Tag: WritingAboutWriting

On Poetry

.Reading time 19 minutes.

By Diana Khoi Nguyen
Featured Art: “Carrying Hay” by Hannah Hatley

Though Lee Chang-dong’s Poetry is a Korean film, I found myself thinking of the Vietnamese word nước, as the opening shot reveals rippling water. A close shot, bird’s eye view of the water, a near-black filter dissolving slowly from the sun-glinted ripples. Nước, meaning water first, for me. Nước, meaning also: country, state, the tide coming in, the tide going out. A place so connected to water it shares the word. The camera doesn’t fall into the river, but moves with it, panning to reveal grade-school-aged boys playing in the grassy sand bank, moving rocks, digging holes. The sun is overhead, it’s 11am perhaps, and the body of a 16-year-old girl floats along like the body of each young woman in every movie and television show I’ve seen before: dead.

Danusha Laméris touched briefly upon Poetry in an earlier New Ohio Review essay, “Beautiful, Brilliant, and Dead: Portraits of the Female Poet in Film.” She writes that literature and art are rife with images of dead women and dead poets: “[t]he dead girl, appearing again and again, by the river bank, in the river.” Kristy Guevara-Flanagan’s short film, What Happened to Her (2016), similarly examines contemporary culture’s obsession with dead women on screen. The dead girl in Poetry’s opening scene isn’t a poet, but she is a casualty in the world of cruel boys (and men); and her death eventually causes the film’s protagonist, Yang Mi-ja, to reflect on her life and society and write her first poem.

And Poetry, itself, feels like a poem: plot is more than mere narrative content; it serves as material arranged and composed in such a way that I found I could trace craft moves that exist in poetry writing: juxtaposition, (visual) syntactical surprise, the interwoven portraits of boys vs. girls, men vs. women . . . all of these have a metrical rhythm in the film. Perhaps what I am trying to describe is that while watching, I felt I was also reading a poem.

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Handwriting

.Reading time less than 1 minute.

By Kathleen Lee
Featured Art: “Thinking Words” by Thad DeVassie

Nothing quite like the feel
of pen in hand moving across paper,
letters and words following like ducks
slipping into water. Back and forth,
margin to margin, emptying
please, my mind. The whole raucous mess:
complaints, general; also issues,
first with one person then another,
some, it’s true, already dead,
also, my self, hapless on the witness stand
wondering how it’s come to this. Until
at last, the relief. Darkness cleared,
the world flares: man with his dog
draped across his shoulders
ordering a triple espresso,
whiff of patchouli, barista calling,
Fern! Iced latte.

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How to Use This Book

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Christopher Brean Murray
Featured Art: “Summer Figs” by Sherry Pollack Walker

Don’t read it aloud
at the harvest festival.
Never search for a curse word
in its index. Tell the helmsman
the whole thing’s symbolic
from the nickel in the chalice
to the pinecone beside
the Nile. If you travel
by train, see the image
on page 9. Never place a pear
in the volume’s vicinity.
Don’t walk your dog
on the eve of its release.
Know that its title
is a piece of underworld slang
spliced with a Serbian maxim.
Don’t read the passage set in Khartoum
unless you’ve put your house in order.
If you find a beetle in your drawer
switch one bookmark
for another. Blossoms
on your steps mean
your interpretations
are fruitful. A crash in the distance:
implications have been ignored.
Should you record your reactions
in a journal? If moonlight bathes
a steel bridge in April.
Will the story be made
into a film? Only when figs
write novels. Direct other questions
to the telescope’s designer.
Never shut the tome on a fly.

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Contemplative on the Train

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Thalia Geiger
Featured Art: “Jordan (she/her)” by Jemma Leigh Roe

I am wearing my leopard pants when I enter
the train. I tell a girl how much the book hurts
that she holds beside her. There is Pink
Whitney in a flask in my purse and punk
rock trickling through the buds in my ears.
I sit and read, too, a poetry book about gay
intimacy. Nothing I know. The world stretches
sideways as we roll through the clearing
in the trees past Washington Lane, past
Germantown. I am stuck in my ways of loving
things from afar. It is all I know how to do.

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Wilt

.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Kathleen Rooney
Featured Art: “Spring Returns and So Do I” by Leo Arkus

Usages tilt and words can wither, but they don’t get torn down like buildings do. 

O archaic present tense second-person singular of will, of what wilt thy obsolescence consist? 

