Scene February 23, 2021

| clevescene.com | February 24-March 9, 2021

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| clevescene.com | February 24-March 9, 2021

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| clevescene.com | February 24-March 9, 2021

CONTENTS

FEBRUARY 24-MARCH 9, 2021 • VOL. 51 NO 29 Upfront .......................................7 Feature ..................................... 10 Eat ............................................ 14

Arts .......................................... 21 Savage Love .............................. 22

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Left to right: Angelo Maneage, Katy Ring, J. David (on ladder), Brendan Joyce, Billy Lennon, Matt Mitchell, Kevin Latimer

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Photo via Scene archives

UPFRONT Councilman Ken Johnson Arrested on Corruption Charges, Finally CLEVELAND CITY Councilman Ken Johnson was arrested by local FBI officers Tuesday morning after a federal grand jury indicted him on 15 corruption-related charges.

The charges stem, per the Department of Justice, from a scheme in which Johnson and his assistant, Garnell Jamison, defrauded the city by submitting false monthly expense reports for a decade. Johnson received the $1,200 monthly maximum as reimbursement for “ward services” that were never performed. Johnson is also alleged to have benefitted from federal dollars he steered to the Buckeye Shaker Square Development Corporation.

Johnson, Jamison and the former head of Buckeye Shaker Square Development Corporation, John Hopkins, were all arrested Tuesday.

Johnson is expected to appear, by videoconference, in federal court later Tuesday.

“The allegations set forth in today’s indictment detail the exploitation of public office for personal gain,” said Acting U.S. Attorney Bridget M. Brennan, in a DOJ press release. “Such conduct may bring about a temporary financial benefit for those involved, but it harms the public’s confidence in its elected officials.”

Equally harmful, no doubt, is the fact that these alleged crimes, and a panoply of related corrupt activities, have been out in the open for nearly three years. Former Cleveland. com columnist Mark Naymik was breaking a new scandalous Ken Johnson story on what felt like a daily basis though the summer and fall of 2018,and hardly anything was done about it. Johnson was permitted to keep his council sinecure, where he’s been double-dipping since 2013, with no repercussions of any kind.

Talk about harming the public’s confidence in elected officials!

The city made statements about investigating the allegations in Naymik’s reporting, and Council President Kevin Kelley, to avoid a cascade of negative PR and deeper investigative reporting, stopped allowing the monthly reimbursements. An outside auditor determined, in the aftermath, that a number of council members other

than Johnson, including Kelley, were improperly filing their monthly expense reports. Joe Jones, Kevin Bishop, Kerry McCormack, Mike Polensek, Anthony Hairston, Dona Brady, Anthony Brancatelli, Jasmin Santana and Brian Kazy were also named.

Kelley then vowed to “tighten rules” governing these monthly reimbursements.

The whole of Cleveland City Council should be squirming at this moment. They likely know that the FBI has been making the rounds in Ohio, and that Ken Johnson very well could be the first domino to fall in Cleveland. In 2020, Cincinnati was rocked as three council members there were charged with accepting bribes related to development deals.

Four council members in Toledo were also indicted in a bribery and extortion scheme last year. Who›s next? -Sam Allard

Mayoral Candidate Basheer Jones’ Campaign Finance Report Raises Red Flags The unaudited year-end campaign finance report for Ward 7 Cleveland City Councilman Basheer Jones raises a number of serious red flags.

Jones is an author, speaker and the first Muslim to serve on City Council. He has publicly stated that he intends to run for Cleveland Mayor in 2021 and in fact pulled petitions at the Cuyahoga County Board of Elections in recent days. As with other candidates, his campaign activities require ongoing scrutiny.

But that scrutiny has proven difficult to apply. On his 2020 report, filed in late January, virtually all of his contributions were listed without names attached.

The report reflects that Jones raised more than $80,000 from June 29 to Dec. 31. Among the Cleveland mayoral hopefuls, that’s more fundraising than all but Council President Kevin Kelley and young executive Justin Bibb. Only two of Jones’ nearly seventy individual contributions were identified by donor name: Kanubai Patel and Pratimaben Patel of Wickliffe gave $500 and $550 to Jones, respectively, in August.

The majority of the other contributions appear to have been

made on Jones’ Act Blue site, but were tabulated in his report without identifying details. That’s against the law.

A Cuyahoga County Board of Elections’ spokeswoman confirmed to Scene that the BOE had been in contact with Jones’ treasurer, who pleaded ignorance and said she was working to update the report.

One of the line items, however, was a $12,086 contribution made on Nov. 4. Regardless of the contributor, that far exceeds the maximum allowable contribution for Cleveland mayoral candidates. The cap was set by city council in 2016 at $5,000 for an individual and $7,500 for a political action committee.

Jones’ expenditures raise eyebrows as well. He spent $44,000 in 2020 — a non-election year — and paid a number of individuals and entities for work presumably unrelated to his campaign. In many instances, the descriptions of these payments were either gently massaged or wholly mischaracterized to present them as legitimate election activities.

The largest contributions were to Jones’ friend Youssef Kromah, with whom he traveled to Egypt in December. Two expenditures totaling $6,500 to Kromah — erroneously spelled “Youssef Komah” in the report — were allegedly for Kromah’s

work as a “campaign strategy and marketing consultant.”

Kromah is a self-described poet, author, public speaker, community activist and television host. His address listed on Jones’ report is Philadelphia, though Kromah’s website says that he is currently a student at the University of Cairo.

His Facebook page also says that he currently lives in Cairo. Jones did not respond to multiple requests for comment submitted via phone and email about the 2020 report. Kromah, too, did not respond to an emailed series of questions. A voicemail was not returned.

As evidenced from their Instagram accounts, though, Kromah accompanied Jones for portions of his December trip. He noted in a December 7 post that he and Jones had “adopted” an orphanage in Aswan, Egypt and had donated 30,000 Egyptian pounds (the equivalent of about $2,000 USD) to cover the expenses of the orphans there.

It’s unclear if a portion of Jones’ payments to Kromah went to the orphanage or for other purposes — the trip itself, for example — but the second payment to Kromah, for $4,000, occurred on Dec. 3, shortly before Jones departed.

Jones also listed an expenditure of

| clevescene.com | February 24-March 9, 2021

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UPFRONT $1,500 for a “Quaran School in Senegal” [sic] in January.

Charitable donations are a permissible use of campaign funds, provided the organization receiving the funds is a nonprofit, duly designated by the IRS, or otherwise approved by the Ohio Elections Commission. Campaign funds are otherwise restricted to costs associated with an election.

Advertising and promotions, staffing, events, etc.

Through 2020, Jones’ campaign made a number of payments to individuals and LLCs for services that they do not typically provide.

Jones paid $500 to a healthcare coordinator for “administrative services,” for example. He paid $1,000 to an Islamic studies teacher in Tampa, Fla., for “writing/content consulting.” He paid $3,200 in two payments to King Management Group, an LLC incorporated in 2017 “to provide comprehensive school management services” for “marketing/branding services.”

Representatives from the King Management group did not respond to multiple phone calls from Scene.

One of the more suspect recipients was an organization called the WPM Group, whose services are described on LinkedIn as “landscaping, snow plowing, professional services, janitorial, property management, entertainment (promotions etc.), flagging co.” Jones gave $2,870 to WPM in three payments ($1,270, $1,100, and $500), ostensibly for “public relations.” These payments were all made in late October and November, shortly before Jones moved into a new house in Hough.

When reached by phone, Rico Webster, CEO of WPM Group, said that his wife could provide details about their work for Jones. When Ebony Webster was reached by phone, she said she had no comment.

When Scene contacted Jones one final time via Instagram to give him an opportunity to clarify his payments or provide a statement, he directed us to Ebony Webster, whom he identified as his communications director.

Webster, when reached by phone again, identified herself as Jones’ Communications Director and said the payments to WPM Group were for her services in that role. How long had she been Jones’ communications director, Scene asked? Webster would only say that it was a recent development.

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Photo via Scene archives

To a series of other questions related to the 2020 report, Webster provided a written statement from Jones.

