Tag: Summer 2024

Announcing the 2024 Summer Online Exclusive

.Reading time 1 minute.

Featured Art by Karen Renee

The latest Summer Online Exclusive from New Ohio Review is now available!

The issue includes art from the Athens Photo Project; fiction from S Graham, Jennifer Schomburg Kanke, Aimee Parkison, and Owen Thomas; nonfiction from  Marissa Yuan; poetry from Pam Baggett, Danny Caine, Lauren Camp, Rob Cording, Savannah DiGregorio, Ockert Greeff, Evan Gurney, Mickie Kennedy, Patrick Kindig, Georgia McKay Lodge, Jennifer Martelli, Olga Maslova, Jory Mickelson, Dion O’Reilly, David B. Prather, Linda Ann Strang, Leigh K. Sugar, Emily Wheeler, Steven Winn, and Dan Wriggins; and reviews of work by J. C. Scharl, George David Clark, Nancy Miller Gomez, Kari Gunter-Seymour, and Kate Fox by Betsy K. Brown, Jonathan Geltner, Michael Lavers, Erin Redfern, Bonnie Proudfoot, and Rose M. Smith.

We hope you enjoy our 2024 Summer Online Exclusive.

Thanks for reading,

-The Editors

Arizona Snow Globe

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Dan Wriggins

I needed two thousand dollars by Friday.
You deadheaded a daisy. I googled
precipitously. You beat the welcome mat.
I had a related question. You wore a hat in a place
where it was considered not the vibe
to wear hats. I choked
on the billowing dust. You buttered a bone
surgeon. I listened to a song you said was money.
You drew five cards (unlucky)
in a row. I dug my heels into the belly
of the mule. You ladled bathwater.
I couldn’t get the mule to move. You tied a sheet
bend in our yo-yo string. I chased a chicken
under a canoe. You had a serious moment
on the tilt-a-whirl. I rearranged
according to aura. Green, indigo, black. You re-
heated soup. I smoked one
down to the filter. You waltzed
with failure in your mind. I possessed a drunk
driver. You roadkill.
I tried pouring coffee on the music.
Why not at least try? You looked at me
like a stalled motorboat.
I asked how many copies we could move
and how fast. You synthesized
a boring diamond. I signed petition
after pathetic petition. You shook
a snow globe. I proposed posting up under a tree
until the whole thing blew over. “Darling,”
you said, “I don’t have the keys to that
apartment.” I focused on a hubcap.
You bought a falafel truck
because apparently Jesus had
a falafel truck, and we can always inch
closer. Everything I did to make you happy.
Everything you did. You chucked a stick in the river
and it floated around.

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It’s Not Always About the Lemmings

.Reading time 5 minutes.

By Olga Maslova

Sometime last century in Kharkiv, father
and I fled the melting August pavement,
bribed the conductor of a sold-out train.
He jammed us in the luggage racks,
and we took off to the Black Sea.

The moving furnace spat us out somewhere
in Kerch, the easternmost town in the Crimea
two hundred miles from sandy beaches, magnolias,
and pine trees,
streets lined with vendors selling buttered corn
charred shish kebabs and chacha. Predawn Kerch

was drab and empty, last night’s drunks
scattered on the streets like seals in their puddles,
seagulls feasting on rotting fish. At the port
we made a deal with a captain of a cargo bulker
Father paid the fare with his life stories, and kept
the crew awake.

I sat 12 hours next to the cockpit
                                                            staring
    at the horizon changing colors
                                                                    from pink
                                to blue
                                                   to pink again
                        to black

till the evening Yalta embraced us
like an old friend at the party:
a little tipsy, a little horny, determined
to dance all night
under shooting stars

                * * *

An arctic snowy owl arrived
in the south of France last Wednesday
3000 miles away from home. Her baffled face
was captured by the paparazzi. British scientists
as their rituals dictate, had offered an explanation:

It’s all about the lemmings:
The owl was following the lemmings
The spike in the lemming population
had lured the hungry bird

There is one person
who really knows what happened—
the captain of the Greenlandic freighter
the stowaway had boarded, heading south

But he won’t tell

                     nor will the owl

                                   nor the lemmings.

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Transitioning Glasses 

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Lauren Camp

Featured Art by Mitzi Klaiber

When I come in after shoveling
that last round of snow—an exquisite parliament
of low-slung brightness
even in its groaning down toward the ground,
I see my sister
has texted QUICK
THING. So easy to send such airy
unplanned balloons. The ordinary
flakes saunter down, will not let go, the white
weather not yet leaving its filthy
will with car tracks and time. I am her
shelter. The snow falls as spheres.
I like being inside now watching it.
I think of the weight of it, the pile-up
as it further neatens. The white at its best
is a blur. My eyesight is off. It has been two years
and seven months since I peered
through one of those devices that brush
eyelashes. I haven’t heard a doctor
circle those disks and ask this one
or that one, this one or that. What I see
is another day, the wind sucking about.
A coyote walks behind the junipers
And now its shadow has become an action.
The snow comes down, side by side.
I am hardly paying attention;
my eye no longer holds what it touches.
There is so much noise in life.
As children, my sister and I played tag
during sermons. I could go on
about how her notes bother me.
The snowflakes are an arm’s length off.
It could be the only thing I do:
answering her, filling the white void
in my hand. Everything comes from further up.
When I respond I can talk now,
I am saying no one realizes
love without feeling this urgency. 

