Newohioreview.org is archiving previous editions as they originally appeared. We are pairing the pieces with curated art work, as well as select audio recordings. In collaboration with our past contributors, we are happy to (re)-present this outstanding work.

Issue 3 compiled by Ellery Pollard.

By Mark Cox

Featured Art: Sand Dunes, Harlech, North Wales by George Elbert Burr

Despite the curvatures adapted each to the other,
The slackening skin that in sleep feels lost without that other’s;
Despite the slatted fencing that marks their yard from others’,
And the offspring at play within, their testament to others;
Despite all the others they have embraced and refused;
Despite all otherness between them
They’ve acknowledged and recused;
They can no longer in mystery come to each other,
With the quickening and total surrender to another
That both empties each and fills the other.
And so they go on, because each goes on, despite the other:
To each their own wind-ironed waters,
To each their own bruised sky and horizon,
Their own shames, their own redemptions,
Awakening to each night’s newly shifted sloping,
Each day by unremitting day’s abiding,
Without need for another day or lover,
They endure side by side, in their time, no other.

By Catie Rosemurgy

A paperweight of sorts.
A shiny genetic clip for the stack of notes she’s become
on carbon dating, lozenges, and “getting over it.”

On a park bench she could lean over
to the other stunned, unmade-up mothers
who stare like cruelly unfinished paintings.
She could say, we are the giant price tags
that once hung off them.

A penny to toss in the well.
Mindlessness held together by bones.
Something that happened once in the distance,
like a war or an arctic expedition.

A list of ways she would try not to feel about a son or a daughter.
A list of choking hazards and a list
of times she will have peeled back the curtain
for him or her by age seven.
A list of golf courses and shades of blue.

Her penmanship begins to pile up and look like sticks,
like an attempt at a tiny fire left on a stone.

By Elizabeth Powell

The door’s made of gingerbread that the rats have eaten through.
You finger your record albums like cold, frigid women.
You could be more silent than silence without much of a fight.
I float, a birthday party balloon you let go into the deepening sky.
How I once felt my life against yours, two pieces of burnt toast.
The town had zoned me for you, now I’m a wetlands—
You can’t run your cable under my land anymore.
There’s nothing wrong with you, just as there is nothing wrong with the sky.
At my core, a humming gas heater, rusted, though still useful.
Nothing loves the world as a mortal soul can.
Yet the very word domestication sounds like a zoo for housewives.
Let’s see—what prayer was it we were saying?
Yes (of course), the one that got us here.
Once I loved you madly, like a girl pirate,
Now I use my sword to pick up moldy, low-loft towels from the floor.
Now we wear headsets because we can’t hear our own music.
Once I was your bride, now nothing more than a mermaid nun,
And the sea is so choppy, torrential, wild, biblical with sadness.
Oh, once you smelled of mint, of truth.

By David Gullette

What dragged me out of sleep was a nightmare about chaos:
I was trapped in rising water, and some idiot had lost the key
that would free the hatch or gridwork, the woven net of chains
in which I roared like a beached sea creature, but

I groped in the ship’s belly only to find
mis-mitred joints, screws without threads, seams oozing caulk,
and behind the last partition a cabal of mutinous carpenters
pissed at me for discovering flaws that were after all

clearly within the province of their fallen craft,
spelled out in terms precise on a typed bid
I somehow couldn’t find, rummage as I might
in Silver’s seachest, and even in the light of the real day,

the crows scattered off-key-cawing as I pushed out the door:
they knew my mind was unforgiving hornets,
they could smell a man disorder had enraged
to a cluster of snarling buckshot,

and the people of the city shrank back
as I strode toward the Capitol, chanting
a mantra vengeful and Sicilian, sixguns and grenades
clanking against my polished chainmail vest.

By Rodney Jones

For every true emotion there is an objective
correlative; a rainy day, for instance,
might mean a person feels a little gloomy.
Or the convertible that carries the Peach Queen
from the parking lot of Kroger West
to the front lawn of the junior high school
could suggest a person’s innermost feelings
about how the war goes on right in front of her
every night on CNN and all the other channels
and no one says what a dumb war it is,
the way no one comes right out and says
that the convertible girl became the peach queen
because she slept with one of the judges, Roy,
who maybe happens to be the ex-boyfriend
of the person writing the poem. I mean
many poems do not come right out and say
the feeling. They just give you the things.
Read More

By Jerry Williams

Featured Art: Rocky Seashore by Louis M. Eilshemius

On Thanksgiving morning, I gulp down triplicate
diet pills so I don’t have to eat.
Unafflicted with an invitation anywhere, the gym closed,
I sit on a bench facing Bristol Harbor.
This is Rhode Island and that’s ocean water.
Maybe I should drive up to the State House
with the Quakers and act useful,
but I stick to this cracked white bench and think of women
in coffee shops writing in leather-bound journals,
cups of adult herbal tea at the ready,
their calm separateness foreboding as boiling oil.
I’m over-and-done-with, a set of monkey bones in outer space.
I can’t even take pleasure
in the perpetuity of shimmering marina,
bright orange buoys, and the eccentricity of sailboats
still anchored out of season, naked masts too proud to move.
I look straight through the occasional jogger or cyclist
preemptively working off an engorgement.
Mute seagulls plunge along the jagged shore,
gloating on the wing and hunting for scraps, ancillary to nothing.