January 2021 | Best of Net nominee, fiction
On the day of the final exam, students walked into the classroom to find a long table lined with body parts inside jars. Confused, and not seeing their professor anywhere, they walked along the table and read the labels on the jars:
– #1: Albert Einstein’s Frontal Lobe
– #2: Frida Kahlo’s Hands
– #3: Chris Hemsworth’s Biceps
– #4: Joan Sutherland’s Lungs
– #5: Usain Bolt’s Feet
– #6: Jane Austen’s Temporal Lobe
– #7: Freddie Mercury’s Vocal Cords
– #8: Oprah Winfrey’s Mouth
– #9: Anthony Bourdain’s Tongue
– #10: Beyoncé’s Legs
– #11: Martin Luther King Jr.’s Heart
– #12: Mother Teresa’s Heart
One of the students noticed an envelope at the end of the table marked, “Please read aloud.” He picked it up and said:
“Hi, class. This is your final exam. You get to choose one jar to eat from. A few minutes after you’ve eaten, you will receive skills and talents related to the person’s body part you’ve selected. As there are only 12 of you, you must choose quickly. You will receive your grade after the test is complete. Once these instructions have been read aloud, you have precisely one minute to select and eat. I am watching. Go.”
The students were the best and brightest at the university, maybe the country. They scurried around the table, some diving for their desired jar, snatching off the lids, shoving the various body parts into their mouths.
After the minute passed, the students stood around the table alternating between looking at each other and looking down at themselves, blood smeared across their hands and faces, meat wedged between their teeth. Only one person stood apart from her classmates.
She clung to the wall, face ashen, body shaking, but as each of her classmates began to clutch at their throats, lines of red crossing across their eyes, gasping, reaching out for help, toppling to the floor, convulsing and then settling into grotesque stillness, she noticed the lone jar left on the table, the one that would have been hers, shining like a beacon, and she understood.
The door opened, and the professor walked in, beaming.
“Congratulations,” he said, shaking her hand. “You passed.”
Elison Alcovendaz
Elison’s work has appeared or will be appearing in The Rumpus, The Santa Monica Review, The Portland Review, Lost Balloon, and other places. Elison has an MA in Creative Writing from Sacramento State and was selected as a Best Small Fictions 2020 winner. To learn more, please visit www.elisonalcovendaz.com.
January 2021 | poetry
After sleeping
for hours, I am still waiting
to exhale
morning breath,
so I can spit
into my bathroom sink
with a healthy squeeze
of toothpaste.
I breathe in again
and hold it again,
like noxious-fumes avoidance
or a morning bong hit.
I waste scant time
gargling mouthwash
like pickle shots,
popping placebos like Xanax,
sucking fresh air,
changing my paradigm,
changing the font
on my nameplate,
changing my password
to something less accessible
but honest,
changing reality itself.
I am frantic to exhale
and spit.
Because, in the morning,
I gasp for breath.
Eric Blanchard
Growing up in Houston, Texas, Eric Blanchard dreamed of dropping out of high school, but when the haze of adolescence cleared, he found himself in law school instead. After being a trial lawyer for a decade and a half, he ran away to Ohio, where he taught school and lived a mindful life for about a minute. Eventually, he returned home to help care for his parents. Eric’s poetry has been included in numerous collections, both online and in hard copy. In 2013, his prose poem “The Meeting Ran Long” was nominated for Sundress Publications’ Best of the Net anthology. His chapbook, The Good Parts, was published in January 2020 by Finishing Line Press.
January 2021 | poetry
Her scent no longer on your face attests
the word apartment is no accident —
it’s parceling, like beans from squash
or like the homebound from the lost.
As gardens, so with rooms: and yet upon
this whisking of tea powder in a bowl
until the conjured swirl displays
the roily froth of all our days,
consider, when our children see the crush
of fragrant yarrow on our backs and shins,
how in telling plain and glad
we might profess the myriad
reckonings of love, that from a fall
when everything, impossibly, is spring,
this place, since from bereavement taken,
may canopy the paths of the forsaken.
Greg Sendi
Greg Sendi a Chicago writer and former fiction editor at Chicago Review. In the past year, his poetry and fiction have appeared or are forthcoming in a number of literary magazines and online outlets, including Apricity, The Briar Cliff Review, Clarion, CONSEQUENCE, The Masters Review, Plume, Pulp Literature, San Antonio Review and upstreet among others.
