, who said with his rubbery tongue,
I remember there were olive trees,
and he released one of the doves from its cage
below deck, where it spent the time we were given
under the gaze of two housecats and two weasels.
But the 4D printer started to print more
than the time we were given. Weeks rolled off in pairs, still
warm from the furnace of creation,
and wedges of space to move the stars apart
so the man had room to fill the weeks with many
fine things to keep in mind. That’s how we turned the world
into a dream, where time doesn’t know what to do with itself,
and you always end up falling.
By Jon Fischer
Far off in a vacant field beside an irrigation
canal alights a stately gray heron
or a plastic bag. The plastic bag flaps
and in the tricky light thick clouds leave behind
trembles in and out of translucence,
just like a heron. The heron flew here from another
land in search of a plot to fill and warmly
fulfill and mute the Sisyphean rhythm of restless
creatures’ lives, across countless miles
that would never do, just like a plastic bag.
Close up it’s clear the field holds both
a stately heron and a plastic bag, each
studying the other like figure and reflection.
Now the difference is obvious. The heron’s eyes
recognize the predicament he’s in, the infernal
froglessness of all this wiregrass, the length
of the horizon, the lean of a eucalyptus. Behind
his eyes is the continent where he first
leapt into a crystalline gust, and at beak’s end wriggles
a continent uncharted, fleshly, ready to be snapped up
like a young shad. But this time of year his wings
know everything there is to know about south
and nothing else. Whereas the bag simply is
the predicament it’s in and billows
with all the joy that has ever flown through
a thousand years of wind.
By Jon Fischer
It’s hard to describe a drawing of a millennium,
but you know it when you see it
on a sticky note fallen to the speckled tile
near the lockers in a high-school hallway
It’s rendered half of the social commentary
inherent in a peach-colored crayon, half
of ablative carbon fiber and iridium dust,
the artist’s signature a sketch
of the human genome. This millennium is half past,
half future, neither all that great.
The drawing smells like a philosopher’s feet.
It tells a story that rises off the paper
and reads the palms of passersby, turning life lines
jagged and love lines into spirals. It tells a story
that sinks deep inside the paper, seizing
for its fibrous heart the best and most harrowing
plot twists. Nonetheless, the drawing explains
why the Nile changed course, why tornadoes
and the sea found fancier homes,
why we made no new religions
but let the ones we had grow brittle, why we still
lose languages and serenade machines
and can’t be bothered to speak with aliens.
There you are in the middle, anatomically accurate.
Built around you are a cathedral and a labyrinth
then skyscrapers and scaffolding, a rational galaxy,
a fleet of anxieties, ignorance
efflorescent in a waxing tide, and your personal
win-loss record. You do with the drawing
what fine art does to you,
folding it into a Möbius strip for later,
and also for earlier.
By Stephanie Choi
Featured Art: Scarlet by Joseph Taylor
You crave
For the wheels to ride across the puddle, muddied
With pebbles & all your past lives too
You want to find again
That sky blue that’s been shut tight
All winter long
You don’t know why
When you finally do
The birds mistake each strand of your hair for a branch
You wish for the pecking to stop
And for the stillness of a bud before blossom
To return to you
You ask for a taste
Of the warm cold wind on your wet lips
Just once more—
You try to remember
What everything was like before
But you take a sip from the cup filled with dust
& ash, instead
By Kelly Rowe
Featured Art: Mimic by Dylan Petrea
When you were small,
we lived in a tropical state,
and you spoke fluently
a language only two could understand.
It had one word
for bean or ball or m&m or kiss,
three for water, six for dream
or any other risk.
When we talked, the dog danced on hind legs,
and the house sailed down the river,
waving its red and white flags.
The rain took you wading under the live oaks
and mispronounced your name,
but showered you with opals,
while high in the branches invisible birds
whistled back and forth in code.
Now, you live somewhere else,
I’ve gone a little deaf.
I press the phone to my ear
as your voice cuts out, fades,
and like the last speaker
of a lost language, I grope
for one of the hundred names for river,
or the single shouted syllable: Ma!
Meaning flash flood, meaning ark,
meaning the one we need
no words for, the one who flies to us
when we cry out in the dark.
By Jennifer Dorner
– for my mother
Season of moths in the strawberries.
An apple or two fallen from the tree.
Plums not yet ripe, through the cornstalks
are burdened with silk,
the vine tomatoes split,
and the sunflowers track the sun,
a bee in each dark center.
