i am out with gloves, foraging for myself

December 4, 2025.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Amanda Nicole Corbin

i’m doing this because i’m wondering if i’m paying enough
attention to my own life. i can’t even get my own molars to stop leaving
toothprints in my tastebuds so i make myself stop and examine
my fingers and find i’ve picked new shapes into their folds. i’ve colored
myself outside the lines. there were once people i called my entire world
and now i don’t even know which timezone they’re in—i only ever
studied the architecture of others, not the geography—and all i know
about that version of myself is that she did not know how to pay
attention to most things, which is not very much to know
about someone. i know less about her than i know about what it’s like
to throw up a veggie burger in the sink at rehab. i know less about
what she saw in each of her lovers than i know about yeast infections.
now i’m not saying i’m an expert; i’m saying the fields are always
changing sides like the illinois–penn state game that went into nonuple
overtime. my finger remembers better the feel of a door slamming
on its eight-year-old marrow than it does its first engagement ring. the only
thing i can remember was the obvious flaw he pointed out. you see,
i’ve memorized the dry scratchy floral chokehold scent of a diaper pail
better than i can recall the man i was going to marry and even the version
of me before that remembers my loose flaking fingernail like a pocket
trinket. it’s funny though, even now, when i think of him, i think of his hair,
his glasses, his hands—and then i’m back to myself.

Infinity Net

December 3, 2025.Reading time 6 minutes.

By Jaye Kranz

It’s a new year and my friends are snowing in.

It’s a new year and my friends are swimming out.

It’s a new year and I meant to be still. I meant to slip between
the years and do one complete back-up of my core, there.

I meant to give away at least half of my wholes.

I meant to reply to last year.

It’s a new year and we throw prawn-heads to the dog
while the algorithm plays Love Theme from Spartacus.

It’s a new year and we’re on the roof counting from ten to one
with strangers we can hear but can’t see
on the other side of the fence.

Dear Year, I see now, how fireworks require emptiness
but can still enter the muscle
of my dog’s hind legs.

Drink it up, buttercup

June 1, 2025.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Natalie Taylor

Blue Fruit Moon: August 30, 2023

There’s a lot of hullabaloo in the woo woo
circles about this Super Blue Fruit moon, so rare
we won’t see the next one until 2037. My astrologer
friend counts on her fingers seven celestial bodies
in retrograde: Mercury, Venus, Saturn, Uranus,
Neptune, Pluto, and Chiron. A celestial goo
of retrospect and rehashing, a muck of revisiting old
stories, exes, holidays and birthdays fuzzy on the why
but clear on what wasn’t there, who didn’t show up,
what we missed. Wheels spinning under
a tree. What was plucked too small, hard
and green. Reconnecting with your inner child,
still wanting to play, to be held. Still dreaming
of some freedom attainable with gobs of money or super
hero powers or sheer will. The planets rotate in reverse,
earth shifts in its nook in the universe. We look back.

Riding my scooter after teaching a late class, I stop
at the light. I am not young anymore. I shiver in sweaty
yoga tights, chilling in night air. Once I make it home,
I will have fulfilled responsibilities of all three jobs,
another 12 hours devoted to maintaining shelter and food.
A young man pulls up next to me on his Kawasaki, dirty
carburetor popping with every wrist crank. He waves
smiling under midnight metallic helmet. In the other lane,
a Harley’s deep throat rumbles as its bandanaed rider
revs the V-twin crankpin engines. We wait for green,
a small symphony of crankpins and cylinders and buzz
and backfires under a freeway overpass. I point to the moon,
full and free as a peach, Saturn in conjunction hovering
just above, still spinning. The riders flip
their thumbs up. Just some kids on bikes
lapping up all the juicy bits they can get.

Wall of Clocks

June 1, 2025.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Kathleen McCoy

“We rarely hear ‘truth and reconciliation’—just ‘truth and justice.'”
—David Park, author of The Truth Commissioner

On this wall tick your childhood and mine, your loves
and mine, your regrets, cacophonies of memory

and harmonies in your ear, coagulations of unuttered grief,
relentless news from a grittier Belfast, our cousins

going at each other in the streets, Molotov cocktails and hurled
rocks. Rifles. Truth without whisper of reconciliation.

But this is not the Belfast we have read about. Now the streets
are clean, the bricks new. Twenty-seven percent check

the “no religion” box. Yet boxes there still be. With Barry’s tea
I toast a thing that is not a thing, a thought that is not

singular beneath rolling gray clouds that siphon the self,
that challenge perception, angle and taste, domesticity,

violence, numinousness. Dozens of clocks stand at attention,
unseeing eyes fixed on the observer, no two declaring

the same time. None advance; all compel stares: one moon-
faced grandfather clock painted blue, grannies’ broken

clocks, wooden clocks with cats or hens or roosters or sheep or
horses or farmers and their wives with mice that once spun

in small circles to children’s delight, oak clocks, clocks of ivory
irony, aluminum alarm, plastic grace, yellowed whites

like tired eyes, grays like boards left out too long in rain—all stand
in pleasing array—but this signpost points in thirty directions.

