Winter Online Exclusive

December 1, 2023.Reading time less than 1 minute.

The latest Winter Online Exclusive of New Ohio Review is now available. The cover art is “Diamond” by Reagan Settle.

This issue includes work from Cara Lynn Albert, Steph Del Rosso, Robert Long Foreman, Rosamund Healey, Caroline Koopford, Cyn Nooney, Daryl Ogden, J. Dominic Patacsil, Valli Jo Porter, Maya Afilalo, Mary Birnbaum, KT Ryan, Craig van Rooyen, Linda Bamber, Emily Blair, Joseph Capista, Wes Civilz, Joyce Schmid, Pichchenda Bao, and Michael Lavers.

We hope you enjoy our 2023 Winter Exclusive, which you can read below. This is an issue we hope will add some warmth to your winter reading.

-The Editors

Improvisation for Beginners

November 30, 2023.Reading time 1 minute.

By Joseph J. Capista

Featured Art by Reagan Settle

Peanuts work for earplugs.
Motor oil’s dandy warpaint.
Hammer yonder socket screw.
Let, for birdsong, boulevard
suffice, its springtime
putsch of blathered whoosh.
Try disorganized religion.
Whereas one yellow, freshly
sharpened pencil expedites
the trach, deep blue in place
of black seldom works.
Socks in place of sanitary
tissue is a trick I learned
in proximity to a mosh pit.
For accolade try: While
the jury commends your
recent submission to our
sculpture exposition,
concerns persist regarding
the capacity of guano,
liverwurst, and gypsum
to withstand the realities
of summertime Chicago.
My mother pierced her ears
with a sharp object and ice,
that trick from way back in
the Pleistocene Epoch when
our ancestors substituted bona
fide desire for Neanderthals
which must have been a hoot.
For Perikles, try sprinkles.
For mope, try poem.
For readjust, just read.
For that hornet nest you’ve
tried all summer to locate
and found now in, yikes,
your front maple whose
leaves turned a very specific
color and then with little
fanfare fell immediately
to the gutter try your heart.
For love, try anything.

The Elko Butter Chase

November 29, 2023.Reading time 37 minutes.

By J. Dominic Patacsil

Lakey Sturgis took a palmful of margarine from the brown plastic tub between her feet and ran it over the cheekbones of her grandson’s face. She smeared the pale-yellow spread across the boy’s sloped forehead, deep into the wrinkles of his ears, working her way down the turkey skin of his throat to his bare chest, then beyond.

Just a little more, she said to Peep, who batted long, effeminate eyelashes back at her. Nuggets of the margarine stuck to them, and for a second, Lakey was reminded of nights long past when she lived in Greenpoint and Hans was still living. She looked into her grandson’s globby lashes and saw her twenty-year-old self going to bed without caring to wipe away the makeup she spent so long painting on for nights of swing dancing and manhattans at Truffani’s. That was before Hans’ job brought them to the desert, before their daughter was born. Now Lakey was sixty-six and dying, far from any place she called home.

Slow Fruit

November 28, 2023.Reading time 45 minutes.

By Robert Long Foreman

Featured Art by Reagan Settle

I sat across the desk from the hospital administrator.

On the desk, reflected in her glasses, I could see a photo of her husband and kids.

Having the photo there must have kept her from feeling lonely at work. Or it fortified her in trying moments. Or both of those things.

Pens were on the desk, and a phone with many extensions.

The hospital administrator must have been in her fifties. She wore her hair short, but we’re not talking Terry Gross short. More like Meg Ryan in the nineties—only the administrator didn’t look like Meg Ryan. She didn’t look like anyone. She was wholly her own person, and I respected that.

Note on Human Who Has Been Insulted

November 27, 2023.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Wes Civilz

Human under observation is suffering from an “insult”—
a verbal exchange with another human
that has inserted a nugget of dark information
firmly into one of the sub-surface personality cores.

