October Tennis Court

August 7, 2026.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Susan Browne

My wedding dress hung in the closet
gathering dust & cobwebs.
On a walk, I’d seen it—a simple white dress—
in a store window & bought it
& continued not planning the wedding.
Once in a while, I’d try it on
to see if it still fit.
A friend came to visit, said,
“That dress needs to see the light of day.”
I’d been living with Kenneth for nine years.
We’d been engaged for three.
I loved him. What was love?
Like Louis Armstrong said about jazz:
If you have to ask, you’ll never know.
I didn’t have to ask, did I?
Love was like a tennis court in late October,
leaves blowing across it & the dream of playing.
Marriage was a tennis ball tossed to a dog over & over,
until the ball was pulverized & the dog dead.
I didn’t tell anyone this, but there it was
like the worm in the apple.
One day, the dress & I wore a gardenia in our hair.
Kenneth’s and my vows swam in the rainlight.
Decades rolled by like tornadoes or pangolins.
Sometimes I’ve thought, we’re done, kaput.
We can’t fix the dishes & doorjambs we’ve broken.
Then we play some more. It’s not a dream
& we need lessons no one can give us.
The best thing is to forget you’re married
& go to a lonely tennis court when the wind is wild
& chase each other around like leaves.
Then lie down. Your beautiful bodies
knowing what they know.

Murmuration

June 2, 2026.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Joyce Schmid
Featured Art: “The Call” by Lesley Weston

When Rock ‘n’ Roll was all sh-boom,
my best friend rocked around the clock
and I did too
in my attempt to be a teen—
just three chords,
tonic, dominant, subdominant—

but what I really loved
was Debussy—
inchoate like the early earth,
like me.

At eighty-three, I love Bach fugues—
a single theme repeated
through a piece as tightly woven
as a Miwok basket capable of holding water,

though in German, “Bach”
means brook or stream—
flow, uncontained—
no certainty on earth
except, and momentarily, in art—
the kind aspiring to certainty and form,
not trying to reflect the way things are—

my friend shape-changing
like a flock of starlings
from a biker on a ten-speed in the morning
to a wheelchair patient
barely strong enough to speak,
to a hiker on the cover
of his own memorial,
his right hand on the guardrails
of a wooden bridge,
his left hand resting easy on his hip,
white water under him.
He stands a moment,
with the whole high country at his back,
then turns,
heads into it.

Ways to Wear It

February 25, 2026.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Melissa McKinstry

Put your arms through the sleeves of this Bauhaus swirl.
Let it drape from your shoulders, a shawl of distraction
in abstraction: Kandinsky’s Dominant Curve. Feel the fine seams
of your private mourning, the silky sway of teabag brown,
sage green. Let yourself be satin amidst bisecting
angles and arcs. You might find a hidden pocket.
You might hold onto what isn’t. When my son was young,
no one knew why the toggle of his genes didn’t fit.
I kept slippering down hallways to brush my teeth in fluorescence,
the smell of hospital soap deep in my skin. Each day
a moving staircase of dread with a hair’s breadth handrail, a repeating
pattern of unpredictability, cut on the bias, selvedge edged.
His small misshapen head, tiny useless feet curved like lyres,
little hands always infant-dimpled. When he died
26 years later, he was still surreal, but let me tell you about his eyes:
blue riders, blue mountains, blue roses. He was the dominant curve
of my life. Somehow Kandinsky painted it all, so I clipped a jigsaw
of it together over and over after the after. The dining room table
like a wall at the Guggenheim. This canvas my favorite kimono.
If this piece feels soft and worn to you too, pull it closer, shrug it up
around your neck. It’s quiet inside these colors, a place you can hear
how things were. All those sharp pins and needles tacked
these shapes together to be basted then stitched, hemming in
what I couldn’t believe: I was going to live a life
impossibly imperfect. Full of chaos. Full of not knowing.
Full of my son’s suffering. I was going to live a life designed
by a dominant curve. Kandinsky said, Everything starts from a dot.

Somerville, Winter 1976

February 24, 2026.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Mark Kraushaar

I’d been going to shovel for days.
Pine Street in Somerville this was and I’d
stepped outside to begin with the stairs
when I heard a door close
and, in a minute, two boys passed,
brothers or friends with their backpacks
and parkas followed by a girl, someone’s
sister I guessed, younger I thought, ten or eleven.
I can’t recall the landlord now, or even
the name of that strange, gentle neighbor
who’d wave from his porch.
I can’t remember the day and I can’t
say why I watched them either anymore,
me with that blue plastic shovel
and my flimsy black shoes.
There’d been the sudden soft
thud of a door and in the moment before
someone’s mother calling goodbye
with a final reminder.
Life was like it is now,
or it mostly was, with the future,
friends and the weather.
We’d rented a place near Boston,
Harvey the artist, Ruth who loved music,
and Jimmy and me and Doris who boosted half
our food from the A&P until she moved back to Queens.
And all this is the past, another country and we were
different in it—
it just seems we always
want to know what’s coming and when.
Or, we do and we don’t.
But one night before she left
Doris took a long breath and leaned
toward me and Ruth.
We’re here, she said.
We’re here, we do stuff
and we’re gone.

