October 2022 | Best of Net nominee, poetry
Would love to bake chocolate chip cookies again with you. Do not
care if we ate all the dough and had no cookies to eat. Miss you.
Come as you are. Do not care if there’s bones, skin, or nothing. As long
as it’s you. I will know you by your laugh or simply your touch. Miss
you. We never did get to run that half marathon together.
Was run in your honor. A full too. When you come please bring that
cheesy pepperoni bread. Soooo delicious. Have not been
able to duplicate it. The cheese melts into the dough and it’s terrible
re-heated. Think it’s the wrong kind of dough. You would know.
Miss you. Heartbreaking life experiences shatter. I’m sorry.
I am sorry I failed you. Would love to hug you. Hard. Kiss your check.
Your forehead. Hug you again. To many unsaid goodbyes. I know
you said goodbye before you left forever. Knew it. Felt it.
Here. Inside. Look for you in my dreams … into that wide darkness … can’t
find you. Will forever Miss You. Riding brought you so much joy … exuberance.
You wanted to go faster and faster … as fast as the horse’s hooves would
run … which now pound my heart … my head. It’s almost spring.
Daffodils sprouting and covered in snow. You loved their yellow happiness.
I remember you telling me how pissed you were with your mom for making
you pick the ones in the field. Planting time. Dogs running through the
garden … playfully trampling all your plants. We are all dog hoarders now. Miss you.
The sea is calling. We can walk on the beach. Looking for sand dollars, shells,
and starfish. Let me know where to meet. We’ll both show up. Bring that
blue jean hat we all loved. The one where your white blond uncontrollable curls
tumble out. We have so much to catch up on. I want to hear all about
Heaven … how you’re doing. I’ll bring the cheesy pepperoni bread and flowers.
Daffodils or Sunflowers? The new dog will be on a leash. You’ll love him.
He’s a foodie too. Any time. Any place. Or just the dining room table.
That’s fine too. Just come.
MD Bier
MD Bier is a binge reader and you’ll always find a book with her. Her writing reflects her passion for social change and social issues. Being part of the Project Write Now Community is where she writes and studies poetry. She has been published in the Write Launch, Humans of the World, New Brunswick Poetry Anthology, and the New Brunswick Windows on the World. MD Bier lives in NJ with her family and dog.
October 2022 | poetry
Dear Tina,
Is it possible your turtleness has something to sing?
Bought with a boy’s allowance, you’ve learned
a new word: plunder, a contribution
to mid-grade reptilian literature.
Is it possible a diva like you
is drawn to a spot of light? You were there
that day with the boy in his room. You seem
desperate to speak. Perhaps some ember of his
infiltrated your shell. He couldn’t sing
either. His head was your Goodyear blimp.
Now, all the lonely hours you’ve shredded.
What were you thinking as he hung there?
The world has many competent turtle people,
but I’m not one of them. I’m sorry.
I tried to give you away but you’re
one of the most invasion species here.
All the turtle literature warned against
plopping red-eared sliders into random habitats.
And now you have mental health issues. You
seem urgent. O Tina, tell me you miss
that boy, that body you watched grow up,
appearing and disappearing like a
companionship of wind, suddenly still,
then gone. Still. Gone.
Brian Builta
Brian Builta lives in Arlington, Texas, and works at Texas Wesleyan University in Fort Worth. He has recently published poems in Jabberwock Review, Juke Joint Magazine, and South Florida Poetry Journal, with poems forthcoming in New Ohio Review and TriQuarterly.
October 2022 | poetry
Downpour pelts windows, rakes roof
like shards hurled in menace.
The torrent brakes slowly, as though coaxed to relent.
A respite that cradles seeds of relief that will soon
vanish, Scott thinks as he zooms in on a cardinal’s
cautious dip in a puddle beyond its sheltered nest.
Choice lies in the space between frames.
Focus to see it, or miss it & get carved by tides.
Worse yet, see it and stand struck, a piano key stuck
unhinged from resonance. Scott once found consonance
with Steph under a willow tree, a refuge from raindrops
that soaked their skin as sunlight dappled through
storm clouds. Creeping myrtle carpeted ground where
he went down on one knee, weather be damned.
He’d still make that choice after seeing
the frames that followed: currents that surged
and swept them in their wake. Adrift, he crops
the cardinal shot, softens shadows until
its color pops, stashes it amid thousands of
moments frozen in time, sketches on fogged glass
stiffened into stone. Steph murmurs, voice barely
a whimper since her last chemo. He
lets go
of his camera, its lens
powerless before a butterfly’s floundering flutter.