To lose turgor from lack of water. To become limp or to languish. O language, if thou wilt not do as I insist, I shall shrivel and droop out of dry brown anguish. 

Words whose referents no longer exist—place them in a room painted pale museum green, cool and clean, a calming space, filled with monstera, dieffenbachia, and schefflera, their leaves a-flap like floppy disks. 

Modern humans suffer from what botanists call plant blindness, moving through life insensate to vegetation, failing to recognize plants at all other than something we might eat. 

“Salad bar” originates in 1940 in American English, “fern bar” in the late 1960s. Do lettuce leaves look more appealing behind sneezeguards? Do ferns thrive in light cast by ersatz Tiffany lamps? 

The flowers upturn their ferocious faces. Would that I could catch what I need from the sky. 

Wilt Chamberlain’s full first name was “Wilton,” but his high school classmates called him “Wilt the Stilt.” Seven-foot-one is tall, but that’s nothing to a tree. He claimed to have had sex with over 20,000 women (despite being “shy”). You’d never catch a tree trying to brag about that. 

At my elementary school, we put on A Midsummer Night’s Dream, abridged considerably. I laughed backstage at my friend Bryn, playing Bottom, declaiming at Titania: “Out of this wood do not desire to go. / Thou shalt remain here whether thou wilt or no.” 

WILT as acronym—What I’m Listening To: Mort Garson’s 1976 album Mother Earth’s Plantasia: “warm earth music for plants . . . and the people who love them.” Soothing, tuneful Moog instrumentals. 

Unlike certain humans I could name, no plant has ever said anything to spoil my mood. 

What’s happening down there beneath the soil? Calibrate your sense of time to plant growth. 

The dreams of plants unfurl with the slow force of a thousand forests. 

In The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky writes, “The centripetal force on our planet is still fearfully strong, Alyosha. I have a longing for life, and I go on living in spite of logic. Though I may not believe in the order of the universe, yet I love the sticky little leaves as they open in spring.”

Malpractice Insurance for Poets

.Reading time 4 minutes.

By David Gullette
Featured Art: “Doomed From the Start” by Thad DeVassie

I mean, 
suppose you opened up your reader’s heart but carelessly
left in the cavity a jagged mixed metaphor? 

Or swore in writing to tell only the truth but used invisible
ink and the stiffed readers cried “Fraud!” and came after you
with something resembling pitchforks? 

Or your rap sheet said you repeatedly named emotions
instead of re-enacting that spot of time that would shake
your readers to the core without telling them what to call
it? 

Or in your fine poem the fine print is
flea-bitten with clichés like “to the
core” 
or “I had never been so unhappy in my life” or
“My father always told me” etc.? 

Or at the Open Mic you groaned out your poem with the
endless Gregorian monotone the Poets’ Theatre calls “The
American Drone Strike”? 
(audience shuffles, checks watches, stares at ceiling). 

Mistakes have consequences, people!
That’s why you need to sell your
house cash in your Roth 
pawn your first edition of Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror
signed “For (your name here) very cordially John Ashbery”
so you can buy our top-of-the-line policy that covers all the
mishaps mentioned above a list that (believe me) only
“scratches the surface.” 

We offer multiple paths of escape from your . . . Let’s
call them slip-ups 
including a new identity as some nondescript who
evinces no interest in writing anything followed by
transplantation to some mindless spot 
(American Virgin Islands?) where no one will
recognize you as the guy whose sonnet used the
same rhyme twice: 
especially after your state-of-the-art
face and hair and voice transplants
[Part 3, paragraphs 4–6] that will
make you unrecognizable 
even to your dead mother who keeps popping up in your poems like a
(hey, time for a moratorium on similes). 

You didn’t think of all this when you were in Poetry School.
Or during your Residency. 
Or were made Partner. 
Or got mentioned in Dispatches as 
“once up-and-coming and now a known quantity
in the world of American poetry.” But this is the
real world, kid. 
Real and unforgiving. 
One false move and down you go. 
Which is why Insurance was invented. 

After the first substantial deposit 
along with the sworn affidavit in which you promise
to lay off poetry once and for all it’s a series of
manageable monthly payments wired to our
headquarters in the Cayman Islands, where no one
remembers anything. It’s not that we forgive you (not
our job). 
It’s that we cover your tracks and
make you disappear long before
your pen has gleaned your
excessively teeming brain. 

And what a relief that will be!