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In Which I Compare My Brain Surgery to a Slope Mine

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Evan Gurney

Featured Art by Greg Rounds

Mine and mill have done their work,
the ridge face once lush with fir
and poplar now cleared of airy timber,
the brow slashed and bored, a strip
of railroad curling like a scar up
the mountain to the excavation’s cavity,
sealed now but still marking its territory,
still leaving its lasting impression.

Hidden from sight, a subterranean labyrinth
of crosscuts line like stitches the shaft
that slopes down and in through folds
and plunges to the precious stope
that engineers surveyed, prospected,
and, finally, removed entire, hoisting out
the bituminous ore, leaving behind a sump
that time and age will fill once more.

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Things of the Earth

.Reading time 3 minutes.

By David B. Prather

Featured Art by Karen Renee

We knew what it meant to grow up
in the suburbs, the product of poor beginnings―
the progeny of farmers who readied the earth
with horse-drawn plows, and women
who kept having children

until it killed them,
people who didn’t know anything else,
surviving the Great Depression
by telling ghost stories and war stories
never meant to be believed.

We never let on.
The girl across the street swore
her mother was a full-blooded Spanish princess,
when we knew she was Mexican.
We were too young to know it didn’t matter.

The Pentecostals three doors down,
women with uncut hair and denim skirts,
men with lives like any other, were the only ones
who were sure in their conviction
they were headed for heaven.

The rest of us resented them
because this meant we were condemned,
like the old tool shed down the dead end
where all the kids used to play,
scaring rabbits in and out of the rotting lumber.

We just had nowhere to go
in the middle of summer. So we dared
the clotted vines of poison ivy, itching
the next day, and grateful for the calamine lotion
pinking our arms and legs

in thick splotches through which our fingernails
dragged until the welts broke
and the fluid spread. How it ever stopped
we couldn’t guess. We ran through
the rain-wet grass, mud-soaked when we found

a one-and-a-half-foot nightcrawler.
Not even the boys would touch it
except with a stick to carry it to the breezeway
where we watched the awful thing suffer
the concrete, already half dead anyway.

As fascinated as we were
by the things of the earth, we should
never have realized the sky was blue.
But there it was, hanging over us
large as any relative who came back

from the front line, shell-shocked
and gun crazy, unable to make a living
at even the smallest thing he tried,
or the girl who hated Christmas
for its one beaded necklace,

who never forgave herself for the gift
of scarlet fever that killed her father,
or any of the rest of us who cursed
in the old backward ways, convinced someday
we could care for ourselves. We could let this go.

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We Grow Apples

.Reading time 45 minutes.

By Owen Thomas

My father told me the story of this big-time gangster from Georgia. The guy ran the streets of Tbilisi but left in the 1990s. He was running from something. He ended up a trash collector on the streets of New York City. I used to imagine this gangster’s thick gloved fingers wrapping around the handles of the plastic bins, lifting them up and flipping them into the back of the truck.  

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Evie and Adam at the Farmer’s Market 

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Linda Ann Strang

After Jack Gilbert 

Scoping out the fattened apples
and snatching QR codes with an iPhone,
Evie, always eager to bootlick, says, in lipstick,
What do you think, Addie, babe? Requiring  

no official arraignment to condemn herself
to death, she proffers in turn Paula Red,
Ginger Gold, Jonamac, Jonagold. Her last ditch:
How about tonight I make tarte tatin,  

or apple crisp? Then, Would you like me to get you
another cup? Careful, take mine. There’s a drip.
Her voice leaping in pitch, she tries to forget
that time she snuck off with fucksome 

Lucifer—Dodge Viper parked in the Johnstone’s
orchard, midnight cigarettes, a demon pretending
his cock’s a rattlesnake to make her laugh.
She stifles a rebel guffaw right now, nearly losing 

it in front of the key limes. Bitching husbands
and fruit can mess with your head, plus
you never know when God might appear pink
aproned on the porch, pie upfront, and eager to snitch. 

Read More

How to Remove a Hot Sauce Stain

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Dan Wriggins

Featured Art by Beth Klaus

First, remove yourself
from the plane entirely.
I’ve heard about drugs that can help,
societies one can join.
Some people move to Maine and jar things.
There’s a Sun Ra movie
where Sun Ra plays the piano
so hot the club burns down.
A guy from my high school started tracking eagles.
I knew a woman who said
she meditated for an hour a day,
sometimes two. Megan
from Wisconsin. You had so many kinds
of hot sauce. Sambal.
Cholula. Dave’s Five Alarm. Habanero
from Hell. Meggy, my days are so long,
and I think only of you

Read More

Remedies

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Mickie Kennedy

I

The surgeon wants me
to remove my prostate.
The upside: my life.
The downside: no more
erections, unless I take
a TriMix penile injection,
used by porn stars
for ten-hour shoots.
I do not feel
like a porn star.
Diapers for a year
if I’m lucky,
for a life if I’m not.
Also for a life:
arid orgasms.
The upside: no more
messes. The downside:
no more messes.

II

Reddit-strangers want me
basic: every day,
I’m swallowing seven
teaspoons of baking soda
to vault my pH
above eight. Cancer
struggles to survive,
they say, in a basic
environment. I shit
a dozen times a day.
I piss on a plastic strip
and it changes color,
almost like a game.
I live on the toilet
but still, that’s a life.

