Lowell Jaeger, Featured Author

January 2018 | Best of Net nominee, poetry

Sugar-White Beaches

Such a never-ending winter, these months

of snow and ice and gloom.  We’ve lost

long hours again today, pushing back

last night’s leaden blanket of wet white,

mounding piles shoulder-high, towering

till they avalanche as if to mock our labors.

The wind whips our cheekbones red

and wet and raw, my wife and I,

our shovels lufting slush, lungs puffing

huffs and grunts . . . when, within a waking dream,

she says, That sugar-white beach

in Isla Mujeres, remember? I nod,

a touch of warmth, a blush, floods over me,

a smile.  Side-by-side we replay these memories,

wordlessly, relishing not just the mind’s rescue

but something bone-deep having bubbled up

like steaming waters from the earth’s core.

And I remember, as a kid, that same sensation,

a resurrection out of the depths of near hopelessness,

our schoolyard in late March beginning to thaw.

One brown patch of lawn opened where snows had receded,

and we gathered there all recess, huddled in awe.

The Bubbles

Jet-lagged, we snugged the covers over our ears

to muffle las campanas de la catedral, tolling.

Stepped into the midday sun, blinded by how far

the day had progressed without us.  Hungry

enough to settle for a vendor’s cart menu,

plastic tables and worn umbrellas, across from the plaza

where someone had switched on

fountains of spray hissing skyward and falling,

sizzling on the hot streets like rain.

Not a fountain, really, but jets

or nozzles embedded in the cobbles and brickwork,

firing at random for the simple screams

of barefoot niňos dashing to soak

their camisetas y pantelones for the joy of what

dazzle might rise on a Sunday afternoon.

And did I mention the children blowing bubbles?

Not blowing them, really, but throwing them

from homemade coat-hanger wands dipped

in pails of sudsy dish soap.  Huge soap balloons

taking shape as the children twirled and laughed.

Families cheering the bubbles as each rose toward the sun,

undulating liquid rainbows.  Kaleidoscopic rainbows!

As my wife and I held hands across the table,

glad to be in love amidst the bustle,

this world’s wondrous and baffling extravagance,

thousands of miles from home.

Three Cathedrals

Our strategy for this day: don’t waste it

roaming the cobbles in the aimless manner

we’d diddled away the hours yesterday —

my customary druthers when accustoming myself

to a foreign locale.  I like to simply set out walking,

let each new intersection dictate which way to go.

But this day at breakfast, a sunlit street-side café,

you opened the guidebook and made plans.  We’d locate

the burial site of the young peasant, a revolutionary.  The one

who gave his life — or so the story alleges —

not for his flag, but for the welfare of his wife and children.

You passed the map across the table, without speaking,

and pointed to our destination, tapping gently with one finger

on the exact coordinates of your chosen goal.

All morning we searched street names, asking directions,

straining to comprehend a few words of a language

not our own, charging this way and that,

until past noon we stopped for a glass of wine,

conceding we were lost.  Something between us,

lost.  I couldn’t guess what it was.  Except that our son

and daughters were grown and gone.  And when we rose

to go again, we had nowhere particular in mind, meandering

across the plaza, stepping recklessly through traffic,

lured by cathedral doors thrown wide.

In the darkness inside, I studied the carved-wood altar.

Someone might have mistaken my mumbling as a prayer.

You lit a votive and set it reverently beside dozens

of strangers’ wishes flaming.  Three cathedrals

we explored that afternoon — their spires rising on the skyline,

easy to find.  This day I now recall in its vaulted ceilings.

And a sadness in you, hushed at depths I’d scarcely divined.

You, slipping pesos into the slotted donation box.  You,

igniting brightness.  I’d give my life for you

and the children, I thought.  You, your face aglow

amidst a thousand flickering shadows.

I’d never loved you more.

We’d Planned

to pull the blinds,

uncork champagne,

jitterbug naked

— your mother and I —

inside the empty nest.

You slammed the hatch

on your Subaru, its bursting load

of fantasies and mysteries boxed,

pillowcases stuffed

with plush bears.

Smiled, waved, honked,

and sped away.  Our last,

at last

college-bound.

We stood at the window

— your mother and I —

and breathed silence.

She simmered a Mexican stew

later that afternoon, which

side-by-side across from your place

at the table, we sipped

spoon by spoon.

Lowell Jaeger

Lowell Jaeger (Montana Poet Laureate 2017-2019) is founding editor of Many Voices Press, author of seven collections of poems, recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Montana Arts Council, and winner of the Grolier Poetry Peace Prize. Most recently Jaeger was awarded the Montana Governor’s Humanities Award for his work in promoting thoughtful civic discourse.

