Immigrant Sisters at the End of the World

January 2024 | poetry

Between 1860 and 1939, thousands of poor young women

from Eastern European shtetls were sold into sexual slavery

by the Jewish-run Zwi Migdal crime syndicate which controlled

highly profitable brothels in Brazil, Argentina and the U.S.

 

How to pry open the iris of footnote.

As they stooped around rickety tables

on dirt floors they imagined an orange

a day and gold capped teeth. So peasant

girls with milky skin and luscious hair

left their hardscrabble shtetls sleeved

in promise from so many visiting Prince

Charmings in patent-leather shoes,

tailored trousers, and silk handkerchiefs

soaked in rose water to temper poverty’s stench.

 

By ship or train, the new air of a new world

was double-dealing, empty of marriage,

seamstress careers, or taffeta finery.  Instead

the air was burdened with fear and sadness,

immigrant streets of trapped women in the many

“convents” of Buenos Aires, Rio de Janeiro, or

New York’s Lower East Side. Yoked by greedy

pimps to another kind of assembly line with rape

the often tool of the trade, each Eve did

their bidding, merchandise of the counterfeit kind.

 

And so the bruised skin of days and nights

began—the who’s your daddy in a labyrinth

of rooms with flimsy plywood partitions

in dilapidated clapboard brothels, to feel

the not feeling of pressure at their napes,

stale breath of sugarcane alcohol, rough

hands to paw their breasts, pry open

their thighs, the insignificance of release.

These transplanted sisters forced and entered,

counted and discounted, dank scent of lavender

struggling to find their no’s.

 

Forged letters back home to Odessa,

Lodz, Krakow, Kiev. I’m afraid your daughter

is lost forever.  She’s a woman who belongs

to everybody now.  Yiddish rhymes from childhood

whispered to soothe their cheap camisoled sleep.

The spit at their heels, hushed children crossing

cobblestones when their red lipsticked, heavily rouged,

high-heeled clicks came by.  These colonized flower buds

that rotted in shame and syphilis, beatings and stabbings,

yellow fever, tuberculosis, or the exhausted swallow

of carbolic acid.

 

How to heal the script for these women of footnote long gone—

the Bruchas, Rebeccas, Sophias, and Rosas, the Klaras, Olgas,

Lenas and Helenas, the Berthas, Isabels, Rachels, and Fannys.

Today, we perform your tahara cleansing your bodies with

cascades of sacred water to comfort and purify you at last.

 

Rikki Santer

Rikki Santer’s poetry has been published widely and has received many honors including several Pushcart and Ohioana book award nominations, a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities, and in 2023 she was named Ohio Poet of the Year. She is currently serving as vice-president of the Ohio Poetry Association and is a member of the teaching artist roster of the Ohio Arts Council. Her twelfth poetry collection, Resurrection Letter: Leonora, Her Tarot, and Me, is a sequence in tribute to the surrealist artist Leonora Carrington. Please contact her through her website, https://rikkisanter.com.

Another One About Birds

January 2024 | poetry

Specifically,

the girl falling

hard enough from the saddle

to clack her teeth.

Just under my favorite tree.

The man: lean into it.

(He does, the tree.)

Unicycle’s like walking

on your hands. You’re

always in a state of almost

falling. Lean into it

or you land on your ass.

So she sets up again,

white lip knuckle-crook

contact, whole earth

like a pendulum.

I never got the hang

of that either, she says.

 

Generally,

what passes for summer

in these parts. A golden crown

sparrow hops clear,

watches her wobble

by in broken light like

it was nothing new.

 

Keith T. Fancher

Keith T. Fancher is not a poet. Born in the California redwoods and raised in the Blue Ridge foothills, he holds degrees in computer science and film studies. Nonetheless, his work has appeared in Poetry Northwest, Red Ogre Review, OPEN: Journal, Right Hand Pointing, and elsewhere. He lives in San Francisco.

Under the Texan Sun

January 2024 | Best of Net nominee, fiction

Bernadette lives in a flat house in West Texas. She often forgets being old until she walks past a mirror or a window and sees the skinny, slightly hunched, somewhat wrinkled body she knows is now hers. She ignores it by keeping busy, tending to the flowers and trees in her yard which seems to get a little bigger each year.

“Hello, kitties,” she coos as she comes outside to sit under her patio awning, shielded from the relentless sun. She listens to them mew as they slink around her, making overlapping curvy trails that crisscross her legs and each other as if they are weaving a tale.

“Here’s your dinner, my sweets,” she says, wishing she was serving watermelon to grandchildren and not stray cats looking for Meow Mix. The cats stop crying and eat without fighting when she puts all the aluminum pie plates down.

I’m still here at ninety-one, she tells herself. My legs work and brain work and I have a roof over my head, owned free and clear. I have my telenovelas and Lester Holt every evening. I have leftover barbecue chicken and a fresh peach from my neighbor. I am fine.

