Tag: NOR 33

Why I Don’t Want to Be Young Again

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By C. O’Sullivan Green

Learning the swoop of a lowercase a,
an egg with an axial tilt, tail that could
wag or stand on end.

The school bus arriving for the first time,
coming from an unknown place, driven
into the nebulous world.

Being small enough to be uprooted
and repotted.

Compounding educations, division,
language, and time—how sixty can be
as remote as seventeen.

That mercurial metal, the trust-fall,
which can support or fail with
equal surprise.

Seeing animals I couldn’t take in, but that I
hoped would escape to find me in my backyard.

The evolving and lengthening definition
of consequence, how far is too far,
in distance as well as boundaries.

The succession of small
choices in file that loll
around the corners of days:

will I go down the driveway
on my skates,

can I say a swear
to ask what it means,

how much
of myself will I compromise
to fit in?

Fit in, better translated, to
survive within an ecosystem
(of which there are many,
school, home, peers, self).

Adolescence, the thinning middle age of
childhood. Middle ages of fiefdoms,
of gossip and lore.

The slow and glitch-prone renaissance
of the late teens.

Discovering the machines
and machinations of industry,
its comforts and unregulated
sins.

The pain of learning how to yearn
and how to become.

Living the unknown answer
to the question that is your life.

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Avenue of Soviet Heroes

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Andrew Payton

It is eight years now
and I still think of how you did not ask

that I look away
when you stripped sweat-soaked polyester

after our games of badminton, or how
you hefted the weight of the couch

onto your haunches while I rested
a hand underneath,

pivoting uselessly, or how
on the mountain you took

my blistered heels into your hands
and wrapped the wounds, replaced

my socks with your own, or how
before dinner you went into the basement

for a bottle of that Czechoslovak vodka
you bought in cases the November when students

flooded Prague, little water
you called it, and then

you inventoried forest biomass in Poland
and cheeks reddened with drink

theorizing
there were not enough trees for the furnaces, and,

touching the wool of your blue
peacekeeping beret, you

speak of the Serb who
served coffee from his porch in the morning

that was a smoldering crater by afternoon,
always you say goodbye you say in

the English you learned on Ohio construction sites
which never quite lost the pneumatic pop

of a nail driver, or how
the evening before I would leave

your wife threw me against the wall and bit my ear,
and I thought how

over the years with you
she must have forgotten to fuck

with anything
but violence.

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Encounter

.Reading time 43 minutes.

By Xingzi Chen

Featured Art by Ashura Lewis

The first thing Su met at the new school was a closed gate.

That day, she arrived earlier than the time agreed before and could not get through the school office number. The HR lady who had been arranging things for her was also not there. That left her waiting at the front entrance until a man stuck his head out from the guard shack to ask who she was.

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Self-help

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Andreas Nussbaumer

Forget everything you know
about contract law and the Chesterfield skink.
Continue to reframe every piece of art
you encounter in the bordello (replace
the last word with imbroglio and ditch
any diction associated with almanacs).
It’s important to hold yourself
to impossible standards. Embrace loved ones
often via ambush—with surprise on your side
you can’t lose. When in doubt
collect your old love letters and
if you don’t have old love letters then spill ink
like it’s milk—level of requitedness is irrelevant,
it’s the exercise itself that matters. Search frantically
for the deed of your house. If you don’t
own a house then buy one now. If you can’t
afford a house then make more money.
If you can’t make more money then get a better job.
If a better job eludes you then enter into organized crime.
I know a guy named Jimmy, he’ll set you right up.
Just tell him I sent you and thank me later.

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Potentially Anyway

.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Matt Hart

Featured Art by Mike Miller

Potentially, anyway, there is more
to the presence of the tree limb crews
on our street than the way they’re cutting
around the wires and sapping the trees
with their uninspired angling. To be sure,

I am not thinking. I am looking

seriously and deeply in invisible ways
at invisible things—the circulatory systems
of the men with their saws and the blood
going around inside a closed system—
and at visible ones—the squirrels with green

berries and the robins on the awnings—and

it occurs to me in this moment that none of them are
thinking, for example, about mitochondria. I mean,
I don’t know that for certain, but I can be pretty
certain—or certain enough—and it’s obvious
that none of them are looking at me looking

at their hearts beating palpably, the men

and the squirrels and the robins now flown
from the awnings and onto the mailboxes
with the red flags up. Mail is outgoing as the air
in my lungs. How did I drift into this? Potentially,
anyway, I sat up and noticed more than wind

in the trees, and I knew it meant something

sentimental to me, because everything is
if one sees it that way, and I do see it that way,
because that is how I’m wired in the middle
of a life, for better and worse. And yes, I am okay,
and I am not okay both—thanks for asking—

