April 2024 | poetry
Up county, here in Mount Kisco, the men
from across the tracks wait patiently
at the station every weekday morning,
not for a train, but a day job, seated
on the edge of the sidewalk or against
the fence, near where cars enter to drop off
or pick up, all expectantly catching
the gazes of incoming drivers,
signaling silently, Whatever it is
you have to do, I can do it for you.
By noon, many head home to emptiness,
their wives away to serve as maids for
the more well-to-do. I wait for the train
from the Bronx that brings my housekeeper.
Jim Tilley has published three full-length collections of poetry and a novel with Red Hen Press. His short memoir, The Elegant Solution, was published as a Ploughshares Solo. His poem, “On the Art of Patience,” was selected by Billy Collins to win Sycamore Review’s Wabash Prize for Poetry. Four of his poems have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. His next poetry collection, Ripples in the Fabric of the Universe: New & Selected Poems, will be published in June 2024.
Jim Tilley
April 2024 | poetry
To go back is as hard almost
as forward.
We all got a little silence lodged
in our molars some time
in middle school, mostly.
Field trips to the museum of future affairs,
long bus rides, behind the glass
our taxidermied bodies
in frozen poses of parenting,
pharmacy lines, conference rooms.
On the ride back we did not discuss it and also
there was no ride back.
We lived there in the museum, locked in,
setting fires in the courtyard to keep busy.
No one came for us
and we liked it that way.
Wrapped our fists in the curtains,
broke the glass,
hauled out our own effigies.
Only warmed them by the fire.
To go forward is much
harder than backward but also less impossible.
They came for us, pounded on the doors,
begged and begged.
We would not budge. Not locked in
but them locked out.
The smoke they thought
was signal was just s’mores.
In the basement canned food
for any number of eternities.
Draped our arms around
ourselves and sang songs
we didn’t know yet.
The silence dried up,
our teeth gleamed, a new silence
came to cushion us.
It was different, springier,
a shared give in the air.
Oh, sure, there must be lots we’re missing,
but we’d just be missing more
out there. We’ve seen enough.
No season left to tempt us.
Katherine Tunning lives in Boston with her partner and a highly variable number of cats. Some of her recent poetry has appeared in Red Rock Review, Prime Number Magazine, and The Westchester Review. Her work has been nominated for the Sundress Best of the Net anthology and the Pushcart Prize and awarded the 2020 Penn Review Fiction Prize. You can find her online at www.katherinetunning.com.
Katherine Tunning
April 2024 | poetry
I.
The Buddhas
tell us not
to think of
a heaven,
of a hell…
This breath comes.
That breath goes.
Then nothing.
II.
Klara Dan
von Neumann,
drove from home
to the beach—
walked into
the surf and
III.
Woolf wrote:
“Dearest, I
feel certain
I am mad …
again… I
am doing
what seems best…”
IV.
Sylvia
sealed off
the kitchen
with towels
to stop gas
from drifting
into where
her children
were sleeping.
V.
Lao Tau says:
“Heaven and
earth are not
humane. They
regard all
as straw dogs.”
VI.
The next day
morning came.
nothing at
all changed.
Straw dogs
don’t bark.
William Waters is an associate professor in the Department of English at the University of Houston Downtown. Along with Sonja Foss, he is coauthor of Destination Dissertation: A Traveler’s Guide to a Done Dissertation.
William J Waters
April 2024 | poetry
In the Peabody Library reading room, a ramshackle longing has liberty to roam,
While the rhetoric of busybodied reality bustles without and within
The center of self-knowing. Beneath the architraves scrolled with Grecian ghosts,
And over the bookcases crimped dense with Virgil’s deeds,
Twenty centuries of ‘I Am’s impartially abided to this place divorced of time.
Beside the domesticity of books, the graduate students sit, talking contentedly
Of matters related to weather, and ‘she loves you not’s’ of restrained importance,
And have exiled vellum-spined Kipling, Coleridge, Cranes’ consciousnesses
From their all-important talk, then to someplace as unreached
Within these twenty centuries and five floors of domesticity,
Below whose atrium the unconsoled words of creation
Retire into their dreadful humanity, read through perhaps and put away –
I search in heed for the truest ‘kings of infinite space.’