Beth Sherman

October 2017 | Best of Net nominee, poetry

Strangler Fig

After midnight you set out, some on foot,

others hiding in the back of an old pick-up

truck. Fate is the string on a paper kite, caught

in a strangler fig tree. Tangled, useless. Root

stems grafted together, merging each time they touch.

Noble and strange. Twisted. Overhead, a crescent

moon, sharp as a sickle. Its hook like blade could

lop your ear off. There are holes in the wall.

But you have to know where to look.

America. Where you cut lawns and give mani-

pedis and mop floors and change old peoples’ diapers.

Sleeping six to a room. Eating food from the dollar store.

If they catch you, they send you away. Hope is the

skin on a copperhead, it sheds and grows back.

The truck rumbles below your ribs. Someone moans.

Stink of fear and piss. The wind tumbles through the

acacias. Your mother’s brother has a cousin outside

Kansas City. You don’t know where Kansas City is.

The figs on the trees not yet ripened. Color of blood

and sadness, hard as the moonlit stones.

Solitude

Sol ‘it’ ude /~/ n.1. The state or situation of being alone. Blue feather dizzily falling. Leaves no one bothered to rake. The empty chair you used to watch TV in. Barren and stained, covered with a winding sheet. Thoreau had it wrong. Once the maple leaf loses that scarlet sheen, it withers and crumples, feigning death. Walden Pond was a kettle hole formed by glaciers in retreat. 2. A lonely or uninhabited place. Rural wilderness or desert, backwoods. The word beasts recline in the shade of the maples, licking their paws, dreaming of meat.

Beth Sherman

Beth Sherman received an MFA in creative writing from Queens College, where she teaches in the English department. Her poetry has been published in Hartskill Review, Lime Hawk, Synecdoche, Gyroscope, The Evansville Review, Silver Birch Press, Zingara, Rust + Moth, and Blue River Review. She is also a Pushcart nominee and has written five mystery novels.

Kelsey Ann Kerr

October 2017 | Best of Net nominee, poetry

High School Lunch

My father made me a sandwich for lunch every day,

carefully put the turkey, cheddar, lettuce and mayo

on the sourdough, then zipped it up in a Ziploc.

And every day during orchestra, I slipped the sandwich

into the whooshing plastic of a black trashcan, or palmed

it off to a friend. Those feinted days, when I almost fainted

in the hallways, eating less than three hundred calories.

Once, my father made a spaghetti dinner—the last
he’d cook for us as a family—and I refused to eat

anything but Special K. His dish crashed into the sink

and my mother ran after him (then, she still could).

I held the shards in my hands; the pasta sauce

coated them like coagulated blood. That was

the first time in my life that I felt regret,

true regret, the kind that’s parasitic

and coils up in you like a tape worm,

eating through your intestines,

inside out. The kind that swims

around in your stomach when you wake

covered in the lilacs and butterflies

of your childhood bed, to come downstairs

and find your mother, alone, crying.

The kind that feels like the frozen lace

of love covering your heart

when your aunts are waiting for you at the airport

in Seattle, instead of your mother’s friend,

and they sit you down in those grey vinyl chairs

by baggage claim. You don’t want to look
at them. You want to watch the carousel

until it’s one with painted horses that never

stops spinning. You hop on, grab

a magenta mane, and hold as tight

as your tiny hands will let you.

Visiting my mother’s memory on a stormy Friday night

I stare at the reflection

in the candle, aimlessly,

until it hits me—it looks

like my mother’s eye,

dark as the sea in a storm,

grey and sad but inquisitive.

Then I realize, it’s actually

the matting of our portrait

that I took in college,

in the reflection, of us

in matching outfits,

mounted on my wall.

The cancer had gotten worse

then; she’d started fearing

death for the first time.

When I asked her

that winter where

she wanted her ashes

spread, she said

she didn’t know,

maybe the Grand Canyon,

where she and my dad

were wed, maybe

Bandelier, where

she spent much

of her childhood,

just outside Los Alamos,

then looked me

in the eyes

and just cried.

I held her until

she fell asleep;

her short

blonde hairs

stuck to the pillow

with static.

The next morning,

when I kissed her goodbye

and flew away,

I refused

to know

it would be

the last time

I’d see her smile.

Kelsey Ann Kerr

Kelsey Ann Kerr has a great interest in loss: holes both metaphorical and physical of the heart, holes in life left by the loss of parents, cauterized by love. She teaches writing composition at the University of Maryland and American University, and holds an M.F.A. in Poetry from the University of Maryland. Her work can be found, or is forthcoming, in “Stirring,” “New Delta Review” and “The Sewanee Review,” among others.