2021 Summer Exclusive
New Ohio Review is archiving previous editions as they originally appeared. We are pairing the pieces with curated artwork, as well as select audio recordings. In collaboration with our past contributors, we are happy to (re)-present this outstanding work.
Issue 7 compiled by Rylee Reis.
By Claire Bateman
Featured Image: Sunset over the Catskills by Frederic Edwin Church, American, 1870-1880
Because it’s my book,
I will treat it however I want.
I will crack its spine, though not its spirit.
I will bend back the corners of its pages along the margins of whose cold fronts
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By Claire Bateman
Featured Image: Trees by Maurice Prendergast 1918
Everywhere in town you hear: “The forest’s on the move again”— our forest!
Not ours, exactly,
but we feel it to be so, since its visitation ensnares our limbs
as, at every crosswalk, neighbors duck and flinch, weaving carefully through, apparently,
nothing at all—
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By Claire Bateman
Featured Image: The Throne of Saturn by Elihu Vedder 1883-1884
What does our universe most like to do?
To contort without any warning into nothing but corners,
an awkward though not unbeautiful configuration.
Of what elements is our universe composed?
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By Lance Larsen
Featured Image: Ocean Swells by Winslow Homer 1895
As in a certain exit ramp outside Seattle,
a glissando of cement and steel
that promises release, or at least a shortcut
to the Sound, then sheers off into sky,
or stretches of Hemingway when dialogue tags
fall off the page, leaving only God
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By Lance Larsen
Featured Image: Approaching Storm by Edward Mitchell Bannister 1886
We have buried our aunt with words and hymns.
Now to finish the job with dirt.
In the front of the church, a hearse
waits to lead the cortège of headlights
to the cemetery two miles away.
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By Emily Toder
Featured Image: Abstract by Carl Newman 1858-1932
I was being chased by a rhombus I had gone up to it
a medium-sized rhombus the size of a float it had enchanted me standing in its canopy a stone-faced rhombus and yet a rhombus with real drive
I had to get through all this landscape to get the rhombus off my trail
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By Connie Wanek
Featured Image: The Thundershower by H. Lyman Saÿen 1916
Country people rise early
as their distant lights testify.
They don’t hold water in common. Each house has a personal source, like a bank account,
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By Melissa Cistaro
Featured Image: Sunset by Edward Mitchell Bannister 1883
1975
It’s a nice place to visit my mom, a lot better than the last one. I get to stay for almost a week and even be here for my tenth birthday. There’s a bed with a blue quilt, a shelf piled high with boxes of puzzles and the scent of my mom’s L’Air du Temps perfume drifting down the hallway. She lives on this dairy farm with 180 cows and her new boyfriend, Roger Short. One of the first things she mentioned about Roger is that he’s colorblind. She says he can’t see how horrible the wall-to-wall chartreuse carpet looks in his house—in fact he can’t see the color green at all. I think that’s a shame, because there are green fields like patchwork for miles around his farm. But then again, I suppose that being colorblind is just fine for Roger since he only raises black-and-white cows.
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By Maya Jewell Zeller
Featured Image: Clouds and Sunset, Jamaica by Frederic Edwin Church 1865
Her skin was too human too often, hands too happy to touch the splintered
door of a barn, too easily moved toward
a nettle, too ready to cover her mouth
when she gasped in joy, so she let
the aliens take her when they came.
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By John Brehm
Featured Image: Clouds and Rainbows, Jamaica by Frederic Edwin Church 1865
Time heals all wounds
except those
it
in-
flicts—and in
time even those.
John Brehm is the author of three books of poetry, most recently No Day at the Beach, and a volume of essays, The Dharma of Poetry. He’s the editor of The Poetry of Impermanence, Mindfulness, and Joy and the associate editor of The Oxford Book of American Poetry. He lives in Portland, Oregon.
Originally published in NOR Spring 2010.
By John Drexel
Featured Image: Sun and Clouds by Winslow Homer 1882
Everyone knows something. No one knows everything.
Most know less than they think.
As in life, there is much confusion,
especially about love. The girl in the basement kitchen,
grown disenchanted with the scholar
who is confused about the shape of his career,
considers entering a nunnery in Argentina.
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By Courtney Queeney
Featured Image: Study of Clouds, Rome, Italy by Francis Augustus Lathrop 1893-94
This is a little like high school
he said, when I wouldn’t take off my clothes.
It was true, although in high school
I would’ve come over to torture him deliberately
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By Kevin Casey
Featured Image: Desert Vista by Benjamin C. Brown 1932
The original plan: move to Los Angeles. Take acting classes. Meet people. Audition. Act. Get famous. (Not Katie Holmes famous. Kate Winslet famous.) Win awards. Get rich. Meet people. Shoot heroin and drown in a bathtub at Chateau Marmont, spawning sudden posthumous appreciation for the life’s work of Jill Dawson, the Actress.
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By Jim Daniels
Featured Image: Clouds by H. Lyman Saÿen 1910-12
She would be dead in twenty years.
I never felt as lonely
as kissing her in between auto shop
and the field house, imagining
wind wouldn’t find us
but it did.
We pulled apart and said nothing.
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By Mark Kraushaar
Featured Image: Kanawha River Valley by Samuel Colman 1888-90
Monsieur LeBrun est un ingénieur chimiste:
on page 8 of our ninth grade French One text
Mr. Brown was just leaving for work
and behind him, always, always, there was Madame
in her pretty print dress and beside her the waving twins
Marcel and Marie—Au revoir, Papa!
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By Mark Kraushaar
Featured Image: Landscape by Peter von Bemmel 1685-1754
She’s in the first booth left of the planters.
She’s been waiting an hour now.
She’s been waiting at the Watertown Family Buffet
with her little girl who’s dreamed up
some kind of a costume:
giant glasses, backwards cap, taffeta gown
which is clearly for him, for Al who’s
just now arriving, finally, and now
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By George Bilgere
Featured Image: A Bride by Abbott Handerson Thayer 1895
Perhaps, in a distant café,
four or five people are talking
with the four or five people
who are chatting on their cell phones this morning
in my favorite café.
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By Jeff Worley
Featured Image: Italian or Swiss Town by Frederic Edwin Church 1868
—after lines by Michael Van Walleghen
The moon, stars and weather
will happen as they always have,
though surely with my breath gone
the wind, in some slight measure,
will falter. Absent my footsteps
the earth will feel along its spine
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