V.A. Bettencourt
A. Bettencourt writes poetry and flash fiction. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Magma Poetry, The American Journal of Poetry, and Willows Wept Review, among others.
October 2022 | poetry
1.
With boulders, or another substance that can’t burn, I’ll build a barn,
buy Nigerian goats to bounce with favored popcorn sheep.
Animals kicking bare bone as wildfire steams a skyline.
2.
Goatee on my chin, the soul of California is burning like a lung.
I’m goat eye, horizontal, confusing as three pupils,
a shag of helpless, readying to die in the coming singe.
3.
I don’t eat meat from a table though mouths I love
water at the char of curry. Sweet strings of shoulder,
a chew of God meat in the cheek of a funky heaven.
Robert Carr
Robert Carr is the author of Amaranth, published in 2016 by Indolent Books and The Unbuttoned Eye, a full-length 2019 collection from 3: A Taos Press. Among other publications his poetry appears in Crab Orchard Review, Lana Turner Journal, the Maine Review, the Massachusetts Review and Shenandoah. Selected by the Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance, he is the recipient of a 2022 artist residency at Monson Arts. Additional information can be found at robertcarr.org
October 2022 | poetry
I’m standing on my head and typing with my toes
because this is for you,
So …
Who’s going to sell those autographs-of-jesus?
Who’s going to snort Beethoven to the clouds?
Who will anoint our hearth with Velveeta?
And who will love me like Livin’ Is A Breeze?
In-furigated,
re-pooperated,
beanie-brained as we pleased,
it was easy to be in love
when livin’ was a breeze.
“Let’s take our feet with us wherever we go”
Ok. And keep them safe inside our shoes
(but if a puppy sucks on our toes, that’s ok, too).
Then we’ll run down rabbits on the way to our soul,
ask the wind which way to go,
then finally, we’ll know how sad we can be:
Making love,
we couldn’t help but press your dying into me;
couldn’t help but want
my life for you.
Gary Lee Barkow practices Tai Chi and walks around feeling loved. He keeps a flashlight by his futon in case he has a brilliant idea at night. He doesn’t know where poetry comes from, so he enjoys the mystery. He likes: Mathematics, aeroplanes with propellers, earthworms, the San Francisco 49ers and rock ‘n’ roll.
October 2022 | poetry
Annotated Patpong Love Song
Verse 1
Her belly’s as big
though she’s only
half his size
Pint-sized really, she’d be his daughter if she weren’t his concubine, his squeeze,
his number really, that is, he picked the number pinned on her bikini while she tumbled
in the neon marsh waters of the Mermaidium.
Verse 2
Wide-eyed calf who strayed,
her stick legs split like fragrant timber.
The old man had his way.
They had sex that he paid for not always in cash, but with a Moschino knock-off handbag, or
Day-Glo Japanese sneakers or increasingly doctor-money to her family up north in Udon Thani,
so much money for gout and nose bleeds and non-specific idiopathic pain that he started to
question how one woman – her mother – could get sick sick/so quick quick.
Verse 3
And now he glows
with foolish pride
as two bellies grow
side by side.
She offered her virtue for a transaction so now she’ll trade her freedom for security,
and keep the baby and become his wife even though he was really fat and made no effort
to contain his chronic flatulence due to the Heineken drip-feed from breakfast onwards. One
other thing: she could not pronounce her new last name. Dutch…Polish…whatever.
The Wild Blue Horses
Long before techno hit Berlin, Franz Marc miffed
the fussbudget bean counters of the Kaiser Reich
by painting blue horses stampeding from the yard,
horses romping like wedding guests on wooded trails
swigging schnapps from the bottle under the yellowest of moons.
But when the war came, Franz bled out on a cratered, treeless plain.
And, his blue horses vanished in the boneyard air.
The Kaiser, it was later learned, had given all notable artists
permission to withdraw. But the order did not arrive in time.
This was not Saving Private Ryan.
It was a very German movie.
Stefan Sullivan
Stefan Sullivan is the author of a memoir set in Siberian oil country (Die Andere Bibliothek/Frankfurt) and a work in philosophy (Marx for a Post-Communist Era: On Poverty, Corruption and Banality (Routledge/London). He has also given over 300 performances as a lounge singer/pianist. He lives in Washington DC.