III

The Happy Prostate
Facebook Group
wants me on everything—
milk thistle, black
seed oil, broccoli sprouts
I grow myself,
sea moss, boron,
tudca twice a day,
a dog dewormer
even though I’m not
a dog, mangosteen,
hibiscus tea, soursop
leaves, and never more
than twenty pits
of bitter apricot,
unless I need
to end things early
(a drop of cyanide
in every pit).

IV

The oncologist wants me
to annihilate my prostate
with targeted blasts
of radiation.
CyberKnife.
Sounds like something
Guy Fieri would hawk
on late-night TV.
This is everything
you need, he says,
trimming his frosted tips
with a glowing scalpel.

V

Randy wants me cumming every day, a frenzy
before the famine.

With the patience of an attentive nurse,
he helps me arrive,

his finger curling towards the place
my prostate takes me—
a brief obliteration.

Maybe if I touch the cancer,
he says, it’ll leave.

My stupid, silly man.
It doesn’t work like that.
But even when there’s nothing left to touch,

I would let him touch me there.

Read More

Jam Sandwich

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Patrick Kindig

I plunge my hand into my husband’s gut
& squeeze. He giggles, doubles over

like an uncovered pill bug.
He has never had a gut before. We

are both taking pleasure in it,
this soft appendage extending

his silhouette. Of course, he is also
taking some shame. Once,

his stomach was ribbed & rigid
like a Victorian corset. Unlike me,

he never knew his body
to grow unexpectedly, never fingered

an expanding love handle. Now
he has. Now

we take turns touching his tum
& laughing like young mothers, delighted

to discover a new fold in the baby’s
arm. Sometimes

we press our bellies together
& jiggle them. For some reason,

we call this the jam
sandwich. Who knows why.

All I know is it makes me feel
like a child, doing something silly

& a little naughty, joystruck
by all our bodies can be.

Read More

Steal a Grape

.Reading time 1 minute.

By David B. Prather

Featured Art by Paulette Hall

Three years now,
I still resurrect my grandmother,
pull her out of that mausoleum vault
and bring her back to life.
My life, that is.
I know she’s tired and wants to rest,
but grief is greedy
and tireless. When I pull her back,
she wears red,
which, for now, is symbolic of Paradise.
Sometimes, she is a cardinal,
especially in winter
when the world needs to be reminded
of whatever it wants most.
What I want is to take her to Kroger,
so she can steal a grape or two.
I want to take her to a doctor’s appointment
so she can complain about the wait.
I want to take her to see a movie
so dramatic she will pretend not to notice
that it hitches my breath
and stings my eyes. Three years from now
is unpredictable at best.
And resurrection
is only a way to drag the past with us,
lest we forget. Yes,
we forget.

Read More

In haraqa al-film

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Jory Mickelson

[One translation of the Arabic title is when a camera’s film is literally burned by the sun] 

In the photographic crypt in Lebanon,
Studio Scheherazade, where amid the hundreds
of thousands of negatives sometimes 

an image will emerge of friends,
lovers, or something in-between, same-gendered
couples playing marriage, behind 

the photographer’s screen, unable to be taken
into the afternoon’s harsh light, the small town’s streets,
where, if exposed all is ruined. 

So too, in the layering of history,
every Egyptian hieroglyph gives you side-eye.
Each Persian relief: 

side-eye, maybe smiling. But an Akkadian
never deigns to look at you at all, a glance beneath
their dignity. Their eyes  

on some king in symmetrically crinkled robes
& perfectly tasseled hair, stiff as the ceramic smocks
of the Sumerian votive statuettes— 

the Sumerian’s eyes enlarged
because their eyes were watching a god—
until we carted them off  

to some white-walled museum where they look
now upon the lookers, praying their dusty prayers,
in climate-controlled absence.  

Our prayers, too, will go unseen
or be lost beyond our time, the gods forgotten,
and every couple a speculation.

Read More

Chapter IV. The Suffocation of the Mother

.Reading time 19 minutes.

By Savannah DiGregorio

Excerpts from The Extant Works of Aretaeus The Cappadocian, translated by Francis Adams (1856), A Brief Discovery of a Disease called the Suffocation of the Mother (1603) by Edward Jorden

In the middle flanks of women lies the womb, a female
viscus, closely resembling an animal; for it is moved of
itself hither and thither. In a word, it is altogether erratic.

                                                                            You made an aquarium of my insides. Sculpted
                                                                            salty marshlands out of meaty pulp. Fashioned
                                                                           algae nests from fleshy sinew, white & crooked
                                                                                                     as the half-moons of fingernails.

You napped in the hollows of my ribcage. Nestled
your mighty body into hammocks of irish moss. Smacked
on sugar kelp like pink chewing gum, sapped & sweet
as the raw nerves under cracked teeth.

                                                                             In fragrant smells it also delights and advances
                                                                     toward them. To fetid smells, it has an aversion, and
                                                                        flees from them. On the whole, the womb is like an
                                                                                                                  animal within an animal.

From deep inside me you now roar. Crying
and howling until my whole belly
sometimes lifts.

                                                                           When, therefore, it is suddenly carried upwards,
                                                                    and remains above for a considerable time, violently
                                                                      compressing the intestines, the woman experiences
                                                                                                                                                choking.

                                                      My organs; an oblation to you.

For the liver, diaphragm, and lungs are quickly
squeezed within a narrow space; and therefore loss
of breathing and speech seems to be present.

