October 2017 | poetry
The Last Time I Talked to My Mom
She’d flown to Florida just to die, not that slow-
motion movie crammed with insights and coming-
to-terms, me on the edge of the plains hearing how
one brother and his wife went bedside, sang their
newest version of psalm twenty-three, another one
praying sweet Jesus how can I compete with that,
so you can see why she flew away.
She’d hired a cab to the hospital, told them, it being
the South, she was fixing to die, told me these doctors
they’re whispering cancer as if I can’t read the seven
signs, and they want to try chemo, as if that’s going
to happen, and anyway it was good to hear but I’m
going now and she just let the phone drop, so I
listened to her breathe for a while.
They called soon enough, saying it was a stroke –
that stubborn old lady, dying as she pleased.
Sometimes, She Says
It was my kid asking me and more than once,
so after she was killed, I decided just to quit,
though it was hard, having smoked for years,
and I loved it, I did, maybe out on the porch
a fall afternoon, someone burning leaves two
streets over, a high hint in the cool air, early
moon above the hills, or after sex sometimes,
like in the movies, where you’re the heroine
if not in this story, then another, wondering
how it might go, this whatever seems to be
happening here – cigarette moments to
ornament a tree with a little history, but
my daughter asks again and there’s a crash
that makes her brain swell into a thunderhead
soaking up ocean till it rains itself away, so I
tell myself, just stop, each time you choose
not to is a kind of prayer, and keeping that
it’s like lighting candles in a church, so
maybe it counts – only, sometimes on a street
a match will flare as another’s smoke whispers
of distant laughter, and yes envy and still the
anger over everything that’s lost, and is it lust
or deadly greed infiltrating my breath – this
banished pleasure, this near occasion of sin?
George Perreault
George Perreault is from Reno, Nevada, and his most recent collection, Bodark County, features poems in the voices of characters living on the Llano Estacado. He has received awards from the Nevada Arts Council and the Washington Poets Association and has served as a visiting writer in New Mexico, Montana, and Utah. His poems have been nominated three times for the Pushcart Prize and selected for fourteen anthologies and dozens of magazines.
October 2017 | poetry
mea·sure 135
mind on the line, ear to the note’s
approach, the hand must needs be
steady, body too―eye blind,
to all but time’s inscribing
mea·sure 557
one slip of the tongue, the world’s awry,
away over the hill she went,
the words said, and the damage done,
the cry too slight, too lame, too late
7/seven 43
someone somewhere’s talking
call them, tell them to come,
one day, when no-one’s home
say, the walls will listen
well enough
to what there is, or was
or will be still, to tell
7/seven 49
to be seen here
from where the poem is
the pale way, to the sense
that something is
that some place, in sight, might
be lying in wait
to be spelt out
nine 53
the sound of your feet then
there in the street
that time night-time
step on step on the stone
it has not stopped
since
the lone way home goes on
the same feet sounding
stone by stone
Ray Malone
Ray Malone is currently living and working as an artist, writer and translator in Berlin. He has published in so-called small magazines in the U.K. in the 60s, and occasionally since. In recent years he has dedicated himself to working with minimal forms.
October 2017 | Best of Net nominee, poetry
Strangler Fig
After midnight you set out, some on foot,
others hiding in the back of an old pick-up
truck. Fate is the string on a paper kite, caught
in a strangler fig tree. Tangled, useless. Root
stems grafted together, merging each time they touch.
Noble and strange. Twisted. Overhead, a crescent
moon, sharp as a sickle. Its hook like blade could
lop your ear off. There are holes in the wall.
But you have to know where to look.
America. Where you cut lawns and give mani-
pedis and mop floors and change old peoples’ diapers.
Sleeping six to a room. Eating food from the dollar store.
If they catch you, they send you away. Hope is the
skin on a copperhead, it sheds and grows back.
The truck rumbles below your ribs. Someone moans.
Stink of fear and piss. The wind tumbles through the
acacias. Your mother’s brother has a cousin outside
Kansas City. You don’t know where Kansas City is.
