Tag: OhioStories

What Is There To Do in Akron, Ohio?

.Reading time 3 minutes.

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.

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Void Unfilled

.Reading time 3 minutes.

By George Bilgere
Featured Art: Long Exposure Couple by Jr Korpa

I walk past Erin’s house at dusk
and there she is at her kitchen table,
working on her book about the Reformation.

She needs to finish it if she wants to get tenure,
but it’s slow going because being a single mom
is very difficult what with child care and cooking dinner
and going in to teach her courses on the Reformation,
which I can see her writing about right now,
her face attractive yet harried in the glow
of her laptop as she searches for le mot juste.

Meanwhile Andrew, her nine-year-old son,
shoots forlorn baskets in the driveway
under the fatherless hoop bolted to the garage
by the father now remarried and living in Dayton,
as Andrew makes a move, a crossover dribble,
against the ghost father guarding him, just as I did
when I was nine, my daddy so immensely dead,
my mother inside looking harried and scared,
studying thick frightening books for her realtor’s exam.

And although I hardly know Erin,
I feel I should walk up, knock on her door,
and when she opens it (looking harried,
apologizing for the mess) ask her to marry me.
And she will smile with relief and say
yes, of course, what took you so long,
and she’ll finish her chapter on the Reformation
and start frying up some pork chops for us

as I walk out to the driveway and exorcise
the ghost father with my amazing Larry Bird jump shot,
and tomorrow I’ll mow the lawn and maybe
build a birdhouse with the power tools slumbering
on the basement workbench where the ghost
father left them on his way to Dayton.

I will fill the void, having left voids of my own,
except that my own wife and son are waiting
down the street for me to come home for dinner,
and so I just walk on by, leaving the void unfilled,
as Erin brushes her hair from her face and types out
a further contribution to the body of scholarship
concerning the Reformation, and Andrew
sinks a long beautiful jumper in the gloom.

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When Mr. Bridges Died

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Mark Kraushaar

Featured Art: (Children Swimming) by Unidentified 

When Mr. Bridges died I knew
the whole eighth grade would have to gather
in the gym and sit there on those cheerless,
folding metal chairs set up by string-bean
Donny Graf the constant burper.
Mr. Bridges was a substitute,
we hardly knew him, but
I knew that there we’d be, all of us,
and there would be our stiff-grinning
twitchy principal, Mr. Albert Fraze, to slowly,
slowly stand and tell us what a deep
and lasting loss this was for all of us.
And later, sitting there three rows from the exit
by fatso Robert Randall who’d socked me
in the stomach on the 8 bus once,
I knew that Mr. Fraze would drill us
with the first long look that said, Every one of you
should be ashamed, ashamed for even thinking about,
for even thinking about thinking about
turning your gaze away one ten
thousandth of an inch:
a man is dead today.
And then would come this clumsy, freighted
metaphor and though I doubt I knew the word
(metaphor) I knew our Mr. Fraze: Mr. Bridges
was a kind of bridge, he’d say,
or found a bridge, or formed a bridge, or built
a bridge, or was a bridge from ignorance to wisdom,
from confusion to compassion, blah, blah, blah,
which is exactly what he said so that
sitting there I thought of that four-cabled
quarter-mile Roebling tower bridge
and I thought of its glittering
river city Cincinnati since we’d studied it all week.
I pictured its reaching, curving waterway, the great
Ohio and I thought of the circling terns and swirling slicks
and chemical froths and then I thought of a row of houseboats
and a paddlewheel steamer with a single, smiling
tourist, anyone and no one, waving once.

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