Wandering the columns of the Peabody,
Bordering a prodigiously fat shelf set aside for the modernist thing,
Certain truths seem forgivable to readers of certain breeds.
To chance upon a no more commonplace volume of Auden –
I turn to his ‘September 3, 1939’ two days, eighty years after the occasion
And chance upon some lady’s no more commonplace tow-color of hair,
Doubtless, having been collected by some stranger into a blonde plait,
A stranger whose limerence had left it truer bookmarked beside the verse –
‘For the error bred in the bone
Of each woman and each man
Craves what it cannot have,
Not universal love
But to be loved alone.’
A young poet whose work can be best described as “allowing the glory of the mundane to permeate our understanding.”
Maxwell Tang
April 2024 | Best of Net nominee, fiction
WORKEROLICK
There’s a run on peaches. Soon the shelves in Produce are empty. I go down to the basement to get more. When I step out of the lift into the warehouse, I see my boss.
Disco Dez.
There he is in his bellbottoms, bouncing what looks like a tennis ball on the ground. Except it doesn’t bounce as high as it should. Then I see him put the ball in a tray of peaches. He takes another peach from the tray and tries to bounce it off the concrete back into his hand.
I ask him what he’s doing.
“Wot does it look like ahm doin? Grab some a these peaches and chuck em at the floor,” he says. “If they’re bruised or damaged, we can send em back to the supplier.” He hurls one to the ground. Picks it up. Smashes it down again. Inspects it. Puts it back in the tray. “Damaged goods,” he says, lighting a smoke. He takes out a third peach and dashes it against the concrete. “Come on,” he says. “Grab a few and bash em like this. Otherwise, we’ll ave to take em upstairs and fart around arranging em on the shelves.”
I tell him it’s no problem to take them up to Produce.
He’s back at me right quick.
“Oh, fuck off! Ah can’t be bothered doin that! Ahm knackered! Ah were at Pips Disco last night. Met a real scorcher. Took er ome too. At it all night, we was! Ah dunna feel like faffin around merchandising fruit. Ah just wanna stay down ere wiv me cigs.”
He replaces the third damaged peach and mashes a fourth against the tray’s wooden edge with his right hand while he puffs on his smoke with his left.
“There we go! Bita variety—This one got damaged in transit!” He takes a fifth and hurls it to the floor. “Bruising’s the best, though.”
I just stand there and watch him.
He looks at me.
“Wotz fuckin wrong wiv thee? Bruise some a these bloody peaches, lod! Come on, mon! Is somet up wiv yer earz? Ooze the fuckin boss around ere?”
I tell him I won’t do it.
He takes a deep drag on his smoke and looks at me incredulously.
“Did ah bloody ear you right? Yer not telling me yerd rather shove the fuckin trays onto a dolly, lug em up the soddin lift, and stick em on the bleeding shelves!? Wotz yer fuckin probo?”
I tell him I won’t damage the peaches.
“Right then!” he says.
He grabs a tray of undamaged peaches with both hands and tosses it at me. I catch it and turn towards the lift.
He shouts after me as I walk off.
“Yer ken wotz wrong wiv thee? Know wot yer fuckin probo iz? Yer a fuckin workerolick, mate! Addicted to bloody work—that’s wot you are! Not me!”
He jabs a thumb into his chest.
“Ahv got a bituva fuckin life to live!”
Mark Crimmins grew up in Manchester, England, dropping out of high school to work in the textile industry. He emigrated to the United States as a skilled labourer in 1978. In the States and Canada, he received a literature education, with a BA in 1985, an MA in 1993, and a PhD from the University of Toronto in 1999, specializing in Contemporary American Fiction. His stories have been published in Chicago Quarterly Review, Apalachee Review, Columbia Journal, Tampa Review, Fiction Southeast, Confrontation, Permafrost, Atticus Review, Kyoto Journal, Queen’s Quarterly, and Flash Frontier. One of his flash fictions was nominated for a Pushcart Fiction Prize by Kansas magazine Inscape.
Mark Crimmins