The figs on the trees not yet ripened. Color of blood
and sadness, hard as the moonlit stones.
Solitude
Sol ‘it’ ude /~/ n.1. The state or situation of being alone. Blue feather dizzily falling. Leaves no one bothered to rake. The empty chair you used to watch TV in. Barren and stained, covered with a winding sheet. Thoreau had it wrong. Once the maple leaf loses that scarlet sheen, it withers and crumples, feigning death. Walden Pond was a kettle hole formed by glaciers in retreat. 2. A lonely or uninhabited place. Rural wilderness or desert, backwoods. The word beasts recline in the shade of the maples, licking their paws, dreaming of meat.
Beth Sherman
Beth Sherman received an MFA in creative writing from Queens College, where she teaches in the English department. Her poetry has been published in Hartskill Review, Lime Hawk, Synecdoche, Gyroscope, The Evansville Review, Silver Birch Press, Zingara, Rust + Moth, and Blue River Review. She is also a Pushcart nominee and has written five mystery novels.
October 2017 | poetry
Asomatous
To have it, be it
those mornings when you wake
and cannot turn your head.
The stiff column of your neck & spine
reminding you they exist & of how
limited peripheral vision is & more so
as we age, the eyes becoming nothing but
slits, wide-eyed wonder no more than a phrase.
This is when you wish for it &, too,
when winter comes ferocious, making its demands:
the coat, the gloves, the hat, the scarf, the boots,
the wariness of ice, press of snow, hands lying
chapped in your lap every evening.
&, lastly, when hungry, that particular ache.
You see it as a flame, some carryover from those Sundays
when you accompanied your mother & served
as acolyte, good girl. The lit candle hovering
is what you imagine, wish to be. Only wind would frighten
or the wet pinch of fingers, nothing more. & not often.
The ease, the ease, & the weightlessness you try for those
days when you walk the house & gather items & drive a mile
to give them away!
Sometimes, in certain settings, you near it:
the ascent into air, the descent into water, those
temporary states. But only sometimes & so briefly.
You dream of a room with one window & white walls,
a bed, a chair, a desk, three books, paper, pen,
the one painting no more than 8 X 8. & still too much
too often. You ask if three is too many, if the image
could rather, instead, be only recalled. If the words need
be written.
What is it you wish to cast off?
What more could you disown?
Lacuna
Argue without sense. Just the furor of the bee’s sting
and subsequent weeping. Quick anger and tears, the stopped
phrase, mid-sentence. I do not want. Or: go ahead and.
Tear the pages out in the middle and near the end, where it gets interesting.
She walks offstage and doesn’t return and we ask, What became of her?
Not even a few lines, like in Shakespeare, about her death. Nothing. Last you heard,
she had moved to Texas and wrote with sadness of the never-ending flatness.
Sure, there were sunsets, but.
Something’s missing.
Way out on the peninsula, there was no service. Even in the town,
before the logging roads, red and wet, nothing.
People used actual maps, folded in haphazard ways, and tried not to think
of the movies they had seen or the books they had read featuring disappearance,
absence, the answer
never given.
Ort
The scrawl,
the cheeky comment in ink on the glossy page,
and another, on the back of a photo. There on the shelf, there
in a box.
And the three-legged stool with its spinning top, no accompanying keys. There
in the corner.
And the white plates and bowls parceled,
stacked in the back of the cabinet.
One, two, and three.
One, two, and three.
And the skin of a berry
or a fruit. Hanging limp on the tree,
lying, gutted, on the cutting board. Or
the bone.
Kelly R. Samuels
Kelly R. Samuels lives and works as an adjunct English instructor near what some term the “west coast of Wisconsin.” Her work has appeared in PoetsArtists’s JuJuBes, online at apt, Off the Coast, and Cleaver, and is forthcoming in Kestrel.
