January 2024 | poetry
What Does Persephone Want?
Our daughter Persephone comes and goes.
She plays peek-a-boo with Oxycodone
and Ambien. She likes it in the dark,
a paradox for when she goes she takes
our sun with her and leaves us only night.
When she returns, she brings pallor and chill
and slumps in sleep like asparagus boiled
to limp defeat. She carries bruises, too,
as if she wrestled with demons or gods
and did not quite escape their fiercest holds.
We welcome our daughter, this almost ghost
who does not smile or speak, who barely lifts
her head. We feed her favored fruits and honey,
make evident (we think) our love, but she—
she sleeps and only sleeps as if the weight
of waking crushes her, as if she has
become her great grandmother, embodiment
of death who waits (asleep) to take the last
step from this world to the next, as if done,
done, done, and unwilling to wrestle more.
We Have to Let Persephone Go
Our daughter Persephone went down to death
to see what it was like and liked it well enough
to stay the whole season in darkness and damp
in that underground of hidden things and worms.
With her, she took her secret toys and our joy
and left for us her sad-eyed terrier mix,
her unfinished business, and a disco wig
of purple tinsel that seemed to spark with light.
We imagined her scrubbing her hair with dirt
and soaking in rejuvenating mud baths
then returning more youthful and radiant
than before, our one daughter renewed, re-born.
When it became clear she was not coming back,
we offered to visit her there, to bring her
the red cinnamon candy she preferred
or that frozen yogurt sold by the pound
and layered with multi-colored sprinkles,
but she said we could not come, could not yet pass
the needle’s eye as she had done. We were left
bereft as when she went to college but more.
Cecil Morris
Cecil Morris retired after 37 years of teaching high school English, and now he tries writing what he spent so many years teaching others to understand and (he hopes) to enjoy. He has poems appearing or forthcoming in English Journal, Rust + Moth, Sugar House Review, Willawaw Journal, and other literary magazines.
January 2024 | poetry
Tang of ammonia, the yellow bins outside our apartment.
Fetor of urine, cardboard sheets in an abandoned doorway.
The girl who brushes past us in the cathedral,
sweat, cologne, and the sweet remains of her night
lying in her lover’s arms.
Didn’t the men who toiled to erect this cathedral,
laying stone on stone,
understand that stone is but hardened muck?
Foolish petitioners, standing before eternity’s bolted doors,
the soil from which we have been fashioned
hard-caked under our nails.
No, for us awaits no heaven,
no chaste and shitless Elysium.
Better to return to the stews of grimed clothes
we leave about our rented rooms,
clothes we faithfully launder,
and faithfully foul again,
sinks of dishes we faithfully scrub
and faithfully dirty again.
Rising from my dinner,
this warm Madrid night,
I go to lie in my lover’s arms,
my hands smelling of roast flesh and oil,
of lemon, butter, and basil.
Robert McKean
Robert McKean’s novel, Mending What is Broken (Livingston Press, 2023), has received coverage from Kirkus Review, Largehearted Boy, KRCB, Author2Author, and more. His short story collection I’ll Be Here for You: Diary of a Town was awarded first prize in the Tartts First Fiction competition (Livingston Press). His novel The Catalog of Crooked Thoughts was awarded first-prize in the Methodist University Longleaf Press Novel Contest and declared a Finalist for the Eric Hoffer Award. Recipient of a Massachusetts Artist’s Grant, McKean has had six stories nominated for Pushcart Prizes. His website is www.robmckean.com.
January 2024 | Best of Net nominee, poetry
She begins:
How have your spirits been?
Tell me your name. Where we are right now. The day of the week.
Have you noticed any smells that others around you cannot sense?
Such as the smell of charred toast—
or honeysuckle?
Do you feel this?
She touches across my face.
How’s your vision?
Last night, when headlights fanned across your bedroom floor, did you feel clean? Or did the light catch in your curtains and remind you of being watched? Everything the light touches proof that the window is all that keeps you from the outside.
Can you hear this?
The sound is alive and mechanical and whirls like a machine.
Smile, like you’re trying to convince someone of something.
As though you’re trying to produce in me a change– the starting edge of which I won’t notice until I leave this exam room, gone home for the day, and let my car idle in the driveway
a minute too long.
When you slice your finger with a knife,
the blood rarely appears as quickly as you’d expect.
Puff your cheeks, now–
her hands against my face as though to test the strength of an inflated balloon.
Very good.
She pulls out a pen light.
Follow this light with your eyes.
She spells out H E R E T I C with her pen.
My eyes roll around in my head.
Now–
put out your hands as if to see if it’s raining. Like you’re the first person at the picnic to feel a drop.
Close your eyes.
Think about the grandfather you never knew. He was a preacher and a liar. Your father sang you to sleep with The Bankrobber by The Clash so you would know what he couldn’t tell you.
Very good.
Liz Irvin
Liz Irvin is a writer and second-year medical student at the University of Massachusetts Chan Medical School. She holds a B.A. in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies from Barnard College at Columbia University. Her essay “Seasick: Lessons in Human Anatomy from Hyman Bloom’s The Hull (1952)” appeared in Hektoen International. She lives in Worcester, Massachusetts.
