October 2023 | Best of Net nominee, poetry
Learning to Dance
Hooked on the two-four sorcery,
bass and drum, dances at St. Jerome’s,
I held up a wall for half an hour
before I could ask the one
whose eyes turned ice to water,
spun home through the dark
between the streetlamp pools of light.
Lost in a trance for a year,
I woke when the plane
bumped down into Luxembourg.
Lost the first day at the hostel,
I took the train to Zurich,
found an old Tolkien
jammed behind the seat,
carried him all the way to here,
hitch-hiked south and crossed
four days later near Chiasso,
rode a box truck into the Dolomites,
traded my boots for a sweater.
The new owner took me
to his family’s stone house,
steep meadows, barn filled with sheep.
For a week I was a shepherd,
combed pastures with the ewes,
saw why I had to go away.
Like a brother, he brought me
back to the road-fork;
I didn’t want to get out,
flatbeds and Fiats all the way to Venice.
Three days later I started again,
no rides past Solesino, evening falling,
I laid in the grass, read
until the dark took it away,
ate the crushed bread and cheese,
slept in the field.
In the morning I sang Creedence,
waited for kindness
danced on the empty road.
Came as Ravens
Cloaks as black as widows
they strut the deck railing,
peer in the windows, leap away,
their shadows stream
across the ferns and rocks.
They come, peck at the doors,
smear saliva on the windows
that dries to a chalky cuneiform.
When I was small, she’d kneel beside me,
coach the story I couldn’t believe.
But last night, kneeling on the kitchen floor
sweeping up pieces of glass,
dust rolled from under the stove
and her voice came into the air.
They glide from tree to tree,
compile their inventories,
drift over the swath of light
I cut in the crowds of hemlock,
a shrine for the lost opened to the sun,
cast the ashes there like seeds.
The winged mourners scavenge
offerings I lay on the boulders,
a lamb abandoned by her ewe,
stiffened hens tired of winter.
I sit on the porch and sift the past,
see her folded hands,
the raised tracks of skin,
burn scars from the bindery’s vinyl-sealer,
listen to their guttural calls,
the clicked code they chant
high in the dead fir by the lake.
Mark Anthony Burke
Mark Burke’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in the North American Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Sugar House Review, Nimrod International Journal, and others. His work has recently been nominated for a Pushcart prize. Please see markanthonyburkesongsandpoems.com
October 2023 | poetry, Pushcart nominee
I.
Honeyed mystery of mahogany,
oak, walnut, teak, Fall’s tawny
offerings sanded into curves,
smooth invitation to touch,
like the sun-warmed thigh
& rising hip of that sunbaked
young woman you once were,
drowsing on a black sand beach
in Santorini, water beading
on your belly.
II.
This box hides your secrets:
How did you get from there to here?
What bodies? What lies?
The stolen quarters/kisses,
the unmade bed, the 6 a.m. departure.
What did you know & when?
III.
After you’ve been unmade,
can you learn trust like fitting
pieces of different puzzles
together? Remember how
they returned your uterus
to its wet cave after the knife
discharged its shrieking cargo?
IV.
How do you birth yourself
into a new name, receive
the gift of it in another’s mouth,
let it melt onto another’s tongue
like Amaro—bitter/sweet & smoky,
let that same tongue undress
your inhibitions, rendering
skin & sinew, splaying bones,
exposing the last hidden chamber?
V.
Is it too much—
all this allowing?
How your ribcage’s rusty hinges
once oiled with clamor and hush
swung wider and wider in desire.
VI.
Were you too much, wearing
your need like drought?
How he slipped away
in millimeters of silence,
disappearing even as he stood
before you—naked, dripping,
cowed.
VII.
Your blind fingers stagger
around the subtle lynchpin.
Had we arrived at the end
of each other? Or could a box
be a road to reunion?
VIII.
Relax. Let surrender carve
a door to a new dimension. Step
through. Let his arms curve
around you. Let his elegant hands
reveal what was jigsawed shut:
a lacuna large enough
for hope.
Elya Braden
Elya Braden is a writer and mixed-media artist living in Ventura County, CA, and is an editor for Gyroscope Review. She is the author of the chapbooks Open The Fist (2020) and The Sight of Invisible Longing, a semi-finalist in Finishing Line Press’s New Women’s Voices Competition (March 2023). Her work has been published in Anti-Heroin Chic, Prometheus Dreaming, Rattle Poets Respond, Sequestrum, Sheila-Na-Gig Online, The Louisville Review, and elsewhere. Her poems have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, and Best New Poets. www.elyabraden.com.