“We are aware there are some amendments that need to be made to the recently released financial report,” the statement read. “Our financial team is working to get that done. I am dedicated to my role and responsibilities as a City leader and councilman. Because of that, I have consultants assisting me and advising me in making the best decisions.” -Sam Allard

Instead of Announcing Mayoral Run, Kevin Kelley Launches “Listening Tour” City Council President Kevin Kelley has launched a neighborhood listening tour that will help him determine, he says, whether or not he will run for Mayor. From Feb. 17 through Mar. 23, Kelley is hosting Zoom meetings with each of the City of Cleveland’s 17 wards to hear residents’ concerns about the city.

“Many Clevelanders feel that they haven’t been listened to,” read a Kelley quote in a citywide mailer last weekend. “I want to hear from them about conditions in their neighborhoods. That’s the most important part of my job.”

Feedback from residents was billed, in the mailer, as a precondition for Kelley’s campaign launch. “Will Kevin Kelley run for Mayor of Cleveland?” It teased ... “Not before hearing directly from the people in every neighborhood.”

As many have noted on social media, residents don’t “feel that

| clevescene.com | February 24-March 9, 2021

they haven’t been listened to”; they straight-up haven’t. Look no further, they say, than Kelley’s refusal to institute public comment at City Council meetings. If listening to residents is indeed the most important part of his job, why has he barred them from speaking at the one venue where they’d regularly have his attention?

Kelley has an enormous campaign war chest — more than $500,000 on hand, as of January — and has been laying the groundwork for a mayoral run for nearly a year. Unlike Sen. Sherrod Brown, whose “Dignity of Work” tour resulted in his decision not to seek the Democratic nomination for president in early 2019, Kelley’s listening tour is much more like an extended pre-launch campaign event, part of a larger effort to rehabilitate his image. As a frontrunner and cash-rich candidate in a field increasingly marked by timidity, deciding not to run would be an astonishing move, (unless his advisors convince him that running for Cuyahoga County Executive in 2022 is the smarter play.)

And yet, if Kelley won’t announce until the conclusion of this listening tour, his campaign can’t officially get underway until late March. The primaries are in September.

In the press release announcing the tour, Kelley’s team called the individual ward events “town halls,” and said that Kelley would “kick off the discussion and answer as many questions as possible from participants.”

“Residents are encouraged to join, engage in conversation, and have a chance to be heard on the issues that matter to them the most,” it read.

But the format for these so-called town halls has led to criticism. After the first week of meetings, a group of Cleveland activists and ward leaders who last month sent a letter to Kelley calling for increased transparency and democracy at City Hall noted that Kelley’s events were set up as “Zoom seminars.” That means Kelley is the only face visible on the call.

Furthermore, all questions are prescreened. “I thought these were for him to listen to us,” an attendee told Scene, “not for us to listen to him.”

-Sam Allard

Boy Commissioner Lee Weingart Running for County Executive in 2022 If Dennis Kucinich was Cleveland’s boy mayor in the late 1970s, Lee Weingart was Cuyahoga County’s boy commissioner nearly two decades later.

Weingart took office in 1995, at the tender age of 28, forsaking the law firm of Jones, Day, Reavis & Pogue to do so. He was and remains a card-carrying Republican, and he lost his re-election bid after one term, as Bill Clinton swept the county by 175,000 votes in 1996. (Weingart is quick to mention, however, that he only lost by 30,000 that year.)

Now, after nearly twenty years running his own lobbying firm in downtown Cleveland, Weingart says he plans to run for Cuyahoga County Executive. He filed paperwork with the Cuyahoga County Board of Elections last week.

He told Scene in a recent Zoom interview that he’s going to devote the next 20 months to the campaign and

noted that if he wins in 2022, he’ll return to public office twice as old as he was when he won the first time around.

For Weingart, the mismanagement of the Armond Budish administration has inspired him to seek office. In no particular order, he referenced the county jail scandal, the ongoing corruption investigation, the fiscal missteps related to Covid-19 and the misappropriation of CARES Act dollars.

“This county government is in disarray,” he told Scene. “We thought a new form of government would solve the problems of corruption and transparency, but what I’m seeing is a county that’s more corrupt and less transparent than it was a decade ago.”

Weingart said he wants Cuyahoga County to be “government for the people, not government for itself.”

He said he plans to deploy some of the same strategies that were effective back in the 90s: dramatically decreasing county costs by reducing

DIGIT WIDGET $70 million Current funding for public transit in the state of Ohio.

$150 million Total proposed funding for public transit in Ohio, in bill sponsored by local Reps.

Mike Skindell (D-Lakewood) and Terrence Upchurch (D-Cleveland).

$7 million Total funding for public transit in Ohio in budget proposed by Gov. Mike DeWine, a 90% decrease from current levels.

$50 million Cost of marketing proposal touted by DeWine to encourage young people to move to Ohio, in part for the state’s supposedly progressive polices and welcoming environment.

non-essential spending and bureaucracy, and using the surplus to fund community projects and economic development initiatives.

The policy planks of his platform — summarized in a one-pager attached below, titled “Cuyahoga 2030: Rebirth of a County” — emphasize what he referred to as competent fiscal management.

Not only does he want to trim the county’s payroll via attrition and voluntary buyouts; he wants to put every county contract and county salary online for the public to see.

When Scene asked how his costcutting measures squared with the region’s high unemployment rates — the County itself representing a major employer — Weingart said that attrition and voluntary buyouts were designed to target those of retirement age or very close to it. “The goal is not to fire anyone,” he said. And his vision is that the savings will flow directly to community projects, managed largely by local nonprofits.

In theory, this will create more jobs than the county loses at its headquarters. When Scene questioned whether his pursuit of efficiency would result in the same jail scandal that Budish oversaw with his quest to turn the jail into a regional profit center, Weingart was definitive: “No. There are some costs you can cut and some you just can’t.”

Unlike many Republicans, Weingart balks at “law and order” rhetoric and says he supports criminal justice reform on both the front and back ends. Moreover, he said he’s suspicious of plans to rebuild the county jail.

“We need reforms that keep people out of jail,” he told Scene. “Nondangerous arrestees should never set foot in the jail. We need to speed up arraignments, promote alternative sentencing and have faster trials to process people more quickly.”

He said he’s interested in creating programs using models like EDWIN’s to create employment pipelines for ex-offenders, and he supports the creation of a dedicated county expungement court.

“Look, I don’t have traditional Republican ideas in some areas,” he said, “but I still have an R in front of my name, and I’ll have to overcome that label in Cuyahoga County.”

In order to do so, Weingart says he’ll have to raise quite a bit of money. He has set the ambitious goal of $3 million, but said he has spoken to more than 250 people about his campaign and has received commitments that give him optimism.

He believes, he said, that the flagrant misdeeds and nonstop

scandalous headlines of the Armond Budish administration should demonstrate that the County Executive position is not partisan.

“You don’t need to be a Democrat to be the county executive, even in a Democratic county like Cuyahoga,” he said. “More than anything, the position calls for someone who understands county government and who has a vision. This county also needs a spokesperson, someone who’s unafraid to come out and say it like it is.”

Weingart, who lives in Shaker Heights, said that his economic development strategy would focus on attracting jobs to the city of Cleveland, closer to where the most people live. He said that new jobs remain the best way to attract more people to the region and to prevent the migration of the county’s most productive people. He even floated the idea of asking Gov. Mike DeWine to send some state government jobs to Cleveland, “to spread the largesse around.”

Attracting jobs was one of four pillars of Weingart’s first campaign, back in 1994. Alongside jobs, Weingart won the seat on promises to reform welfare, make the government more efficient and not raise anyone’s taxes.

His pitch in the 2022 race will be derivative, with similar priorities about efficiency. But this campaign will also be inflected with criticism of the incumbent Budish, and policies that that he sees as countermeasures to Budish’s failures.

“I believe that government ought to be run on the principles of persuasion, reason and facts,” he told Scene. “What I’m seeing in this administration is government run on coercion, leverage and misdirection.

I want to bring back honest government.” -Sam Allard

Bipartisan Statehouse Bill May Finally Abolish Death Penalty A bipartisan group of Ohio lawmakers will soon introduce legislation to abolish the death penalty in Ohio.

State Sen. Nickie Antonio in a virtual press conference last week said, “There is a team right now that is dedicated to ending the death penalty in Ohio. And that team can only get larger.”

The bill will be similar to the one Antonio introduced with a Republican co-sponsor last year that would also transition all current death sentences to life in prison without the chance of parole.

Ohio is one of 28 states that

currently has the death penalty, though the state hasn’t executed an inmate since July 2018 after the lethal injection cocktail used by the state came under scrutiny and Ohio struggled to find a manufacturer willing to sell it the necessary drugs.

