Blood Moon Blues

November 20, 2024.Reading time 1 minute.

By Johnny Cate

Featured Art: “Choreographic Translation,” black and white scan of choreographic
notation encapsulated in hand-made paper, by Zelda Thayer-Hansen

Post-punk November puts on
her black lipstick in the year’s mirror.
Eye shadow and zygomatic rouge

give time that Bauhaus cool: we’ve all
got it coming—who cares?
Death’s inevitability

means as much to me
as the bone-dry bottle of pinot noir
I drained solo under the blood moon—

gonna die and soon, soon.
So what? You won’t see me cry.
I’m deep six, baby—crystal-iris wastoid

in a white feather bed, voices in my head,
yeah, born doomed but it’s no
business of mine. I’m

drawing the blinds,
thinking about a girl in leather,
last name Jett slash first name Joan—

throw out your lame zodiac, loser,
and repeat after me: I don’t give a damn
’bout my bad reputation.

PORTRAIT OF LUCI (ON FRIDAY NIGHT)

November 17, 2024.Reading time 1 minute.

By Johnny Cate

Featured Art: Still from “feed me stone fruits”, by Zelda Thayer Hansen, a collaborative performance with Isabella DeRose

She’s driving buzzed
but the PSAs call that drunk.
Soft swerve under a gibbous moon
ripe as a white bleb
ready to pop, subs banging
College Dropout. Baby blue
cardigan over a hot pink bra—
call it cotton candy Bubblicious,
messy pony strobing
in the passing streetlights.
Crimson lip’s been her thing
since something like eighth grade,
and in the dash-glow
it’s the deepest red imaginable,
catching the light as she raps
every word to every verse.
This is pretty girl privilege shit,
sweater riding up the small
of her back shit, black
and white rattlesnake boot shit.
If all beauty is truth and truth
beauty, her body’s sola
scriptura—spritzed with
“God is a Woman”, the latest
Ariana Grande eau de parfum.
The right tire grazes the rumble strip:
kiss of death but it’s a butterfly,
a literal vibe, and subtly
the whole car shudders, touched.

Should You Choose To Accept It

November 23, 2023.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Emily Blair

I couldn’t wait to leave town when I was young.
After that, I’m not sure I have much of a story.
It’s true I met someone. We had a child together.
In between I walked across a frozen lake.
I drove over a frozen mountain.
I ran up a hill to find a pay phone.
I closed down the city for extended action scenes
to the tune of 290 million dollars. No—
I’m thinking of the latest Mission Impossible movie
with Tom Cruise. I get confused.
I should be writing domestic poetry,
but I don’t want to. What more do you need to know?
Our family of three live in a third floor apartment.
Sometimes we also meet up outside. I guess leaving town
is still the most exciting thing I’ve done. The other day
I asked another mother on the playground how to clean
bathroom grout. I said Stephanie, what’s your secret?
Then we ripped off our latex masks,
revealing our true identities. No—
that mask thing happened in the first Mission Impossible movie,
the one I saw with my friend Michelle. I leaned over
to say something snarky, but she was fast asleep.
It must have been the whirring of the helicopter blades.
There’s nothing duller than an overblown action sequence.
The secret to having an exciting life is the people you meet.
The secret to battling a helicopter in a tunnel
is explosive chewing gum. The secret to cleaning grout
is a magic eraser from Mr. Clean.

Culprit

May 11, 2022.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Carolina Hotchandani

Featured Art: Hello, Hello, by John Schriner

As you finish your morning cup of tea,
an identity thief rings.

You answer.

Sleep wraps loosely around your mind
like the flannel robe you’re still wearing.

It’s almost noon.

The television is on
but muted.

On the screen, Lieutenant Columbo’s mouth moves
as he pesters his prime suspect.
Soon, he’ll reveal how the murderer
murdered the murdered.

Ahhh, you say to the voice on the phone
that dubs over the episode’s denouement:

Tell me the story behind your name.
So you do.
Can you spell it for me?
So you enunciate:
M as in “money” — A — N as in “Nancy” — O — H . . .
till all the letters of your name go down
into the small holes of the phone.

