The Gristle of Love

April 2023 | poetry

Months after I had cleared her clothes from our apartment

and delivered them to a homeless shelter as was her wish,

I drove to our cabin in the mountains to gather her last shirts

and sweaters, socks and tights, sneakers and slippers. I was

weary of all the searching, finding, sorting, folding. Weary even

of the touching. I could not stomach one more trip for charity.

Death, you see, had made me a coward. I just jammed everything

in three thirty-gallon black plastic bags, which I tied off tightly,

left for next morning pick-up at the end of the driveway,

flanked by six-foot banks of ice-skinned snow. An hour’s nap later

I saw through the window that crows had come, torn open the bags,

dragged their contents all over, confused perhaps by wisps

of sweat and perfume, thinking who in his right mind would put

anything but chicken bones and pizza crust in such beguiling sacks.

One had her lace panties in its beak, shaking it like a battle flag.

Another was chewing the sleeve of her pineapple tee shirt.

A third was back at the bags, manically scrounging for more.

I walked out calmly with a shovel. The birds flew away.

I had visions of leaving it all for a next storm to bury,

re-collecting the debris after spring thaw and burning it into

a biblical pillar of smoke, soaking the ashes in the stream out back.

Instead, I climbed the crusted banks, roamed the neighbors’ yards

and snowbound streets, picked up the pieces, placed and cinched them

in new bags, left them as before. The birds came again and again.

Again and again I gathered, each time working more slowly, each time

the pieces smaller. Until the sun was gone and I stood by the last bags

I owned, slightly less full. I stood there all night, the crows laughing

and I laughing back, their amber eyes flashing in the new moon dark,

neither stupid nor cruel, though I had thought them both.

At first light, men with boots and gloves came in a green truck.

One said Good Morning. Another took the bags away.

 

Ken Haas

Ken Haas lives in San Francisco where he works in healthcare and sponsors a poetry writing program at the UCSF Children’s Hospital. His first book, Borrowed Light, won the 2020 Red Mountain Press Discovery Award, won a 2021 prize from the National Federation of Press Women and was shortlisted for the 2021 Rubery Book Award. Ken has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and has won the Betsy Colquitt Poetry Award. His poems have appeared in over 50 journals and numerous anthologies. Please visit him online at http://kenhaas.org.

Do You Have an Accent?

April 2023 | Best of Net nominee, poetry

This town has a rusted roof gas station,
a store shelf where you would find
charm and shame sitting side-by-side,
as inseparable as lovebugs,
buy-one-get-one for the last 50 years.

You can still buy a scratcher ticket – or twelve,
and sit, welcomed, on the sidewalk
with your dreams of a less-debted life,
or watch as barefoot beauties walk west to work,
carrying babies bulging with
Dollar General budget-nutrition.

Don’t forget your manners if you’re just visitin’,
one proper and polite nod to say,
“just like my daddy did,”
to all those with their collars blue
just like the sky-paint on the gulf.

“Poor, rural, and southern”,
is meant by most
to sound scary and scabbed
just like the shallow intimidation
of pitbull pups scratching and slobbering
against their chain-link boundary lines.
But to me it sure looks a lot like
lovin’ and learnin’ that the things
worth having take the most time,
saturating slowly like sun tea
brewin’ in the porch-pitcher.

I spent a decade patting makeup
onto the warm red tones of my neck
to conceal a crime of culture,
instead of questioning
why moving up
had to mean moving away.

These memories had a lesson for me,
like a neighbor pulling my ear
back to my mother for new wisdom,
chastising me for talking to strangers,
forgetting my manners,
and not listening to my father.

These memories are like mangrove mud,
hugging my ankles until I am stalled,
anchoring me to mindfulness of a moment
tinged with something sour,
like that sulfuric smell across the marshes,
that is hard to romanticize – yet still cues a smile,
when its rotten earthiness tells me that I am home.

It is only in this pause,
the stillness before a shifting tide,
when I can clearly recall and recite
the scripture –
the allegory of me,
and where it was written.

It was composed here;

In the nimble thank you wave,
at a neighbor kind or neglectful enough
to turn an eye as I swiped citrus slices
from yard overhangs,
to rub into my vulgar mouth,
with dirty hands.

On the sweet-wind steeped from
magnolia blooms and orange blossoms,
the perfect perfume to compliment
a blushing heat-sick face.

It was spoken over the rumble of thunder,
during the can’t-miss primetime storm watch,
hurricane season 2004,
sung with the intoxicating breaths
of the gulf stream,
scented with pheromonic petrichor.

They say that one man’s white trash
is another’s treasured upbringing,
and through the catharsis of return,
a lowbrow renaissance,
I know both to be true.