January 2021 | poetry
Grackles
Grackles fly over the doll factory.
Dolls reach out their stiff arms,
they know you’re dead.
Someone sues Big Pharma—
too late for you.
At the back of the turquoise bodega
drug deals go down.
Even in jail you found things
to smile about
even if you smiled wistfully,
like someone who remembers red poppies
when they had eyes.
Peacocks
The peacocks of addiction
strut their luminous wares.
Wherever you go
their purple moons tremble with promise.
When you sleep
they catch your dreams in snares.
They peck your bright hopes,
leaving
only
death’s dope.
Eighteen Months Recovery
You take your girlfriend to detox
as I once drove you along the potholes of Mass. Ave
to Boston Medical.
I have a video we took that night—
your hands shaking, skin
hanging on depleted bones.
You give your girlfriend a pink rose.
You give her kisses you’ve been saving for years.
I wish I could spare you the urgent truth:
She loves someone more than you.
Someone who stuffs promises in her suitcase,
someone with a voice like liquid caramel,
a nomad who goes by different names:
Juice, Tar, Mud, sometimes just H.
The trustee of hopelessness
holds her hand and whispers, Come,
come into the shadow of no memories,
the fortuity of my embrace.
Lee Varon
Lee Varon is a poetry, fiction and non-fiction writer. She won the 19th Annual Briar Cliff Review Fiction contest. Her poetry and short stories have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and published in various journals including Painted Bride Quarterly and Atlanta Review. In 2017, Finishing Line Press published her chapbook, Affairs Run in the Family. In 2018 she won the Sunshot Poetry Prize for her book, Shot in the Head. She is the co-editor of the anthology Spare Change News Poems: An Anthology by Homeless People and those Touched by Homelessness, published by Ibbetson Street Press in 2018.
January 2021 | poetry
Forty years ago, with smoke wafting
down our hallway and billowing
under the door and the fire alarm
blaring away, I had to get out fast.
My young wife was at work,
no animals to locate and save,
years away from our child’s birth,
I grabbed what was, at the time,
my most valuable possession—something
I’d held dear since my first year at
the University of Wyoming where I sat
in Richard Howey’s philosophy class,
sharpened my life, progressed it out of
the cave of conformity and complacency.
I grabbed my copy of The Portable Nietzsche
and fled our smoke-choked abode.
Outside, on the sunbleached sidewalk,
while helmeted Denver firemen wrapped
in their heavy rubber coats and boots,
stormed our building, I opened to Zarathustra
and read my favorite aphorism—a beatitude
Freddy wrote to Christians whom, he averred,
always slept well because they got God
to forgive their sins every night before bed:
“Blessed are the sleepy ones,” he wrote,
for they shall soon drop off.”
As it turned out, ours was a silly,
if smokey, dumpster fire, put out easily
by Denver’s best. When my sweet wife
returned from her day’s labor (I was still
struggling to obtain my BA), I told her
of the afternoons’ excitement.
Had I wrapped arms around our wedding album?
she wanted to know. Had I carried it out of
our endangered building that day, rescued
our most cherished memories from the
inchoate flames? Her long dark hair,
moon-cool eyes, and hands whose fingers
moved over me like a Chopin etude,
instantly obliterated twenty years of Catholic
dogma about truth telling as well as my
adherence to Nietzsche’s transvaluation
of all values. Of course, I replied. I ran out
of our endangered home with our memories
held firmly in my hands, kept safe from
flames, hoses, water damage, and enemies:
foreign or domestic.
That night I slept well. Dropped right off.
Charlie Brice
Charlie Brice is the winner of the 2020 Field Guide Magazine Poetry Contest and is the author of Flashcuts Out of Chaos (2016), Mnemosyne’s Hand (2018), An Accident of Blood (2019), and The Broad Grin of Eternity (forthcoming), all from WordTech Editions. His poetry has been nominated for the Best of Net anthology and twice for a Pushcart Prize and has appeared in The Atlanta Review, Chiron Review, Plainsongs, I-70 Review, The Sunlight Press, Anti-Heroin Chic, and elsewhere.
