The Attic

July 2019 | poetry

Tapestries of gossamer

festoon rough-hewn rafters.

Knotty old floorboards

groan under a century’s burden of

memories, dust-coated secrets,

buried shadows in decaying chests,

hearts stilled and gone frigid.

 

A shaft of skittish sunbeams

pierces a grimy window,

spotlighting crazed sepias

of austere gentlemen

in over-starched high collars

and ladies bedecked

in lacy décolletage

and frilly hats, looking

quite prim and proper.

 

In a dank, dusty corner

where the sun never visits

a doll lies long-abandoned,

naked, crumpled, eyes

rolled back in a face

of fractured china.

 

Krikor Der Hohannesian

Krikor Der Hohannesian lives in Medford, MA. His poems have appeared in over 150 literary journals including The Evansville Review, The South Carolina Review, Atlanta Review, Louisiana Literature, Connecticut Review and Natural Bridge. He is a three-time Pushcart Prize nominee and the author of two chapbooks,“Ghosts and Whispers” (Finishing Line Press, 2010) and “Refuge in the Shadows” (Cervena Barva Press, 2013). “Ghosts and Whispers” was a finalist for the Mass Book awards poetry category in 2011.

Milk Bomb

July 2019 | poetry

When Buddhists were a national security threat a strange old world broke open, swallowing poems like prayers. America, land of the unfree fundamentally white, Christian. When all the world grows dark, a growing political crisis wraps itself in mortality poems love poems grief poems peace poems happiest place on earth poems. When bombs bullets rain down, Pearl Harbor 1941 December 7th David Tanaka, Japanese American surgeon, father, family, friend climbs a mango tree on a dead-end street raises his hands, seeks god’s protection, the tenor of his voice rising with dark orange brown, black smoke, war poisons lingers off water knees give way to soil tears to martial law ignorance to incarceration. He will die there, asphyxiated, by racially-based hatred. 77-years later, a large crater where hearts used to be. Pummeled with milk bombs the world opens its mouth & sings. Resistance poems, protest poems #MeToo poems, Black Lives Matter poems, refuge poems lgbt rights poems, school violence poems, liberation poems.

Sheree La Puma

Sheree La Puma is an award-winning writer whose personal essays, fiction and poetry have appeared in or are forthcoming in O:JA&L, Burningword Literary Journal, I-70 Review, Inflectionist Review, Levee, Crack The Spine, Mad Swirl, The London Reader, Gravel, Foliate Oak, PacificReview, Westwind and Ginosko Literary Review, among others. She received an MFA in Writing from California Institute of the Arts and taught poetry to former gang members.

Duality

July 2019 | Best of Net nominee, poetry

it’s a question of relativity

ignorant view that there are two

split down the middle a brain’s

how and how not to see landscape

or hear a heartbeat an echo

a distraction from the other

and me thing and essence each

where are we even free

cut through the dry ochred earth

we need borders to cross

and again in almost

of work the transportation business

deficit and accrual an increase

effort of balancing side

is an abstraction rocking us

align to misalign

to the enormous

an exposure of the usual

sides

consciousness divided

when we look outside

detect a rhyme one

by turns stroke evoke you

requiring for identity the other

to fly over this road

this line drawn in the sand

to find ourselves again

the same place this line

a kind of attention

of possible answers in the physical

by side even eye movement

from limbic to critique

a door swung wide

all we could ever ask

Alice B Fogel

Alice B Fogel is the New Hampshire poet laureate. Her collections include A Doubtful House, Interval: Poems Based on Bach’s “Goldberg Variations,” which won the Schaffner Award for Music in Literature & the 2016 NH Literary Award, & Be That Empty, a national bestseller in 2008. Strange Terrain is her guide to appreciating poetry without necessarily “getting” it. Nominated ten times for the Pushcart, she has been awarded a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, among other awards, & her poems have appeared in many journals & anthologies, including Best American Poetry, Spillway, Hotel Amerika, The Inflectionist, & DIAGRAM.

