Ohio
Drinking red wine in a peeling
canoe, land-bound, by
the drained swimming pool.
The leaves watched as we turned
to run. Our plan was to break
the glass, take the fancy heirloom.
You talked me down with a shy
glance. Later, we huddled in
the flooded basement, watching
the washing machine float by.
We called it a chapel.
Then the rain then the snow.
The click-beetles scratching at the door.
Bills in a pile by the gas stove.
I tasted your dirty red scarf; over and full,
your hands kneaded my stiff neck.
The snow buried the house till we couldn’t see.
Twice I fixed soup you refused to eat.
About the author:
Charles Kell is a PhD student at The University of Rhode Island and associate editor of The Ocean State Review. His poetry and fiction have appeared in The New Orleans Review, The Saint Ann’s Review, Kestrel, The Pinch, and elsewhere. Cage of Lit Glass, chosen by Kimiko Hahn for the 2018 Autumn House Press Poetry Prize, is forthcoming. He teaches in Rhode Island and Connecticut.
Art: Jazz in the Air by Susana Aldanondo
In the artist's words:
Susana Aldanondo is an immigrant and a New Yorker. Susana lived her whole life surrounded by the sounds of tango and the art her father made out of his small apartment in NYC. Her father was an artist and muralist who sold his art to various restaurants and venues in NYC, and in the streets of Soho, NYC where she’d often accompany him during the summer months, leaving an inspirational mark on Susana. Her own experiences as an immigrant in New York City, the challenges attached to that identity, the contrast between life in the city and life in an isolating town in Vermont while facing adversity and having her identity as an immigrant and an American questioned while facing challenging situations was what inspired her to turn to art and to create art. Susana also turned to education to contribute to her art. She uses her studies of Sociology and International Relations as a background to her approach to make statements through her art. She hopes to appeal to audiences across different cultural boundaries as she invites spectators to look beyond those boundaries through art, considering new and unexplored ways of seeing the world and each other. Susana’s art also expresses the joy found in music, movement, energy, and the inner world we can connect to. Susana’s art aims to focus on the positives, the possibilities, the ‘what ifs’, the beauty found in our cultural differences through music, movement, and the doors that await and open when we are open minded, while maintaining a focus of our collective existence and experiences. Susana’s art hopes to encourage everyone to challenge themselves to connect their own personal experiences to a much broader context; and step into a conscious and mindful path to connect with each other. Giving specific titles to her work and through gestural abstraction, splattered and dripped paint, large and thin strokes, straight lines and loose curvilinear forms , she creates movement and energy that stand out in her paintings. Her art offers hope, joy, while looking at our human experience through a lens found in the most unexpected places, and within each of us. Her art encourages each person to keep an open mind, to look within, to look at each other and find common ground. When she paints, Susana is inspired by music. She listens to jazz, tango, salsa, flamenco, and popular music, her art is inspired by the music she listens to while she paints inspiring her to paint movement, energy, joy.