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Oatmeal

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Billy Collins

Many of us poets have been asked
to go someplace, often somewhere
we have never been, nor would ever think
to go, to read our poems out loud.

Audiences gather in these places
to hear us read our poems out loud
and to see what we are wearing,
which is often part of the disappointment.

Someone said that professors get paid
to read, but poets get paid to read out loud.

Julian Barnes said: they don’t come
to hear you read your work.
They want to know what you had for breakfast.

I think it’s a little of both,
as in Galway Kinnell’s poem called “Oatmeal,”
which is both beautiful and informative
regarding what the poet likes for breakfast.

It’s about having breakfast with John Keats
and he must have read that poem out loud
many times and in many places
where he had never been before

because we have only a handful of good poems,
so we read the same ones time after time,
if only to please the crowd,

and the poems come and go,
repeating like the painted animals
on a carousel, only without the up-and-down music.

And the audiences watch them go by,
the oatmeal poem coming around again
and one about a man in a hammock,
and a poem with an uncle in a single-engine plane.

And here’s the white horse again
with the orange plume and the wooden teeth,
as all the decorative little mirrors make their rounds.

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Scavengers

.Reading time 19 minutes.

By Mark Neely

I could do without these turkey buzzards
hunched like crash victims
                      on the water tower’s whitewashed railing

                                                       red skulls

             poking from the ratty blankets
             of their wings. A county over

two taxidermied buzzards hang
from another tower. Their sickly talons
sway in the breeze—

            the only thing we’ve found that really works
            says the mayor in the local paper.

September. Heat rises in shimmery waves
from the asphalt. The black holes of their eyes
trail me as I sweat through a sluggish run.
They don’t stir, don’t so much as turn their heads.

                                    A few frayed feathers shiver against the sky.

                                                Remember newspapers? They were useful
                                                when we lived with the delusion
                                                we might need each other—under city
                                                bridges the destitute spread
                                                them over heating grates.

             I’m guessing water towers will last longer
             and vultures, who only eat the dead. I read somewhere
             their stomach acids allow them to ingest
             meat so rotten it would kill another animal. Like poets

                                                 I said, though no one else was there.

I’m always reading things, storing them away
for later. I’m always
chasing down my youth. So far he’s unimpressed.
He prances along in sleek shoes, pays me about as much
mind as groups of jostling teenagers pay me on the street.

             I fear these old birds
             have a thing or two to say, like grandmothers
             warbling behind screen doors. One drops

                                    flaps twice, rides a thermal
                                    traces three wobbly ovals
                                    over the train tracks where the road crumbles
                                    into gravel. I remember the lines
                                    from “At the Fishhouses,” about the seal who visits

                                                       evening after evening

              a playful opening
              in the vast, inhospitable sea.

              He shrugs off Bishop’s silly hymns, vanishes,
              reemerges elsewhere, making it clear
              he’s in his element. Here

streets run down toward the river, houses shrink
their porches falling in
until they finally collapse. My buzzard veers
over the dog groomer’s, the green-shingled nursing home
the Bahá’í temple—no more than a rundown ranch house—
then swoops high above the dentist’s billboard, a fearsome maw
of gleaming teeth. Earlier, Son House came on the radio:

                        woke up this morning feeling so sick and bad
                        thinking ‘bout the good times I once had had

I could see him banging his foot
on the juke joint floor, then withering
in a seedy hospital.

                                           Well, we got that over with,
                                           my mother-in-law likes to say
                                           after the parade winds down
                                           or the last guest pulls away.

You like to run? she asked me once, baffled
by any exercise that isn’t useful. I like to have run
I answered, stealing a line from a novelist I heard once, talking
about his labors, the endless straining for the right word

as opposed to the almost right one, which Mark Twain said
was the difference between the lightning bug
and the lighting. A few cars flash in the distance
as I cross over onto the greenway, a gray path
winding along the river like Ariadne’s thread—

                                    she helped a man who didn’t love her
                                    find his way. Sound familiar?

              Sometimes I catch myself
              wishing the day would end. Or try to leap
              whole years, even as they spool away.

                                             We used to call this human nature.

Bishop thought of knowledge
as a kind of suffering
a dark expanse
we can only skirt the edges of…

                                    Inside the tower’s globe, an ocean
                                    waits for another emergency—
                                    metallic, unthinkably heavy
                                                        drawn impossibly into the sky.

            One morning I watched three buzzards
            huddled by the road, tearing at the pink entrails of a possum
            knocked into the ditch as it scuttled through the night.

