April 2021 | Best of Net nominee, poetry
Like eyes in a skull,
riveted on me,
I see the windows
of a white van
in my rearview
mirror.
I speed up
so does he
and we keep
going like this,
the sweat of fear
stinging my eyes
till I am racing,
a rabbit, with
a fox that covets,
gaining.
A sign for a business district–
the car, and my heart, slow
down. I turn off, spy a gaggle
of little boys headed home
from Cub Scouts or Bible School.
Grateful to them, I stop, roll down
the window, tell the nearest child:
“I am being followed.
Could I use your parents’ phone?”
“OK”, the kid says “I live over there,”
pointing down the road. “Get in,”
I say, “I’ll take you all home,”
and seven small boys
climb in.
I am driving slowly
when the sheriff
curious
at the sight,
of a white lady’s car
bursting
with black boys,
stops me.
I look back and see
the white van
at the turnoff
to the town,
waiting.
E. Laura Golberg
Laura Golberg’s poem Erasure has been nominated for a Pushcart 2021 Prize. Her poetry has appeared in Rattle, Poet Lore, Laurel Review, Birmingham Poetry Review, Spillway, RHINO, and the Journal of Humanistic Mathematics, among other places. She won first place in the Washington, DC Commission on the Arts Larry Neal Poetry Competition.
April 2021 | poetry
Sitting in the isolation booth,
listening for the fading bell.
The headphones, leather-bound and lush,
are pillowy around my ears,
a vacuum of sound.
When I first signed up,
I thought it would be easy money.
But within the experiment,
there is always a double game.
Amidst a distant humming,
my eardrums gradually disconnect,
and another timbre insinuates itself.
Exclusivity is now unblurred into its primary coloring.
Causal potency, insistent and self-confident,
reaches across the small revolutions
of electrons and protons,
and the power embedded within the orbits becomes tactile.
If you calculate the empty space between the points of energy,
the sum will strain comprehension.
Layer on the emergent potential
and it will fold upon itself, numberless.
They want you to tell them what they already know,
but, there’s something else answered
in the darkening absence of sound.
As the soul machine re-dons
its practiced gait, momentum and mass
disguise the slightest remnant of a limp.
Metal shavings vibrate softly,
re-orienting to magnetic poles
with their interpretations.
Chris Innes
Chris Innes is a writer living in Washington, D.C. and has had poetry published in a variety of literary magazines, including The Wisconsin Review, The Cape Rock, Prairie Winds, Common Ground Review, The Pikeville Review, Descant, and The Mankato Poetry Review.
April 2021 | Best of Net nominee, poetry
Honestly, I can’t be bothered to find out
Whether there is already a poem
About how to draw a horse,
The words brushed sleek as the roan mare
You curried the summer you were fourteen
And horseshit was a perfume you sniffed
Eagerly as lilac, as bread broken open,
The linseed funk of a boy two years older,
His voice beyond breaking; his long lashes
Pretty as a forelock. Stables call for pen and ink
And a sure hand; you can use charcoal for a canter.
How to draw a horse– you’re thinking the horse
Stands for something else and it may,
They come standard in quartets for an apocalypse,
Well-matched, ready for a chaise and four
Like Bingley had, along with Netherfield
And Darcy’s impossible friendship, fronting
A dusty stagecoach in the Wild West. You listen
For hoofbeats similar to your systole
If you are not terrified, in a tizzy, falling in love
The way I fall down the stairs in my dreams, endless,
The fall through clouds on a gas giant, pocked Jupiter
Or Bespin, an asymptotic descent I cannot complete.
How to draw a horse:
Simply,
Using your dominant hand,
Knowing the crest and the croup,
Still, breathless, tasting
The sweet green scent of masticated hay,
The antithesis of your adoration,
Knowing you will fail.
Daisy Bassen
Daisy Bassen is a poet and practicing physician who graduated from Princeton University’s Creative Writing Program and completed her medical training at The University of Rochester and Brown. Her work has been published in Oberon, McSweeney’s, and [PANK] among other journals. She was the winner of the So to Speak 2019 Poetry Contest, the 2019 ILDS White Mice Contest and the 2020 Beullah Rose Poetry Prize. She was doubly nominated for the 2019 Best of the Net Anthology and for a 2019 and 2020 Pushcart Prize. She lives in Rhode Island with her family.
