April 2018 | Best of Net nominee, poetry
your body is still your body,
even though they took
everything from you,
like the famished hare
who pulls even the bitterer berries
from the wilted stem.
they came easily, jarringly,
and pried everything that you carried
from your tired, trembling arms
while the assorted leaves were
making their slow descent;
or while they went moldering
from green to that quiet blaze
before dismemberment or rot;
or while they succumbed
to their crushing, to a grinding down,
like the fronds falling suddenly,
pressed flat and silent
under the buck’s fierce footfall
—he did not see them,
he did not care,
their delicate fibers
were not of his concern.
and why would he look away
from the horizon’s early smoke?—
they were flattened, twisted and gnarled
for the rest of their short life
while the unmarred fronds grew
strong and straight and long
around them.
is there a resilience
that can be learned?
the carnivorous heron
holds wide its wings
to hunt. the false shade
a canopy of disaster
for its tired prey.
when the southerly wind
tears its wild way around the orb
you too will understand how
the heronshaw differs
from the hungrier hawk.
by Alani Rosa Hicks-Bartlett
Alani Rosa Hicks-Bartlett is a writer and translator from the SF Bay Area. Her work is forthcoming or has appeared in Apricity, The Stillwater Review, IthacaLit, Gathering Storm, Broad River Review, ellipsis…literature & art, The Fourth River, Mantis: A Journal of Poetry, Criticism, and Translation, and others. She twice received the UC Berkeley Dorothy Rosenberg Memorial Prize in Lyric Poetry for her poems “Song of Advice or Valediction” and “second lament,” and the Emily Chamberlain Cook Prize in Poetry for her poem “The Haunting.” Alani is currently working on a novel set in Portugal, many translations, and a collection of villanelles. You can find her at Twitter and Instagram at @AlaniRosa.
April 2018 | poetry
When dad’s grief
unbottled itself,
when he could not square
his guilt over the dad
he could not love,
when his beast of a past
coiled him, a rattler
ready to strike,
he would tell the story.
I still try to picture it,
my grandfather,
deep lines in his red face,
trademark overalls,
a Fedora tipped
over one eye,
ordering a whiskey
from a line of bottles
behind bored barkeeps,
the bar’s stale gloom,
barely visible through
the smoke of Camels
fingered by old drinkers
schlumped on stools,
regulars like him
who wished he’d
get on with it, shoot
the bitch and bastard,
or shut the fuck up.
No one this night noticed
how his pocket curved,
saw his old Army pistol,
a loaded Colt .45,
that minutes later
just outside their reach
would bare
its yellow heat
into the bar’s plate
glass, didn’t guess
how whiskey still
in hand, he’d smoke
the orange circles
of streetlights
and red neons
flashing nickel beer
and Budweiser,
or how bar mirrors
would reflect a man
slurried in a slough
of his own making
melt down on a
cracked sidewalk,
alone with the years
that tripped
him there,
his boy left behind,
frozen in time
no feeling in his blue feet.
by Janet Reed
Janet Reed is a 2017 and 2016 Pushcart Prize nominee. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Nassau Review, Chiron Review, Tipton Poetry Journal, Avalon Review, I-70 Review, and others. She is at work on her first collection and teaches writing and literature for Crowder College in Missouri.
April 2018 | poetry
When I go to places
The seaside
I am already leaving there
Rehoboth Beach
More water than sand
More sky than water
Bones of fish laid bare
A new tableau each morning
Tides take back
All that they lay down
Washing me to white
To bold
To bright
A seagull screams just once
And dissolves in my skull
Naked sun
She milks my pupils
Opalescent to blind
At dawn
I see dead birds
Banking fast from clouds
My cousin Eddie
Arc of his returning boomerang
A spinning, skimming whir
Over the green, the coppery
Glossy mallards
Old pennies for heads
Pumpkin orange feet
Folded under what floats and bobs
At the edges of Camp Brule Lake
Startled flock rising
Quaking the water lilies
Seesaw tipping frogs into leaps
A melee of flaps and squawks
My cousin Vernon now
Boomerang two
Not returning
Arm bent back as an arrow to its bow
One unlucky heartbeat
Twirling into tailspin
A roped corpse to splash
So boys can cheer
And echo echo echo
I am already returning
To Camp Brule Lake
Spilling into Elk Creek
Who pauses and changes her clothes
The Flat
Expanse of silt and limestone
Red shale and watercress
Big enough for two pickups
Nature’s Car Wash
In between cascades
A waterfall at the top
A waterfall at the bottom
Liquid chimes
Teacups resting in their saucers
On top of a walking tray
Treed place
Entombing the cold pools
Where fish can stand still
I step across The Flat
To the other side
Soles on the same level parts of the same stones
Nine steps
I’ve made it
The slippery silt covers me
Cloaked in branches and tangle
Caught without my own feet at the seaside
I dissolve into backgrounds brushed and shaded
Into the shadows of the places who know me
by Virginia Watts
Virginia Watts has been published in The Philadelphia Inquirer, recently in Ruminate Magazine’s Readers’ Notes and her nonfiction story “Marti’s Father” appears in Volume 1, Issue 2 of Ponder Review, Fall 2017. This story has been nominated for a 2018 Pushcart Prize.