                                                Curious, bathed in blood
                                                incapable of mercy, they bowed like monks
                                                over the body.

As they tore at the animal, one fixed me
in her stare.

                                   Look here, she seemed to say.

            I wanted to conflate carrion
            and carry, to imagine an airy chariot
            ascending from the corpse.

    

A delivery truck rattled around the corner
and startled the birds into flight, where they joined the host
swirling above.

                                   Carnal, of course
                                   is the word I was looking for—

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Process

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Zuzanna Ginczanka
Translated from the Polish by Joanna Trzeciak Huss

Featured Image: Untitled by Tanner Pearson

1
In the beginning was heaven and earth:
black tallow and blue oxygen—
and fawns
beside nimble stags
and God, soft, white as linen.

2
Cretaceous
Jurassic
Triassic
The earth layers in strata—
The Miocene advances by tank — a majestic conquest.
There is a separation between water
and the land of ferns and birches
—and God sees that it is good when Genesis dawns.
Nitrogen brews in magma,
magma congeals into rock
mountain
thrusts
upon mountain
in a thunderous, cosmic mounting
The Carboniferous enriches the earth with bituminous pulp.
—and He sees that it is good
for moist amphibians and stars.
Iron pulses like blood
Phosphorus hardens into tibia——
— and with singing air, God whistles into pipes of crater.

3
In the beginning was heaven and earth:
and fawn
and tawny stags
but then things took a different course:
and
flesh
was made
word.

4
Back then, a lone rhododendron trembled before a fragrant angel,
horsetails tall as New York creaked and clattered.
Now daisies wilt
in town squares
in Konin, Brest, and Równe
and at night
policemen
and their spouses
make love.

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Another Refugee Poem

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Pichchenda Bao

This poem has already been written.
The nausea, familiar.
You’ve been left, bobbing
bereft, in water, watching
flames eat home and hearth.
Or vicariously felt
that dread suck of time
elongating the slim barrel of a gun.
You’ve picked your steps
through a landscape of corpses,
fumbled through each level of grief.
This poem, your companion.

But who will read this poem?
Not the ones with the guns.
Nor the ones cheering them on
or silently assenting
to their menace.
Not even the ones who are carrying
their children away from their fears
toward your fears
of what you know
about this country.
This poem does not
traffic in saviors.

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Blue Camaro

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Owen McLeod

I’m up at 6 A.M. to write, but all I do is stare
at the rain and the trees and watch the wind
strip away what remains of November’s leaves.
Somewhere in Virginia, my father is dying.
Not on the sidewalk of a sudden heart attack
from shoveling snow, or in a hospital room
monitored by nurses and beeping machines,
but at home, alone, and almost imperceptibly
from a sluggish, inoperable form of cancer.
That man was never satisfied with anything.
When leaves were green he wanted them red,
when red then brown, when brown then fallen
and gone. Once, after making me rake them
into a curbside pile, he tossed in a cinderblock
meant for the local punk who’d been plowing
his 1982 Camaro through the heaped up leaves
of our neighborhood. Two days later, the kid
blew through our pile without suffering a scratch.
My father didn’t realize that I, fearing for him
as much as for the boy, had fished out the brick
and chucked it in the ravine behind our house.
As punishment, I had to climb down in there,
retrieve the cinderblock, and bury it in the leaves
after I’d raked them back into a mound. My dad
said that was nothing if I dared to take it out.
I can still see him, stationed at the window,
watching and waiting for that boy to return—
but he never did, because I tipped him off
the next day after spotting him at 7-Eleven.
Decades later and hundreds of miles away,
a malignant brick buried deep inside him,
my father still waits at the living room window,
listening for the death rumble of that blue Camaro.

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My IRS

.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Adam O. Davis

I am two vowels strung twenty years long.
                                                                                            My life a ransom
letter written by a cardiogram, tympanic as traffic & the lights of traffic

that renew the tercets of Esso stations standing violent as macaws
in the ululative night.
                                                      I need lithium or language, nurse.

I need words to fall like ricin from an envelope.
Clearly, my synapses need seeing to.
                                                                      So, please, repo the verb of me.

                                        Conduct me swiftly
through the conjunction of Tennessee where nouns loiter like limbs
languid with Quaaludes, where daylight breaks

like a mouthful of fentanyl over the teeth of a country that cares not
for such news.
                           Should a poem be the pill or the pharmacy?