April 2021 | poetry
She rambles around Plénée-Jugon,
seeking signs, leftovers of her younger self –
life tending kitchen gardens, a commune,
her home at L’abbaye de Boquen. She took a vow,
to return. Determined, she makes her oath good now.
Besret’s Cistercian monks have long gone
and she found years ago, she cannot believe
in God. The oak-timbred door creaks open
and within whitewashed walls, sparse
furnishings, hard pews, scents
of chalky musk
press her back
in time:
guitar riffs, folk songs, radical liturgies
and always people holding hands,
spiritual and temporal
kissing, uniting.
Once inside
her worn out hippy soul
lights a tapered prayer
for peace –
disbelief snuffed out
for seconds.
Ceinwen E Cariad Haydon
Ceinwen lives near Newcastle upon Tyne, UK and writes short stories and poetry. She is widely published in online magazines and in print anthologies. Her first chapbook was published in July 2019: ‘Cerddi Bach’ [Little Poems], Hedgehog Press. Her first pamphlet is due to be published in 2021. She is a Pushcart Prize (2019 & 2020) and Forward Prize (2019) nominee and holds an MA in Creative Writing from Newcastle University, UK (2017). She believes everyone’s voice counts.
April 2021 | poetry
An analysis shows there is a 50% chance that we are living in a synthetic reality – Scientific American
If life is a lucid dream or some near-perfect
computer simulation, do I risk waking up
to a world in which I can’t embrace you?
I was so young when I came to feel that
death is as simple to understand as the eons
before our birth: we are not, and then we are,
and then we are not again. I’m a mystic. I
love the weight of the cosmos, how it feels
in the palm of my hand. I reach for your
hand in order to hold on to all that I wish
were eternal but stand to lose. I can’t dwell
on loss, least of all when thinking of you;
and if none of this is real, if there are
truths stranger than our brief mortality,
all the more reason to lie down together and
demand that the earth reveal what it knows—
to discover who we are when stripped of fear,
our bodies trembling at the edge of reason.
Andy Posner
Andy Posner grew up in Los Angeles and earned an MA in Environmental Studies at Brown. While there, he founded Capital Good Fund, a nonprofit that provides financial services to low-income families. When not working, he enjoys reading, writing, watching documentaries, and ranting about the state of the world. He has had his poetry published in several journals, including Burningword Literary Journal (which nominated his poem ‘The Machinery of the State’ for the Pushcart Poetry Prize), Noble/Gas Quarterly, and The Esthetic Apostle.
January 2021 | poetry, Pushcart nominee
I bet the four flush—
worth next to nothing
but looking to all like the key
to the kingdom of heaven.
You told me once
that poker
was half luck
and half bluff.
They had just
cleaned you out again
at the Friday night game
above the body shop on Sutter Avenue.
You and your six
unemployable friends—
passing a cheap bottle of rye
and shots at each other’s parentage,
in a room
full of reefer
and the sweat
of day labor.
You told me once
you had no luck—
having given it
all to me.
And I pictured a medallion
bestowed upon the younger brother—
no small burden
you’d hung around my neck—
as if the family’s fortune
was riding on my narrow shoulders.
“What fortune?”
anyone who knew us might think to ask.
“But, you’ll never be a bluffer,
you told me,
for that you need a pair—
and in our family, I got them.”
Cold as cobra’s breath
I bet my four spades
and watched
as the better hand folded.
You never were a judge of character—
a lifetime
of confusing
friends and enemies.
Steven Deutsch
Steve Deutsch lives in State College, PA. His recent publications have or will appear in RavensPerch, MacQueen’s, 8 Poems, Louisiana Lit, Burningword Literary Journal, The Write Launch, Biscuit Root Drive, Evening Street, Better Than Starbucks, Flashes of Brilliance, SanAntonio Review, Softblow, Mojave River Review, The Broadkill Review, Linden Avenue Literary Journal, Panoply, Algebra of Owls, The Blue Nib, Thimble Magazine, The Muddy River Poetry Review, Ghost City Review, Borfski Press, Streetlight Press, Gravel, Literary Heist, Nixes Mate Review, Third Wednesday, Misfit Magazine, Word Fountain, Eclectica Magazine, The Drabble, New Verse News and The Ekphrastic Review. He was nominated for Pushcart Prizes in 2017 and 2018. His Chapbook, “Perhaps You Can,” was published in 2019 by Kelsay Press. His full length book, Persistence of Memory was just published by Kelsay.
