July 2022 | Best of Net nominee, poetry
Thursday, 12:20 p.m.
Tug is listening to music at his desk.
“What’s that instrument that sounds
like a washing machine?” asks Claire.
Tug says “That’s what we in the industry
call a ‘drum,’ Claire.”
A single eyelash falls from my face,
into my yogurt cup.
A redbird taps its head against the window.
Saturday, 2:22 p.m.
I’m deep in the forest right now.
I have no time to listen
to grown men argue
whether Bib Fortuna
survived Jedi or not.
I want the forest in this poem
to function like the forest
in Shakespeare comedies:
A place of working things out,
unencumbered by social constraints.
But I may have learned that wrong.
Thursday, 3:25 p.m.
No one talks about Jane’s Addiction anymore.
Their admixture of heart and decadence.
They seemed so important at the time.
I wish a machine would take me back.
Spring is here with its dampness
and smell of shit.
A guy balancing on a skateboard
with an armful of flowers.
Justin Lacour
Justin Lacour lives in New Orleans and edits Trampoline: A Journal of Poetry. He is the author of the chapbook My Heart is Shaped Like a Bed: 46 Sonnets (Fjords 2022).
July 2022 | poetry
Squinting through fresh
joy I can see everything
the sun sees and like a
child full of new words
I wish to name all of us
who are here under this
upended periwinkle bowl
Tow truck! Convertible!
Cell tower! Foot bridge!
Dead raccoon! Another!
The steering wheel is a
warm gift in my palm
At a cellular level I am
aware of not being alone
At a cellular level I know
two raccoons now revel
somewhere having made
the most of embodiment
I am not too busy to
love whichever song
an algorithm chooses
as the sun loves all it
must touch. Today the
pines grow tall enough
to cast dark pools where
deer will graze a safe
distance from traffic
as the sun loves them
enough to feed the grass
and we are all still here
together boat trailer
ambulance red pickup
Even at night when a
tower of weathered logs
is consumed by a slow
controlled explosion
whose amber light I
receive in open hands
the sleeping cat makes
a long spoon of her body
and drinks every drop of
the tree that once held
her favorite red birds
Lauren Endicott
Lauren Endicott is an emerging poet who is grateful for forthcoming publications in West Trade Review, Duck Head Journal, SEISMA, and others. She is also a masters student of social work training in psychotherapy. She lives in the greater Boston area with her spouse, two children, and cat.
July 2022 | poetry
Vincent Thomas Bridge, San Pedro Harbor, CA
The green bridge is a weighty suspension
of disbelief,
its angle of ascent firing my muscles,
a forced march in country
shadowing my climb up its short suspenders.
Hands heavy on the rotund rail,
its pitted touch flashes a pier railing,
my father demonstrating baiting a hook,
the wriggling body dangling over the side.
Night pulls up its blanket
veiling the wind-stropped containers
stacked like toy blocks below
while nestled in the standing army of alien cranes
a decommissioned battleship sleeps.
The watery bay beckons.
Below a siren wails to climb the rail.
Roger Camp
Roger Camp lives in Seal Beach, CA where he tends his orchids, walks the pier, plays blues piano and spends afternoons with his pal, Harry, over drinks at Saint & 2nd. When he’s not at home, he’s traveling in the Old World. His work has appeared in Tinderbox Poetry Journal, North American Review, Gulf Coast, Southern Poetry Review and Nimrod.
July 2022 | poetry
Even during class, my sister
strummed chords, fingers
caressing frets or stretching
strings bleeding the blues.
Sometimes she’d pick
a country tune, wailing for lost
beers and pickup trucks,
mourning every orphan.
Now her fingers pluck
bibs and diapers
from laundry, her kids
a Greek chorus of woes
and triumphs. The guitar resonates
during birthdays
or under a beer tent.
My brother-in-law puzzles
at her frustrations. After beers
one night, he confessed
she hums in her sleep,
and taps her finger.
It’s weird, he tells me: sometimes
her hand finds a rhythm, as if
stroking our last dog’s head.
John Cullen
John Cullen graduated from SUNY Geneseo and worked in the entertainment business booking rock bands, a clown troupe, and an R-rated magician. Currently he teaches at Ferris State University and has had work published in American Journal of Poetry, The MacGuffin, Harpur Palate, North Dakota Quarterly and other journals. His chapbook, TOWN CRAZY, is available from Slipstream Press.
July 2022 | poetry
They know before we do,
the birds. In the yard,
feeders swing on their chains.
If you think we don’t bury
our cash in the thaw
of the dark dicey frostbite,
you’re wrong. Trust God
or no one, I urge my husband.
Do not answer the door.
I pour vodka down his throat,
call through the cracks
to bring back the warblers.
Bird bird bird, where is your,
when will it, why why why.
What jumps faster
than blood from a vein?
If you think we don’t practice
the dash to the bunker,
you’re wrong. We’ve run out
of drugs and honey,
but we cannot run far,
railcars packed with
no more time. Before
the siren glass shatter,
we walked fine,
and the mistle thrush
spilled operettas
over the sunflowers.
The neighbors are hiding
their children in attics.
The absence of silvery
wings. Do it now,
begs my husband, break
the thermometer, inject me
with mercury, hollow
my bones before lark
and nightingale swallow
each other’s songs.
Jenny Hubbard
A former high-school English teacher, Jenny Hubbard writes full-time in her hometown of Salisbury, NC. Her work has been published over the years in various journals, including Hunger Mountain, Crab Orchard Review, Tar River Poetry, Nine Mile, Maryland Literary Review, and The Southern Poetry Anthology. Both of Jenny’s novels, And We Stay and Paper Covers Rock, have earned major awards from the American Library Association. Represented by Jonathan Lyons of Curtis Brown, Ltd., Jenny is currently under contract with Penguin Random House.
July 2022 | poetry
I was born under a fish-scaled star, a scar in my aunt’s
brother’s father’s eye. Is this a bone I see, or ash dust
inherited, a silent twin inhabiting my ventricles?
The prima-donna sky preens, sends us lightning sprites
red and too quick to capture. I was walking. I was a whole
lot of broken, and snap, there goes my ankle. The moss
spoke of spring-like January, but the camera didn’t
hit the deep-rutted trail, held close to my heart. My
mornings are voluptuous, my miscalculations disguised
as happy accidents. I believe in my grandfather’s third
kidney, the way he lived through the work of shifting
one pile of stones to another corner of the barbed
and electrified yard, and back again until the sirens sounded
the end of light. Today I discovered a new species
of beetle, a bee who loved my shirt and wouldn’t leave.
The wind issuing from god’s mouth was warm. The wind
issuing from god’s mouth chilled me to the bone. The grass
was god’s also, and Matisse’s cat dreamt of Marianne
Moore with crooked wings. The moon is in umbra, the moon
is menopausal, and time makes less sense than it did
five seconds ago. I will haunt the stars I can’t touch
right now. Every turtle galaxy, every swan-booted nebula
now my problems have been all but solved. I put my nose
to the sweet pea, to the whetstone, and learned something
of the extermination of the human race. I pray my father’s
father’s sisters, who flew through the chimneys, knit
their souls back into body when the stars call us away from here.
Ronda Piszk Broatch
Ronda Piszk Broatch is the author of Lake of Fallen Constellations, (MoonPath Press). She is the recipient of an Artist Trust GAP Grant. Ronda’s journal publications include Fugue, Blackbird, 2River, Sycamore Review, Missouri Review, Palette Poetry, and NPR News / KUOW’s All Things Considered. She is a graduate student working toward her MFA at Pacific Lutheran University’s Rainier Writing Workshop.
