I-70 Review
Writing and Art from the Middle and Beyond
Featured Poet
Doug Ramspeck
Doug Ramspeck's latest short story collection, Dancing in Their Dead Mother's Dresses, will be published in early 2026 by Wolfson Press. Recent poetry books include Smoke Memories (Redhawk Publications, 2025), winner of the Lena Shull Book Award, and Blur (The Word Works, 2023), winner of the Tenth Gate Prize. Ramspeck is a three-time winner of the Ohio Art Council Individual Excellence Award, twice for poetry and once for fiction.
Artist's Statement
For me, writing a poem isn't about taking control over the material but about relinquishing that control, about listening instead of deciding. Sometimes, I will start with the title while having no idea what it might mean. I then launch into an opening line that, as far as I know, has nothing to do with that title. The writing, then, becomes a process of letting the poem and the title reveal themselves to me. Another method is to write four poems very quickly—poems that have nothing to do with each other—then to circle the best lines. When that is done, I find some way to stitch them together into a poem.
Crow Epistles
My father flew away finally
with the crows. And then it was winter.
We heard him calling sometimes
from the woods as snow came down.
It was a kind of faith, the falling snow.
And always the crows seemed harmless
in the trees. The hours were blind
beyond the river, an offering
of masked leaves and broken earth,
the wet smell of mud in the swales,
snow prints in our dreams that arced
down to the river then back,
approaching the back door
like tooth marks in an apple.
And once we saw a lone black feather
dropped and resting in the falling
snow, snow that wanted nothing
from the field but its erasure.
And come morning the crows
were gathering in the distance,
watching the snow coming down,
the obelisks of their black bodies
motionless, the way you might
imagine a prayer arising
from the stillness of a breath.
Though later, after dark, the nightly
drama of the moon conducted
its pale sojourn above the trees,
where it briefly stayed before
drifting its smoke toward the river.
from Original Bodies (Southern Indiana Review Press, 2014)
Field Religion
The old men believe their hearts are bruised.
It is another summer of manifold skies.
The field is restless beyond the fence,
and the mud, which has given birth to grass,
chalks the landscape where young boys
are throwing rocks, where the river sculpts
the feral body of new day. Sometimes the men
remember loved ones who have died, the souls
that call outward to the clouds, while a cabal
of vultures makes an augury of shrouded wings.
Light dreams the old men at their windows.
And then it is winter and snow falls on the
nervous horses by the fence. Is this what the earth
demands? The men have their boredom as disguise.
They realize, now, how death is consensual,
a door set loose on its hinges in the wind.
And summer returns. Here is our season of spirits:
black rain streaking windows, a plastic sack
caught in a dust devil by the wire fence, a dark calling
of birds, this dusk moon an overturned bowl
above the barn, spilling white ash or dust,
night calling out of the primitive throat.
from Original Bodies (Southern Indiana Review Press, 2014)
Notes on Beauty: The Skull
In Turner's Sun Setting
over a Lake, the colors fuse
and bleed out
of the imagined
body of water and sky.
I believe this is
dumb substance,
evolving or devolving,
the way my father
used to love
the edge of woods
that looked out on the fence
and river. Here a day moon
lay broken above
a plumage of black-eyed
Susans. Or say
that moon was stone
and the grass was forever,
the way grackles
each morning
cry out their augury
from summer-thickened
leaves alive with
motion, and the mud
with its rank smells
has its divinations,
and at dusk
the bats row
out of the willows,
the old meditation
of moonlight scavenging
around us after dark,
sepulchral. Our father said
he went there to be alone,
to watch the hemoglobin
cars moving past
on the distant road,
to hear not his family
but primitive birds
singing from the old
church cemetery,
to watch, in winter,
a calligraphy
of snow chalking
the paper birches
like a faint solder
of moonlight.
And once he found
there a woodchuck's skull
half buried
in the earth,
and he brought it
back to the house,
washed it with
a hose, wrapped it
in a box,
and presented it
to our mother
for their final
anniversary.
I was there
when she lifted it
into view—the most
strangely surprising
and beautiful gift
I'd ever seen.
from Black Flowers (LSU press, 2018)
How Humans Came to Love
First rain overwhelmed
the creek, scratching earth.
You could sense the years
were eyelids opening
then closing. You could watch
in the primitive field—
beyond where the waters
slipped—a homily of stars
congealing after dark.
It was cold when the black
winds arranged themselves
across the plains. And there,
in a faint depression
of bare ground, two shadows
huddled close, the human
warmth conserved between
them soundless and discursive.
Soon the clouds dissolved
to expose the moon's
extracted tooth.
In the distant trees
a lost creature began
crying out its death agony.
The shadows stirred
faintly in their dreams,
slipping closer—the way
a rock dropped into
dark waters disappears.
from Black Flowers (LSU press, 2018)
Smoke Dress
Except for the burning leaves,
nothing seems to breathe.
I think the drivers on the highway
must see the gray-white occultation
corkscrewing into air and think
of smoke as a kind of living forgetfulness,
this thing that has nothing to do
with any life but exists on its own,
separate and beyond all recompense.
My mother used to claim that the years
gathered like snow inside a chest
and the bones of her body
were made of the labor of the hours,
as though you might sweep your way
into a kind of stasis. Once, when I was nine,
I found her sitting cross-legged
in her closet, holding the dress in which
she said she wanted to be buried.