                                                                                                                 With teeth clamped shut,
                                                                                                         our hearts convulse in chorus.

This suffocation from the womb accompanies females
                                             alone.

                                                                                    Men stuff partridge feathers and hot coals
                                                                                                                    inside my nostrils. Prod
                                                                                                       blisters on my breasts—blindly,
                                                                                                      as newborn kits search for milk.

Those from the uterus are remedied by fetid smells,
and the application of fragrant things. A pessary
induces abortion and a powerful congelation of the
womb.

                                                                                                              From me you surface burnt
                                                                                                 and hemorrhaging on sorrow. Like
                                                                                                                that of slaughtered swine.

                                                      Grief comes with sponge and pail.
                                                      Scours my soul—barren,
                                                      we laugh ourselves to sleep.

Read More

To Be Stevie Nicks Cool

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Jennifer Martelli

So many men love my friend:
her boyfriend and both ex-husbands build her a three-season porch,
all cedarwood and teak. Pine needles from her backyard

cover the almost-floor. I tell her she is sexual,
like Stevie Nicks. People can smell it like golden beer. They smell my indifference—
it smells like a New England Timber Rattlesnake, all scales,

black-tinged-gold, like a hole. I learned today in a crossword
that Venus has no moons. That was the down clue,
What Venus lacks that Earth has: _ _ _ _ _:

five letters—O and O—filled in already. She sends me
a video of the three men and their equipment: saws, nails, drills,
hammers, planes, pulleys, rope,

planks of wood, aromatic as a closet, some tool
with claws on both ends they toss back and forth, way too hot.

Read More

Almost Heavenly Babies

.Reading time 11 minutes.

By Aimee Parkison

Featured Art by Chris Leonard

1.) You Sound Drunk, You Probably Shouldn’t Leave the House Today

We never speak of the reasons for her drinking, though her husband was in the navy overseas, a high-ranking officer, leaving her alone at home. When I was a child, whenever her husband was away, my neighbor would visit my mother, stumbling into our house, reeking of whiskey and crying about her husband, not wanting to be alone at night. She was the type of woman other women called a doll. Pretty, slender, elfin-faced with no children, she was youthful and kind with an aura of fragile, feminine innocence nurtured like a pet in a well-swept house with caramel aluminum siding and wooden shutters painted sunny-sky blue. A divorced woman also abandoned by a man, my mother felt sorry for our neighbor and asked me to stay over with her to keep her company, since my mother had to watch my baby sisters and had work in the early morning as a secretary at the meat-packing plant. I packed my tattered overnight bag and skipped over to the neighbor’s neatly decorated house, where I slept in crisply laundered paisley bedsheets in her husband’s place as she attempted to fall into a drunken sleep, shivering, curled against my back, spooning me. Sensing her dreaming, I woke in the dark with her hands on me. I was thirteen when it started, fifteen when it ended with her fingers creeping inside me. I pretended to sleep. At sunrise, she cooked me a breakfast of burnt buttered toast dusted in cinnamon sugar while warning me about men. She watched me eat as she sucked her fingers while sipping bourbon-spiked tea.

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Miraculous

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Pam Baggett

Featured Art by Eliza Scott

Switch on the car radio, music falls out of the air
into my ears: James Brown, Joni Mitchell,
Jim Croce. Old gold. Plus, when I got in my car,
it cranked like it does every time, so many miracles
in that I can’t even count them. Traffic lights
that help us get along with one another,
scent of roast chicken rising from my grocery bag,
which also contains the most delicious bread,
whole wheat with flax, sesame and a hint
of cherries. That someone thought to turn wheat
into bread, miraculous. Yeah, I know, I just
had to start on a heart pill, but it’s nothing,
a little electrical nuisance, no effect
on longevity. And yeah, my best friend
has a hurt so deep and wide whole oceans
pour through it, and her story’s not mine to tell
but jeez, what a soul-shatterer. Yet even she
watches bumblebees. She swears they’re her favorite
miracle. So aerodynamically complicated
in the way they get off the ground you’d think
they never would—flapping their wings
back and forth, not up and down—yet up they go.
She says if they can beat gravity she can too,
and I gotta tell you that to see her dressed
and laughing, hear her singing with that voice
that sounds like water tumbling over rocks
in some ancient river, water that’s passed through
some murky cavernous places but has emerged
into the stunning light of day, to hear her sing again
is one big fat black-and-yellow buzzing miracle.

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The Grandmother Tree

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Pam Baggett

My sister named this venerable maple
growing at the edge of the mountain’s gravel road,
main trunk long broken, pocked with holes,
a once-mighty tree now slowly failing.
She’s lost her apical dominance, I say, meaning
that when the top broke off, side branches
shot up past the injured trunk like raised arms.
On the left, one wide kind eye, an open mouth
framed by credible lips. Step right, a second eye
squinted shut, mouth twisted up, as if she’s yelling
at us the way our father’s mother did: imagined slights,
our insufferable rudeness, which she thought
should be spanked out of us. Mom never laid a hand,
which says a lot about her mother, gone too soon
for my sister and me to have known. Grandma Baggett
and her snarling chihuahuas gone, too, when our parents divorced.
No wonder my sister imagines a tree could be a grandmother;
she’s been hiding in stories since we were small.
I anchored to the safety of science, to cold fact: Trees break.
A grandmother can call you Sugar one minute,
rage at you the next. Can die without you ever once
hearing her voice.