but I do, when I can, wish to overflow and bury

myself in the azaleas of the next world.
Right now, however, I am somewhat content
to feel that the other beings I’m watching
are also feeling things. Some of them are
conscious of this and others probably not,

but everything that moves moves wisely

if you watch, or if you see it that way.
There is something inside us that shows
through our motion. I don’t know for certain,
but I feel pretty sure, or I want to anyway.
Sentimental, I squint until my eyes become

stars, potentially or possibly, I can feel it

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That Evening Sun

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Kate Fox

“The best line of iambic pentameter is not in classical
poetry but in W. C. Handy’s ‘St. Louis Blues.’”
—Elizabeth Bishop

Let me end this song on a not-so-minor note,
rest my head on this 1926 Gibson, sing goodbye

to every lyric I have ever learned: the one about the boat
that can carry two and the lonesome picker, the one

about how Louise rode home on the mail train
and how walking is most too slow. And, of course,

the one about riding down the canyon that, even after
forty years, recalls my father on a Saturday night


wrapping the fingers of his left hand with adhesive tape,
swaying and slapping an upright bass in some

small-town dance hall while my mother waltzes
across a floor strewn with corn meal, and my brother

and I fall asleep among coats piled high on folding chairs
against the wall. He once told me music was the one thing

he could count on, married, as he was, in 1929,
his first child, a girl, born and buried a year later,

a life of lung trouble that finally sent him out West
to either die or get well. At thirty, I took him

at his word, picked up the guitar he gave me,
the one around whose neck he wrapped my fingers,

and taught me songs that survive on breath alone:
how the water is wide, how I won’t be worried long,

how I hate to see that evening sun go down.

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Questions for the Singer of the Last American Folk Song

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Matthew Thomas Bernell

Featured Art: 2130, Site Study by Brooke Ripley

Does the last chorus include a rose
or heart-shaped Armageddon
dust cloud? How tender
was your lover’s touch,

if ever? Do you stay up,
fireside, listening for a howl
or yip with which to tune your beat
Gibson, sooty fingers twisting

tarnished tuners slowly, scared
a snap will be the end
of it all? No more strings, no
more accompaniment. Or

are you about to upload yourself,
the last embodied homo sapiens,
levitating, tinkering with a vintage
synthesizer one note at a time?

Have incandescent whirring
contraptions replaced mixers
and interfaces except in robot-guided
music museums? Have we reached

the singularity? Or are you cut
by a lonely glass shard wind
from the bent, grim
horizon? When your jaw opens

and the vocal cords start
to vibrate, what
is the first word? Something short,
heartfelt? Like Don’t or Oh?

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“Enduring Mystery” and the Ferryman Farmer in Mary Oliver’s “The River Styx, Ohio”

.Reading time 8 minutes.

By Rachel Rinehart

Abandoned barns and houses are a common feature of farm country in Ohio. It’s not unusual to see them far back off the highway—two-story clapboard colonials with doors missing or ajar, an oak tree growing out of a roofless silo or vine-choked milkhouse. These places are, as Mary Oliver presents them in her poem “The River Styx, Ohio,” extinct portals to the underworld, places where a connection has been severed, where old ways of knowing and suffering are buried.

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“Above the River”: James Wright’s Ohio “Bloodroots”

.Reading time 24 minutes.

By Therese Gleason

Featured Art by Claire Bateman

The Ohio River runs through James Wright’s oeuvre, a throughline leading back to the hardscrabble community of his youth. It’s a region ravaged by strip mining, extractive industry and labor practices, and dead-end factory jobs resulting in generational poverty. Yet despite his professed hatred of and determination to escape his native Martins Ferry in the Appalachian foothills, Wright returns again and again in his poems to the banks of the river he grew up exploring. This boundary between Ohio and West Virginia, between water and land, is haunted by the ghosts of drowned childhood friends, miners “dead with us” in the gorges, and memories of violence witnessed—and perpetrated—in his youth. But the sacred and profane river—with its “bare-ass beach” that is “supposed to be some holiness”—is also his “Muse of black sand.” “How can I live without you?” he writes. “Come up to me, love, / Out of the river, or I will / Come down to you.”

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Elegies for Home: An Interview with Amit Majmudar

.Reading time 13 minutes.

conducted by Betsy K. Brown on July 11th, 2023

Betsy K. Brown: Today, we will be hearing from poet, novelist, and doctor Amit Majmudar. Majmudar is the author of seventeen books, with three more forthcoming this year. He also served as the first poet laureate of Ohio.

As a fellow Ohioan and poet, I’m particularly curious about how Ohio has influenced your writing.