Antonio said she currently has commitments from four Republicans to co-sponsor the bill — Sen. Steve Huffman of Tipp City, Rep. Niraj Antani of Miamisburg, Sen. Kristina Roegner of Hudson, and Rep. Jean Schmidt of Loveland.

Momentum has built in conservative circles in recent years to do away with the death penalty, including from a statewide group called Ohio Conservatives Concerned About the Death Penalty that launched early last year.

“As we have seen in recent polling, public opinion has dramatically shifted against Ohio having the death penalty.

Conservative’s evolving views of the death penalty have been a major reason for this movement of public sentiment,” OCCADP member Michael Hartley said today in a statement. “Ohio is a pro-life and fiscally conservative state. The death penalty no longer represents Ohio’s values and it is time for our state to finally repeal this policy.”

Supporters argue that the system is inherently flawed — according to the Death Penalty Information Center, 166 Death Row inmates have been exonerated since 1973.

And beyond the moral arguments at play, note that death penalty cases cost taxpayers 10 times the amount of non-capital cases.

“The death penalty is expensive, inhumane, impractical, unjust and often erroneous. Abolishing it is a practical solution,” Antonio said in a release. “This is not a Republican or a Democratic issue. No matter what a person’s reason is for supporting this legislation, we all agree that this is critical for our own collective humanity. It is our responsibility to work together across party lines and legislative chambers and move forward to end the death penalty in Ohio.”

DeWine has remained noncommittal on the issue but has said no executions would go forward in Ohio unless the legislature approved a method that wasn’t lethal injection and, in interviews last year, distanced himself from being a capital punishment supporter. -Vince Grzegorek

scene@clevescene.com @clevelandscene | clevescene.com | February 24-March 9, 2021

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FEATURE

THE CLEVELAND SCHOOL OF POETICS DEMANDS YOUR ATTENTION

A young, politically engaged group of local poets is building community through art, on and off the page 10

| clevescene.com | February 24-March 9, 2021

By J. David

AT ITS MOST BASIC AND foundational level, an artistic movement is a shift in ideological persuasion. The disposition of the field is contrary to some position and a group, or many groups, will push back against it.

But I would argue, however, that there is a fractal nature to ideologies, that many are occurring in many disparate places. Therefore an artistic movement’s philosophical architecture is formed by the expansion or addition of its ideology into the prevailing culture, as well as the interactions that occur as a result.

This is precisely what’s happening in Cleveland, where there is an emerging cohort of young poets interested in writing outside of the institution. Their poems are ecstatic, inventive, and challenge the poetic establishment in ways reminiscent of The New York School. As a group, they prioritize collaboration, innovation, and service to the community. These poets, to name some, include Noor Hindi, Kevin Latimer, Brendan Joyce, Geramee Hensley, Katy Ring, DT McCrea, Angelo Maneage and Matt Mitchell.

Explicitly political and interested in dismantling the prevailing culture, The Cleveland School has already established a multitude of opportunities for the community to engage in poetry — The Starlight Elsewhere Reading, This Series Is Not on Netflix, the Joyland events, and more. In addition, their work extends to creating opportunities for writers themselves: founding independent literary journals that pay their writers, like Flypaper; running workshops for writers outside of the academy; engaging in a plurality of mentorship positions; creating Grieveland, a radical poetry press whose practices include paying authors 70% of each book sold; and the formation of The Cleveland Review of Books, run by Billy Lennon — one of the few regional book reviews paying authors professional rates and focusing on small presses.

Though the individual poets within the cohort differ in subject matter, their philosophical underpinnings all include the intent to dismantle the racist capitalist hetero-patriarchy and its associated systems. On the whole, the group believes in Leftist politics along with imagining and building better futures for marginalized communities. Their poetics transparently communicate this.

Noor Hindi, in her poem “Fuck Your Lecture on Craft, My People Are Dying,” observes the following:

Colonizers write about flowers.

I tell you about children throwing rocks at Israeli tanks seconds before becoming daisies…

I know I’m American because when I walk into a room something dies.

Metaphors about death are for poets who think ghosts care about sound.

When I die, I promise to haunt you forever.

One day, I’ll write about the flowers like we own them.

Her poetics, while at times mistaken for a poetics of witness, does something far more useful — it participates. Hindi’s poetry engages in a decolonization of language and imagery as is clearly evidenced in the above section. A journalist by trade, Hindi spent the summer covering protests throughout Northeast Ohio with an incisive purpose of reframing the way media reports on society and illuminating the ways in which the journalistic endeavor has fallen short. This purpose leaks into her poetry as well (“Breaking News”):

In interviews, I frame my subject’s stories through a lens to make them digestible to consumers.

I become a machine. A transfer of information. They become a plea for empathy, an oversaturation of feelings we’ll fail at transforming into action.

What’s lost is incalculable.

And at the end of summer, the swimming pools will be gutted of water.

And it’ll be impossible to swim.

Hindi’s poems concern themselves with a politic of belonging, what constitutes home, decolonization, and reclamation of spaces.

In a similar vein, Geramee Hensley’s work examines the particulars of relationships — whether that be our relationship to a nation, our relationships with others, or our relationships with ourselves.

While Hindi’s poetry exists often as an elevated lingual narrative, straight-forward and interested in conveying information, Hensley’s is experimental and variegated, intent on a poetics of excess and generosity (“One Million Pound Cloud”):

BRENDAN JOYCE (he/him) is a busboy from Cleveland, Ohio. His poems have appeared in Protean Magazine and the Johannesburg Review of Books. He is the author of Character Limit (Grieveland, 2019) and Love & Solidarity (Grieveland, 2020).

even the moon The breeze through the sycamore trees’ sickly leaves that screams worsening working conditions, the squirrel taunting the cat from its clicking perch, the possums hunting rats below in the arson lot, the rats getting hunted, the cloud of bats rising from the school’s roof into October orange cloud cover, the spider sewing its night against a security light, the raccoons casing the attic windows, the millipede ducking a stream of piss in the urinal, the mouse ripping its leg off in the glue trap, the dog singing its song to the whole block of dogs, even the moon in its sorry state of endless retort — hates cops too, you are not alone.

The forest, my comrade, whispers: “I am full of cops. I am on fire. They have names & addresses & a growing list of co-conspirators, go, find them. Settle my debt.

Say my name.”

MATT MITCHELL (he/him) is an intersex chump getting pummeled by his own carbon footprint in Columbus, Ohio. His work is currently, or soon will be, sleeping on the pull-out couches of Hobart Pulp, The Missouri Review, Bat City Review, The Boiler, and others. He wrote The Neon Hollywood Cowboy (Big Lucks, 2021) and tweets @matt_mitchell48. in Times Square gift shops for granted.

The Last Great American Blockbuster

We will walk through the gardens of thick hair thinning into mullets

Say neon. MTV. Cocaine. Cut it by telling me how much of a monarch butterfly beautiful

and come out as electric New Coke signs like lighthouses.

in New York air you are.

Tell me how much it hurt you

Intersex bodies were just bodies, our hearts yellow as flux capacitors.

when Wham! broke up.

The problem with iconography

When Ric Ocasek says who’s gonna pick you up when you fall and you learn how

is how I want to swallow all of it, DeLorean myself back into its outdated orbit.

there is a blade cutting voice in every man’s throat.

I dream of a time when cracking knees only means you can’t dance anymore.

I promise you, I am dreaming of living in a neon decade —

If we could all go back, I’m sure we wouldn’t take losing our mothers

one where everything that is wrong with me did not yet have a name.

Clockwise from left: Matt Mitchell, Billy Lennon, J. David, Katy Ring, Angelo Maneage, Kevin Latimer, Brendan Joyce

Karin McKenna

| clevescene.com | February 24-March 9, 2021

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Hello I have a knife and I won’t stab you for resources…

Hello I have a bigger knife, it is growing now and I don’t know how to make it stop. Soon it will outgrow my hand then cleave whatever is in front of it…

Imagine you work for a living, imagine you have more than you need to live and someone says hello I have a knife and I won’t stab you for resources. Imagine a person attempting to delay their death by holding a knife and saying they deserve to live. Imagine what they were denied so someone you don’t know can own a private jet…

Suppose a private jet is a knife…

The ways in which this Cleveland School harkens back to the New York School are interesting and informative.

