July 2022 | poetry
Rat Meister’s baton-busy tail flashes against the steady hall lights. Standing upright on his humming haunches, the five toes on his fore feet touch each note as they swell the air and fill hungry ears. His mystacial vibrissae (to the unenlightened: his whiskers) average eight sweeps each second, sensing as objects what others know as music. They follow the wind to create an Euler spiral (think negative infinity), swirling in alternate directions at times, neither defensive or aggressive towards music critics, channeled towards woodwinds and brass instruments. The blur of drumsticks. The tinkle of a triangle to tantalize his organs of touch and rounded erect ears. They approve of the musing of Archimedes (r = aθ) where r = ramblings of Archie of Medes and his Teth or voiceless dental fricatives. A cosine of the rhythmic sines of the time indiscriminately following the wind. Rat Meister follows no such tangents. He measures angles with the assembled ensemble of trained and tuned rats whose eyes and ears follow his raton. The walls swell. Spirits lift. The divine spirals away towards awareness and enlightenment, twin reciprocals of the radius, a staff or stave where note heads do battle space unless del segno appears and stutters ear nauseum.
Richard Weaver
The author hopes to one day to once again volunteer with the Maryland Book Bank, CityLit, and return as writer-in-residence at the James Joyce Pub. Other pubs include: Loch Raven Review, Dead Mule, Free State Review, Little Patuxent Review, Pembroke, & Mad Swirl. He’s the author of The Stars Undone (Duende Press, 1992). Recently, his 160th prose poem was published under a checker-board cone of silence.
July 2022 | Best of Net nominee, poetry
The Very First Venus Flytrap
Who could blame your delicate flowers
For growing sharp teeth, for learning that flesh
Is so much tastier than sunlight
You found out it’s more satisfying to snap shut
Than it is to bloom, that it feels good to bite back
After being chewed on for so many centuries
Jaws of slender grass. Jaws of patience.
You opened your jaws once and wow
How delicious the world tasted
Look how your body transformed into a throat
Your roots into tongues and your blossoms into fists
I can hear your flora siblings whispering nervously
About the one who speaks in needles, who prefers
Blood to dew, pink fanged, an angel
With sharp wings of green, fallen straight into the dirt
Your life is now a feast of moth hearts
And iridescent beetle wings, bee stingers
With spider’s silk used as elegant floss
For your delicate lips of chattering
Knives, lips that wait patiently
To be kissed again and again
That’s why you were named after Aphrodite
Because eating the world counts as loving it twice
And who doesn’t want to die in the mouth of a flower?
Who doesn’t want to be sipped up by the Earth, cradled
Unconscious in the arms of soft petals, suffocated by sunshine
By the plant that turned into death itself?
Finally Appreciating the New Moon
It’s a blank slate, black-blessed, a moment
To enjoy the stars, not named
Like its big bright brothers are
But it should be, it’s a testament that huge unseen things
Can be floating directly above our heads and we’d never
Be the wiser, that even the persistence of sunlight
Needs sleep, no more secrets spilled
Under the moon’s sweet silver, no need for blankets
When you are concealed like an earthworm, a cavern
It’s the moon as whole as we’ve ever seen it
A clasping of two dark halves, providing rest
For our werewolves, a holy day of obligation
For all things nocturnal, if you picnic
Underneath it you enjoy the sensation of being swallowed
By the universe itself, returning to pre-light
When we didn’t have the sun to depend on
And the endless night sky
Was more comforting than any ball of fire
Phantom Hugger
Science has proven
That humans need at least eight hugs a day
And by golly I was going to get them
One way or another
I picked my targets carefully
Drooped shoulders
Downward glances
Unpresumptuous auras
All dead giveaways
I began with quick squeezes, innocent
Shoulder-to-shoulder
Single hand behind the back
Over in a second
Painless pats
Short and sweet and good for everybody
But soon it wasn’t enough, the embraces
Were lasting longer, becoming vulnerable
Soon we were eye-to-eye
And it was becoming embarrassingly difficult
To let go
People began seeking my services
On busy sidewalks and crowded nightclub
Dance floors, a vigilante
Of touch therapy, of a new
Public service
And it wasn’t long before I perfected
My technique, transformed my hugs
Into something sacred, something
Soul-to-soul
An embrace that turned me into Atlas, and you
Into the world
That wrapped around us
Again and again
Until we were lost
In a land of each other’s palms, that proved
The Earth really is
The center of the universe
That dissolved
The very concept of stranger
What I do is illegal in nearly 38 states
But if you ever need me
Go out on empty nights and raise your hands
To the dark lonely air
I promise, eventually, I’ll be there
Dante Novario
Dante Novario is an internationally published writer from Louisville, KY where he works as a therapist with special needs individuals. Nominated for both the 2022 pushcart and rhysling awards, his writing has previously appeared or is forthcoming in Firewords Magazine, KAIROS Lit, Coffin Bell Journal, New Contexts 3, Nimrod International Journal, Thin Air Magazine and others. His poetry can also be heard on the literary podcast Strange Horizons. Find more of his writing on Instagram @dante_novario
July 2022 | poetry
If I tell my mother she is the sky,
what I really mean is that I’m the pond
my father built her. What I mean is
I watch the way she rises and sets
in herself. I mirror every cloud
that mars her features. I darken
to match her windy movements.