January 2024 | poetry
Untitled (Coke was taller than most women)
Coke was taller than most women and moved in a way that somehow provoked anticipation watching
her cross a room you wondered if this splendid thing would actually happen to you same with her voice
with everything she’d say and I remember that her eyes were grey
and Jimmy once Jimmy kissed me I couldn’t have been more than fourteen when Jimmy kissed me
his mouth seemed to take me over and afterwards I ran away but stayed kissed all afternoon
I saw Coke on the bus wearing a mink jacket one morning and big diamonds looking a handsome late
thirties on her second marriage twelve year old child and she says Jimmy’s got his masters degree and his
wife’s a nurse and Coke says that Mileage whose black moon face and joke on you laughter used to
frighten me has passed away
Untitled (when things get bad enough)
when things get bad enough
I start wishing I would die.
actually, I had intended to say,
when things get bad enough
I start wishing other people would die
so I would be left
the pleasures of abandonment.
you mentioned the word suicide today
I caught it in my teeth and
carried it home to put in a poem.
I am not respectful enough its true
of me of you
but thank you for the word.
Untitled (I have a small book)
I have a small book with yellow covers and half translucent pages. I thought of using it as a drawing
book but never did because I imagined the drawings would bleed through to each other in disturbing
ways. but now I have the idea of making my first drawing on the last page of the book, so I can see it as I
draw on the page that comes before. that way I can design that second drawing to relate to the first.
and so on.
Ditta Baron Hoeber
An artist and a poet, Ditta Baron Hoeber’s poems have been published in a number of magazines including Noon: journal of the short poem, Gargoyle, the American Journal of Poetry, Juxtaprose, Pank, Burningword Literary Journal, the American Poetry Review, and Contemporary American Voices. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and her first book, Without You, is forthcoming in March of 2024. Her photographs, drawings, and book works have been exhibited nationally and acquired by several collections in the US and the UK.
January 2024 | poetry
In another dimension, it is me & not Dostoevsky
who claims 2-plus-2 can equal 5.
I have pressed TV rewind enough times
to see how toothpaste can slide right back into the tube
after dissolving across teeth & draining into the sink.
The vomit gurgitates itself back into a glass of kegged beer.
I have seen blood pour itself back into the vein, from wine.
& who is to say that after her father laid himself to rest
under the commuter train that he didn’t lift his body
back into another world
where we are still twelve years old
at Fenway Park. At the seventh inning stretch,
he holds both a beer, & a camera
to capture our sweet Caroline smiles.
O, ode to the Jeremy Bearimy!
To be a dot in the I
& repeat that one life
forever and without time.
A place where nothing never happens.
I mean, if Leo himself can climb through a dream
inside a dream, then why not me?
There could be a galaxy in which I’m seen.
In which my body was never taken away from me.
A world in which I can spot love
3 trillion miles away.
I can hold it in my palms:
a crystal ball of intimacy.
A life in which your death is only a death in flesh.
& when your bones crumble to ash, they will
sprout with the grass,
germinate with the morning dew.
Yes, you will be reborn in a different world –
you will arrive again, as you.
Lis Beasley
Lis Beasley (she/her) is a licensed mental health counselor. She was previously published in the Worcester Review. A lifelong writer, her poetry often explores the intersection of family, mental health, substance abuse, and incarceration. She can be found on Instagram @lisbeaspoetry.
January 2024 | Best of Net nominee, poetry
His hair has grown the shock of sunflowers after rain.
The smell of those threshed stalks, nosegay against variant ills—
he also loves the man-fox after musty plum tomatoes
which, having brazened wooden stakes, now devolve seed-ward.
How his mother swells uneasily with every moon,
how she trails stale chocolate wrappers, coffee dregs
luring whatever’s hungry and curiously about.
Mornings she sweeps red golds from the stoop as he crouches in desire
his fox will reappear. These nocturnal dreams are an open door,
white ruff soaking up detritus cast by meteorites and stars.
Too young to stay awake all night, he’s been promised she will fetch him
at a pale quarter to five, bring him a basket of boiled eggs
light sepia in craquelure. Then the recognition scene:
sharp teeth will seize his wrist leaving a faint mark
that can never truly fade. He, the fiercest boy
on the bleak suburban road, child unrehearsed in loss,
can watch the animal devour yolk and shell. It is already and done.
A pewter sky rings harshly before the fall deluge
while the fox that threads its way beyond the fences
does what wild creatures do. Leaves a hint, a question
small puffs of incandescent fur, narrow footprints in the mud.
Carol Alexander
Carol Alexander is the author of Fever and Bone (Dos Madres Press), Environments (Dos Madres), and Habitat Lost (CMP). Her work appears in About Place Journal, Another Chicago Magazine, The Common, Denver Quarterly, Mudlark, RHINO, Southern Humanities Review, The Summerset Review, Third Wednesday, Verdad, and elsewhere. With Stephen Massimilla, Alexander co-edited the award-winning anthology Stronger Than Fear: Poems of Empowerment, Compassion, and Social Justice (Cave Moon Press, 2022). A new collection of Alexander’s poetry is forthcoming in 2024 from Glass Lyre Press.