That school — a group of poets, dancers, painters, and musicians finding themselves in close proximity during the 1950s and ’60s in New York City — was, rather than a cadre of scholastic prominence, a loose association based on co-operation in similar fields around similar principles. The New York School, to put it as simply as possible, was a group of friends building community around art.

Their communal artistic interests were as varied as their members, and poets such as Barbara Guest, James Schuyler, Kenneth Koch, Frank O’Hara and Alice Notley found themselves collaborating with experimental painters like Jackson Pollock and Willem DeKooning. Their poems also interested themselves with experimentation and alternate avenues of presentation, which found the artists surveying everyday moments, inserting levity and humor into work, consecrating the personal and intimate, and centering conversations with pop culture. They loved using quotations and names in their work, enjoyed documenting personal interactions, and stirring conversation between disciplines.

The poets in the group lived not simply non-normative lives, but antinormative lives: John Ashbery and Frank O’Hara were explicit about their queerness in their work and lifestyles, Joe Brainard curated a practice of faux-naivete, Alice Notley fashioned for herself a poetry of disobedience and a freedom of sexuality that was at that time a radical notion, and other members of the group participated in the construct of deviance in their own ways.

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It was, in many ways, an island of misfit toys, but together became one of the most prominent groups of poets and artists in modern history. And though fame followed, it wasn’t that these poets became widely lauded and admired which made the movement special; it was their interest in community and collaboration.

Here, and now, it’s also what has separated and distinguished the Cleveland School. Take for example the work of Kevin Latimer, another experimental poet working in concert with Hindi and Hensley. He, along with Brendan Joyce, both of whom have long histories of organizing and activism, founded Grieveland — an independent poetry press focusing on radical art while avoiding labor exploitation and paying its authors a higher percentage of sales than any other press in the country.

Outside of the work done with Grieveland, Latimer is a prolific writer.

His debut, ZOETROPE, formally restless and adventurous, takes on the task of reimagining grief, lineage, and the future (“TO THE BOYS IN THE WOUND IN THE GROUND”):

a hole opens up in the ground. no one dares go near it. they call the site condemned. little did they know in the depths of the night, boys dance casually around the hole’s iris; praying in ritual. praying for the sun. for new beginnings. they pray for the rain to fall & dance off their fingertips & fall into the nothing. every night these boys pray…

Latimer’s work deals with disaster — personal and societal — creating a compendium of imagistic renderings that collaborate with each other in an effort to create new realizations and futures (“NOTES”):

GOD: what are they doing up there?

BOY: surveying.

GOD: for what?

BOY: light.

Whereas Hensley and Latimer choose to enact a broad and expansive poetics, Hindi and Joyce carry a thoughtful and tactful specificity into their work. They are interested in observing and naming, in uncovering narratives that center everyone being silenced. Joyce is a master of poignant specificity, of drawing connections, elucidating within his work the architecture of our oppressions (“WEEKLY CLAIMS”):

…The conspiracy of a dying empire is only to

| clevescene.com | February 24-March 9, 2021

KEVIN LATIMER (he/him) is a poet from Cleveland, Ohio. he is co-director of grieveland, a poetry project. his recent poems can be found in Jubilat, Passages North, Hobart, Poetry Northwest & more. his plays have been produced by convergence-continuum. find him at @likelykevin.

SQUEEZE GENTLY The light is a place where i can re-use drugs & there are pillows under my head in the bed of my cell. where there’s no jail. where my name spoken under the muzzle of a gun inspires laughter, not fear. where the bears can use the grocery store as they please & where my sister, dusting nestled dirt off her knees, holds me for the first time since i was five. the light, loud as it is, audacious as it is; where there’s a fire in my mouth, where i cough & we all turn to ash. where we build new worlds; riding rafts down the sink drain on a summer morning. Oh little-us, oh vengeful us, where is the salt under your lip? where is the filament? where does the sinkhole begin. In the light, i jump out of a baby’s mouth. i want to be born again. like salt on the cracked road; tires ripped & torn to shreds, car soaring over the river; bright light in my eyes turning everything white for days. my eyes clear up & now a tall man in the desert stands over me holding a can of gasoline. crumpled, i offer myself to him, tongue out. i wish i knew more about planes. & about love, the whistling in my ears, the real silence. The light, the light, bright slate, yet nothing, yet wedding bells, diamond rings, cigarette halos billowing over the creek. God arriving like he always does: a hug, warm hands, all of my dead family behind him, grinning. The light is a place where there is no joy & no pillows & no jails & no cocaine & no hashtags & no sports & no nostalgia & noprotests & no war & no balconies & no dead ___s & no more books about dead ___s & no idols & no rafts & no banks & no audience & no stage & make up & no applause & no anxiety & no tears & i’m just so tired of talking about this again.

NOOR HINDI (she/her) is a Palestinian-American poet and reporter. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in POETRY, Hobart and Jubilat.

Her essays have appeared or are forthcoming in American Poetry Review, Literary Hub, and Adroit Journal. Hindi is the Equity and Inclusion Reporter for The Devil Strip Magazine. Visit her website at noorhindi.com.

Fuck Your Lecture on Craft, My People Are Dying Colonizers write about flowers.

I tell you about children throwing rocks at Israeli tanks seconds before becoming daisies.

I want to be like those poets who care about the moon.

Palestinians don’t see the moon from jail cells and prisons.

It’s so beautiful, the moon.

They’re so beautiful, the flowers.

I pick flowers for my dead father when I’m sad.

He watches Al Jazeera all day.

I wish Jessica would stop texting me Happy Ramadan.

I know I’m American because when I walk into a room something dies.

Metaphors about death are for poets who think ghosts care about sound.

When I die, I promise to haunt you forever.

One day, I’ll write about the flowers like we own them.

kill faster…

The workplace & unemployment compensation are different sides of the same grave…

These poets, like the New York School, also find themselves actively collaborating with visual artists, among them Angelo Maneage and Matt Mitchell, both of whom are exciting poets as well. Mitchell’s work, like that of Frank O’Hara and many of the other New York

School poets, integrates pop culture along with tender poems directed at the rest of the cohort. His work demonstrates the ways in which art impacts the prevailing culture and seeks to work in the liminal spaces drawn between disciplines. There is a reckless abandon in Mitchell’s poems, one that enters with its hair ablaze and begins ripping apart the room until the discovery of something monumental (“MERRY CLAYTON BURIED HER CHILD IN A THROAT OF STARS”):

Merry Clayton carved a whole life out of a song she never listened to.

Because that is what it’s like to inhabit the space of someone else’s grief: to fear hearing your own voice echo off the walls.

Though its members are colored by their particular obsessions and styles, the connective tissue among the Cleveland School poets is vast and encompassing. It includes a desire to re-communicate histories honestly, centering excluded voices and philosophies; reimagining better futures for excluded and oppressed communities; prioritizing activism and community-building; and fostering a culture of collaboration. But above all else, the group demonstrates a palpable understanding of the personal as political, this becoming the propulsion for their poetics.

The personal has always been political, and this is something the New York School believed. But don’t take their word for it, examine the facts — it is hard to escape notice that we live in a country inextricably tied in a global capitalist system devolved into corporatism; a country whose democracy is influenced by western values and individualist mores; a country infiltrated by perpetual data and technological monitoring at every incidence of opportunity. Because of this, I find myself unable to believe in any distance between the personal and political. We are an irreducible part of the system and take part in the corporate — whose influence in the political is both insidious and understandable in a capitalist system. This reaches into each aspect of our lives: when we wake, how we choose to rest, what we devote our time and energy to, what we spend our money on; these, just a miniscule sampling of our existence, will find ways to impact who is elected, fluctuations in various spectrums of personal rights, and even which people have what rights and when. Every action we take has political ramifications.

How can any poetry exist outside of this system? It can’t.

Poetry, though it resists commodification, and though it be an art, will never be apolitical.

Whether you believe it to be an alternative form of knowing or just a cute occurrence of word-play, poetry will enter the world through an individual mind. And that mind is colored by its perceptive capabilities, its memories, and its societal placement. Each person brings to the table their socioeconomic standing;

ANGELO MANEAGE (he/him) is an artist and poet in Cleveland, Ohio. His work is on or in poets. org, Hobart, jam & sand, around. His plays have been put on by convergence continuum. Visit him at angelomaneagethewebsite.com.