What I’m saying is my surface
catches her light, but when she
grows overcast with gray,
my entire face disappears.
I’m saying the two of us
are always facing each other
and wincing away at the same
time. I’ve absorbed into myself
every color she’s taught me
When I try to reveal my
drowned leaves to her,
she can’t see through
her own reflection.
What I’m trying to say is
I can’t stop taking
her shape.
Racine Watson
Racine Watson is a graduate of the University of Nebraska at Omaha, where she studied Creative Writing within the UNO’s Writer’s Workshop. Her work includes fiction, creative non-fiction and poetry. Her creative-nonfiction essay, “The Five Ways I Left” is forthcoming in the 13th Floor literary journal, 2022 edition.
July 2022 | poetry
I walk over train ties
searching for drops of water,
like the rains I’ve loved, negotiating
tumbleweeds where the train runs
regardless of how many rocks lie on the ties.
Farms, silos, industry with steam rising
from the table of land, I watch passively
as workers drain a swamp, plant rice,
and fill it again.
Scale of the wounds
call it forgiveness
call it dread
this pilgrimage.
Call it jasmine.
Call it an address.
Open space, even dry trees
at the mountain’s base–
they too suffer their own mirror.
Call it eyelashes, moist
with their own nick names.
Plumes of smoke make their own
weather in the shape of
a cross or is it a figure
with head and arms
or a rocket
raising itself above the cloud shelf.
Laurel Benjamin
Laurel Benjamin is a San Francisco Bay Area native, where she invented a secret language with her brother. She has work forthcoming or published in Lily Poetry Review, Turning a Train of Thought Upside Down: An Anthology of Women’s Poetry, South Florida Poetry Journal, Trouvaille Review, One Art, Ekphrastic Review, Wordpeace, The Thieving Magpie, Black Fox, Hare’s Paw, California Quarterly, Mac Queens Quinterly, among others. Affiliated with the Bay Area Women’s Poetry Salon and the Port Townsend Writers, she holds an MFA from Mills College. She is a reader for Common Ground Review. Find her blog at https://thebadgerpress.blogspot.com. Find her at Twitter at @lbencleo. Find her on Instragram at cleobenjami.
July 2022 | nonfiction
I was in line at the Delta counter behind two white men of military bearing. They each had man sized hard cases with latches and locks, big enough for long barrel shotguns or automatic rifles. It was Mother’s Day in Texas, and I had missed my flight home to true blue LA. Delta had a flight out around noon and I was trying to find out if there were seats to be had for anything less than the cost of a Trumpian lie.
Five lines. Three agents. Worse still, the agents kept calling up those waiting in other lines. The world’s babble tangoed on the noisy air: Italian, Arabic, Tex Mex, Chinese. 20 minutes later, I sighed with exasperation, sure that whatever seats were left were gone at any price. The man in front of me confided:
“You’d think they would want to get the guns out of sight first….”
That won a chuckle from me.
Another long wait. The first guy with a gun case was finally summoned. The case was opened. A big rifle. The crowd was unimpressed. Much chatter among the uniforms, then a strategic huddle and another long wait. My neighbor laughed:
“That guy’s a pilot for them—Delta. What am I gonna have to do?”
The pilot signed a contracty looking document and was handed a red tag which he carefully placed inside the case before securing all the locks and an extra case-hardened steel padlock. The uniforms witnessed his every move until all those keys disappeared into the man’s carry on and he had stepped back from the gun case.
We were invisible again. A Chinese traveler from another line needed a translator. The man in front of me turned and made small talk:
“Where are you going?”
I mumbled,
“Home.” Then,
“To California,” more assertively, from inside my covid mask. A translator was found. The Italian family were called next.
“Where are you travelling with rifles?” I asked.
“Nevada. We got the contract on feral pigs outside Vegas,” he drawled.
“Yes,” I answered. “I read recently that they are becoming a problem in Southern California, too. Do you ever eat what you kill?
“Once. I brought a young pig home to cook for my sons. One, two years old—they only eat nuts and roots. The older ones eat dead things and stink. I had a bite. The meat was really sweet, but I am a vegetarian, almost a vegan, really.”
I had been visiting my sister in Austin for the first time since Covid began, since her husband had died, since my cancer fight. Alito’s draft opinion on Roe leaked that week. We hung on each other again, trying to ease our shared despair. Uvalde was yet to come.
I called her when I got home and told her about my travel travails, ending with the vegan pig hunter. She laughed and sung the Lyle Lovett line:
“Texas wants you anyway….”
Ellen T. Birrell
Ellen Birrell is an artist and lemon farmer in Ventura County, CA. Her writings have appeared in X-TRA, Cabinet, Adelaide, Adelaide Literary Award Anthology 2018, Mac-ro-mic, Condiment, Material, and Parabol. Her 2019 essay “Gloves” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She is Faculty Emerita at California Institute of the Arts.