For LC (1946—2024)

Somewhere North of Extinction

February 23, 2026.Reading time 1 minute.

By Phillip Schultz

Well, here we are again,
on our treadmills,
deep within a hospital’s cardiac center,
two fellow rehabbers,
accountants I believe,
on either side of me,
watching Fox News while discussing
tax-free Caribbean vacations,
organized, I imagine, by Dante.
My silence, I assume they assume,
implies equal pleasure in seeing
noisy ideas being crucified.
My TV, tuned to the History Channel
by a previous tenant, shows
a jubilant Darwin wandering curiously
among incurious tortoises,
who, apparently, have no idea
what being naturally selected means,
other than, perhaps, having somehow adapted
to their new and surprising
personalities. In any case,
the surrounding clamor is triumphant,
we’re all still here, after all,
on the treadmill of evolution,
somewhere north of extinction,
sweating happily, contemplating
our complex, peculiar strivings
toward the rewards of indefatigability,
one dogged assumption, cranky idea,
and tax-free holiday at a time.

On Learning to Play the Shakuhachi Before You’re Dead

February 17, 2026.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Ash Good

Sometimes, or probably all the time and with the same outcome,
I try something new, or old for that matter,
like playing the shakuhachi, and can’t get the damn thing
to make a single solitary sound, not even a noise that would annoy my wife,
and cause her to give me that look. That would at the least, be somethin worth complaining about,
and even in terms of complaining, I fail to create much commotion,
but after years of puckering my lips as if going in for a kiss
and blowing over the simplest of angled cuts
on the most ordinary of all bamboo sticks, the shakuhachi is silent.
I thought it would make me wise, and it is silent.
I thought it would calm my inner demons, and yet—silent anger.
I thought it could help me find inner peace, but inner turmoil rises
with breath after breath until I’m out of breath and must catch it
and maybe this was the point, maybe the final answer is to be more silent.
But then, I know that shakuhachis do, in practice, make sounds,
and making sounds with the shakuhachi is what I wanted to do,
regardless of some Buddhist lesson in futility.
I imagined myself playing the shakuhachi at parties and office retreats,
under waterfalls in Hawaii, at a Japanese appreciation festival,
while sitting as peaceful and grounded as a boulder,
rooted by a healthy and robust butt chakra,
or outside a Buddhist temple with a basket on my head—
I even have a proper basket—
on spiritual trips to Bhutan, or at local yoga classes,
at least local yoga, but still and always, along with all Gods
and the vast Universe, there is effort and intention
only to be followed by more silence.
Sometimes I hum through it and pretend.
Sometimes I think, definitely, without a doubt, this is a faulty shakuhachi.
There is something deeply wrong with this shakuhachi,
something dark and disturbing and beyond my grasp.
But then—I do hear something.
There is a voice calling to me from inside the shakuhachi.
It is wise and it is smug, and it represents all things
as they pertain to the essence of the embodiment of me,
and it says, “Well, there’s one thing we know for sure,
the problem isn’t the shakuhachi.”

First Joy

February 12, 2026.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Jana-Lee Germaine

Hard to pick the moment—first smudge
of my smile when my nephew, learning the
Earth’s age, told his teacher Grandpa’s old
as dirt! so serious, so proud to connect
eons with epochs with his own long span.

No antidote for grief, Just walk
straight through, mom always
said, don’t stop to smell the
self-pity. My heart pushing its
wheelbarrow dirt and rocks
across the overgrown lawn,

Sisyphus New England–style, until
one morning I flip through the
comic-a-day calendar and laugh,
though months and months too late.

Hard to pick where—to untangle one katydid note
from the rest in September, synchronous scrumming
legs like insect Rockettes. Easier to say it was that
first leaf in autumn to orange: unexpected flash
among reams of still-

green, precocious student of temperature
shifts you can’t unsee, can’t unfocus on once
your eye lights it, signal flare that means not
help anymore, but a spot to mark, here. The
end of something approaches,

I learn first to drop, allot each piece to
patchwork air, branches lift, shuck down to
simplest selves so you can see them stretch,
lengthen, then second: to stand,

in an attitude suggesting peace, not understood by
the ever-grinding mind, but held in the core,
learning still, learning know that I am, in a far
country, meditate on the merits of snow.

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