You were born in India before Partition?
Those were hard times.

When the voice solicits your social security number,
you want to know why,
but the logic you’re offered makes sense:
there’s money to be claimed
by survivors of arduous times.

Columbo lights his cigar.
The murderer’s exposed, and the credits are rolling.

The end is not surprising; we’ve known it from the start.

We won’t learn who trafficked in your memories,
committing this crime.
You aren’t the best witness,
forgetful these days.
But you watch and rewatch your favorite TV sleuth
intuit the culprit, apprehend the truth.

My Mother Meets the Cast of Hair

November 30, 2021.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Adam Grabowski

Featured Image: Rush by Sam Warren

-Ludlow, Ma. May 1970

Let the sunshine
Let the sunshine in…

Smoking against the façade of a moon-
bleached gas station she listens
with a waitress’s patience to the local boy’s prattle
—her senior year of high school

& already the air stinks of coveralls.
Her hair is black. Brushed out long. Flyaways.
The occasional breeze & his good blue eyes.
A mile from here the highway shakes.

Free Will

April 1, 2021.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Daniel Eduardo Ruiz

I will pay for singing lessons

and play the piano. I will

learn Kung Fu, capoeira,

and break dance on the A train.

My magazine will be called

Pangaea and I’ll deliver

a carry-on bag of Café Bustelo

to poets living in Lithuania,

Zimbabwe, Jerusalem, Honduras.

I swear I’ll hold chopsticks correctly

before I’m buried, swear

to bungee jump, skydive,

go fishing because

I’ve never done it. One day

I’ll dunk a basketball—

sooner before later. Kiss

me, I wake up early

on purpose. Someone must

sing to the roosters,

peel the kiwis,

and preheat the oven.

Kiss me—I’m learning

Catalan. I’m getting a credit card

with sky miles and flossing

so my dentist will smile

more. At first, I missed

my car, but after seeing Dracula

I found I sleep sound

on buses. If Bruce Lee

did push-ups with two fingers,

what about me? Why can’t

I karate-chop concrete

slabs? I wasn’t always an apt

jump-roper. I didn’t always

speak English, nor did I like

cheese until my teens. I played

baseball with rocks and sticks,

basketball with a netless hoop,

soccer with a kickball.

The first seven years of my life

I refused to tie my shoes

myself. Now I can cut my own hair,

hold a handstand a few seconds, and

type with ten fingers.

I have whole albums memorized—

Big L and New Order, Kanye West and

Duran Duran—and every minute I’m

witness to the wind, a trained secret

agent. Every day I do

1,000 calf-raises. I’m turning

my body into a sculpture.

Daniel Eduardo Ruiz was born in Bayamón, Puerto Rico, and now studies poetry at the Michener Center for Writers at University of Texas-Austin. A 2016 Fulbright Scholar to Chile, his poems can or will be found in Southern Indiana Review, Juked, The Adroit Journal, and elsewhere.

Originally appeared in NOR 23.

The Flash

November 14, 2019.Reading time 5 minutes.

By Jennifer Givhan

My 11-yr-old son has forgotten not to eat on my bed He loves watching The Flash
from my room with the widest windows, the warmest place in our house each winter,

& with the coneflower warmth of his brown skin veiled in his bright red suit, he tucks
his kinky curls under the cap & ghosts from room to room undetected, sneaking

cookies till I climb beside him into piles of crumbs You’re grounded I echo
& he is sobbing but what he says catches

the pit of wax burning always inside me We got him
into special ed classes last year after years of fighting with teachers & breakdowns

over homework & his father yelling You’ve got to learn to listen & I kept insisting
he’s trying, he just doesn’t understand & here he slides onto my floor,

tears & mucus streaming down his cheeks, onto the superhero costume he wears
24/7, the toddlers at the park following him around perennially because he’s Iron

Man, Flash, Capt. America— Mama I don’t know what’s wrong with me
between hiccupping sobs I forgot—

I was hungry & your bed is so warm & I’m afraid I’ll go to jail
when I’m a grownup I’m afraid I’m bad because I always do the wrong thing

