January 2024 | poetry, Pushcart nominee
I attended a party hosted by one of my university
English professors. The party was timid. Everyone
in a house full of friendless people. Soon, I see
my professor is flirting on my date. I am across the patio
talking to a stoned lonely classmate near the nacho
salsa station, and my prof, swinging jigging away,
making my date giggle, smile, move, bob and sway.
The world is glorious and cruel. Full of voids
impossible to fill and so hard to ignore.
My professor was working hard to diminish
his middle-age pansa: running his hand through his hair,
leaning forward, holding that cigarette but not lighting it.
Does this really work? When does his ex step in? And I wonder
if this is me in twenty years. Drifting to bad jazz, citing Derrida,
considering busted summers in Prague, then back to all this,
hosting a house of students and colleagues
without anyone causing a lucha, because no one thinks anything
is worth throwing a punch. Nada happens.
I had this friend who launched off a table
in a crowded bar because he saw his novia
dancing with a gringo. Did my friend think she really
had a Sancho? (Remember this: action is often a good
remedy for grief). He flew into the dancers,
a super-villain returning to earth. His cape a flash
of cursing. A big fight, the boogying couples scattering
off the dancefloor. After the incident, and him
banished from the club, I spied him and la novia, seated
on a curb in the parking lot. She cupping his face
in tenderness insisting, she loved him, loved
him. Chanting it. The night sky believing all
of her. My friend looking down into the alley,
discovering his bruises, adjusting his ripped
camisa, her words all shadow and dusk.
Christopher Rubio-Goldsmith
Christopher Rubio-Goldsmith was born in Merida, Yucatan, grew up in Tucson, Arizona and taught English at Tucson High School for 27 years. Much of his work explores growing up near the border, being raised biracial/bilingual, and teaching in a large urban school where 70% of the students are American/Mexican. A Pushcart and Best of the Net nominee, his writings will appear in Drunk Monkeys, Inverted Syntax and have been published in Sky Island Journal, Muse, Discretionary Love and other places too. His wife, Kelly, sometimes edits his work, and the two cats seem happy.
January 2024 | poetry
ankle-winged Word Thief flutters ~
orbiting The Muse
wicker creel on shoulder
stealing words off succumbing tongue, from depraved pink lips
collecting manifestos, dispatches, commands, lexeme-threads for unborn poems.
deliciously spilled onto insatiable empty page
deciphering their tangled satisfying meaning
blustery afternoons, elven queens, entangled roots, deep set red brick walls, swim in halo eyes outside time and space, float and dream, bask in caressing warmth, a vision, possibility, sensuality. Mythological building blocks held down on the table ~
kaleidoscopic paper spun round
allowing entry inside
to new worlds.
Gleipnir bindings hold winged ankles fast to Little Deaths.
faultless weapons handling in niche darkness.
stiff bow
arrow loosed
raining towards purposed destination
crossing through streaks of bright light
fleshed out totemic monument pierces orienting Dionysian-natured North Star
drowning inspirational beacon in gratification
seeking simultaneous orgasmic release of the lore-neuron
greedy minds shine with mythic legend veneer
wandering the halls around midnight
for satisfying heights of pleasure
organic and ever-changing panoply of wonders and sensations
lingering into daylight-crippling twilight delight
intent on breaking prey
the beast is afoot, baiting; heavily armed with unpredictable body language.
safe, at a distance
summoning strategic Sun Tzu’s ancient wisdom
the way, the weather, the terrain, the leadership, the discipline
coding memories of my nightmares, my fantasies.
verklempt knight walks seven unlit blocks to doors that can’t be closed after opening.
tectonic plates shifting under pace-worn leather boots.
Paineater stills the chaos
disarms the shadows
guards the spiraling-wanderer.
J. M. Platts-Fanning
J. M. Platts-Fanning is an award-winning writer nestled within the woodlands of the wave-tousled coastline of Prince Edward Island. Recipient of a PEI Writers’ Guild2022Island Literary Poetry Award, 2020 Island Literary Short Story Award, the 2022 Battle Tales VII Champion and 2nd place winner in the Humans of the World 2022 Summer Poetry Challenge. Publications include, The Dalhousie Review 2024, Burningword Literary Journal 2024, Pownal Street Press’ 2023 anthology, Fiona: Prince Edward Island Accounts from Canada’s Biggest Storm, Toronto Metropolitan University’s White Wall Review 2023/03, 2022/11, The Write Launch literary magazine 2023/08, 2022/08, 2022/06, Prometheus Dreaming cultural magazine 2022/11, Artistic Warrior’s 2022 Dribbles, Drabbles and Postcards anthology, Common Ground 2020/03 and GIFt Horse anthologies Vol 1 through 5. Her plays have appeared on various theatrical stages, including her dystopian fable, “Apple Bones” performed at the 2021 PEI Community Theatre Festival, “An Answer to the Question on Death” staged at Fridays with Fringe in 2019 and “Held to the Fire” chosen for Watermark Theatre’s 2018 Play Reading Series.
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.