PICKED UP ZOETROPE FROM KEVIN’S HOUSE First appeared in The Hunger.

By the blue chair I climbed to grab the future It was in a PO box that was unlocked So I backed up and jumped pretty high in but Who grows so much

landed in the petunia bed

Red and white in the middle of summer my nipples hairless in the driveway I climbed to the roof and jumped into a bucket of ribbons or a mail truck one of those And had gotten red juice all over my shirt I decided I would work for the living And then that I would never work for this government a blue chair The rim of a tea ball game that outskirt where I like to sit in and get kissed At I hear a ringing and I think it is the doorbell TO THE OPEN BOX I climb the chair As a child I am far away from the baseball when it hits me I went with the boys To prom I puked all over ryan’s sister and the police arrived and justin fell over He has leukemia later on anyway he got right back up and they arrest craig We hold our own and wait to share a lawyer For justice I climb the elevator shaft to the lawyer›s house and swing down The rope he hands me full of special knots like bowlines and sheet bends I move my body through the blue into the box I lick the stamp or wait no what am I oh yeah I am climbing Into the sky and eating the poison it does not filter out and spitting it out again And eating the sauce with the daffodils A flavor we share both of us Tape up the box with my body inside I thought about the echos in here there are echos in here Its depth it had to have been a thousand feet or two And there IS an ocean I am falling past tons of whales And before I hit the ground the whales sing YOU ARE BLUE LIKE US WE SING FOR THE AIR WE FALL INTO

in this small box

to me they sing JOY TO FILL

MEGAN NEVILLE (she/her) is an educator and writer. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in The Academy of American Poets (Poets.org), Cherry Tree, Pleiades, wildness, Cream City Review, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, The Boiler, McSweeney’s, Lunch Ticket, Gordon Square Review, and elsewhere. She is a poetry reader for Split Lip Magazine and was a finalist in Write Bloody’s 2019 book contest. She lives in Tremont with her spouse and three cats. Find her online at megannevillepoetry.com.

TO THE WOMEN WHO SURROUNDED THE PENTAGON

lost in a nuclear war, dissolved by splitting

out of the world & make peace. oh, mothers of that generation: the world is still a vortex of hate.

First appeared in Gordon Square Review.

atoms as miraculously as they’d conceived us. we ate pizza & watched nickelodeon

with their sturdy legs, milk-flat breasts, & embroidered panels of muslin –

while they wedged themselves before any lawmakers or gods who’d hear

who deployed on overnight greyhounds leaving their children in ohio while

prayers for non-proliferation. that late summer afternoon in 1985 they

but we’ve seen believing isn’t enough. blanket the world. blanket as a noun &

they took on world leaders with needles & thread greased with beeswax –

so believed in their fabric activism – thought by unfolding & tying together

verb. cover the earth with your stitchery, but the feet always find their way out.

who could not bear to think of us as

each piece they could hug evil

those men did not listen or act & you returned home to trim crusts from bread. we’ve grown up & as you’d hoped, most were not lost –

| clevescene.com | February 24-March 9, 2021

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| clevescene.com | February 24-March 9, 2021

their privileges or lack-of in terms of race, gender, sexuality, and etc.; and their knowledge of disparities in the world. These factors color our expression every second of the day, and even too, despite the best of intentions, color our writing each time we enter into the possibility of the blank page to create poetry.

What turns up on the page can be many things — an action of community building, an action of documentation or journalism, a shepherd through grief, a template for emotional understanding, a call to direct action, a linguistic cudgel to change someone’s mind.

A poem is useful in the right circumstances, and for people living on the verge of financial collapse or an environmental apocalypse or civil rights violations, it is becoming increasingly necessary that we participate in radical change. Art can be a part of this radical change.

However, it cannot be the sole form of participation.

This is where I believe the two poetic schools differ. On the whole, both groups believe in radical art — often times overtly political — but I feel their opinions diverge on the topic of activism, which was what the New York School hoped to inspire and believed art participated in. On the other hand, the Cleveland School believes activism to be separate from art and that it must be actively practiced as a radical form of expression in addition to the creation of overly political art.

I find myself siding concretely with the Cleveland School, being reminded of this quote by Toni Cade Bambara: “The role of the artist is to make the revolution irresistible.”

This is the artist’s role, yes, but the artists too must participate in revolution as well.

Whenever I sit down to write, I think, as Noor Hindi says, “who is going to need this poem,” and the answer is becoming increasingly clear: immigrants, disenfranchised people, people of color, sick folks, queer individuals, those who are disabled, those who suffer from mental illness, and those languishing in poverty, to name but a sampling.

The guiding philosophy of the Cleveland School may still be developing, but it has always included the belief that community must sustain those who are most vulnerable and in doing so transform us in such a way as to be capable of creating a better world.

“Life is very short and what we have to do must be done in the now,” says Audre Lorde, and the Cleveland School is already at work.

GERAMEE HENSLEY (they/them) is Poetry Editor at Sonora Review and Tinderbox Poetry Journal. Their work has been featured in Button Poetry, Indiana Review, Hobart, New Poetry from the Midwest 2019, and elsewhere. You can find them at geramee.com.

Kamayan First appeared in Button Poetry. for mom / home is ghost eaten by hand / four fingers act / as shovel & scoop Van Gogh brushstrokes on a bamboo plate she thumbs / brined duck egg shrimp paste sinanang & flakes of smoked bangus into a greasy jewel pushes / the pearl into / my mouth /amen the proper method / to prepare / milkfish: fry / in the garage as to not / stink up / the whole house it’s profuse oils / migrate in air / proliferate in furniture / in pores / hole up / in porous surfaces / smells resurface haunt the heart / mom shrouds an old / button-down / over my face / I experience / Lolo’s ghost for the first time / taste / the fish head / of yesteryear its sunken eyes / fogged with milky / lipids suca-slick hands / swarm this ruined / face peel the delicate meat from / wisps of bone / amen like a sculptor / who wets / her fingers we season ours in fish sauce & vinegar / mix in garlic & siling labuyo fusing / stink & stink / what communion / not unlike / my blood / in a world without airplane & diaspora / this body hypothetical / amen instead / belly is / monument of regret a museum of everything / tongue struck / tongue don’t leave / home / the way body does so long / as you keep it / fed fattened / with ghost offered / by mother’s hand to my mouth / amen one day there won’t be hands / to gift / the ghost without / mom what percent / ghost / is home one day / what percent / fraud am I / one day / no hands to guide mine / when I’m / for my own safety / prohibited from / Paco or the house / where mom grew up without / mom to Paco / I’m just interloper / & to America a cloud / of patis into vinegar / this half-blood / either a threat / or a prayer / depending on who’s looking / amen when mom’s / hands weren’t feeding me / it was my own / shoveling / waste into waist / but when prayer & eating / are your hands main activity / the idea behind them / mixes / so with every / bite I meant to say / thank you God / amen & Lola says / (note: not my direct / blood Lola / one through marriage / but when there so / few of you / all surrounding elders family / the same way / last wolves herd) / & Lola says / I must / eat only American food / Filipino food can’t / make you fat / but Lola / what about mounds of / white rice & grilled / pork butt ain’t fatenning? / which part of this body / is not monument honoring / inihaw na baboy / no joke / dark matter / is both invisible / & 85% of all mass / in the universe / this body / the same every step / forward curdles boulder / to soil / every cough / stirs ghost from grave / as twister / kicked up / in this dream I have / my brown meat suspends / in cool / white gel an aspic / knifed onto toast / not allegory of being spread / too thin but a palpable anxiety of knowing / through only / smearing / amen even god thumbed dirt / smudged bodes / into shape / even god spoke light / unmixed it from / dark / by hand even god expects our palms’ / ruddy collision / to resemble prayer / even god mixed bodies / pushed them into world’s / amen everlasting

| clevescene.com | February 24-March 9, 2021

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KATY RING (she/her) is a poet and art-enthusiast from Cleveland, Ohio. She is a devout Leftist and believes memes are art.

an idiots guide to oversharing after exchanging names, you should start out strong and let them know how you can’t be loved by anyone without thinking they’re going to pull the rug out from under your feet. if you can make it past introductions they’ll tell you their age, try not to think about how every time you think about death you puke in your mouth a little bit. they might start talking about travelling, which would be the perfect time to bring up how you learned a whole language for a girl who was learning how to leave you. lean in real close and whisper in their ear about how your ex-boyfriends addiction ended up stuck under your fingernails, how you can still taste iron when you think about his calloused hands. if they start talking about their hobbies, tell them how you learned to ice skate on every cold shoulder you’ve slept beside, and then warn them that you’re notorious for writing about people who don’t know how to love you the right way. when they start to look nervous (and they will) remind them that it could be worse, you could still be cutting teeth on the wrists of girls that keep their hearts far from their sleeves. it could be worse, you could still be drinking tea with boys who hold fire in their fingers. and they’ll get up to leave but god, it could be so much worse

DT MCCREA (they/she) is a trans-anarchist poet. They love the NBA, know the lyrics to every Saintseneca song, and have a love hate relationship with philosophy. Her work can be found in Gordon Square Review, Indianapolis Review, Honey & Lime, mutiny!, and on her website at https://dtmccrea. wordpress.com/. Follow them on twitter @dt_mccrea.