Interestingly, the insult has, on the quantum level, a shape
related fractally to the central pieces used in the game
called “darts.” Pointy and missile-shaped. Capable
of lodging deeply, if aimed with skill.

Upon pointy end of insult it should be noted
there are “barbs,” similar to those on hooks
used for fishing (these enable ease
of entry and difficulty of removal).

After several observations, I note that
the most effective insults are those that are true.
False claims are much more easily processed
by the ego’s immune system, and dumped from memory.

Specifically, this human was told
he is “dumb.”
Note that this insult referred to
his lack of intelligence

rather than its older meaning-layer
of non-speaking (although it could be interesting
to at some point analyze the connection,
if any, between stupidity and muteness).

This human suffers internally
because he was assigned the word dumb
and the word matched lock-and-key
with the fact that he is indeed dumb.

Upon observing him again
some days later, he has failed to discover
the hidden intelligence boost
contained within the quantum dart of the insult.

I will spend no more time
observing this specimen;
he is sad,
entropic.

Flying Objects

November 25, 2023.Reading time 28 minutes.

By Daryl Ogden

My mother and I were driving home at dusk on a two-lane country highway following one of our visits to the fire station where her newish boyfriend was posted. It was Memorial Day, a couple of months ahead of my eleventh birthday. A pair of vehicles were bearing down on us, their headlights filling up the rear and side view mirrors of our Toyota. The trailing drivers had already twice veered over the center line and gunned their engines, with ambitions of sling-shotting past. My mother responded by pressing hard on the accelerator, threatening a head on collision from traffic traveling in the opposite lane. Even though an 18-wheeler was now headed our direction a few hundred yards in the distance, both trailing vehicles tried again to pass. My mother floored it, forcing the drivers back into our lane or risk being entombed within thousand-pound accordions.

“They’ll have to wait until I’m ready for them to drive on by, Billy.”

On the road, my mother didn’t take any crap.

Stick Season

November 24, 2023.Reading time 17 minutes.

By Rosamund Healey

Featured Art by Reagan Settle

Ruth Ann doesn’t drive that way anymore. She doesn’t have a car but if she did, she wouldn’t. She has no reason to go to that side of the hill anyway. All that’s left of the Alstead farm is a small sliver of land on the dark side of the hill, just big enough for Ruth Ann’s double-wide trailer. Her daddy’s old place—the parts bought by the flatlanders—sits on the sun side of the hill, empty aside from ski season or leaf-peeping. Ruth Ann heard they razed the old farmhouse and put up a new lodge, all logs, meant to look old, yet nothing like what folks used to build. She heard someone else taps their sap lines and runs their sugar house too, but they still put their name on the syrup. She would not drive to that side of the hill for a thousand dollars. Well. Hundred.

“Time, lovey.” Haley doesn’t want to go to school. She pouts, sticky fingers on the cheap screen, knowing she can test Ruth Ann. Ruth Ann reaches out and tries to paw it off the girl, her arms jiggling as she stretches, yellowed nails like sloth claws. Haley jumps up quick and they play their game, the two of them moving in the trailer like slow-motion ninjas, knowing every corner by heart, how to avoid every precarious pile of stuff or mound of dirty laundry. Ruth Ann soon stops to catch her breath. She steadies herself, hand on her knee, palm on her heart, neither body part built for such a heavy body or small space. Haley relents quick, eyebrows knitting as she tosses the screen and roots around for a bottle of stale water. Ruth Ann smiles when she takes a sip even though it hurts. “Come now. Bus will be here.”

Should You Choose To Accept It

November 23, 2023.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Emily Blair

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

Down in the Valley

November 22, 2023.Reading time 37 minutes.