April 2018 | poetry
This thing I wear around me like a talisman is copper from the earth I don’t know why it stains my skin but a healing naked mumbling tribesman will rub shaman ashes into my wounds while cucumbers settle on my lids and warm eggs in the air pool like small white pills reconstructing a sweat lodge meditating body and knife blades part cells of thin skins while the medicinal value of broccoli calcium olive oil and silver coins I stole from the old man watching the pizza-maker twirling golden dough into leafy green crusts while walking through the goat cheese bazaar with chest lumps while I’m on the way to the dentist dancers thumping in dust their nude buttery feet drawing life through straws from a thickened vessel racing room to room wax on wax separating off your melting and porous spine trying to find the clue bombarded by small radiant bullets and rhinoceros horn shark fin yoga light against the bone amidst cries of the pouring of liquids syrups elixirs milk of nuts and hanging fruit sultry wine the anti-oxidants corrective cleansing goldenseal grounding my existence warding off the slow creeping pressing diving thin hollow needles and the mushrooms dried in hot air and dead vegetable matter playa mud sucking pores soft touch of my hand an icy salve a song in the dark and rough memories alive and you wanting every spice every action every soothing voice the comfort of aboriginal fire a thin line of vaccinating friendship the thick repeating muscle of another.
by Brad Garber
Brad has degrees in biology, chemistry and law. He writes, paints, draws, photographs, hunts for mushrooms and snakes, and runs around naked in the Great Northwest. Since 1991, he has published poetry, essays and weird stuff in such publications as Edge Literary Journal, Pure Slush, On the Rusk Literary Journal, Sugar Mule, Third Wednesday, Barrow Street, Black Fox Literary Magazine, Barzakh Magazine, Five:2:One, Ginosko Journal, Vine Leaves Press, Riverfeet Press, Smoky Blue Literary Magazine, Aji Magazine and other quality publications. 2013 & 2018 Pushcart Prize nominee.
April 2018 | poetry
An Essay on Indifference
the technology was basic and difficult to understand
the outside seemed to have removed itself from interference
as in vice applied to territory as in acceptance of questionable forethought
as in don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone
No One appeared like a young boy popping out of a white shirt
No One said this No One only had to (you’re back let’s get it over with)
every agent doubled every unsung witness
no limp but each careful verbal shoe still lisping
No One knew the workers were already detached (you could open them all
with hinges placed at inappropriate but functional locations)
as in will you skate with my terrible monkey
as in honoring the bright intrusions of ice cream
each one emitted a solvent suggesting the activities of deciduous bees
each one chalky with deposits worried and singing (scanned for hidden pleasures)
as in delightful with errant salvage
as in beautifully mistaken narratives of gathering
delicate ice gathered therefore in persuasion of a fish-skin purse
No One found in this the thawing joker
as in a testimony as in A Testimony
as in clarity: inadequate
a variety of phonetic closet-signal remained as yet uncatalogued
in favor of a fluid thrush caged in aspic (parenthetically speaking)
as in cautiously following my anticipatory shoes
as in a small life of delicate conveyance
No One arrived on time for the several precautionary proceedings because
No One was not there to merely notice
that’s not always what No One does when you ignore No One
in the rain he looks old again as in the snow unborn
No One has told the truth so much about having fun he’ll have to lie about the sadness
he really doesn’t know which irony that is which gives the sadness a certain pleasure
by Rich Ives
Rich Ives has received grants and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, Artist Trust, Seattle Arts Commission and the Coordinating Council of Literary Magazines for his work in poetry, fiction, editing, publishing, translation and photography. His writing has appeared in Verse, North American Review, Massachusetts Review, Northwest Review, Quarterly West, Iowa Review, Poetry Northwest, Virginia Quarterly Review, Fiction Daily and many more. He is the 2009 winner of the Francis Locke Memorial Poetry Award from Bitter Oleander. He has been nominated seven times for the Pushcart Prize. He is the 2012 winner of the Thin Air Creative Nonfiction Award. His books include Light from a Small Brown Bird (Bitter Oleander Press–poetry), Sharpen (The Newer York-fiction chapbook), The Ballooon Containing the Water Containing the Narrative Begins Leaking-What Books) and Tunneling to the Moon (Silenced Press–hybrid).
January 2018 | poetry
Dusty, moldy, musty
Yellowed, brown stained
Wrinkled, tattered pages
Faded ink, missing leaves
Broken spine
Forgotten on the shelf
Few visitors
Antiseptic smell
Darkened, liver spots
Wrinkled, translucent skin
Gray, thinning hair
Achy back, swollen joints
Forgotten in the home
Few visitors
Have all their pages been written?
Priceless, rare editions
Stores of wisdom
Treasured stories
Will all their pages be read?
Suzanne Cottrell
Suzanne Cottrell, an Ohio buckeye by birth, lives with her husband and three rescue dogs in rural Piedmont North Carolina. An outdoor enthusiast and retired teacher, she enjoys hiking, biking, gardening, and Pilates. She loves nature and its sensory stimuli and particularly enjoys writing and experimenting with poetry and flash fiction. Her poetry has appeared in The Avocet, The Weekly Avocet, The Remembered Arts Journal, Plum Tree Tavern, The Skinny Poetry Journal, Three Line Poetry, Haiku Journal, Tanka Journal, Poetry Quarterly, Dragon Poet Review, and Naturewriting.