A tired king constructs a shopping mall that is filled with existence First appeared in Gordon Square Review, title taken from a tweet by Magic Realism Bot.

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| clevescene.com | February 24-March 9, 2021

You and I are there. We are on the display rack in the window of the Footlocker.

We are sitting next to each other with our knees pulled to our chests and our feet extended outward on the ground in front of us. We are wearing sneakers, and we are trying to make our bodies look like sneakers, like a pair. We are holding hands. You, in this case, are the reader. You, the reader, and I, the poet, are here in the tired king’s shopping mall filled with existence. We are holding hands, and looking at ourselves through the window of the footlocker holding hands and trying to look like sneakers. God is here too. You say I want to see God. I say don’t we all. You say don’t be pedantic. You know that’s why we came here. It’s true. When the tired king built his shopping mall filled with existence that’s how he drew everyone in. Come to my shopping mall filled with existence and see God. The statue of the horse outside of the P.F. Chang’s by the front entrance has a banner on it that reads, simply INSIDE: GOD. You and I saw an informercial for it. A middle-aged man with shiny teeth and hair and a bad suit said If you want to see God go to the shopping mall and buy my book. Or perhaps that was a televangelist program. Perhaps the infomercial said only I am that am. You say I came here to see God but we’ve only seen ourselves. So, we start walking down the hallway that ends at the entrance of the JC Penney, which is also a Dillard’s, which is also a Macy’s, which is also a Kohl’s. We can already see from where we are that the only thing inside the JC Penney Dillard’s Macy’s Kohl’s is the entire moon. We pass the Spencer’s and inside its door is a blackhole. We pass a PacSun and inside its door is a barren, cracked desert landscape with a single golden suncup blooming at the center. The last store in this hall is a Hot Topic. Everyone is there. Everyone is shopping at Hot Topic and everyone is also working at Hot Topic and everyone is also on display at Hot Topic. Everyone’s bodies are mannequins for t-shirts and everyone’s bodies are also on display to be sold.

Everyone is buying each other and themselves. Everyone is selling each other and themselves to each other and themselves. We are there in all of the same roles as everyone else. We both consider buying Nirvana t-shirts and then decide we shouldn’t. Instead you buy gauges and I buy a pronoun pin. We still haven’t seen God. So, we head back towards the food court. As we pass the Kay Jewelers at the corner you nudge me and so I approach the man at the counter. Um excuse me, I say we were wondering if you could tell us where we might find God? God is here. He says, without gesturing toward anything.

You, the reader, are becoming frustrated. Make him say something else. You say. Um, I’m sorry, where is here, exactly? I say. God is here. He says.

EAT CALLING ALL RANCH HANDS

In a market not lacking in fried chicken options, Chicken Ranch stands out NO, IT’S NOT YOUR IMAGINATION. Cleveland, like many American cities, is awash in fried chicken places. It’s nearly impossible to take a step without feeling the crunch of runaway breading beneath one’s feet. In addition to the longstanding fast-food chains there are the aggressively expanding regional favorites and plucky local startups. Even places that don’t technically qualify as “fried chicken restaurants” are carving out space on the menu for a fried chicken sandwich.

Part of the reason for the explosion, duh, is that fried chicken is and always will be amazing, a near-perfect arrangement of crunch, salt, schmaltz and spice. The other main factor is that it’s well suited to carry-out and delivery, making the concept ideal for the fastcasual framework that presently is upending the hospitality landscape. When you combine those two components, you also happen to end up with a nearly pandemic-proof business model.

While many modern fried chicken projects seem to have been formulated in a boardroom to achieve peak profitability, Chicken Ranch clearly originates from the mind of an obsessive chef.

Given his years as chef-partner at places like Forage Public House, Oak Barrel and Bold, all of which boasted lengthy and eclectic menus, there are few foods Demetrios Atheneos doesn’t excel at. But fried chicken has been omnipresent, a pet dating clear back to his days at Deagan’s.

When Atheneos became aware of a turnkey space in his own neck of the woods, he quickly put pen to paper and devised a concept. The two-month-old eatery slid into the Cedar Center space vacated by the Rice Shop. It took the chef less than three weeks to convert the business and start selling – you guessed it – fried chicken.

“There’s this evolution of chefs and restaurants going on right now,” he says. “I’m still going to be doing the things that I’ve always done, which is farm-to-

table inspired and chefdriven, just affordable, fast and casual.”

The birds here are buttermilk-brined, battered and fried in the form of tenders ($7/2, $10/3), wings ($8.50/5) and boneless thighs ($5). Far from a thin, crisp, eggshell-brittle crust, this is the kind of batter that sends craggy, crunchy shards in all directions, making the pieces look three times their actual size. The seasoning runs clear through, from that outrageous mahogany-hued armor to the supple-soft meat within.

There’s only one way to improve on hot, crispy, aggressively seasoned fried chicken, and that’s by dunking it into creamycool ranch dressing. That impeccable ranch is just one of 16 (yes, 16) sauces that Atheneos makes from scratch to gild the so-called lily. I tasted my way through a healthy number of them and found them all to be unique, flavorful and well balanced. They span the spectrum from bracing blue cheese to combustible Cleveland

Photo by Doug Trattner

By Douglas Trattner

tail-on shrimp ($9) that arrives in a smoky, spicy, buttery broth not unlike that of New Orleansstyle barbecue shrimp. The white cheddar mac and cheese ($7) is

CHICKEN RANCH 13892 CEDAR RD., UNIVERSITY HTS. 216-938-7645 THEORIGINALCHICKENRANCH.COM

hot. Both the honey mustard and house BBQ are tasty enough to bottle, while the black garlic toum has just the right mix of garlic, lemon and funk.

Those brawny fried thighs land in three-fisted sandwiches like the Korean Fried Chicken ($10), a jawbreaking stack of chicken, slaw, pickles, candied jalapeños, soychile jam and hot sauce on a soft, eggy bun. Also in the sandwich category is a fiery Nashville Hot version and a mild-mannered crispy chicken with buttermilk mayo.

In the non-chicken arena there’s a half-pound portion of zesty

appropriately satisfying, with al dente corkscrew pasta bathed in a creamy but subtle sauce. Vegans and meat-eaters alike will enjoy the hearty texture and barelythere spice batter surrounding the popcorn cauliflower ($8).

Don’t overlook the Dino kale slaw ($4), a healthy, flavorful toss of dinosaur kale, purple cabbage and shredded carrot in a light vinaigrette. There’s a larger, more “proper” salad as well that includes more vegetables and a choice of dressings.

Most items include sauces, pickles and a pale-yellow corn cake. But no meal from Chicken

Ranch is complete without an order of crinkle-cut fries ($4).

That golden-brown zig-zag exterior grips sauces like a dream, and the shape seems to hold up better to travel than others.

Craft beer fans should consider placing an order here simply for the suds. How many take-out joints keep their coolers stocked with the likes of 3 Floyds Zombie Dust, New Holland Dragon’s Milk White Stout and Urban Artifact’s blackberry sour The Gadget.

Atheneos is partnering on the project with his brother Niko.