By Mary Birnbaum

The Featured Art is “Sea Library” by Greta Delapp

I was supposed to go on vacation to a National Park, but I don’t vacation. I mean, I did go, but I came very close to not seeing anything at all, because here is how I am accustomed to seeing: There are windows in my home office, but my desk does not face them, so light enters from the side. I am obliquely aware of the day. Sometimes I twist my body to see if the sun has risen, whether fog covers or wind stirs the big green shrub outside. In this small room in my house, I face three computer monitors and their glowing non-sun. I do a real-time job. Creation and consumption of the product are simultaneous; I make live captions for people to read on the Internet, like a stenographer does in court. I do it for seminars and webinars and legal proceedings, in Zoom or Teams or Chime or the platform du jour. My job is to listen and talk at once. What I do is called Voicewriting. It is a job of ears and mouth, an occupation more physical than cerebral, though I’m very stuck at a desk. I receive an audio feed from a remote source and say aloud what I hear as I hear it. Voice recognition software instantly converts my speech to text, which appears in a unique URL, or onscreen in a meeting platform. Someone I don’t know, someone far away or near, reads it as it unfurls. The job is sweaty and live. I’ve parroted defense contractors, nuclear regulators, pastors and poets. It’s echo, not interpretation.

There is no time to fall behind. A dropped word can be fatal to sentence meaning, a dropped sentence is dereliction. Tethered to my laptop by a web of cords, in my black microphone-headset, I resemble an air traffic controller. When a meeting has weak audio, I jack the volume up, and with my palms I press the headphones to my skull, so I am filled with sound and its vibration, then quickly I move my lips and tongue. If I get a very speedy talker, I close my eyes to eliminate all extraneous stimuli. The trick of the job is to tune out your own noise, to be a channel of syllables divorced from sense.

Sweater Weather

November 21, 2023.Reading time 9 minutes.

By Cara Lynn Albert

The Featured Art is “The Illusion of Memory” by Greta Delapp

You drive to Cassadaga not because you really believe in psychics and spiritualists, but because you’re thirty-eight and feel like you’re running out of options. Because it’s January fourth and you just spent another holiday season alone while your family asks about the absent husband.

The was-never-present in-the-first-place husband. The would-rather-fuck-the-eighteen-year-old-dog-walker husband.

He’s been gone for two years, and good riddance. You pull a cashmere cardigan over your shoulders, a Christmas present from your aunt bought half-off at JCPenney, because it’s one of the few days out of the year where Central Florida dips below sixty degrees. Angels and bloated polar bears dance over crabgrass-infested lawns. Plastic icicles hang from gutters, though it hasn’t fallen under freezing here in three decades.

Masking

November 20, 2023.Reading time 42 minutes.

By KT Ryan

The Featured Art is “Dead or Dreaming?” by Greta Delapp

Month 1: June

“Promise me you’re not gonna die,” my eight-year-old Ellie said.

It was a simple request during her bedtime tuck-in. All she needed was a one sentence guarantee that the operation to remove my brain tumor would go well. I couldn’t do it. What if something went wrong—a spinal fluid leak, paralysis, even death? Ellie’s arms formed a vice-grip around my body. I kneaded Ellie’s pillow, worried that she’d never be able to trust an adult again if I promised success and then something bad happened.

With twelve hours to go before I went under the knife, I resorted to chanting the same thing I’d been saying since my diagnosis one month earlier: that my surgeon, Dr. T. was “the best of the best.” It had worked well up until now.

Horses in a Field

November 19, 2023.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Emily Blair

I am reading my book manuscript to my mother
in her backyard. She tells me that was probably a catbird
I saw earlier. She tells me bleach is the real way
to get stains out of grout. The narrative urge is a strong one,
she says. She had an invisible horse, but never said
she wanted to be one. On that last point, we disagree.
Perhaps it was only a feeling I had
when we were watching horses in a field. That blurring of beings.
Like the colors in a Vuillard painting. A dress turning into
a table or an orchard. My college painting teacher said edges
are important, but never explained how best to create them.
I wanted us to be old ladies together, I say to my mother,
meaning me and her. Now we know it isn’t going to happen.
But she says she was dreading it—she didn’t want to be here
to see me grow old. We decide death comes too soon,
in the second section of my manuscript—
And speaking of death, how can the deck chair cushions
still have a cat hair side, I ask her,
now that the cats have been dead for years.
Because we’re disgusting old people, she replies
with a laugh, meaning herself and my stepfather.
Though the truth is I’m the sloppy one. This redbud tree
is a new redbud tree and I didn’t even notice.
I didn’t notice the new flowers she potted either, lined up
with their brilliant blossoms, waiting
to be put on the front porch. It’s all one to me:
the backyard, the flowers, my mother, me.
How can any of it exist without the rest?
We agree that I’ve written too many poems,
and they don’t go together.