Should I pledge myself to this business as if it were Gerard Manley Hopkins
or Jesus Christ?
                            Here I am, Lord, earnest as a rice cooker, lively as Superman

in his leotard, my spiritual fizz empirical as Pepsi & just as cheap.
                                                                                                           Jesus, Gerard—
who will irrigate these ears from error?

                                                                   Who will whisper that in the empire
of swans the black cygnet is Elvis?
                                                    All around me the malady of my unmaking

unmans me: roadside trash, unrecycled recyclables, my shadow laid
like a new suit over the bus bench & birds behind it.
                                                                                    All this urban tumbleweed,

all these words for worse.
                                           When whoever’s kingdom it is comes calling for it
will the last televangelist of grammar go angled like an angel in the direction

of their god?
                            Or will America just eat my opioids as it like Nemo poisons
its seas to peace?

When I was a verb I thought as a verb so I did as a verb, just like the police.
Tonight the moon slouches in its straitjacket of stars.
                                                                                            There’s a multinational

wind afoot, some merry beast loose, all pronoun without surcease.
                                What rooky woods will it rouse first?
                                                       What islands will it make of our bodies yet?

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Revising Bosch’s Hell Panel for the 21st Century

.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Kelly Michels

“Hundreds of couples toting AR-15 rifles packed a Unification church in Pennsylvania on Wednesday to have their marriages blessed and their weapons celebrated as ‘rods of iron’ that could have saved lives in a recent Florida school shooting.” Reuters, Feb. 28th 2018

They come wearing crowns of gold bullets in their hair, bodies drenched

in white satin, white lace, tulle, lining the pews on a weekday morning,

AR-15s in their hands, calling on god to save them. There is no

such thing as salvation, only the chosen and too few are chosen.

Children are told to stay inside, schools locked shut, swings hushed,

even the wind says, quiet, as the guns are blessed, dark O of mouths

waiting to exhale a ribbon of smoke. The children are told to crouch

in the closet, to stay still as butterflies on butcher knives

while the men take their brides and iron rods, saluting the book

of revelation, its scribbled last words, the coming of a new kingdom.

Don’t speak. Don’t breathe. Pretend you are an astronaut gathering wisteria

twigs in a crater of the moon. Pretend the twigs are the arm of a broken mandolin.

Someday, it will speak. Someday it will sing. Dear God, bless the self in the age

of the self, bless this bracelet of rifle shells, bless our god-given individual

right. I know you want to sing. You want to sing like blackbirds escaping

from the mouth of a grasshopper. But remember, we are only here

for a little while, so for now, keep quiet, pretend we are somewhere else.

Pretend we’re practicing our handwriting, the lollipop of a lowercase i,

the uppercase A, a triangle in an orchestra, the different sounds it makes

if you strike it the right way. Practice the slow arch of a R. Now—

form the words. Scribble run, scribble come, scribble mom, scribble when

will this be over? But for god’s sake, be quiet. Don’t cry. Just write. Scribble

on the walls, on your arms, scribble as if it’s the last thing you will ever say.

Pretend it sounds like music. And if the devil comes through that door, remember

to go limp, lie on the floor like a tumble of legos. Don’t move. Don’t speak.

Don’t breathe. Pretend you’re already dead. Remember, this is how you live.

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Aphorisms for a Lonely Planet

.Reading time 4 minutes.

By Lance Larsen

1

Conception, gamete meeting gamete, cells dividing and differentiating. Who wants to imagine themselves coming into the world this way? Instead think of your parents as amateurs lying down in the enchanted dark and rising up as seasoned weavers of light.  Picture fire, with sparks flying off. One was lucky enough to catch—and now pulses inside you.  Listen to yourself breathe.

2

Like a rolling billiard ball we touch the world one green millisecond at a time.

3

A good story possesses its own magnetic north, to which every vibrating sentence must point.

4

To live is to doubt.

5

At the exit of the Paris catacombs, which houses the remains of six million sleepers, the guard looked me over, then fanned a flashlight into my backpack: Any bones, any bones?  No, I said, then smuggled my skeleton into the morning.

6

Should I read Descartes or listen to Motown? Depends whether I want to interrogate my doubts or slap them on my feet and dance them under the table.

7

The young are young. The old are young and old at the same time. You have to be old to know this—that’s the problem.

8

Seek labor which both tires and renews.