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A Small Room Off To The Side

.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Ockert Greeff

Featured Art by Karen Renee

He will come to live with you
Make him feel welcome 
My mother says 
Her eyes turning away from mine 
Before I can search for the meaning 

I imagine I might have a small, empty room off to the side 
With a reddish glim 
That might bother him at night 
When he takes off his thick, black-rimmed glasses 
And his eyelids become soft and white 
Butterflies in his leathery face 

I would have to get a night-side table for his glasses 
And his teeth 
And his cowboy book 
So that he feels welcome when he comes to live with me 

I think that old single bed will be fine 
Now that he is alone 
He wouldn’t want more anyway 
But I will get new sheets 
For his old, pale body and his tanned forearms 
And maybe a soft, new pillow for his sunken cheeks 

I will ask my sister for that old painting 
With the open plains and hazy blue mountains 
So far, far in the distance  
The one she took when he died 

So that he has something to look at 
And so that he feels welcome  

When he comes to live with me, in me 
In a small room off to the side of my heart 
So very far from the plains where he grew up.

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Coworker

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Kate Hubbard

You were spinning a top on the bar the night we met at happy hour. We had known each other for years. You gave me a poinsettia for Christmas once and I gave it away, left it in my mother’s picture window so she could end every phone call asking about the boy who gave me that nice flower.

I fell down your stairs. I lost myself in the gaze of your oak trees. I fell in and out of your bed when I wasn’t falling in and out of the Italian tenor’s bed. I met you over and over in the street crossing to the deli. I saw you in the parking lot. I forgot you when the gulls squawked, when my feet were sandy, when I took my lunch in bed.

I forgot you when it rained and the gutters overflowed. You sang to the fax machine. You counted your cigarette breaks. You tipped your hat and loitered by my window. I wore blue when you’d remember it. I drank apple ginger tea with my feet in a desk drawer.

I’d stamp your letters. I’d throw out the tenor’s bills. I was mistress of the postage meter. We’d muse about the smell of death in the walls, the drop ins in the drop ceiling. Some nights I’d roller skate around the file cabinets, overtime under the exit lights. You never let the coffee get cold.

You caught a deer mouse in a file folder. I caught a field mouse in an envelope box and sat by the train tracks watching the hawks pick off the chipmunks. I wore a green dress so the forest swallowed everything but my eyes. I told my mother I’d never love you.

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No One Wants To See Mourning Doves Fucking

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Patrick Kindig

yet here we are, watching
one gray dove fleece & fluster
another. We watch the pecan tree

shiver, shaken alive by
fluttering wings, those grim birds
bumping uglies. For ugly they are

& ugly the thing they are
doing: no slow caresses, all
rough tumbling & the touching

of fronts. In between:
the sad, low call that tells us
it is mourning doves doing it,

even when they vanish
among the clumps of green pollen
& pecan leaves. There is something

awful about it, something
profane, the way, the day we received
the ashes of our dog, two weeks

dead, we cried on the couch
& I laid my head in my husband’s lap
& suddenly there was something

moving there, pressed against
my ear, & when I opened his fly
the dog was still there, still sitting

in his urn in the middle
of the coffee table, waiting
for a permanent place, watching all.

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Leave rocks here

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Georgina McKay Lodge

Featured Art by Glenna Parry

Annoyed at rocks
in shoes
in laundry
in little piles at dinner,
she has placed a box
in the hall.

            -> Leave rocks here

Hold my rock,
her son says
when they are out,
and squats down
to select another.

            Be my rock

The smooth
pebbles,
dove-colored,
worn to wisdom,
she will gladly
carry home, but

his favorite find is
the jagged
saw-toothed
ugly rock,

scraped knee
stung by a bee
broken-armed
heart-choked rock.

Of course
she will carry that one too;
to the end of the world
she would carry it.

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A Peacock on Niner Hill

.Reading time 54 minutes.

By Jennifer Schomburg Kanke

Featured Art by Debbie Norton

The union was strong, but not strong enough to make Detroit Steel keep a dying man on the payroll. John shouldn’t have known this, but he often overheard his parents talking in the room beneath him until late in the evening. He was a respectful boy and was never trying to eavesdrop, but in a house that’s small with heating vents that weren’t so much vents as just holes in the floor (or ceiling, depending on your perception), there wasn’t much of a way to avoid it. He knew the other men at the mill were keeping an eye on his father, Bernard. They were propping him up at his station and bringing him water and coffee throughout the day, whatever he needed to keep him going. “I don’t know why they do it, I don’t need no special treatment,” his father complained to his mother at least once a week. But he still hopped in the car of whoever showed up for him in the morning, usually Jay Mingus’s dad Jimmy who had a 1947 Studebaker with a long front hood and wild wrap-around back window. The fathers of most of John’s friends had older cars like that, bought when they first returned from the war and were fresh hires at the mill. Some bought new ones every few years, like Joseph’s dad who bought a 1957 Buick a few months back even though his old one, which Joseph’s mom had now, was only three years old. The Bondurant’s didn’t even have one car, let alone two. His father always told John it was because he liked to walk to work and couldn’t imagine missing out on the fresh New Boston air, which John assumed was a joke like when he told him his Purple Heart was from getting stabbed with a fork in the chow line. No one, not even John, who loved his town with a ferocity rivaled only by his love for Roy Rogers, would describe the air of their town as fresh. 