Acting Out

November 18, 2023.Reading time 33 minutes.

By Caroline Koopford

A Friday afternoon, late March of 1990, suburban New Jersey. A second-floor apartment in a series of two-story brick buildings. In the living room there is a slumped brown couch, a scarred coffee table, and a television with dial controls and bunny-ear antenna that stick out garishly from a lop-sided wicker shelving unit strewn with artificial flowers. Beside the shelves is an unshaded window. Outside, the branches of a close maple tree bud neon green. It is almost evening. The light is warm, crepuscular.

Two girls laze on either end of the couch, sleek as seals on a dock, stretched out as far as they can be without touching one another. The television blazes. Cassie is ten. Franny is eight and has been suspended from school. Not for the first time.

Skin Check

November 17, 2023.Reading time 30 minutes.

By Steph Del Rosso

Featured Art by Reagan Settle

The mole was the color of charcoal, shaped like a raindrop sliding down a car window. Mona had gotten the call from her dermatologist in the bathroom stall of a dive bar. Two women were arguing at the sink.

“I can’t tell where his opinions end and yours begin,” said one.

“What are you talking about? I’ve always hated neoliberalism,” said the other.

“Unfortunately, we’ve detected melanoma,” said the dermatologist. “The good news is, we caught it early.”

But Mona hadn’t heard her above the whir of the hand dryer. She plugged one ear with her finger. “Sorry, could you repeat that?”

“We caught it early,” said her dermatologist. “And that’s helpful with melanoma.”

The word cut through the bathroom din like an un-tuned chord. Mona looked down at her bare thighs on the toilet seat.

The Strange Situation

November 16, 2023.Reading time 36 minutes.

By Valli Jo Porter

Featured Art by Tristen Luken

I escaped the religion of my youth by moving five hundred miles from Ohio to Virginia. There, I refused to pray as I drifted off to sleep, and I never roused for church on Sunday morning. I lived in a tiny broken-down ranch on a quarter acre lot, a single oak tree in the front yard and the world’s worst neighbor to my side. Wayne Bishop was his name, and he spent his afternoons in his driveway, under the shade of my oak, his feet propped on an upturned milk crate, empty beer cans lined up next to his lawn chair. He looked like a toad with a rosacaed face and giant turned-out lips. He called me over to help with his projects, and each time I’d internally debate just drunk or personality disorder. He’d enlist me to help him cut crown molding or install paneling, then he’d hover and insult my handiwork and calculations while he drank his beer. He was also breathtakingly litigious, prone to staying up all night authoring lawsuits that he asked me to copy edit before he filed. I picked random sentences and inserted commas—he never had enough commas—to placate him, so he didn’t sue me like he did his former employer, every doctor who tried to help him, and his own brother. I always helped because I was lonely, and it seemed prudent to stay on his good side.

Craig’s List

November 15, 2023.Reading time 4 minutes.

By Craig van Rooyen

Nowhere in history will you find Craig followed by
“the Great” or preceded by “His Excellency,”
though many have been excellent
at diagramming sentences and choosing crisp apples
and braiding their daughters’ hair.

There are no Craigs in the Old Testament or the New
but yourdestinyblueprint.com says we are
useful, friendly, and prone to suffer from a bottomless hunger.
Which must be why I find myself in unmatched socks
on the bare patch of earth overlooking town every morning.
I am useful here because I am walking the dog.
No one questions the usefulness of a man walking a dog.
But really I’m here to watch the 6:30 Amtrak
head south toward L.A. where 10 million suns rise
in a city of panes and Craig’s is about to open on Melrose –
a place a man can start with baked french toast and move on
to southern fried chicken on corn pancakes
smothered in maple syrup.