The warm breeze dries the sweat on her face and arms, cooling her. She leans back in the lawn chair and closes her eyes for a few minutes to rest. Bernadette sees someone walking in her yard, coming toward her from the road so far away. It’s a woman who is very small at first but keeps getting bigger as she comes closer. She appears gray and nearly transparent but gradually becomes bright and solid, and the old lady gasps, seeing the woman wearing a multi-colored dress.

Bernadette remembers that dress from long ago, recalls buying the fabric and carefully cutting it out, using a special pattern begged from her older sister. Bernadette pinned the parts together and sewed the seams one by one, fit each of the sleeves into the arm holes, which was always tricky and took patience, something Bernadette had little of then. It took hours to set in the zipper and make it smooth and even. Finally, she ironed each seam flat like her mother had taught by her.

This dress was for a dance. A nice young man had invited her, and her mother had said okay. It was her first dance and her first date. The dress had to be perfect. She could still feel the fabric resting on her arms, soft and clingy. The skirt cascaded from her tiny waist, hugged her hips, and fluttered against her knees.

Bernadette was sixteen. She had long black hair and eyes so dark people swore she had no pupils. Everything was brilliant and new and special that night. She danced for hours, and her feet didn’t feel the floor. He held her gently like she would break if he let her go.

Suzanne C Martinez

Suzanne C Martinez’s fiction has appeared in Vestal Review, The Citron Review, Gone Lawn, and The Broadkill Review, among others, and was nominated for Pushcart Prizes (2019, 2020), The Best of the Net (2020), and Best Short Fictions (2022). She was a finalist in the 2023 Tartts First Fiction Award for her linked story collection. She lives in Brooklyn. Website: www.scmwrites.com X: @SuzanneCMartin3 • IN: s.martinez1441 • FB: scm1441

It’s Ungodly Cold in Kahramanmaraş

January 2024 | Best of Net nominee, nonfiction

When I google Turkey earthquake photos, I find a man sitting amidst broken concrete slabs, holding the hand of his daughter, her body sandwiched between mattress and pancaked upper floors. Her hand is smooth and white, spared from the broken and slid. Her palm is open— an invitation. The pink sheet too spills off the bed, the way she’d slide off each morning, sleepy-eyed, following smells into the kitchen, her chair across from his. His other hand is in his pocket. Men dig around him with bare hands. His stare barely touches upon their movements, the sunsets and sunrises that will come and go.

I zoom into his vacant stare. And I am sixteen, with too many theater friends piled in my car. We sit at a red light in awe of the pink and orange sunset silhouetting the mall. In the next lane, a woman stares ahead, unsmiling, haggard. We bang on our windows and yell until she hears our muted cries through glass and turns, confused, awakened. We wildly point and shout Look. At. The. Sunset! until she understands. And when she sees it, she smiles. We pulse with victory, changing the world one soul-less adult at a time! All the empties that walk the earth— those who’ve forgotten to notice.

Caroline N. Simpson

Caroline N. Simpson’s chapbook, Choose Your Own Adventures and Other Poems, was published by Finishing Line Press in 2018. In 2020, Delaware Division of Arts awarded Caroline an Established Artist Fellowship in Poetry, and she has been nominated several times for a Pushcart Prize in both poetry and nonfiction. carolinensimpson.com

Tracey Dean Widelitz

January 2024 | visual art

Fairy Tales Do Come True

Tracey Dean Widelitz

Tracey Dean Widelitz is a published writer, poet and photographer. She is the author of the published children’s book A Heavenly World. Her personal experience of pet loss would later become her first children’s book A Heavenly World. Her poetry has been published in Wingless Dreamer’s Dreamstones of Summer, Dawn of the Day, Whispers of Pumpkin, My Cityline, Field of Black Roses, The Black Haven and My Sanskriti In Teal, and Rhapsodies of Rhyme Anthologies, and she was the Grand Winner of Wingless Dreamer’s Dreamstones of Summer Poetry Contest and one of the top finalists in Field of Black Roses Poetry Contest 2022. Her photographs appear in Months to Years Winter 2022 edition, Camas Winter 2021 edition literary magazines, Tiny Seed Literary Journal July 10th, 2022 and October 4th, 2022 Blog and print Anthology edition, Burningword Literary Journal April 2022 literary journal, Poet’s Choice “A Taste of Reality” Anthology, Wild Roof Journal Issue 20 May 2023, Las Laguna Art Gallery February show Captured (Photography) 2022-Online Edition, March 2022 Online Exhibition Landscapes or Seascapes, April 2022 Online Exhibition “Light & Shade” and April 2023 “2023-Women In Art” Online Exhibition. Visit her website at https://www.traceydeanwidelitz.com Twitter @tracey_author Instagram @traceydeanwidelitz.com and @aheavenlyworld