Late to the tasks you left me
I unfold the watering instructions again,
late to harvest the beds circled
on your hand-drawn map.
The evening is a haze,
sheets of starlings stretched
over the mown grass field,
a brush of red beneath
the shadowed tree line.
This week I read about the dying,
how those who have passed
can speak to the ones left behind
in the language of what they loved.
One man who tended rhododendron gardens,
a canopy of blossoms suddenly falling
over his first daughter’s car
while the second daughter
gathered a loose cluster
blown down into her path
the moment their father died.
I slide your patio door open, step over
trays of vegetable starts
on the faded rug
packed with potting soil.
Your handwriting vertical on the slim
labels beside each stem:
chard, fennel, romaine, madeley,
winterkeeper. I wish I’d known better –
this world of straw hats and arthritic wrist,
the duct-taped trowel,
these rubber boots that fit my feet.
By Stephanie Wheeler
Featured Art: Peeled II by Samantha Slone
The dryer was making a monstrous sound. The repairman stood with his hand resting flat on top.
“I feel the vibration,” he said. He was a fat man with a three-day stubble sprouting in uneven patches on his face. His uniform shirt was belted into his trousers around the front and haphazardly untucked in the back. Hazel could see his milky eyes shifting rapidly through smudged glasses. She hated him a little.
Hazel nodded. “And you can hear it, too.”
He squinted his eyes, then squeezed them tight, concentrating.
Hazel decided that she hated him a lot.
“The grinding sound,” Hazel said, straining to make her voice heard above the din. “It’s quite obvious, really.”
“Ah, yes. The grinding. I hear it.”
Hazel’s cell phone chimed then, and she looked at the screen. The name Walt appeared in white letters, glowing.
Read MoreBy Jasmine V. Bailey
During his reign, four hundred bears.
On the bloodiest day, twenty-four.
On a hunting trip with friends, staged,
as they all were staged, twenty-two
and eleven for his friends. No one
tallied the boar and deer.
Ceaușescu sitting in his perch above a clearing a gamekeeper chases the bears through,
firing an automatic rifle.
One hundred thirty bears
in those last six years.
Brown bears, grizzlies in our West,
eat mostly plants
but Ceaușescu’s bears ate pellets
fed to them by the gamekeepers
who say they don’t like hunting anymore.
He will die next to Elena
in December, nineteen eighty-nine,
the shortest day of the year.
One hundred sixty-eight centimeters: Ceaușescu’s height.
The bears flourished with the kibble,
hunting forbidden to everyone but
Ceaușescu, their Conseil International de la Chasse points
unnaturally high.
Twenty thousand dollars
to hunt a brown bear in Romania now
if you are a citizen of the EU.
The population is smaller, each bear
smaller since Romania joined Europe—
seven thousand five hundred at the height
to fewer than five thousand three hundred
once the doors of the Carpathians opened.
Forty-three grizzlies died
when Yellowstone closed its dumpsters.
Staggering in their final, worst hunger.
Once someone hatched a scheme
to raise bears for Ceaușescu’s hunts.
Two hundred twenty-seven
bear cubs were torn from their mothers
who, crazed, had to be shot
to let them go, as I would have to be shot.
One or two: the number of toes cut off without anesthetic
to create a code by which to identify each cub,
who went insane with grief for their mothers,
who were never successfully raised for the hunt,
who all escaped or were released
haphazardly, dying on highways
and in circuses, ending in a daze
the daze of their lives.
Two: the number of days
the cubs howled
after their claws were ripped from their paws.
The number of suicides
during his twenty-four years as general secretary of the Communist Party
of Romania:
not known.
Twelve weeks my daughter’s lived
outside my body.
I want to lie with her under one blanket
until God thinks better of so much.
By Jasmine V. Bailey
I drove to meet you the first day of the year
at a B&B fifteen miles east of my childhood
on the White Horse Pike.
For three mornings we had a German pancake
and three cups of coffee
with the black-haired innkeeper
whose husband coughed in another room,
whose philodendra vined her walls
and ceilings like a cage.
You led me down the beach that first night
all the way to Longport Bridge
keeping secret what we were after.
Everything seemed a candidate—
the armor of some crab picked clean,
Polaris beneath the moon
like Marilyn Monroe’s mole.
When we got to the bay
I thought we might swim it.
Your face fell realizing
what we’d come to see was gone,
that you would have to tell
what you’d brought me there to show.