We are known for our lists of gently used or
used up things, where you can find a spittoon for $50
and for only ten, a vintage wooden ironing board that
has been intimate with the underarms of 10,000 shirts
worn by various middle managers since 1892.

The first of us must have lived
up some Scottish canyon, content to stay
in the crag with stonechats and sparrows
until the townspeople named the person for his place,
a type of blurring that persists in this variety
of boys and men who have done so little of note
they are known not by their achievements
but by the space they take up in the world:
Crag dwellers, a half-rung above cave men.

Over the history of the modern Olympic games,
our seven medalists brought home
bronze twice and exactly five silvers.

Our numbers dwindle. In 1967, I was one of 7,310 Craigs
born in the U.S. By 2017, American parents chose the name
just 207 times. By all rights we are ready to take our place
on the endangered species list along with the Birdwing Pearlymussel
and the Bandrumped Storm Petrel, creatures that appear
nowhere on stamps or posters, and still are holy in their way.

Broken yellow stripes spangle the ribcage of
the Santa Cruz Long-Toed Salamander.
The last few, with their evolved tail fins and
absurd toes, like to live near slow-moving streams
and are apparently useless to humankind.
Do you see now that a list can also be a psalm?

On the graph of Craigs, the plunging line predicts
the last of us will be born in 2032.
If I could, I’d tell that last Craig to have only daughters
and try to learn the french braid. I’d tell him
to take up everything that is everything to him
in his own hands every day and, fistful over fistful, weave
the trinity of brown strands into a shining rope, taking care
not to miss the sun-bleached strays around
his girl’s temples and the nape of her neck, knowing
when the time comes he must find a way to let it go.

The Nigels

November 15, 2023.Reading time 1 minute.

By Linda Bamber

I used to have no name-mates
but I never took my birth name back and now
two other Linda Bambers
sometimes get my mail. Texas and Kansas, I call them

to tell them apart. One is the author of a perennially best-selling textbook
on accounting; the other
wears crossed pink ribbons
in images online. I trust them both and plan
to be in touch.

If all 8 billion of us had one name
would no one ever start another war?

Nigel Smith, a pub owner in Worcestershire, England
once threw a ‘Nigel night’
expecting maybe half a dozen name-mates.
Four hundred thirty four showed up, he exulted,
including one from Colorado
crowd-sourced for the trip.

Ni GEL, Ni GEL, Ni GEL
they all shouted
when they’d had enough beer.

All these Nigels, crowed the host,
were really keen to talk and share their lives
and come together in a kind of Nigel community.

I’m saying . . .
could you scale that up?

Lone Star Jubilee

November 14, 2023.Reading time 56 minutes.

By Cyn Nooney

Tanya says Hollis beat a boy last night. Tanya says the boy crawled through the girl’s bedroom window and good thing Hollis caught him. He beat that boy so hard he soiled himself, Tanya goes on, taking a drag from her cigarette. She saw it with her own two eyes, heard all the whooping and hollering, then the boy curled up beneath the window, jeans streaked with shit. We’re at work when Tanya tells me this. She’s standing near my desk, her back against the easel where I lay out the company newsletter. I’m twenty-three, she’s thirty-eight. She works in purchasing. I’m in PR. Her cubicle is catty-corner to mine. As she talks Tanya adjusts the underwire in her bra with long, tapered fingernails painted the color of strawberry frosting. My boobies are sagging by the minute, she says, Hollis used to spray ‘em all over with whipped cream then slurp up every last bit, but now he never touches them let alone glances their way.

It embarrasses me when she talks like this, but I keep a straight face, so she’ll tell me more. I like to know what’s coming down the pike. She has a young son, Hollis Junior, and a daughter named Mercy who just turned fourteen. Mercy is the one with the window in her room that the boy crawled through.