& I’m hugging him on the floor where I’ve joined him
as sirens flick onscreen thinking of how his little sister ties his shoes how years

back his best friend said You have to learn to tie your shoes—do you want your mom
to tie them for you when you’re twenty? & we laughed before we realized

we should not have been laughing how at night I watch him breathing & pray
because when I screamed at his father for screaming at him he said He has to learn

to listen! I’m trying to keep him safe—

Much later I ask our boy with a milkshake in his hand
what he would do if the police, like they did to his daddy—

He beeps. Electronic Jeremiah is not here right now. Please leave a message.
He flashes so quick, I never see him vanish.

What is your favorite past time?

February 19, 2019.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Robert Danberg

The form asked, “What is your favorite past time?”
So I wrote how I loved the 1947 Technicolor American comedy classic
Life with Father.
Whereas home to me as a kid felt like the morning after a trip to the emergency room,
William Powell’s brood lived on the brink of a joy omnipresent
in the wealthy brownstones of Gay Nineties New York,
and in Meet Me in St. Louis, which opens
on Mary Astor and Marjorie Main making ketchup,
Judy Garland’s face in repose always seemed baffled by love.
And who knew ketchup could be made?

Then, I peeked and saw my neighbor’d written “tennis.”
The guy on the other side, “tailgating.”
I noted that the question before was favorite color,
the one after, what would you do with an unexpected day off.
(Blue, by the way. And, of course, watch whatever’s on Turner Classic Movies.)

Suddenly, I was tired.
I longed for the time before I was ever asked this question.
I crossed out my answer and drew an arrow to the bottom where I wrote

“When I was twenty and my body was a blossom
trembling to shake itself from the vine.”

I Go Back to Mykonos 1976

February 1, 2019.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Maria Nazos

Featured Art: “Mykonos” by Maria Karalyos

—after Sharon Olds’ “I Go Back to May 1937”

By the third martini, he’ll ask her to marry him.
She’s a tourist, he’s a captain, home by chance.
I stand at the window, watching. I want to walk
into that bar, order an ouzo, and tell them
that, together, they’ll create a new generation
of pain. I want to tell him to court the island girl,
the one who, forty years later, will see him, run
to the restroom, and return with a fresh coat
of lipstick. I want to tell my young mother,
in the words of the great North American philosopher,
Pamela Anderson, “Never get married on vacation.”
But this is long before Pam and Tommy Lee, before
I existed. Before Reagan reigned over his long line of wreckage,
and couples shot themselves, together, in their cars. The Vietnam War
has ended, but here I am standing
at the window, watching while they meet,
both oblivious of wars they’ll wage. They’ll move
from Greece back to the Midwest—she’ll drink, alone,
in her kitchen. He’ll return to the island every chance
he gets. When he’s back in Illinois, he’ll stare
into the aquarium and long for water. She’ll look
at him, frozen, behind her highball glass. Still, I stay
at the window of the bar, wanting to use Pam’s biting wit.
But this is long before Baywatch, and they’re gazing at the
bay. I tap the glass like Morse code. Sealed in
my own tank of silence, I say, Please let go.
But as they take each other’s hands, I softly touch
the pane and turn away. Because they, too, have the right
to plunge. Even if they’ll swim out too deep:
holding onto each other until death.

My Mouth Versus Your Mouth

October 29, 2015.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Devon J. Moore

Featured Art: Miss Loïe Fuller by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec

Gwyneth Paltrow is on the air again
saying something about the difficulty of being
a mother on set is more difficult than being
a mother in an office, on a train, commuting
to those 9 to 5s. She says you have it easier
when your life is synchronized to the needs of mouths
that are not your mouth, to the needs of bosses
that don’t know your name. You have it easier when
you’re alone in a room with a baby,
when the sun hasn’t risen and your chest is dripping milk
and you wonder if today is the day the paycheck
or the 7 o’clock bus or the sun won’t come.
Gwyneth, I don’t have a baby,
but my dread is bigger than your dread,
my breasts are bigger, heavier, than your breasts.
Do you still feel the need to compare?
How about this? My cat would be cuter than your cat
if it hadn’t been for that sick neighbor and his box cutters.
My lover left and his back got smaller,
more quickly, than your lover’s back.
My dad dying sucked more than your dad dying sucked.
I could do this ridiculousness all day. But, Gwyneth,
the memory of my mother needs me
to say, that novel she always wanted to write
never got written. I was a needy daughter,
maybe even needier than your daughter.
I demanded
she look at me instead
of a book or the movie on the TV,
and maybe, Gwyneth, you were
in it, being thinner than my mother
but not prettier. There were days
my pretty mother didn’t look at me
because she couldn’t see past the dark
space in herself and I hated her.
There was a day my mother cried in the laundromat
when a woman, another mother, asked her what she did
for a living, and when my mother said she was a home
health care aide, the woman said that meant
my mother was nothing
but a maid.
The color of blood is more vivid and harder to clean
in my daydreams than in your daydreams,
and a powerless life is harder to describe to the powerful
than the sound of my mother crying on the rug.
But I’ll try.

Gun on the Table

November 18, 2014.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Eric Nelson

My favorite scene in Body Heat has nothing
To do with the intricate plot
That William Hurt and Kathleen Turner
Devise to kill her rich, oppressive husband.
My favorite scene, maybe ten seconds long,
Shows Hurt getting into his car as an antique
Convertible drives by, a fully costumed clown
At the wheel, waving. Hurt stares, slightly
Bewildered, while the clown passes and disappears.
That’s it. Cut to Hurt and Turner in another
Sweaty sex scene and post-coital planning,
The foregone noir conclusion closing in. Meanwhile,
Since we know there are no meaningless details
In art, we keep expecting the clown to reappear
Or at least figure indirectly yet clearly in the action.
Like Chekhov said—if there’s a gun on the table
In act one, it had better be fired by act three.
But no, the clown is random, there and gone, an odd,
Unrelated moment like any of the ones that pass us
Every day and we barely notice
Because life isn’t art, isn’t revised for coherence,
Not until our lives collapse around us
Like a circus tent in flames
And we begin to look for the alarm we missed.

Ocean State Job Lot

September 2, 2010.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Stephanie Burt

No one is going to make
much more of this stuff now, or ever again.

Graceless in defeat
but beautiful, harmless and sad
on shelves that overlap like continents,

these Cookie Monster magnets, miniature
monster trucks, scuffed multiple Elmos, banners

that say NO FEAR
and A GRILL FOR EVERY BOY
are a feast for every sense.

Some would be bad manners
to give or bring home-

Superman at 95

November 18, 2009.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Gregory Djanikian

Featured Art: The Collector of Prints by Edgar Degas

It was never a question of age, finally.
Time for him had always moved
too slowly, wasn’t he faster than time,
outrunning it whenever he wished?
Even now, he could hear the sound
of every second before it clicked.

Oh, he was powerful enough,
still wildly aerodynamic, able
to leap imagination itself.

But he’d grown weary of it all,
the adoring looks, the caped crusading
in the name of righteousness and truth:
hadn’t it frayed a little, lost
its gleam through the turbulent years?

Nothing had changed really,
annihilation, ruin, the horsemen
of every apocalypse still riding through
like bad cops and pestilence,
knowing where everyone lived.

And his own life, emptier now
with so many friends gone
or on the way, Jimmy, Lois,
doddering in their last stages
in a metropolis of fear.

Cherry Pop-Tarts®

October 28, 2009.Reading time 4 minutes.

By Heather McNaugher

Featured Art: Sweet Tooth by Dylan Petrea

I decide this will be it, my last pop-tart, cherry,
as I stand at the circ desk of the college library
and tear up your number
which I had written on a Post-it®, Hello Kitty®,
and then stuck to my ID.
The computer says I love you I owe 29 dollars
for Frank O’Hara and that thesaurus
I borrowed when I taught the class
how to find a synonym. I’m sorry. Hello Kitty’s ears
are burning—so tiny, so pink,
and so I pulverize them.
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New Ohio Review

Tag: PopCulture