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HEN

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Steven Winn

Featured Art by Gary Cartwright

Somehow inside this wire-walled farrago,
Its strutty discombobulation half
Parade of plume and barrel-bottomed flank
And half a mad stampede for any door,

She stands apart, her neck up-stretched and target
Eyes aimed off somewhere, and stands her ground,
Each step a claim on just that spot, the way
Her spindled claw alights to clutch at sand

While high above, a royal in a bulbous
Ornamental coach, she barely takes
It in, crown swiveled to and from the broody
Babble of the mob, their rancid screams.

Something percolates, something like thought
That makes her beak beat down magnetic to
A speck of grain then up again to bring
The morsel down her rippling throat, a throat

That then becomes a spectacle, engorged
To twice its size, complete with guttering
Sound effects, one wing flexed out to show
She can and on another whim retracted,

Head turtled in and out and torqued so fast
She nearly does a full-on Linda Blair,
As if to advertise the fact that she’s
Detachable, a thing of separate parts.

A haze of downy silt hangs in the flock.
Tail raised and primly twitched, she ambles off,
A countess in her gown with time to spare
Before she hears the ax head split the air.

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Pitching and Staving

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Evan Gurney

from Folk Medical Lexicon of South Central Appalachia

The phrase that mountain folk
coined for this condition

provides its own lesson
in the semantics of vertigo,

its participial movement
staggering to and fro,

unmoored by prepositions,
the grammar gone dizzy too

as those twinned verbs spin
into gerundive nouns,

all meaning aptly erratic,
out of tune, each stave’s

horizontal bars failing to fix
in place its pitch, which drifts

off the scale like a ship
that has lost its horizon

among the many staves
in this timbered ocean

of hollow, ridge, and cove
that roll and reel and veer

until I look up, I sing out,
I pitch over, I’m staved in.

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Grimace

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Mickie Kennedy

I liked him because nobody knew what he was. We were alike, bulging in all the wrong places. We tottered around, as if our bodies weren’t meant for movement. As if our bodies weren’t quite ours.

When I was twelve, my mother dropped me at the mall for a meet-and-greet. Grimace was planted in front of a plastic date palm. I was the oldest kid there. Permed mothers kept sending me dubious looks. A group of boys pointed, then giggled.

When I finally reached the front, he was bigger than I’d imagined—a swollen spade, a hill-sized bruise. He pulled me close for a photo, and I kept myself against him. The mothers whispered, but I didn’t let go. I couldn’t. You gotta move on, kid, said the head inside the head. A soft voice. Too soft. Human.

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College Days

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Rob Cording

Featured Art by Stephen Rounthwaite

Outside, a few gray snowflakes fell,
a truck rumbled onto 290, and the cold
seeped through our windows.
Our landlord had rigged our thermostat
so we couldn’t turn up the heat.
But that day, the four of us nailed a bag of ice
to the wall over the sensor, and when
the heat kicked on, we let it pump
until we’d shed our sweatshirts and flannels.
Leaning back on our futon, we shared a joint,
invincible in our underwear and T-shirts, laughing
and laughing. Twenty years ago now,
before we knew loss and grief, when we sang along
to our DVD of The Last Waltz and didn’t notice
the steady drip of the ice melting.

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Lore

.Reading time 39 minutes.

By S Graham

Featured Art by Beth Klaus

Every night I tag a surface with the word LORE.  

Last night: the wall of a mansion abandoned mid-construction.  

The night before: the back garage of a boarded-up health spa.  

Tonight: a section of the fence that marks the end of our skinny seaside town. 

No one really comes down to this fence, no one except for surfers on their way to the beach and cyclists heading south. Beyond the fence are kilometers of forest before the next town. In front of it is where Lauren’s body washed up on the sand.  

The fence was her training ground. Her minimalist tags run along it, as well as our father’s nickname for her in other styles: bubble throw ups, pichação pieces, the occasional wildstyle.  

After adding my mimicry to the painted patchwork, I look at the precision of her lines and the sloppiness of mine. The contrast makes me petulant in the way I often was when we were kids and she was better at something, better at everything. But then my heart swells with pride and I have to get away from her symbols and signs.

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In poetry school

.Reading time 9 minutes.

By Leigh K. Sugar

my co-fellow leading the free veterans writing workshop—
                    a fiction writer—
had been to prison
                    for killing a guy.


It was accidental.
                    College,
                                        a party,
                                                            alcohol,
                                                                                a gun.


The dead guy’s parents
                    didn’t even want him in court
(him being my co-fellow).
                    It was all a terrible mistake.


He’s white, the fiction writer,
                    and was writing a book about a man who kills his brother
and goes to prison.


What I took away from the book,
                    which he showed me in draft form,
is not shocking. There’s guilt, then dread,
                    then guilt again, then, somehow, life


but never the same.
                    The veterans in the workshop never talked
about if, or who, or what
                    they’d killed
except a rogue navy guy who wouldn’t (couldn’t?) stop
                    reliving the glory days of the Gulf. Otherwise,
they didn’t tell
                    and we didn’t ask.


My co-fellow had been a college student.
                    It was an accident; young dudes, a party,
alcohol, a gun. He’s white. It was Maine.
                    The dead boy’s parents didn’t even want prison.


He got a year and taught guys inside how to write.
                    He told me it was frustrating, the guys
who were illiterate. They were all white
                    and couldn’t get high. After, he did manual labor—
construction?—for a few years
                    then came to New York.