On The Complexity of Symbols

July 2019 | Best of Net nominee, poetry

            He is a bird of bad moral character. He does not get his living honestly. —Ben Franklin

 

Right after my mother moved

to South Carolina, a man approached her

after church to show her the Confederate flag

in a stained glass window.

If this took place in a novel,

most readers would be able to deconstruct

the authorial intent

implied by a white man

showing a black woman

his heritage.

 

In Los Angeles, I drove an Oldsmobile,

a symbol of American engineering,

mass production, luxury . . .

It was a couch on wheels,

and one the most likely vehicles

to be used in the commission of a crime.

I could roam the streets of South Central

with impunity,

but in the Valley

I’d be pulled over for DWB.

 

In the rain and through a green-caged enclosure,

I marveled at a maimed bald eagle

and pondered at how

before the Constitution, the presidency,

the Bill of Rights, we placed it on a seal,

minted it,

then took it near extinction.

It shrugged its 6-feet of wings

and let out

an impressive scat.

 

Michele Reese

Michele Reese is a Daughter of the American Revolution and the daughter of a Jamaican immigrant. Her poetry focuses on this place of intersection as well as others including race, gender, and sexuality. She is the author of the poetry collection Following Phia. Her poems have also been published in several journals and anthologies including Crack the Spine Literary Magazine, The Oklahoma Review, Poetry Midwest, The Paris Review, The Tulane Review, Chemistry of Color: Cave Canem South Poets Responding to Art, Hand in Hand: Poets Respond to Race, and Home is Where: An Anthology of African American Poets from the Carolinas. She is currently a Professor of English at the University of South Carolina Sumter.

Price of a Coin

July 2019 | poetry

A turnstile coin

falls in slow motion,

hits with a rattle and a clink.

Rolling to a stop at his feet.

I bend to pick it up,

retrieving long lost visions

of a love that used to be.

Turning from the past,

I walk away.

A burning ache

pulls at me,

filling my heart with sorrow.

I look back one last time.

Coin pocketed,

I board the train

to my redemption.

Ann Christine Tabaka

Ann Christine Tabaka was nominated for the 2017 Pushcart Prize in Poetry, has been internationally published, and won poetry awards from numerous publications. She is the author of 9 poetry books. Christine lives in Delaware, USA. She loves gardening and cooking. Chris lives with her husband and two cats. Her most recent credits are: Ethos Literary Journal, North of Oxford, Pomona Valley Review, Page & Spine, West Texas Literary Review, The Hungry Chimera, Sheila-Na-Gig, Synchronized Chaos, Pangolin Review, Foliate Oak Review, Better Than Starbucks!, The Write Launch, The Stray Branch, The McKinley Review, Fourth & Sycamore.

Ceasefire Pantoum

July 2019 | poetry

openmouthed, we grasp our children

this is what it means to start

from the beginning

shivering in one’s skin

 

what it means to start

a truce with face and form

soothing in one’s skin

the familial, a mother’s love

 

a truce without face forms

a dead son awash, the tiny body

familial (a brother) loved

now lifeless arms

 

dead son awash, a tiny body

to his mother still through gunfire

now lifeless, disarmed

on the corner by the playground

 

his mother still, though gunfire

crosses her son, the border (lengthwise)

on the corner, the playground

widens with neglect

 

cross with her son at the border

from the beginning

we widen with neglect’s

openmouth gasp, our children

 

Brenda Serpick

Brenda Serpick received her MFA in poetry from The New School and is the author of three chapbooks: ‘the other conjunction in it’ (Furniture Press), ‘No Sequence But Luck’ (3 Sad Tigers Press) and ‘The Female Skeleton Makes Her Debut’ (Hophophop Press). She was a participating poet for Tupelo Press’ 30/30 Project (July 2016), and her poems have appeared in Requited, Tule Review, The Potomac, Free State Review, eccolinguistics, Printer’s Devil Review, Spiral Orb, LIT, Lungfull! Magazine, and Boog City – among other fine journals. She currently teaches English and creative writing for Baltimore City Public Schools.