They named it Chicken Ranch in honor of their uncle, who ran a joint in New York with the same name back in the 1980s. I’ll be returning soon to check out the just-unveiled weekend brunch starring buttermilk biscuits and gravy, bacon, egg and cheese sandwiches, and chicken and waffles.

dtrattner@clevescene.com t@dougtrattner | clevescene.com | February 24-March 9, 2021

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MARCH 29-APRIL 4, 2021 | CLEVELANDMACNCHEESEWEEK.COM | clevescene.com | February 24-March 9, 2021

Photo courtesy Bar Italia

EAT BITES

Rick Doody to close Lindey’s Lake House in Beachwood and reopen as Bar Italia

By Douglas Trattner “I’M HUMBLE ENOUGH TO SAY that if it doesn’t work, that’s okay.

We tried,” says Rick Doody, owner of Cedar Creek Grille, 17 River Grille, Bar Italia and, at least through Valentine’s Day weekend, Lindey’s Lake House in Beachwood.

Just last month, Doody announced that he was reconcepting his two-year-old Lakewood eatery, Lindey’s Lake House, to Bar Italia. At the time, the co-founder of Bravo and Brio restaurants expressed a hesitancy to do the same in Beachwood, where another Lake House sits adjacent to Cedar Creek Grille. But that’s no longer the case.

“I never wanted to be a chain; I want to be a small collection of restaurants,” he explains. “But I have this asset here and it’s not working.

Bar Italia in Lakewood is working.

We’re doing double the volume that we were as Lake House. People like it. They like the food, they like the atmosphere, they like the feel of the place.”

Lindey’s Lake House in Beachwood is now closed and will reopen as Bar Italia in March.

Bar Italia will build a menu around fresh pasta from Flour Pasta Company, fresh-baked breads from On the Rise bakery and made-fromscratch sauces. Doody says that by and large, the menus at both the Lakewood and Beachwood eateries will be the same, but he also leaves room for neighborhood-driven customization. And then there’s the matter of the pizza oven.

“We have this wood-burning oven in the center of the room,” notes Doody.

While Bar Italia in Lakewood offers Italian appetizers like frito misto, beef carpaccio, and stuffed peppers, and pastas like bucatini Bolognese, three-meat lasagna, shrimp Diavolo and pasta primavera, and entrees such as classic chicken parmesan, grilled branzino and grilled Tuscan steak, it does not sell pizza.

Doody says that the kitchen might utilize the oven for sharable platters like roast chicken for two and other wood-roasted items.

When it reopens as Bar Italia, the restaurant will sport a new look, one that Doody describes as a blend of polished chic and rustic casual.

The only remaining Lindey’s Lake House, located on the East Bank of the Flats, will stay as is.

Kate’s Good Fish Company PopUp Now Running Every Weekend Through Lent After a two-day test run in January, Kate’s Good Fish Company will now run every Friday and Saturday through the duration of Lent.

The collaborative pop-up from Tom McIntyre of Kate’s Fish and Brett Sawyer of Good Company is a take-out and delivery-only venture operating out of the Good Company kitchen in Battery Park.

The menu offers items like clam chowder, lobster rolls, oyster po’ boys, fried fish sandwiches and seafood dinners – all made with the freshest possible seafood sourced and selected by McIntyre.

“I’m super-excited,” he says. “I’ve been selling fish to Brett for years.

We’ve been talking about doing something together forever but we didn’t know how. Obviously, these are unique circumstances and a unique opportunity.”

Orders can be made through the Good Company website. Follow along with weekly menu updates at @KatesGoodFishCompany on Instagram.

Market Garden Brewery, Bar Cento, Bier Market and Nano Brew All to Reopen on Wednesday, March 10 “It’s official,” says Sam McNulty.

The decision has been made, he confirms, to finally reopen Market Garden Brewery, Bar Cento, Bier Market and Nano Brew, all located in Ohio City. Speakeasy, the subterranean nightclub, will remain closed for the time being. The production brewery, located behind the West Side Market, has never stopped brewing beer for retail sales.

Those restaurants all closed a year ago March, reopened in July, and shuttered, once again, in November following the Governor’s institution of a 10 p.m. curfew on alcohol sales and City and County issued “Stay at Home Advisories.” But on March 10, a year to the week since the original shutdown, they all will reopen to the public. “[Partner] Mark [Premier] and I and our entire team are thrilled to be reopening Market Garden Brewpub, Bier Markt, Bar Cento, and Nano Brew on Wednesday, March 10th for the St. Patrick’s Week of festivities,” McNulty states. “We believe St. Patrick deserves more than just a single day! Brewmaster Andy Tveekrem and his team are working tirelessly to get all locations stocked with fresh and bold Market Garden brews. And our chef teams are crafting exciting new restaurant menus with St. Patrick specials, Lenten Friday Fish Fries, as well as some lighter and healthier options for the less indulgent.”

Before reopening last July, McNulty invested more than $250,000 in UV air filtration technology at all of his establishments. Those measures combined with mandated-mask protocol for staff and guests (when not seated), consistent sanitation procedures, and social distancing ensures a safe environment, he believes.

“We’ll be keeping it fun, festive and safe with all protocols in full effect,” he assures guests.

McNulty, who has been outspoken about the challenges he and all of his colleagues in the hospitality industry have been facing for a full year, is optimistic about the coming weeks and months.

“This past year has been a rocky road for everyone on the planet,” he says. “But there is a light at the

end of the tunnel and it’s getting brighter by the day. Cheers to better times coming soon!”

Pour Cleveland Permanently Shutters Downtown Retail Location Charlie Eisenstat has permanently closed his downtown coffee shop Pour Cleveland, which he opened in 2013. The retail establishment had ceased serving customers in March and never reopened.

“We were trying to hold out hope that something would change sooner, but it’s going to be a while before downtown will be able to sustain a business like ours,” he explains. “When we first decided to close, I thought it would be a couple weeks.”

Eisenstat says that he had hoped normal downtown life would return, but even after a year, the outlook for his business had not improved.

“There’s a growing residential population, but we really are still so dependent on events, tourism and not just the regular residential crowd,” he states. “And even students. CSU went pretty much fully remote, no plays, no sporting events, no conferences. That’s really what drove our business down there.”

Eisenstat still maintains a coffee roastery and e-commerce site for international coffees.

His next order of business, he says, will be to find a good use for all of his brewing equipment.

“I’m sure we’ll eventually open back up in a new spot,” he says. “I’m just not sure if it will be downtown or elsewhere. But I would love to continue to see downtown grow and thrive one day, but it’s hard to say when that will happen.”

dtrattner@clevescene.com t@dougtrattner | clevescene.com | February 24-March 9, 2021

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LAUREN LANZARETTA

“For God chose the lowly things of this world and the despised things, and the things that are not – to nullify the things that are.” 1 Corinthians 1:28

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| clevescene.com | February 24-March 9, 2021

Antwoine Washington, “154 years”, 2021. Mixed media, mural installation in Museum of Creative Human Art, Lakewood, OH. Courtesy the artist.

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moCa Cleveland launches “Imagine Otherwise,” an exhibition and citywide initiative partnering with Black organizations

By Shawn Mishak LA TANYA S. AUTRY, THE GUND Curator in Residence at Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland and first on-staff Black curator in its 52-year history, has organized“Imagine Otherwise,” a multimedia exhibition and city-wide initiative sited at moCa Cleveland, ThirdSpace Action Lab in Glenville, and Museum of Creative Human Art (MOCHA) in Lakewood.

The exhibition, on view through June 6, is unique in its collaboration between moCa Cleveland and these Black-led and centered organizations.

The title, “Imagine Otherwise,” comes from a passage in Christina Sharpe’s book “In the Wake: On Blackness and Being,” which inspires this exhibition.

“To ‘imagine otherwise’ involves countering systemic racism and nurturing our ability to envision other worlds, other ways of being in the world,” says Autry, who has been with moCa since 2019. Autry partnered with ThirdSpace Action Lab and Museum of Creative Human Art because she admires their work in Cleveland. She encountered Evelyn Burnett and Mordecai Cargill of ThirdSpace at various local events.

She also connected with Antwoine Washington of Museum of Creative Human Art on several occasions before collaborating with him on this exhibition. The exhibition has been a feat which has taken nearly 5 months from concept to completion.

Autry co-created The Art of Black Dissent and the Social Justice & Museums Resource List, and coproduced #MuseumsAreNotNeutral, a global initiative that exposes the fallacies of the neutrality claim and calls for an equity-based transformation of museums.