The bioluminescence you’d seen
the night before I arrived
coaxing a glistering shore
out of the dark
was gone with the jellies
or bacteria arrived now in the Atlantic.
You described it as a lit path, if
a narrow one, like the aisle
of an airplane you pace at night
when every passenger is asleep
because you no longer know
what your country is like
or if your mom will manage
to find her way to Philadelphia
to pick you up, or if there will ever
be a child to grow so tired
you have to carry her, sleeping,
all the way home on your chest,
her heavy head just starting to dampen,
her eyelids working against your heart—
and I saw it.
By Jeanne-Marie Osterman
Featured Art: “Catpurnia” by Julie Riley
I had a sickly cat whose cure,
said the homeopath, was raw meat
so I replaced the canned food with scraps
from the butcher and overnight
her gingerly eating turned feral devouring.
She’d yowl as I took the jiggling red flesh
from the fridge, pace as I cut it into pieces,
then suck it down before I could rinse the knife.
This so exhausted her, she’d lie on the sofa
for hours before getting up to prey
on the dustbunnies under my desk.
While I was watching Shark Tank one night,
a ball of Kleenex walked across my living room floor.
It turned out to be a mouse
who was carrying it to the bookcase
where she was building a house
behind my dog-eared copy of Balzac’s Lost Illusions.
Seeing the mouse brought my cat back to full health.
She stalked the tiny creature, crippled it
with her jaws, sat back to watch it struggle.
I called the building super and asked him
to take the mouse away, signing
the creature’s death warrant.
My sister and her husband raise cows for the slaughter.
Though my sister will eat them,
she refuses to go to the slaughterhouse
when their time has come.
I watched how they do it on YouTube.
An operator lines the stunner up
with the sweet spot of the cow’s brain.
The bolt inside is captive—
held like a breath in its chamber,
then expired with such force
it knocks the animal unconscious.
The bolt doesn’t penetrate.
It recoils to be used for the next.
And the cow lives!
The heart keeps beating,
which speeds the bleeding-out,
which is the actual slaughter.
When my husband left, it hit like a bolt.
He’d held his infidelity in like a breath,
then walked away, recoiled.
By Maura Faulise
Featured Art: “I Feel Like Pieces” by E’Lizia Perry
Pulling out of Dingle Bay
in the rental van that rainy day
after singing to the tunes
of the fiddle player in the family pub,
my father drove red-faced
and under the influence
of what I now know
was nostalgia
for the affair he’d just ended
before flying us over the ocean
to kiss the Blarney Stone.
He mumbled her name at the wheel,
and something about O’Shaughnessy’s
fine music and the fountain of tears
and the Celtic rain.
When the van slid off the road
and into a field of peat, he punched
the gas to get us out
but the wheels stuttered in the cold mud.
Unconcerned with our fate,
we four kids sat stiff
in the backseat, doe-eyed
and glued to the rhythm
of our mother’s timorous noises.
I don’t know what moved him
—the relentless gray sky
or the lightning hammering
so close to the metal,
but he looked at us one by one
for a while
before opening his mouth to sing
of the long-long way to Tipperary,
where the heart remains
and he got us singing too,
broke us down the way he always did
amid claps of thunder,
angry rumble or applause,
I just couldn’t be sure.
By Justin Rigamonti
With a bouquet
of ferns
and lemon
yellow roses,
she looks
incandescent
in the dug-up
photo of
“the time I
got married
the first time.”
Meaning,
pain followed
hot on this
happy woman’s
heels. Meaning,
don’t think
her life has
hummed along
luminously
ever since.
Life never does.
But won’t a smile
like a string of
holiday lights
still have been
a smile?
And joy
for awhile
was still joy.
By Emma Aylor
—1936–2013
Sleeping it off last night I dreamed I had one lung.
The other next to me in bed dark and putting
off smoke. When you were young
I passed my Virginia Slim so you wouldn’t get
the taste for it: I remember standing in the kitchen
lighting it up for my girl.
You never did smoke after that. In front of the TV
last night I spilled the whole drink down my shirt
a little in this world a little in the other.
I’ve been Anne Moore for most of my life.
My last morning as Lester I looked
like Liz Taylor’s sister hair dark and glossed.
It’s hard to remember myself like that.
I depend on a picture to know I was beautiful—
waist a switch in a virgin’s dress.
Couldn’t have done better at nineteen,
grew up so close to Tennessee.
