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.
January 2024 | poetry
That evening you drove us out on the bruised southern beach
we lost the hope we’d find the words to match
the gold slant of sunlight’s sail across Gulf Coast swells and sand.
We stood in the empty lobby, luggage in tow full of secrets,
two people, houseless together, and the wind—don’t you remember? —
shoved us off the courtyard and boardwalk and shore
onto broken bits of orange shell and seaglass the foam white sand
absolved of its every edge. When we look back
through photos on the shiny screen of a phone,
we’ve slipped away from those patient guides, the pelicans
on updrafts off breakers where the sun never goes down,
and stepped into a groaning wind and chill light, two people
on earth, itself a straggler in a flight of planets touring the sun.
Apalachicola, February 2023
Michael Daley
Michael Daley, born and raised in Massachusetts, has published sixteen books, three of which came out in 2022: Reinhabited: New & Selected Poems (Dos Madres, Loveland, OH), Telemachus, a novel (Pleasure Boat Studio, Seattle, WA), and True Heresies, poems (Cervena Barva, Somerville, MA). He is managing editor of The Madrona Project anthology series. A retired teacher, he lives in Anacortes, Washington
October 2023 | poetry
There’s only so much you can change about yourself.
Like this morning, I dreamt I dropped a baby down the stairs and trumpets started playing
As it stared through me with my own eyes like I’d just suicided.
Flavors of trauma come with malleable parts.
Today, I ate an entire bag of chips and painted a watercolor octopus. I thought I had cancer.
I took my blood pressure three times. I told everyone of my fear… to practice saying cancer.
In public places, my neck strains like a dried sunflower curling down, looking for the stairs.
Hell is a dream full of music.
Brandyce Ingram is a writer, tutor, and jazz-head in Seattle, WA. Her work has appeared in High Shelf Press, Willowdown Books, Sand Hills Lit Mag, Wildroof Journal, An Evening with Emily Dickinson (via Wingless Dreamer), and elsewhere. Her latest search history includes “20th-century lunatic asylums women” and “how to use a crap ton of fresh mint pesto chimichurri sauces or soju cocktails.”
October 2023 | Best of Net nominee, poetry
It’s always the rot stench of the wound
that draws me in—the beetle to the Corpse Flower.
You were eager to unfurl your bruised blooms:
you told me about the poverty, the prison, your abusive,
alcoholic father. You winced to mention him. A palpable
stab. I ached to smell more of your festering, to share how it feels
to be birthed of betrayal. I wanted to open myself up
to you like a trench coat, show you the ax to my gut—
my mother. My vanished leg—my father. Now,
I wonder if the stalking, the drugging, the rape
was your wound reveal: This is the ghost
of my dead inner child. I’m here to show you
what can happen to children and how bad it can get.
The blood and feces in my sheets said, This bad.
Anne Champion
Anne Champion is the author of She Saints & Holy Profanities (Quarterly West, 2019), The Good Girl is Always a Ghost (Black Lawrence Press, 2018), Book of Levitations (Trembling Pillow Press, 2019), Reluctant Mistress (Gold Wake Press, 2013), and The Dark Length Home (Noctuary Press, 2017). Her work appears in Verse Daily, diode, Tupelo Quarterly, Prairie Schooner, Crab Orchard Review, Salamander, New South, Redivider, PANK Magazine, and elsewhere. She was a 2009 Academy of American Poets Prize recipient, a 2016 Best of the Net winner, and a Barbara Deming Memorial Grant recipient.
October 2023 | poetry
They finished each other’s sentences about the differences
between ’56 and ’57 Chevies, how they rebuilt transmissions,
how the Hurst shifters needed a hole drilled in the floorboard,
as I sat in the back seat hearing tales of another country.
Their dads knew how to build houses and get the right tools,
took their boys to the seances of men huddled in a circle
who spit as they called forth the spirits of wrenches and vises,
while I slept each night on the living room couch overhearing
Mom and Sis whispering in their beds about curlers and creams.
I learned about how to bounce drops of water on the heated pan
telling what size flame would make the pancake batter not stick,
and to speak about love and hurt, and not bolt it down inside.
The soft voices of poets and writers speaking sadness and joy
let me wander in places far away from that sofa in the night,
and I liked myself knowing the things that other boys didn’t
as they lay under cars with friends finding power in engines.
No dad, I sank lower in the back seat hearing how men loved
mastering gears, electrodes, filters, valves, and carburetors
like there was a way of friendship with the tribe of machines
always scary to me, who hissed I was not one of them.
Glen A. Mazis
Glen A. Mazis taught philosophy for decades at Penn State Harrisburg, retiring in 2020. He has more than 90 poems in literary journals, including Rosebud, The North American Review, Sou’wester, Spoon River Poetry Review, Willow Review, Atlanta Review, Reed Magazine and Asheville Poetry Review, and the collection, The River Bends in Time (Anaphora Literary Press, 2012), a chapbook, The Body Is a Dancing Star (Orchard Street Press, 2020), and Bodies of Space and Time (Kelsay Books, 2022). He is the 2019 winner of the Malovrh-Fenlon Poetry Prize (Orchard Street national contest).