The Black Liberation Center, Autry’s latest project, is an experimental series of exhibitions, workshops, and programming which aim to spotlight arts and culture that envision and strategize paths toward the freedom of all Black people, and thus, all people. Autry continues her challenging charge in the Cleveland community curating what writer Christina Sharpe refers to as “wake work.” “‘Wake work’ is a careful navigation, a meticulous form of care,” says Autry. “It encompasses the various methods Black people implement to get through this antiBlack world and find ways to love themselves, one another, to love life. This long history of exclusion in a majority Black city is an indication of antiBlackness. Black people and other racialized people have not been a part of the moCa Cleveland’s top level management in over half a century.”

It is noteworthy that in June of 2020 The Museum of Contemporary Art’s Executive Director, Jill Snyder, announced her resignation after 23 years with the museum and just weeks after publicly apologizing for canceling “The Breath of Empty Space,” an exhibition that had been slated to debut in Cleveland and was to feature Shaun Lenardo’s charcoal drawings of police violence against minorities, including Eric Garner and Tamir Rice.

“Imagine Otherwise” features artists Shikeith, Imani Dennison, Amber Ford, and Antwoine Washington, and aims to spotlight Black pathways to self-determination and collective liberation through photographic, sculptural, mixed media, and video-based installations.

Antwoine Washington is a Cleveland artist and is the Co-Founder, creative director and a ‘bunch of other things’ for Museum of Creative Human Art (MOCHA).

Among the variety of enticing works showcased in this exhibition, the piece, “154 Years” by Antwoine Washington is a mural installation which portrays a woman with black historical figures in the background, a rainbow darting out from behind her and text barely revealing the word, “FREE.” The subject is wearing a shirt that reads, “A CERTAIN DARKNESS IS NEEDED TO SEE THE STARS,” which is a quote from the civil rights leader, Martin Luther King Jr. The piece may symbolize and theorize a future where, as King stated in his “I Have a Dream” speech, “people will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.”

“I feel honored to play a part in this powerful exhibition,” says Washington. “I think it’s a great idea and it’s needed especially at a time like this. Often black-led orgs are never the focus, underfunded, and used as a box to check off to fulfill a grant requirement. So I appreciate the opportunity to be recognized and be able to tell my side of the story.”

“I hope everyone who encounters ‘Imagine Otherwise’ feels the deep degree of authentic care and rich imagination Shikeith, Imani Dennison, Amber Ford, Antwoine Washington, ThirdSpace Action Lab, and Museum of Creative Human Art embody in their work,” concludes Autry.

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scene@clevescene.com t@clevelandscene | clevescene.com | February 24-March 9, 2021

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SAVAGE LOVE DE-KINKED

By Dan Savage Hey, Dan: I know you and other sexperts say that kinks are ingrained and not something you can get rid of, but mine have all vanished! Ever since I started on antidepressants my relationship with my body and how it reacts to pain, both physical and mental, has completely changed. I used to love getting bit and spanked and beat black and blue, but now all that just hurts. I used to love getting humiliated and spit on, commanded to do dirty things, but none of that holds much appeal anywhere. So what gives? Were these even kinks in the first place if they could vanish so easily with one little pill?

Or were these coping mechanisms for emotional problems I no longer have? I know my libido is suppressed due to the meds. Did my kinks just follow my libido out the door?

The Missing Kink Antidepressants showed your kinks the door at the same time they showed your libido the door.

Zooming out for a second: While some people find that consensual BDSM helps them cope with trauma and/or process their emotional problems — or work through the kind of traumas that create emotional problems — many people into BDSM have no significant history of sexual trauma, TMK, or whatever trauma(s) they may have suffered, sexual or otherwise, didn’t create or shape their kinks. And while consensual BDSM can provide therapeutic benefits to a person who 1. has a history of trauma and 2. has an interest in kink — by making them feel in control of their own bodies (even if they’re temporarily ceding that control) — not everyone who’s kinky can point to a traumatic event at the root of their kinks.

And kinky people shouldn’t have to cite trauma to justify the pleasure they find in getting bit, spanked, beaten, bruised, bound, etc.

“It’s become an oft-repeated narrative of many a wellness think piece that BDSM and freaky fetishes are actually okay because they help people deal with their traumatic past,” as the writer, comedian and self-described “Leatherdyke Muppet” Chingy Nea wrote in a recent essay about the creeping pathologizing of kink. “What gets you off is not

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inherently born of trauma or sign of dysfunction, nor does it require suffering to validate it. Being turned on by weird fucked-up things you want to do with another consenting adult is acceptable simply because it’s hot and sexy and fun.”

OK, TMK, back to your question: Antidepressants — one little pill that can relieve mental anguish and disappear a libido at the same time — can’t cure kinks, but they can suppress them. I mean, think about it … if you’re not horny right now because of the antidepressants … you’re not going to be horny for the things that get you off when you are horny … because you’re not horny … because the antidepressants. If you miss your libido — and if you miss all the hot and sexy and fun and fucked-up things you used to enjoy with other consenting adults — work with your doctor to find a different med that relieves your depression without tanking your libido, TMK, or a different dosage of the med you’re currently on that provides you with emotional benefits without depriving you of your libido and the kinks that come bundled with it.

Follow Chingy Nea on Twitter @ TheGayChingy.

Hey, Dan: I’m a longtime reader who appreciates the candor and insight you’ve offered since, what, the 1990s!

Yeesh. With that in mind, I have a piece of advice I’d like to share with your readers. I’m a 56-year-old gay man. From my 20s though my 40s, I was as sexually active as often as it was possible for me to be. I loved sex and had it every chance I got. It made me feel alive! Then, just as I was about to enter my 50s, I started to have erection problems. I could still come, but a spongy dick is egodeflating. Not wanting to accept what was going on, I talked to my doctor about it. I’ve tried Levitra, Cialis and now Viagra, as well as a host of cock rings. Not much of anything seems

| clevescene.com | February 24-March 9, 2021

and game partner and still have tons hot and fulfilling sex without ever pulling your dick out.

Which is not to say you shouldn’t pull your dick out — you should.

But if you’re feeling selfconscious about your cock, GHOST, seek out guys who aren’t looking for sexual experiences that require a hard dick and you’ll feel less inhibited about pulling your dick out and getting yourself off as you get Joe Newton them off. to help. I miss my sex life, and I miss You already took your own advice, the confidence that came with it. I GHOST, now you need to take mine: didn’t expect this, nor did I plan for it. Stop grieving what you’ve lost and It’s a lonely feeling. get out there and enjoy what you’ve That’s why I think it’s important still got. for your readers to understand the Hey, Dan: I read this in a recent following: Have all the sex you want column of yours: “... if your parents and that you can while you can so are still fucking each other that long as you’re not hurting anyone means your parents still like each or putting anyone at risk! Do this other.” Not always, Dan. My father as often as you want to. Don’t put fucked my mother daily while he those sexual fantasies on the back was having an affair with another burner. Don’t stay in a relationship woman. As soon as the other that stifles you sexually! You owe it woman’s husband died of cancer, my to yourself to experience what you father left my mother. Affair aside, want to experience today. Don’t take he didn’t much like my mother, tomorrow for granted as tomorrow which was evident from the way he might have something else in store treated her and not just from the for you.

Guy’s Hard Off Seems Terminal affair. Maybe he wanted to keep her in place until he could leave, maybe Good advice — don’t screw he had a monstrous sex drive, I don’t tomorrow what you can screw know. But he didn’t like her.

My Asshole Dad today — and I’m glad you didn’t pass on any of the opportunities Thank you for writing in, MAD, and that came your way back when you you’re absolutely right: A lot of people could still “obtain and maintain” — and not just married people — a fully erect cock. But I worry fuck people they don’t like. And some you may be passing on all the people are only nice to their spouses sexual opportunities that are still when they want sex and resume available to you. Even if the rockneglecting their spouses and/or hard erections of your youth and treating them like shit immediately early middle age are gone forever, after they get sex. I obviously needed GHOST, you can still give and to qualify that statement, MAD, and receive pleasure. You can suck a if I had it to do over again I’d go with cock, you can get your ass fucked, this: “If your parents are still fucking you can fist and be fisted. And not each other, that’s a pretty good sign every gay dude into daddies wants they might still like each other.” to be plowed by his hot daddy.

Lots of gay guys wanna be orally serviced by hot daddies and lots of mail@savagelove.net gay guys love having their holes t@fakedansavage eaten and stretched with big toys www.savagelovecast.com and fists. You can be a good, giving

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| clevescene.com | February 24-March 9, 2021