We moved all over the plains for a time
and came back to Bill’s dad’s store.
I remember days up to my elbows in spicy chili,
nights raising you right up the hill.
My hands have shaken my whole life. Always think
it could have been worse. A favorite joke:
a parrot who swears is punished by being put
in the freezer. Once, it sees a frozen turkey
in the corner and says,
DAMN, that bird must have said fuck.
I remember I told you and your daughter you looked at me
like I didn’t understand a single stupid thing.
Would it make a difference if I did
that same house your father repeating GODDAMN IT ANNE
like a stuck station in front of you and all
my children’s children
and
it’s morning in the bath now and I’m not getting up yet.
In the water a bruise on my arm
develops like a litmus paper a little
yellow— hardly acidic.
I remember leaving your daughter at the pool while I wet
my brain came back to her sunburned
pink as a hot pig. Remember she fell
off the bed and scarred her little nose
a white line still cut through the freckles.
Light through the bathroom glancing sideways.
My daddy drank. I remember how bad.
It’s not really a reason but I remember enough.
My chest clutches a little
and then fills up. Water gets a little bluer
with what comes off my skin.
It’s not possible that you remember me.
By Emma Aylor
Featured Art: “Skin ‘N’ Bones” by Arianna Kocab
– 1936-2013
My granny died facedown in the kitchen
of the isolate house: atop a hill named for ruins
of a burned plantation near, whose owner was rumored
to be buried standing so he could continue to survey
the land from his summited tomb, up a lick
off Opossum Creek, itself off a bend
in the body of the James. A stroke. And grandpop
made a big show of never looking at her face
again; he said he couldn’t overlap his memory;
he let her lay crashed in her own bones until help came,
let her face settle into its death with no witness,
and I don’t know where her ash was scattered
after that, if it was, the memorial just a party in the house without
her around—a body never really there—and closing night
for my grandfather’s fifty-eight-year claim
to a good marriage. I took a train from New York
down through Virginia, eight hours marked
at intervals by the crumbling backs of Newark,
Baltimore, Washington, Charlottesville—
to Lynchburg. At one stretch, hard pink spray paint over
a whole swatch of dry grass. To tell the truth,
the ease of missing her then was almost a comfort.
Its relative water-fed simplicity. When I got the call
I had space set for further clearing.
On the walls she was nineteen and already flickering,
her hair in my mother’s curls, or mine, careful set
of her mouth, her heels and her dresses.
Down the dark hill, weeds lushed by June,
our dead gathered to murmur through the river’s red throat.
By Darius Simpson
Selected as winner of the 2021 NORward Prize for Poetry by a panel of previous poetry contributors
Featured Art: “Candid Sampler” by Amy Pryor
we second line trumpet through gridlock traffic.
we home-go in the back of cadillac limousines. we
wake up stiff in our sunday best. we move the sky.
we escape route the stars. we moonlit conspiracy
against daytime madness. we electrify. we past
due bill but full belly. we fridge empty. we pocket
lint. we make ends into extensions. we multiply
in case of capture. we claim cousins as protection.
we extend family to belong to someone, we siblings
cuz we gotta be. we chicken fry. we greased scalp. we
hog neck greens. we scrape together a recipe outta scraps.
we prophecy. we told you so even if we never told you nothin.
we omniscient except in our own business. we swallow a
national anthem and spit it out sweet. make it sound like
red velvet ain’t just chocolate wit some dye. we bend lies.
we amplify. we laugh so hard it hurts. we hurt so quiet we
dance. we stay fly. we float on tracks. we glide across
linoleum like ice. we make it look like butter. we melt
like candle wax in the warmth of saturday night liquor sweat.
we don’t die. we dust that colonies couldn’t settle. we saltwater
city built from runaway skeletons. we organize. we oakland in ’66.
we attica in ’71. we ferguson before and after the camera crews we
won’t die we won’t die we won’t die we won’t die we won’t
By Todd Boss
Featured Art: Silhouette of Person in Airport by Skitterphoto
I’m down to two bags.
I use a friend’s address.
I’ve only got one last
recurring nightmare
that forces me to face
my ex. There’s still one
child I haven’t lost, but
he’s next. Even loved
ones are non-essential,
sorry to report. You’ve
come here for news of
how to live, but Grieve
and grieve, is all I can
say. Grieve enough, you
can even get grieving
out of the way. Grief’s
chiefest among chores.
Do it well, and the
mostly empty universe
is yours.
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