April 2023 | Best of Net nominee, poetry
This town has a rusted roof gas station,
a store shelf where you would find
charm and shame sitting side-by-side,
as inseparable as lovebugs,
buy-one-get-one for the last 50 years.
You can still buy a scratcher ticket – or twelve,
and sit, welcomed, on the sidewalk
with your dreams of a less-debted life,
or watch as barefoot beauties walk west to work,
carrying babies bulging with
Dollar General budget-nutrition.
Don’t forget your manners if you’re just visitin’,
one proper and polite nod to say,
“just like my daddy did,”
to all those with their collars blue
just like the sky-paint on the gulf.
“Poor, rural, and southern”,
is meant by most
to sound scary and scabbed
just like the shallow intimidation
of pitbull pups scratching and slobbering
against their chain-link boundary lines.
But to me it sure looks a lot like
lovin’ and learnin’ that the things
worth having take the most time,
saturating slowly like sun tea
brewin’ in the porch-pitcher.
I spent a decade patting makeup
onto the warm red tones of my neck
to conceal a crime of culture,
instead of questioning
why moving up
had to mean moving away.
These memories had a lesson for me,
like a neighbor pulling my ear
back to my mother for new wisdom,
chastising me for talking to strangers,
forgetting my manners,
and not listening to my father.
These memories are like mangrove mud,
hugging my ankles until I am stalled,
anchoring me to mindfulness of a moment
tinged with something sour,
like that sulfuric smell across the marshes,
that is hard to romanticize – yet still cues a smile,
when its rotten earthiness tells me that I am home.
It is only in this pause,
the stillness before a shifting tide,
when I can clearly recall and recite
the scripture –
the allegory of me,
and where it was written.
It was composed here;
In the nimble thank you wave,
at a neighbor kind or neglectful enough
to turn an eye as I swiped citrus slices
from yard overhangs,
to rub into my vulgar mouth,
with dirty hands.
On the sweet-wind steeped from
magnolia blooms and orange blossoms,
the perfect perfume to compliment
a blushing heat-sick face.
It was spoken over the rumble of thunder,
during the can’t-miss primetime storm watch,
hurricane season 2004,
sung with the intoxicating breaths
of the gulf stream,
scented with pheromonic petrichor.
They say that one man’s white trash
is another’s treasured upbringing,
and through the catharsis of return,
a lowbrow renaissance,
I know both to be true.
My only infallible faith is in the
beauty visible from the gutter,
and I will celebrate each day
in the midst of a perennial
impoverished holiday,
like the Christmas lights draped
on fences, roofs, and trailer tops,
hanging on with staple-gun hugs,
all year ‘round.
Elizabeth Curley
Elizabeth Curley lives a dual life as both a poet and a social work researcher. Elizabeth received a Silver Medal from the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards in 2012 and is still writing a decade later. Elizabeth’s time is spent consuming, collecting, carrying, crafting, and quantifying the human experience.
April 2023 | poetry
Months after I had cleared her clothes from our apartment
and delivered them to a homeless shelter as was her wish,
I drove to our cabin in the mountains to gather her last shirts
and sweaters, socks and tights, sneakers and slippers. I was
weary of all the searching, finding, sorting, folding. Weary even
of the touching. I could not stomach one more trip for charity.
Death, you see, had made me a coward. I just jammed everything
in three thirty-gallon black plastic bags, which I tied off tightly,
left for next morning pick-up at the end of the driveway,
flanked by six-foot banks of ice-skinned snow. An hour’s nap later
I saw through the window that crows had come, torn open the bags,
dragged their contents all over, confused perhaps by wisps
of sweat and perfume, thinking who in his right mind would put
anything but chicken bones and pizza crust in such beguiling sacks.
One had her lace panties in its beak, shaking it like a battle flag.
Another was chewing the sleeve of her pineapple tee shirt.
A third was back at the bags, manically scrounging for more.
I walked out calmly with a shovel. The birds flew away.
I had visions of leaving it all for a next storm to bury,
re-collecting the debris after spring thaw and burning it into
a biblical pillar of smoke, soaking the ashes in the stream out back.
Instead, I climbed the crusted banks, roamed the neighbors’ yards
and snowbound streets, picked up the pieces, placed and cinched them
in new bags, left them as before. The birds came again and again.
Again and again I gathered, each time working more slowly, each time
the pieces smaller. Until the sun was gone and I stood by the last bags
I owned, slightly less full. I stood there all night, the crows laughing
and I laughing back, their amber eyes flashing in the new moon dark,
neither stupid nor cruel, though I had thought them both.
At first light, men with boots and gloves came in a green truck.
One said Good Morning. Another took the bags away.
Ken Haas
Ken Haas lives in San Francisco where he works in healthcare and sponsors a poetry writing program at the UCSF Children’s Hospital. His first book, Borrowed Light, won the 2020 Red Mountain Press Discovery Award, won a 2021 prize from the National Federation of Press Women and was shortlisted for the 2021 Rubery Book Award. Ken has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and has won the Betsy Colquitt Poetry Award. His poems have appeared in over 50 journals and numerous anthologies. Please visit him online at http://kenhaas.org.