My only infallible faith is in the
beauty visible from the gutter,
and I will celebrate each day
in the midst of a perennial
impoverished holiday,
like the Christmas lights draped
on fences, roofs, and trailer tops,
hanging on with staple-gun hugs,
all year ‘round.

Elizabeth Curley

Elizabeth Curley lives a dual life as both a poet and a social work researcher. Elizabeth received a Silver Medal from the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards in 2012 and is still writing a decade later. Elizabeth’s time is spent consuming, collecting, carrying, crafting, and quantifying the human experience.

Max Capacity

January 2023 | poetry

My mind is

a cluttered cupboard

a hoarder’s den

skyscraper-stacked

bits and chits

shiny scraps strident notes

on skin when there is

no room at the inn

no vacancy

for one more guest

nor even space

for oxygen

 

 

thirst is the strongman of needs

with many ways to drink

morning news with morning joe

the Times they are a-changing

podcasts preachers PSAs

Sirius no longer lit

but air-waved and ever-on

any cracks in the stacks

I fill with pages beloved

books poems of my own

and others (who I’d like to be)

 

 

all this mess

magpie-made

I’ll use it someday

but the cows stray

I’m too busy to fence

my mind is at capacity

I fear the thoughts

will overflow like the gentle man

I saw yesterday

at 4th and Main

deep in conversation

with the gentle man

in the glass of the bookstore window

Ann Weil

Ann Weil writes at her home on the corner of Stratford and Avon in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and on a deck boat at Snipe’s Point Sandbar off Key West, Florida. Her work has been nominated for Best of the Net and appears in Crab Creek Review, Bacopa Literary Review, Whale Road Review, Shooter Literary Magazine, Eastern Iowa Review, DMQ Review, and elsewhere. Her first chapbook, Life Cycle of a Beautiful Woman, will be published in 2023 by Yellow Arrow Publishing. Read more of Ann’s poetry at www.annweilpoetry.com.

Rich Spang

January 2023 | visual art

Whalebone Church

 

Logwalk

 

Rich Spang

Rich Spang has been connected to a camera for over 60 years. During retirement his art has become the focus of his life. Film double exposures have led him to digital double exposures, from an accidental to a purposeful creation of his vision.

Clapping Game

January 2023 | fiction, Pushcart nominee

They played on the rug, Erica Hashimoto and her mom, they played the clapping game. Her mom said the words, and they clapped their hands across the empty air.

Willy was a German,

Willy was a thief,

Willy came into my house,

And caused a lot of grief.

Erica knew the game. Her mom had learned it in camp, where she and the other girls had clapped their mittened hands and laughed, and the only variation was to say it louder than the last, because in camp what else was there to do?

Her mom stopped playing on the rug. She got up. It was 1965, and there were lots of things to do. The moms were coming over for the big luncheon. Becky Sakamoto and Erica and the other girls were to play in the front yard.

* * *

Willy was a German.

Erica could see the moms through the big window. They were seated in the living room around the rug and talking. What were they talking about? Erica was bored with the girls’ games, so she went in to sit on her mom’s lap. She watched the women smoke cigarettes and talk in allusions she did not understand.

Willy was a thief.

“What is camp anyway?” she finally burst.

Silence.

Willy came into my house.

Erica slipped out of her mom’s lap and went back to the other girls, her bobbed hair bouncing. Click of white leather sandals. Erica was not curious about camp. Not really. And her mom never suggested that she should be.

And caused a lot of grief.

Erica found her dad on the front lawn, watching the children play in the street. He was standing on their half of the duplex lawn, beside the dried out vegetables patch with its little Popsicle sticks that told you what had tried to grow. Erica took his hands, and allowed herself to be spun, round and round, saying “Willy was a German, Willy was a thief, Willy came into my house…” Then Erica’s white sandals dragged in the brown grass. Her dad was done. They held hands. He said nothing. He fought for breath.

“We don’t say those words,” he wheezed.

And caused a lot of grief.

Erica didn’t ask her dad about camp. She knew the story, how they called him Charlie Hustle, the way he ran the bases, even when the dust was bad, he ran so fast, and the dust stuck in his lungs, and Erica didn’t ask because she knew. Walking out to the girls in the street, she held her dad’s hand. He didn’t hold hers back. She didn’t expect him to.

We don’t say those words.

We don’t say any words at all.

Evan Morgan Williams

Evan Morgan Williams has published over fifty short stories in literary magazines famous and obscure, including Kenyon Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, ZYZZYVA, Witness, and Antioch Review. He has published three collections of short stories: “Thorn,” winner of Chandra Prize at BkMk Press in 2014, “Canyons: Older Stories” self-published in 2018, and “Stories of the New West,” published by Main Street Rag Press in 2021. Williams holds an MFA, tattered and faded, from the University of Montana in 1991. He has just retired after 29 years as a Language Arts teacher in Oregon’s toughest middle school.