I must have answered something
in response, but what I remember
are the dust motes suspended
and breathing in the air around her
and the dark stains on the undersides
of her bare feet. She smoked sometimes
on the back porch, and I sat beside her
and watched the orange tip flare,
the way a feeling beneath your ribs
grows suddenly hot and bright
and so betrays you. We had four apple trees
in the side yard, and each late summer
I watched the wasps grow drunk and lie
on their backs in the grass. I like to think
that the distant clouds seemed to them
like smoke that clothed the sky.
from Book of Years (Cloudbank Books, 2021)
Stepping into the Dark
There were a few years of my life when every time I spoke with my mother
by phone she told me which of her friends had most recently died,
though the terms she used were always “passed on” or “lost” or “isn't
with us anymore,” as though the queue that approached the steep cliff
was populated only by the most soft-spoken of kindly people,
the sort who would say “pardon me” while stepping into the dark.
But in my dreams the dead—like my mother—are more like the unruly
boys I see sometimes from my back window, all of them shouting by the river,
throwing stones at each other and running like feral creatures through the trees.
No one rests in peace inside my dreams. In one my mother scolds me
for removing a green tomato from the kitchen windowsill, and in that dream
I understand that a tomato is often the size of a fist, and a fist is often the size
of a heart, and my mother is furious that hers gave out. In another dream
my brother keeps trying to speak, but his lungs have filled again with blood,
and the words are a damp fury, a red spray. I woke from that particular dream
to hear acorns dropping in the night onto the roof, an offering from the oaks
that sounded liked slow-motion gunfire, or polite little bombs, stepping off
one by one to fall. And often as a teen I went swimming at the quarry with
my friends, and we gazed into the still and green waters, which were always
vastly more cool than we expected, even in summer. And at night
when we ventured there, those waters were the blown pupil of an eye,
and the moon was desiccated bone, and again and again we dragged ourselves
up the rocks, climbing to maybe ten feet up, made a wild shriek, and jumped.
from Book of Years (Cloudbank Books, 2021)
family anthem
sister believes her brothers are the brackish waters of the river are the possum face
of the moon & she believes that dusk light congeals inside their throats
once she saw them set fire to the neighbor's cat saw them dance around the flames
& she dreamed that night that their teeth crumbled in their mouths like stones
that the stars were kicked over & abandoned & she believes that the years
have soot-black tongues that her brothers have soot-black tongues & the songs
they sing spill bitter salt into the world once she might have smothered them
in their cribs might have dropped them like anthems from windows once she
watched them swim beneath a canker-sore of sun & she thought let the mud waters
carry them away carry them under & she dreamed that night
that they were standing by her bed were carefully dousing her with lighter fluid
& they said we anoint you & she said stop & they said we baptize you
& she said you are not my brothers & they said hush hush
from Blur (The Word Works, 2023)
The Marriage We Carried in our Pockets
Or sometimes watched drifting with the leaves,
some last confetti of yellow or brown. Or it existed
the way the juncos huddled beneath the thistle
feeder in winter, in the way clouds spilled water
in May to soak the ground. Once we found it
in the attic in a steamer trunk, and another time
we closed it in a suitcase and drove it across
the countryside. And often we imagined that
the years were a locked door against which
we kept knocking to be admitted. And on the dresser
of the new house, I spilled the change of the marriage
into a heap, and later we sat on the back porch and watched
the nuptial clouds on their conveyor belts. And we slept
at night with the breaths of the marriage around us.
from Blur (The Word Works, 2023)
Orchard of Years
I keep thinking there is someone out there.
Maybe it is Mother in the dress in which
we buried her. I wonder if the gray morning light
amid the apple trees confuses her. She can't decide
where the darkness ends and the day begins.
We used to go out together and watch
the wasps getting drunk. They fed on fallen
and fermenting apples. They rolled over
on their backs and huzzed. She lifted
them and held them in her palms.
She told me once that the apple limbs sagged
not because of the burden of the globes
but because they didn't want the fruit to have
too far to drop to find the ground. And she said
that the story of Eve left out the part where
she slipped the noose around her neck and tried
to hang herself from God's cursed tree. During one
of her longest stays away, there was a view
from her hospital window of flowering crabapple
trees. I sat with her sometimes and we talked
about how the seasons were wanderers,
how they could never settle down but always,
eventually, came back home. In the car
on the ride back to the house, my father told us
that what kept happening to our mother's mind
was like the fire blight that darkened
then shriveled the leaves until they infected
every single other tree and leaf around them.
from Smoke Memories (Redhawk Publications, 2025)
Center of Gravity
This morning arrives like a slow boat,
here with its quiet station of light
amid the clouds. We never imagine
that the world will end with vines
slowly wrapping themselves around
the sky's neck. We think we will hear
it coming, that a trumpet will
suddenly fissure air, and not that
the orator snow will fall without
a sound, fall toward the center
of everything. Once, we were fifteen
forever. There was a drumbeat inside
our chests, a weightlessness so buoyant
we were carried aloft inside our dreams
to decode the treetops. Now the years gather
like bees inside a hive, while we,
the beekeepers, perform the minor
miracles with smoke.
from Smoke Memories (Redhawk Publications, 2025)