January 2023 | poetry
My mind is
a cluttered cupboard
a hoarder’s den
skyscraper-stacked
bits and chits
shiny scraps strident notes
on skin when there is
no room at the inn
no vacancy
for one more guest
nor even space
for oxygen
thirst is the strongman of needs
with many ways to drink
morning news with morning joe
the Times they are a-changing
podcasts preachers PSAs
Sirius no longer lit
but air-waved and ever-on
any cracks in the stacks
I fill with pages beloved
books poems of my own
and others (who I’d like to be)
all this mess
magpie-made
I’ll use it someday
but the cows stray
I’m too busy to fence
my mind is at capacity
I fear the thoughts
will overflow like the gentle man
I saw yesterday
at 4th and Main
deep in conversation
with the gentle man
in the glass of the bookstore window
Ann Weil
Ann Weil writes at her home on the corner of Stratford and Avon in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and on a deck boat at Snipe’s Point Sandbar off Key West, Florida. Her work has been nominated for Best of the Net and appears in Crab Creek Review, Bacopa Literary Review, Whale Road Review, Shooter Literary Magazine, Eastern Iowa Review, DMQ Review, and elsewhere. Her first chapbook, Life Cycle of a Beautiful Woman, will be published in 2023 by Yellow Arrow Publishing. Read more of Ann’s poetry at www.annweilpoetry.com.
January 2023 | poetry
Emilio’s
—Sorry, We’re Open!
The young lady is served ribollita
with a fresh chunk of bread and a question:
What is it you prefer about a man—
his propensity to cheat—or to kill?
The young lady is perplexed—first time here—
stares at her soup, steps on her boyfriend’s boot,
knocks a can off the counter. Young lady,
please don’t be upset. We are all friends here.
Whatever you say, please—say it in Greek.
Or Italian. Or even English. Think:
here we are on the brink of disaster
and only you— your answer—can save us.
She thinks. She says, “I don’t care for either.”
Her boyfriend smiles. She smiles. Emilio
smiles—like Socrates in the Agora:
Ah, good! So then: ta chrimata paidi mou.
In this Dark World and Wide
He lived inside his head; his lust
lay with books. He read, he wrote.
(Some of his works are mind-numbing.)
He’ll go blind, they said, you watch.
And they were right. One poor eye patched,
one weeping, there was no doubt—
(though he didn’t see it coming)—
that paradise was lost.
And going blind he made a list
of every angel God let
out of heaven—his mind combing
Lucifer’s by feel, by touch.
The dark night of the soul. The match.
The smoldering intellect
smoking out free will. That humming
in the wings? His wife. The last.
John Perrault
John Perrault is author of Jefferson’s Dream (Hobblebush Books), Here Comes the Old Man Now (Oyster River), and Ballad of Louis Wagner (Peter Randall). A Pushcart Nominee, John has published in Beltway Poetry Quarterly, Blue Unicorn, Christian Science Monitor, Comstock Review, Poet Lore and elsewhere. John is a former Portsmouth, NH poet laureate. His chapbook, Season of Shagginess, has just been published by Finishing Line Press. www.johnperrault.com
January 2023 | poetry
I wasn’t prepared for the body
the stillness of it, a life muted,
how the gray sets in
how small a man can be.
The stillness of him, a life muted
in a hospital room, thin blankets
against his rails of bone
how the gray sets in,
the breath still in him,
I learned
how small a father can be
when I’m too afraid
to touch him.
to touch him
when I’m too afraid,
how hollow a father can be
I learned
to still breathe,
as the gray sets in
rails of bone, against
thin blankets, and his hospital room
in stillness, a life muted,
how gone a father can be
when the gray begins
stillness, our lives muted.
I wasn’t prepared for my father’s body.
Lisa Rua-Ware
Lisa Rua-Ware is a poet in central Massachusetts. Her work has appeared in San Pedro River Review, Muddy River Poetry Review, and Lily Poetry Review. When she’s not chasing her two rambunctious kids, she works as a technical writer, loves drawing, journaling, list making, and all things paper crafts.
January 2023 | poetry
She handed me her heart —
a red ceramic music box
she painted for me, kiln fired for me
in the heat of summer, in the dark
of basement, with tiny brushes,
shimmer chalk & glaze. Mamma
with her hair ragged back by gingham. Hands
knotted, tucking curls under cotton. Hands hinging
the lid & notes hammering. Mamma —
held out a heart that was hollow
as an empty cup, frigid as porcelain
beneath my palms those nights I stayed up
gripping the rim & waiting for the moon
to pass right through. My mamma
was girl, is a sunset at dawn, will be
an artist waking to breath’s echo in the sink.
This heart is a dam. The melody is a dam.
Her daughter is a damn opening
of the lid. She tells me the notes will play
a thousand times before the battery dies & she will live
for as long as I can make it last. Mamma —
molds mortality out of clay, leaves me
with a heart that defines the future
in terms of ration, in terms of choosing which days
are worthy of a play. Tomorrow is now
lifting the lid & listening for the time
when silence answers back.
Her heart is a fragile thief
I immediately break.
Lorrie Ness
Lorrie Ness is a poet writing in a rural corner of Virginia. When she’s not writing, she can be found stomping through the woods, watching birds and playing in the dirt. Her work can be found in numerous journals, including THRUSH, Palette Poetry and Sky Island Journal. She was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2021 and her chapbook, “Anatomy of a Wound” was published by Flowstone Press in July of 2021.