Praying I Wouldn’t Be Last

November 12, 2023.Reading time 34 minutes.

By Maya Afilalo

The Featured Art is “Blossoming” by Greta Delapp

The summer after ninth grade, I had my first kiss. All school year, I’d been on a mission to no longer be “prude”—the kissing equivalent of a virgin. It seemed other girls were always talking about their conquests. Who they had kissed, and where, and whether the boys felt them up over or under the bra. I longed to be part of these conversations, to offer my own tale of triumph, to sagely weigh in on others’ dilemmas. Instead, I stood to the side, quiet, fiddling with my razr flip phone. That summer was the Summer of Death: Michael Jackson, Walter Cronkite, Farrah Fawcett, Billy Mays. Others, whose names I didn’t recognize. I was fourteen years old, and death was no deterrent to my desire.

I wondered if my lack of suitors had something to do with my appearance. Through middle school, I had sported frizzy curls cropped into an unfortunate bob. Every day, I wore a Life is Good T-shirt or a hoodie or both. Adidas track pants. I had what my well-intentioned cousin once called “only a little bit of a mustache.” When high school started, I made an effort. I traded my swishy pants for jeans, my shapeless T-shirts for fitted tops from Old Navy. I got my ears pierced. I kept the bob, though I began styling it with John Frieda mousse that came in a tall silver can. It was my cousin who showed me how to apply the mousse. He was my age, also curly-haired, had been kissing girls for years.

The lone wild goose sticks out his tongue at me

November 12, 2023.Reading time 1 minute.

By Joyce Schmid

half-heartedly, not like the one last April— fierce,
protecting pear-green goslings. But this year, no little ones.

It’s been so long since I have seen a baby—
even seen one—not to speak of holding one,
or watching a tiny face reflect my smile.

I’m not demented yet, not like the woman who begged to see
her stolen babies as they loomed above her, grown.

I’m not asking to be young again, back in the tent
with everyone asleep but me and the baby at my breast—
warm baby in the chill of night— or in the back seat

of my daughter’s Ford Escape— the “baby-whisperer” she called me
as I gentled her son to sleep.

I tell myself there are advantages to being old:
no longer wondering

if God exists, or what life’s meaning is
(He does, there’s none),
acquiring bits of wisdom

such as everything takes longer than you think
except your life.

Review: Let Our Bodies Change the Subject by Jared Harél

November 11, 2023.Reading time 5 minutes.

By Pichchenda Bao

Let Our Bodies Change the Subject, Jared Harél’s latest poetry collection, is an invitation to reckon with what it means to steward life, your own as well as others’, to hold on to its preciousness while also taking stock of its dear costs. It calls to mind Emily Dickinson’s exhortation to “tell all the truth, but tell it slant.” The language and the subjects of Harél’s poems are plainspoken and familiar, yet the truths they hold have the power to devastate.

Consider the first line of the first poem, “Sad Rollercoaster”:

My daughter is in the kitchen, working out death.

Harél situates us first with his daughter, establishes kinship in the kitchen, that place of nourishment, labor, and loaded emotions. The sentence is matter-of-fact and utterly relatable until we get to the word, “death,” that lightning strike of truth. Even in the comfort of a kitchen, even with a beloved child, we face mortality. This movement between ease and confrontation, this “working out” of being human, will carry on throughout the collection as Harél takes us through the various places and phases of his life as a son, a husband and a parent in the 21st century in the U.S.

Review: Rise Above the River by Kelly Rowe

November 10, 2023.Reading time 14 minutes.

By Michael Lavers

In Rise Above the River Kelly Rowe writes about her brother, whose Huck Finn boyhood–building rafts and climbing trees–was shattered when a teacher sexually abused him. Gone is the boy who cries “the world goes on forever–- // and I’m the king!” Instead we get a man in free fall, ramifying trauma outward. He wrecks cars, he steals his dying mother’s morphine, he drives right from her funeral to the bank to get his share of the inheritance, and then disappears. Eventually he commits suicide after a stint in prison.