He was very handsome, and later
                    we didn’t-but-almost kissed
after I’d come home from 2 months
                    in the psych ward.


He knew where I’d been
                    and told me I looked great,
which I knew,
                    but he had a girlfriend,
which I didn’t.


                    Psych patients,
wards, and prisons alike love puzzles—soft
                    harmless pieces dumped
on the floor, the table, guaranteed
                    to fit together, already
perfect, the answer already known
                    to exist—

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What It Looks Like

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Emily Wheeler

Featured Art by Glenna Parry

Returning from emptying 
compost out back,
I’m stopped 
by a praying mantis.
Don’t you look fabulous,

I hear my mother’s voice,
Dressed to kill and
to blend in, with just
a flash of emerald 
on your lower wing. 

I hear her say, 
Your feelers, are they new,
or are you parting 
them differently?  
Also, great figure!

I see her swooning
over its eyes that pop 
without any makeup,
and the way its face 
comes to a point 

at its delicate chin: 
really quite special.
To me, the mantis 
just stares, nods, 
possibly politely.

My mother appreciates
many kinds of beauty
and the bug’s elegant 
plus alluring look
but I know

its brown egg sac 
is hard as cement to protect 
the eggs from heat, cold, 
even the occasional maternal 
appetite for its young.

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The Man in the Mirror

.Reading time 44 minutes.

By Marissa Yuan

-After Chelsea Bieker

I see him when I look in the mirror, my father, the coach of my 5 a.m. 800-meter runs, who sacrificed to finance my education and once presented a twenty-five-slide PowerPoint on how to live my college life in the U.S. He carried a black-and-white photo of our family in his wallet. People say we look the same.  

He was the first in his village to go to college after China’s Culture Revolution. He brought honor to and redeemed his once politically shamed family. By his mid-thirties, he already made tenure and was named vice president, the youngest in his university’s history. I remember him waking up in the middle of the night, drenched in sweat, punching the air and yelling, “You can’t get me!” My mother once gave me a peek into his childhood: being hung up-side-down to the ceiling with a rope tied to his ankles while my grandfather beat him until he had broken all three broom sticks. Wrinkles cover my father’s face now, his temples all gray, sharp shoulder bones gathering under his shirt. At my wedding, he hugged me long and tight, with tears of joy and pride, though I had walked down the aisle by myself and never asked him for the honor. I freeze-frame this minute. It was the moment I want to see him in and remember. 

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Impossible

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Dion O’Reilly

Featured Art by Kelly Basillio

Maury Island Marine Park, Vashon Island, fall 2023

Five hundred feet
beneath us, waves 
appear as ripples,  

their drone, inexact,
yet cadent,  

methodical  

as the shush of a heart,
a great liquid pump,
that bulges and rakes  

the blue-black beach. 

Listen, we whisper, Listen.  

The pulse reaches us,
and we can’t tell
if we’re flutes  

or porous stones.  

But I know, we both know,
I’ll leave,
and then, these present hours  

will become impossible
to hold, like coal
in darkness,  

a billion years, compressed,
but brilliant
when back to light. 

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The Lyric Moment Lasts

.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Dion O’Reilly

Featured Art by Levi McLain

Canadian smoke              vape-skunk
on public paths

a smokeless Rivian
driven by a man who didn’t want me

all the men and women who didn’t want me
and the one who does       our favorite bed       our over-washed sheets

I let them in

I let in the living              I let in the dead

the expanding ranks
of the mad with tin cups and tuneless guitars

the falsely proud
with their flags and concealed carry

my assassin mother       plumbers              pilots project managers
ex-presidents       thieves

I let in the fleshy              I let in the wasted

yes I let in the one who loves me              and the velvet night
lifts my bed       takes me

like a clipper ship
takes fine-cut tea

the oaks and eucalyptus bow to me like a queen

they regain their kingdoms       and the sins
of the eucalyptus are forgotten

monarchs guild their branches like magnificent cloth

the beetle-eaten oaks burst into green
the white clay broken in bogs and spray cans in landfills

lift like Jehovah’s Witnesses

even my assassin mother       deathless god              dies
and gives me reign

the necrophiliacs abandon their passions
the flag bearers and gunslingers are stunned

by the lies of Revelation

A.I. ceases its hallucinations
project managers leave their applications
totalitarians learn to follow

their breath

in a warm sea              fish tremble       leaderless
they move toward another world

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Love Poem in The Unfortunate

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Danny Caine

There’s too much news
and not enough me.
I’m not sure if there’s
enough of you either.
It takes a million news
to buy a loaf of bread.
Wheelbarrows of news.
People line up for blocks
to withdraw their news
before it’s too late.
The run on news
has caused the industry
to consolidate further
and us too—there’s
really only two of us now.
As the plane lands
you slowly loosen
your grip on my
whitened fingers.
The attendant says
“I’d like to be the first
to welcome you to
Unprecedented Times.”
Somewhere a man
is buying a gun.
Somewhere a couple
is trying not to
think about it.
Somewhere a sign
says “Due to The
Unfortunate we are
deeply out of onions!”
I’d like to stop living
through history.
I’d love to know more
about how to love.
I have questions
for you. Four
questions. More.
You tell me to
pardon your dust.
Every day is demo day.
I’m sure there are
a million times you
could’ve given up
on me. But here you are.
Now help me with this
wheelbarrow, would ya?

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Review: Sonnez Les Matines by J. C. Scharl

.Reading time 8 minutes.