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Women in Treatment

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Theresa Burns

Featured Art by Dante Gabriel Rossetti

Why had I not noticed them
before? The women in treatment
on every block, it seems, leaving
the library, walking their dogs.
Once they hid themselves
beneath wigs, fashionable hats
in the city, or entered softly
in Birkenstocks and baseball caps,
stayed out of the way. Now they
show up, unannounced.
In offices, in waiting rooms,
in aisle seats with legs outstretched,
the women in treatment
flip the pages, reach the end,
bald, emboldened. One
outside a florist today arranges
lantana in time for evening
rush. A bright silk scarf
around her pale round head
calls attention to her Supermoon.
And one woman my own age,
in my own town, takes up a table
right in front. She nurses a chai latte
in a purple jacket, her hair
making its gentle comeback.
What she pens in a small
leather notebook: a grocery list?
Ode to her half-finished
French toast? The kind of poem
living people write.

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Wex in Totus Taggle

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Owen Doyle

Featured Art by James McNeill Whistler

Words in an old notebook
prove (I was twenty-ish, then)
that mind-mud and dismally
tangled brain material
have causes other than old age
or illness. At the time,
they might have been explained
by the rum or beer in mind-
blowing excess the night before.
I don’t remember.
But surely those episodes
of binge and babble
are far outnumbered
by drier spells of helplessness:
me, frozen
over the neat rectangular form
of a blank page, compelled
to write totus to avoid
writing nothing.
It’s reason enough for terror
or self-pity, the thought
that those very things—the booze-
blasts and blackouts—were then
and are now the efficient
cause of wex and taggle:
furrows of gray matter, tilled
for art and wisdom, laid
waste, and the flood of those young
insults cascading still. But no,
I’ve heard that it’s very common:
this empty gaze, the pen loose
between a finger and a thumb,
its tip hovering
over absolutely nothing. And so,
as tragic as it all may be, finally,
I won’t let it bother me too
too much. Why taggle over wex
totus? I’ll pour myself a glass
of wine and see
what comes spilling out.

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If You See Something

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Billy Collins

Featured Art: Dove in Flight by Pablo Picasso

On my morning walk along a cinder path
that follows the shore of a lake,
I saw a good-size, solitary rabbit,

seven mourning doves who rose to the top of a fence
at my approach,

two anhingas, one drying his extended wings
like a pope on a balcony,
the other not doing anything at all,

also, a loud bird who refused to identify himself,

then ten young ducks in a huddle
by the vegetation near the water,
some sleeping, others preening their feathers,
all not quite old enough to be on their own,

oh, and a squirrel who headed up a tree
when he heard me coming down the path.

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Looking on the Bright Side

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By John Brehm

Featured Art: Nocturne by James McNeill Whistler

Death: at least it’ll give me a chance to catch up
on my sleep. No more tossing and turning
worrying about what’s going to happen next.
Unless of course my dreams of dancing girls
and hookah parties come true.
In which case it’ll give me a chance
to catch up on all the fun I missed
being too tired from lack of sleep.
A win-win situation.
Unless of course the dancing girls turn out to be
my former lovers, flitting before me
with vengeful or disdainful expressions
on their still painfully lovely faces.
In which case I can go on writing the poems
of failed love that failed to make me
famous when I was alive.
A suitable way to while away eternity.
Unless of course the hookahs are filled
not with tobacco but with heavenly peyote,
(food of the gods the gods left for us)
in which case it’ll give me a chance
to catch up on the deathless
bliss of boundless mystical oneness
my fear of death always kept me
from fully experiencing
here and now.

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Scooter

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By David Rivard

Featured Art: City at Night by Arthur B. Carles

Phil Rizzuto, shortstop, the Yankees’
Scooter & play-by-play announcer & The Money Store’s
man of a certifiably trustworthy nature,
but invented for me first in war stories told
by my father—
on a South Pacific island naval air station
maybe it’d be fun to put Scooter
in the game, brass thinks
a sports star visitor to war zone
great theater of operations P.R.—
but basketball, not
civilization-beating baseball, basketball
my father’s game—
“I could take him,
he couldn’t get by
me”: sayeth Norman
Rivard, testimony of
a former All-State point guard
1942 season Mass state champs
team captain
Durfee High School Fall River;
his torpedoed destroyer sunk
by a two-man Japanese sub
(a sake brewers’ assistant & an Imperial War College ensign?),
a few days earlier their suicide mission
had sent my father
to the base, rescued
just in time for Scooter’s morale boosting
visit, the two together on an asphalt court
in cosmic time Holy Cow!
an immortal, lucky accident—
but will, pride, intensity
count more for Norman—“don’t depend on luck
OK, why don’t you just apply yourself?”
my father’s question, frustrated by
his distracted, blurry
son—
apply yourself, stay on track,
stick to it, that’s the thing,
you’ll adhere
successfully to whatever you want
(not sure I know what the wanting is for even now),
you can be
an architect, trial lawyer, oncologist, surveyor,
if only you apply yourself—
like a wing decal on the model
of a Mustang P-51 Fighter
or whiskey dried in a glass-sized ring
on a liquor cart?—
skim the ear wax off your eardrums,
Dad—here is your poet, & here
is your poem.