October 2023 | poetry
(*For the runaway bunnies morphing into boys)
Good night you crooked little grapnel,
hanging on to possession
with the deference of a widow’s walk.
Good night to all the graphemes — back
slashes & sashaying greater thans buckling
brackets upon ballroom blitzes.
Rest easy tired tilde, till you are straightened
into an em dash — or simply
hyphenated between shut & eye.
Sleep well underscores, curly brackets
and ampersands. Asterisks notate inward
implosions as the parenthetical implies.
Brian Bruso
Brian Bruso has been putting words into various forms since just after reading Biddy and the Ducks prior to kindergarten. Those early 70’s were a blur, especially for a six-year-old. Fast forward a few decades and suddenly Brian finally has poetry worthy of submitting for publication. Since embarking on this newfound creature of submissions he has been included in several lit mags — LEVITATE, BirdHouse & Rathalla, so far.
July 2023 | poetry
May you sleep in slushy apples,
the acid mash of stomachs,
seafloor chimneys smearing
the deep with tartars of smoke.
I coo to poisonous beans,
noxious Botox twinkies,
and hum at naughty bonbons
of streptococci. Let your dreams
carry hordes through rotten tarns
and maggot guts. The world
needs your silent sawing:
wood to dirt, corpses to sand.
Waking, your tiny diamonds
dapple dog tongues and rain.
Your rancid flocks fester kisses
and ferment grapes to wine.
Eric Fisher Stone
Eric Fisher Stone is a poet and writing tutor from Fort Worth, Texas. He received his MFA in writing and the environment from Iowa State University. His publications include two full-length collections: The Providence of Grass, from Chatter House Press, and Animal Joy, from WordTech Editions.
July 2023 | Best of Net nominee, poetry
& just like that aggrieved
or not thrust flush
against metal
the all of abandoned farm machinery
& all but barn of a house
nettled/ in shambles
of razor grass/ rooted/ my feet
stumbling close enough
to peace for breath/ waist high
to the ground/ the all of green caterpillar
& algae towers/ peaked up
in cicadas’ buzzing
make for rest
supine back against dock rust/ lake lap
& grass hungering for legs
leaving me for just a moment lying
back in black brilliants’ flame/ bursting
swallowing whole
in my dreaming sleep the all of everything
Mara Adamitz Scrupe
Mara Adamitz Scrupe’s publications include four full collections. BEAST (2014 Stevens Manuscript Publication Prize, National Federation of State Poetry Societies, U.S), in the bare bones house of was (2019 Brighthorse Books Prize in Poetry), Eat The Marrow (2019 erbacce-press Poetry Book Prize UK; shortlisted 2020 Rubery Book Award UK), and REAP a flora (2023 Shipwreckt Books). She has selections in generational anthologies by Southword/ Munster Literature, Stony Thursday, and 64 Best Poets/ Black Mountain Press, and poems in key UK and US journals including The London Magazine, Mslexia, Magma, Abridged, and The Poetry Business/ Smith Doorstop. Twice nominated for the Pushcart Prize in Poetry, she has won or been shortlisted for significant literary awards including Arts University Bournemouth International Poetry Prize, Magma Pamphlet Publication Award, Gregory O’Donohugh International Poetry Prize, Pablo Neruda Poetry Prize and National Poetry Society UK. She serves concurrently as Lance Williams Resident Artist in the Arts & Sciences, University of Kansas, and Dean and Professor Emerita, School of Art, University of the Arts Philadelphia.
July 2023 | poetry
Reading poetry online takes me
down the rabbit hole of the next poem
and the next, and oh, I like this poet
and how did they even come up
with gold leaf or orange sweat.
Outside, Spring is in the world.
My husband’s down the hall
drawing machinery on his computer.
He says he’s not an artist,
but those clear, concise lines
are strong enough to swing on.
Lay down your mouse, my beloved.
Look! The pine tree across the way
has released a cloud of golden pollen.
Patricia L. Scruggs
Patricia L. Scruggs is the author of one poetry collection, Forget the Moon. Born in Colorado, she spent ten formative years in Alberta, Canada before taking root in Southern California. Her work has appeared in Burningword, McQueen’s Quinterly, Inlandia, ONTHEBUS, Spillway, Rattle, Rip Rap, Cultural Weekly, Crab Creek Review, as well as the anthologies l3 Los Angeles Poets, So Luminous the Wildflowers and Beyond the Lyric Moment. A recent Pushcart Prize nominee, Patricia is a retired art teacher who earned her MFA at the California State University, Fullerton. She and her husband of over 60 years are parents of two and grandparents of three.