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Ohio Geometry: Hanif Abdurraqib and the Shape of Home

.Reading time 10 minutes.

By Vrinda Jagota

Throughout my 20s, when romances have fizzled or my career trajectory has felt unmappable, my deep passion for my home of New York City and my belief that I will always live here has been an emotional anchor. But in reading poet and essayist Hanif Abdurraqib’s writing about his home state of Ohio, I’ve reconsidered what a hometown is and how we can relate to these places.

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A Writer in America

.Reading time 9 minutes.

By Molly Rideout

It wasn’t until I had to move from Iowa to Columbus that I finally sat down to read Sherwood Anderson. When my father’s father downsized his book collection for the move to the retirement home, he took with him thirteen copies of Winesburg, Ohio, the most famous title of this now less-than-famous author. Thirteen doesn’t count the twenty-one volume complete Anderson published in Kyoto, Japan, or the scholarly publications devoted to Anderson’s novel-in-stories. It doesn’t include the 1962 issue of Shenandoah, wherein my grandfather argues that, while Anderson’s “hard, plain, concrete diction” paints superficial impressions of Ohio, what truly interested the author was the “dark, unrevealed parts of the personality like the complex mass of roots that, below the surface of the ground, feeds the common grass above in the light.”

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Ohio Hip: In-betweenness in Michael Cunningham’s “White Angel”

.Reading time 14 minutes.

By Caitlin Horrocks

One of my all-time, hands-down, desert-island favorite short stories begins like this: “We lived then in Cleveland, in the middle of everything.” The narrator does not mean the middle of the action. “One of the beauties of living in Cleveland,” he later explains, “is that any direction feels like progress.” We’re in the middle of the country and also the middle of the Twentieth century, just after Woodstock but “before the city of Cleveland went broke, before its river caught fire.” We’re four sentences in and Cleveland’s not looking too good. It’s looking like a placeholder for either midwestern boredom or rustbelt squalor.

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“An Other for Ohio’s Self”: David Foster Wallace’s Great Ohio Desert

.Reading time 15 minutes.

By Michael O’Connell

Featured Art by Claire Bateman

David Foster Wallace is often discussed as a regional writer; critics have focused on the ways his fiction and nonfiction depict both the northeast (in Infinite Jest) and the midwest, primarily his sometime-home of Illinois. But what is often overlooked is that his first novel, The Broom of the System, is an Ohio novel. Although Wallace didn’t have any concrete ties to the state (he grew up in Illinois, and was living in Massachusetts when he first drafted the novel), he chose to set the book in the Cleveland area, for the same reason that so many writers use Ohio as a setting—because it serves as a synecdoche for America itself. Shortly after the novel’s release, he told an interviewer that he had never actually been to Cleveland, but as “a middle-westerner. . . he wanted a heartland city that he could imagine instead of describe.” In Wallace’s imaginative vision of the “heartland,” Ohio is, as one character describes it, “both in the middle and on the fringe. The physical heart and the cultural extremity.” He goes on to claim that “we feed and stoke and supply a nation much of which doesn’t know we exist. A nation we tend to be decades behind, culturally and intellectually.” This is a division that Wallace explores in much more depth and detail in many of his nonfiction pieces, such as “The View from Mrs. Thompson’s,” “Getting Away From Already Being Pretty Much Away From It All,” and “Derivative Sport in Tornado Alley,” all of which use the midwestern locale to interrogate what it means to be a true American.

In Broom, Wallace uses the heartland setting to explore many of the thematic elements that are central to his later writing (some more successfully than others—it is very much an apprentice work). The central plot, such as it is, revolves around 24-year-old Lenore Beadsman, who must negotiate being surrounded by a variety of hideous men (including her boyfriend/boss, her landlord, and her therapist), while searching for her great-grandmother, a former student of Wittgenstein, who has escaped from her Shaker Heights nursing home. The novel also interrogates the idea of what constitutes reality; Lenore in particular is worried that she is just a construct of language, and that “she had no real existence, except for what she said and did and perceived and et cetera, and that these were . . . not really under her control.” Wallace later distanced himself from the novel, calling it “a sensitive little self-obsessed bildungsroman” written when he was “a young 22.” Michiko Kakutani accurately described Broom as “an unwieldy, uneven work—by turns, hilarious and stultifying, daring and derivative.” She notes how Wallace takes on “serious philosophical and literary discussions” while also getting sidetracked by “repetitious digressions, and nonsensical babbling that reads like out-takes from a stoned, late-night dormitory exchange.” This is a fair critique, but as with many a late-night stoner conversation, there are certain elements that can hold up to closer scrutiny in the sober light of day.

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