No wonder I never know what time it is!
This liminal Belfast in earliest glimmer of spring

wriggles into the raincoat and, despite its bloody past,
could be nearly anywhere within the body or the earth.

Sitting before this monument to time, its silent mellifluence of green,
its threat or promise of birdsong or the sound of striking, I note

how milky tea grows cool, limbs warm. In my absence, here. I am.

Has this happened to you

October 20, 2023.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Rebecca Foust

Selected as winner of the 2023 New Ohio Review Poetry Contest by Denise Duhamel

Featured Art by Claire Bateman

You realize you know something
you didn’t know you knew,

like in what modern-day country
lie the ruins

of ancient Troy, or the name of the boy
Achilles loved, or the Trojan

who speared him, or the former Beatle
or first drummer for The Stones

or your sister’s first flame, who drank
milk straight from the carton,

whose name she now—60 years later
& brain-wiped by ALZ—

cannot herself recall. He was a strapping,
young crewcut man, who came

to court my sister & then left with her more
winsome twin—our other sister

now in an ICU after swallowing a full vial
of Tylenol. I knew

before it happened, it would happen like this
& nothing to be done.

There is foresight, & then, its impotence.
Anyway, it was Pat Nicodemus

who courted my sister, not to be confused
with Patroclus, Hector,

Pete Best or Tony Chapman, each doomed
in their way as my sisters are,

as we all are doomed, but each name still
a small ping of pleasure

when I blurt it out, surprising everyone,
especially me, still playing

the game. In the days before Google,
it felt powerful & oracular,

what we didn’t know we knew welling up
on our tongues,

coursing its way out & through, like the body
of a baby after the head is born.

Aristotle demanded surprise & recognition
from good writing,

plus pity & horror, much of which presumes
foreknowledge,

for a time occluded but still operating behind
the scene, unseen,

as a kind of sixth sense, or is it non-sense,
like when you know

without knowing your husband is cheating
again, or what sometimes

pulls your pen across the page like automatic
writing, or your cribbage peg home

ahead of the rest when you’ve all along been,
with immense concentration,

wondering did I close those car windows?
now that you’re hearing rain.

How unknown are we to ourselves, unreadable
code in the end. I never thought

that after nine years of drought it would rain
like the Amazon inside my car,

nor that one sister would wind up living every
hour of every day in the same

Bonanza rerun, nor another so enwombed
in despair, nor that I’d be the one

to leave my marriage after four decades of fear
my husband would leave,

but somehow, I was not surprised
that my car, a sauna inside,

would continue to run, even after I found
that floormat profusion

of mushroom, each pink cup turned up
& open like a wish

or a tiny satellite dish set to receive.

We Don’t Die

July 10, 2021.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Darius Simpson
Selected as winner of the 2021 NORward Prize for Poetry by a panel of previous poetry contributors

Featured Art: “Candid Sampler” by Amy Pryor

we second line trumpet through gridlock traffic.
we home-go in the back of cadillac limousines. we
wake up stiff in our sunday best. we move the sky.
we escape route the stars. we moonlit conspiracy
against daytime madness. we electrify. we past
due bill but full belly. we fridge empty. we pocket
lint. we make ends into extensions. we multiply
in case of capture. we claim cousins as protection.
we extend family to belong to someone, we siblings
cuz we gotta be. we chicken fry. we greased scalp. we
hog neck greens. we scrape together a recipe outta scraps.
we prophecy. we told you so even if we never told you nothin.
we omniscient except in our own business. we swallow a
national anthem and spit it out sweet. make it sound like
red velvet ain’t just chocolate wit some dye. we bend lies.
we amplify. we laugh so hard it hurts. we hurt so quiet we
dance. we stay fly. we float on tracks. we glide across
linoleum like ice. we make it look like butter. we melt
like candle wax in the warmth of saturday night liquor sweat.
we don’t die. we dust that colonies couldn’t settle. we saltwater
city built from runaway skeletons. we organize. we oakland in ’66.
we attica in ’71. we ferguson before and after the camera crews we
won’t die we won’t die we won’t die we won’t die we won’t

Notre histoire sinister

October 1, 2007.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Michael Joyce

Here is our lurid history, the days that were before us once
have slipped behind now and press against us as in a crowd
stumbling from the circus. The circus again! How it haunts
their memories, the afternoon at the Tibetan resto juste en face
where the young clown reminisced about life as a dominatrix
in San Francisco and how gentle it all was finally, her smile
truly angelic, framed in a corona of spun gold hair, le coiff’
paillé, soft, vaguely leonine, the archangel with golden hair
at Petersburg perhaps or Raphael’s lost “Portrait of a Boy”
pillaged by the Nazis from the Musée Czartoryski. This she
recognizes in herself, how in the snapshot from her troupe
she had them guess which one she was, eyes giving her away:
the boy in the pale blue jumper, a play upon Pierrot, fey,
younger, at that age where gender is permeable, apt to slip
hermaphroditic back to girlish, qualis ab incepto processerit
et sibi constet, as Horace had it, i.e., let him stay what he was
at first, but what that was hardly any of us can remember.
And now the children come pouring out from the matinée
into rue Amelot as dans le coin de la salle the three of them
whisper softly lost in each other over tea and dumplings