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Ambassador of the Dead

.Reading time 5 minutes.

By George Kalogeris

Selected as runner-up of the 2013 New Ohio Review Poetry Contest by Barbara Hamby

Featured Art: The Artist in His Studio by James McNeill Whistler

My parents were never crazy about Cavafy—
They didn’t know much about poetry, at all,
And barely had time to read anything but the papers;

Though sometimes a poem they liked would appear in their
Beloved Hellenic Voice. (A poem that was always
In rhyming stanzas, and deeply nostalgic.) Or else

I’d show them one of the Modern Greek poets that I
Was trying to translate, and ask for their advice
About a line. “Is this for school?” they’d say.

My parents were never crazy about Cavafy—
To them he was too refined, too ALEX-AN-
DRIAN, and they were only peasants, xhoríates.

And there was no Ithaka for them to go back to.
When I’d beg them to read the Greek, they’d balk when they got
To his purist kátharévousa diction—they just

Couldn’t stomach its formalist starch. His poems were never
Demotic enough, never trapέzeiká:
Songs to be sung across the kitchen table.

And if I read them Elytis, Odysseus Elytis
Too was too elitist to trust, too drunk
On the island sun of his own Ionian vision.

To people for whom elevation meant being raised
In the steepening shadows of Peloponnesos.
(“The great Odysseus,” my father would chide.)

And if Yannis Ritsos spoke their working-class language,
And his poems weren’t hard to follow, still, once they heard
That Ritsos was Marxist that’s all they needed to know.

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My Father’s New Woman

.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Fleda Brown

Featured Art: Fruit and Flowers by Orsola Maddalena Caccia

My father has a new woman. He’s 93, the old one is worn out.
They used to hold hands and watch TV in his Independent Living
cottage, but now there is the new one, to hold hands. The old
one is in Assisted Living not 50 feet away but barely able
to lift herself to her walker. He sits in her room after dinner,
her mind wandering in and out. What if she escapes
and comes over while my father is “taking a nap”
with this new one? My mother is two miles away beneath
her stone, relieved. I bring artificial flowers to her with my sister,
who likes to do that when we visit. I am not much for
demonstration. I would just stand there and say, oh, mother,
he’s at it again. And she’d say, I am sleeping, don’t bother me
with him anymore. And we’d commune in that way that knows
well enough what we’re not saying. And I’d be lamenting
my self-righteous silence in the past, my smart-aleck-motherjust-
go-to-a-therapist talk. What I should have said was, was,
was, oh, it was like a tower of blocks. Pull one out and all
would fall. She would get a divorce and a job and marry some
balding man like her father, who would be my ersatz father
and would take her dancing and let her wear her hair
the way she wanted, and she would cut it short and get it
permed and life would quiet down and my father, to her, would
morph into the handsome and funny Harvard Man he was
in the old days, the way he posed her for his camera, tilting
her head to the light with his devouring-passion fingertips
and her days would begin to feel like a succession
of pale slates to scribble on and erase before the new husband
came home from work, while my father would spin off
after whoever would “put up with him,” as he says,
and would follow his new one around carrying her groceries
and complaining that she spends too much, but biting his tongue
and thinking how soon she would let him, well, you know,
and I would be, what? The same as now, writing this down
so that none of the shifting and sifting could get away
cleanly without at least this small consequence.

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Animals

.Reading time 5 minutes.