By Betsy K. Brown

The greatest murder mysteries are often hilarious. Perhaps this is because, as investigator Porfiry Petrovich says in Crime and Punishment, “Human nature is a mirror, sir, the clearest mirror!” Raskolnikov, and other famous murderers in many stories, are not that different from ourselves. How should we respond to this devastating fact? Laughter may be the answer. 

Sonnez Les Matines by Jane Clark Scharl is many things—a verse play, a murder mystery, a philosophical dialogue—but it is also simply and deeply funny. A trio of famous former Parisians: François Rabelais, Jean Calvin, and Ignatius of Loyola, stumble upon a dead body during Mardi Gras, and spend the story arguing about who is guilty. In the play this is both an immediate question and a cosmic question, as the interlocutors explore everything from the weapon and evidence to the incarnation of Jesus and what happens when we die. Meanwhile, there is also ample banter, finger-pointing, and poop jokes. 

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Vitality in Poetry, a Review of Ponds by J. C. Scharl

.Reading time 15 minutes.

By Jonathan Geltner

I came that they may have life and have it abundantly. 

So says Jesus in the Gospel of John. It is a line that occurs to me often when I consider the influence of religious ideas—in this case, Christian—on a writer’s ability to engage with the fullness of life. That is a vague phrase, I realize: fullness of life. Perhaps it would be helpful to say what gets in the way of fullness of life.  

There are two major obstacles, in my view. One is material: the virtual world we have constructed and inhabit through screens is by its nature a thing set apart from real life. The more time a writer spends immersed in that world, the less she is able to observe, reflect upon, and move bodily through the real world, the given world of nature and human society as it is experienced face-to-face. The second obstacle is mental: the temptation to delude ourselves, to live in a fantasy of who we are, pretending to believe and feel what we think we ought to believe and feel or want to believe and feel in order to secure membership in a particular tribe. 

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Review: Newly Not Eternal by George David Clark

.Reading time 10 minutes.

By Michael Lavers

Newly Not Eternal, the second collection by George David Clark, is a book in which time has burned the dross away. The poems look small, but like Blake’s grain of sand each holds a world. The prologue poem, “Mosquito,” is a manifesto which, with its childlike music and theological contrariness, I think the author of “The Fly” would recognize:

                              God was only acting godly
                              when he strapped a dirty needle
                              to the fly
                              and taught it how to curtsy
                              on our knees and elbows

                              on our necks and earlobes
                              so politely that it hardly
                              stirs an eye.
                              God was hard but speaking softly
                              when He told us we should die.

It’s like Paradise Lost covered by Ariel, Shakespeare’s most musical character. Most of the poems have that spirit’s melodic drive, sitting somewhere between nursery-rhymes and spells.

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Insight and Echo: A Review of Kate Fox’s The Company Misery Loves

.Reading time 5 minutes.

By Rose M. Smith

Within the first few lines of Kate Fox’s latest collection The Company Misery Loves (Sheila-Na-Gig 2024), we embark on a journey to consider the role of inevitability in shaping how we face or embrace life’s absolutes. In language that shimmers on the page, she becomes stage director, tour guide, host as we follow her lead over a marvelous succession of former landscapes.  We are invited in turn to believe and to suspend our former belief, to hear the author’s voice and the voices this author has shared so insightfully that one wonders when each poem’s speaker visited her bedside, pulled back the veil, guided her hand over the page.

Poems from the poet’s thoughts of home invite us with visceral, concrete images into each moment. Such is the craft at work in this collection that bids us to see “that oil mixed with rain / in a hubcap is beautiful, which it is / because you own it,” and long years later to walk the land under great emotional weight and behold “as the entry shawls itself / in brilliant leaves, and the mountain beside me / pulls the sun’s deep brim down over its eyes” as though even the land feels the loss of things past.

Just when you think you know what sort of work will be encountered throughout, Fox introduces us to beautifully dimensional voices such as Mary Shelley, Josephine Peary (wife of the admiral), and Kathleen Scott (widow of the Antarctic explorer), whose voice becomes a masterful device to illuminate us regarding Scott’s expedition and those of George Mallory. This present Kathleen Scott handles with alacrity having been mistaken for the wife of Ernest Shackleton as well as how she might have sculpted Mallory had she not found “Everest / holding fast its own.” This author threads much sound insight and fact into these historical poems without ever drifting out of poetic voice—there again, as with us at the beginning, empowering Scott with agency to recount or rewrite history as she pleases. And it pleases.

With misery in the title, yes, there is loss in this book—loss not shared for loss’ sake but because its inclusion is essential. The losses are here, but the art and beauty of this work is not diminished by what is inevitable for us all. These poems stare into the face of that inevitable and seem to say “this, too can be beautiful.” To repeat Jane Ann Fuller’s words, “This poetry is flawless.” Here is where I must confess exceptional bias. Having begun reading The Company Misery Loves, I was pleased to find this collection includes some of my favorite works by Kate Fox. Finally, I get to share my excitement at how deftly she also wraps biblical icons in humor and contemporary sensibility. Poems from Fox’s book The Lazarus Method retell age-old stories with brilliance. In our varied experiences, there are poems remembered because they were assigned or were the subject of debate. There are poems we witness in live readings that echo the poet’s voice inside us for days. Then there are poems that are remembered because they refuse to be forgotten. The Company Misery Loves draws us into the unforgettable like “human branches reaching armless / toward their maker.”

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