By Brock Guthrie

Featured Art: Leg in Hammock by Edward Weston

One is what one looks at—well, at least partially. —Joseph Brodsky

All morning in my hammock burning
a tight one, poised with pencil and notebook
and seven-week beard, I look to the pines
outside my cabin, seeking inspiration
from the birds and the squirrels
whose singing and foraging, whose
exclamations, no, arguments, reflect
my inner my inner my inner . . .
and every so often my cousin Ricky returns
from hunting rabbits on my four-wheeler
to tell me he’s thought of a new way
to beat off: Anywhere around here to buy
watermelons? Even his camo flannel
can’t conceal that Superdome belly
and I hate to think how long
since anyone’s seen his diminutive dangle
so I tell him in all seriousness, my sympathy
sincere, You might be on to something,
but after he tokes and rides away
I get inspired, realize I should’ve said
Go drive around these country roads, man,
look for signs! and even Ricky would’ve
nodded with a look of feigned profundity
like he’s posing for an author photo
but I let that moment go

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The Muse of Work

.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Ellen Bass

Featured Image: “Portrait of Mrs Marie Jeanette de Lange” (1900) by Jan Toorop

If I could choose my muse,
she’d have red hair, short, spikey,
and green cateye glasses with rhinestones at the tips.
She’d wear a sleeveless white blouse, ruffled
over shallow scallop-shell breasts.
Can you see how young she is?
I think she’s the girl Sappho loved,
the one with violets in her lap.
When she opens the door, a flurry of spring,
apple blossoms and plum, sweeps in.
But I’ve been assigned the Muse of Work.
It turns out she’s a dead ringer for my mother
as she scrambles the eggs, sips black coffee,
a Marlboro burning in a cut-glass ashtray.
Then she opens the store. The wooden shelves shine
with amber whiskeys and clear vodkas,
bruise-dark wine rising in the slender necks.

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Yet

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Eric Torgersen

Featured Image: “Study for “Le Bain”: Two Women and a Child in a Boat” by Mary Cassatt

You’ve got to act, and soon, but you don’t dare yet.
There’s one big load you don’t think you can bear yet.

You chose to dive this deep; it’s not for me
to tell you why you can’t come up for air yet.

You had big plans. You’re running out of time.
There’s no excuse to contemplate despair yet.

All that time and trouble spent on you.
For all the rest, you don’t have much to spare yet.

The world should find some meaning in your work?
You haven’t shown us why we ought to care yet.

Don’t give me that I-don’t-get-it look.
Sixty-five, and still not self-aware yet.

You might just want to start to pack your bags.
You may not have enough to pay the fare yet,

but that doesn’t mean the taxi’s not on its way.
Look out the window. No, it isn’t there. Yet.

Call it what you will, but thank something, Eric.
There’s one stiff suit you haven’t had to wear yet.

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Heroine in Repose

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Rick Bursky
Featured Image: The Vase of Tulips by Paul Cézanne

I wasn’t sure if she kissed me
or simply used her lips
to push my face away. Yes,
the moist warmth was enjoyable,
but when my head was forced
back over the top of the sofa
the intention grayed.

Earlier that day I planned
to quit my job and pursue
a career writing romantic novels
that would be confused with memoirs.
But if I couldn’t distinguish
between a kiss and a push
what chance do I have
of writing romantic novels
that would be confused with memoirs?

After the kiss, and I prefer
to think it was a kiss,
she sank back into the pillows
and watched me
out of the corner of her eye.

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Chicken

.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Stephen Cramer

Featured Image: For Sunday’s Dinner by William Michael Barnett

At the festival when we were celebrating
harvest with pumpkin tarts & cider,
an older farmer asked what I was into
& maybe my answer was muffled a bit
from the cider’s tang because he started
talking passionately not about his favorite poet
or the use of weather in haiku
but about his chickens: White Leghorns,
Silkie Bantams, Rhode Island Reds,
Plymouth Rocks, how, in Corporate Agriculture
the birds are bred so big that their legs
cripple beneath them & isn’t that a shame.
I tried to break in, to tell him he misheard.
But he shook his head & held up his finger.
That’s not the case with his birds.
When his hens are laying he puts oyster shells
in their grit to give them extra calcium
for their own shells. His birds are free range—
not debeaked & stuffed two dozen
to a pen. No, his birds can go anywheres they want
from the barn to the bog & even in the house.
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In which I first discovered

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Emily Pérez

Featured Art: Woman Writing by Zabitz

Quite suddenly, at least it seems in retrospect
Though I still seek a complete

My relationship to my past
It was as if my past had taken

Without warning, understand,
Had slipped in such a way that it uncovered

No, that’s not right, for it suggests a lack of deliberate
It wasn’t that I didn’t try

Read More