October 2017 | Best of Net nominee, poetry
High School Lunch
My father made me a sandwich for lunch every day,
carefully put the turkey, cheddar, lettuce and mayo
on the sourdough, then zipped it up in a Ziploc.
And every day during orchestra, I slipped the sandwich
into the whooshing plastic of a black trashcan, or palmed
it off to a friend. Those feinted days, when I almost fainted
in the hallways, eating less than three hundred calories.
Once, my father made a spaghetti dinner—the last
he’d cook for us as a family—and I refused to eat
anything but Special K. His dish crashed into the sink
and my mother ran after him (then, she still could).
I held the shards in my hands; the pasta sauce
coated them like coagulated blood. That was
the first time in my life that I felt regret,
true regret, the kind that’s parasitic
and coils up in you like a tape worm,
eating through your intestines,
inside out. The kind that swims
around in your stomach when you wake
covered in the lilacs and butterflies
of your childhood bed, to come downstairs
and find your mother, alone, crying.
The kind that feels like the frozen lace
of love covering your heart
when your aunts are waiting for you at the airport
in Seattle, instead of your mother’s friend,
and they sit you down in those grey vinyl chairs
by baggage claim. You don’t want to look
at them. You want to watch the carousel
until it’s one with painted horses that never
stops spinning. You hop on, grab
a magenta mane, and hold as tight
as your tiny hands will let you.
Visiting my mother’s memory on a stormy Friday night
I stare at the reflection
in the candle, aimlessly,
until it hits me—it looks
like my mother’s eye,
dark as the sea in a storm,
grey and sad but inquisitive.
Then I realize, it’s actually
the matting of our portrait
that I took in college,
in the reflection, of us
in matching outfits,
mounted on my wall.
The cancer had gotten worse
then; she’d started fearing
death for the first time.
When I asked her
that winter where
she wanted her ashes
spread, she said
she didn’t know,
maybe the Grand Canyon,
where she and my dad
were wed, maybe
Bandelier, where
she spent much
of her childhood,
just outside Los Alamos,
then looked me
in the eyes
and just cried.
I held her until
she fell asleep;
her short
blonde hairs
stuck to the pillow
with static.
The next morning,
when I kissed her goodbye
and flew away,
I refused
to know
it would be
the last time
I’d see her smile.
Kelsey Ann Kerr
Kelsey Ann Kerr has a great interest in loss: holes both metaphorical and physical of the heart, holes in life left by the loss of parents, cauterized by love. She teaches writing composition at the University of Maryland and American University, and holds an M.F.A. in Poetry from the University of Maryland. Her work can be found, or is forthcoming, in “Stirring,” “New Delta Review” and “The Sewanee Review,” among others.
October 2017 | poetry
The first time she fucked a machine, there was some uncomfortable pinching. But it was momentary, corrected after a few thrusts by a data-driven recalibration. The second time was much better. The machine had measured her depths, tested her temperature, listened to the tempo of her breaths, and now it slid into her with the smooth precision of a crescent moon turning in circles for the sun. And the money was incredible. Impossible to beat. She could show up for two study visits a week and spend the rest of her time lounging around the hacienda with her fat black lab, Queero, painting and having languid encounters with lovers of the human variety.
But lately, something was different. She was starting to crave the feeling of the machine’s slithery suit sliding across her skin—the softest organic polymers yet, they said. The other night, Juno came over and seduced her. As they fell to the bed with mouths full of blue agave, tonguing the circles of tequila’s heat, she caught herself listening for the soft purrs of the machine’s sensors transmitting data back to its central server, missing the rhythmic hum of cooling fans spinning behind glassy eyes. After Juno left, she sat on the porch in an old flannel robe, feet tucked under Queero, staring out across the bay. The night was clear, no fog, and there were thousands of drones flying above the waves in coordinated fashion. Manufactured by the same company as the machine. Her machine? God, only two more days until she would see it again. Queero started to snore and she decided there was nothing wrong with drinking alone.
Farley Thompson
Farley Thompson is an attorney, educator, and writer who hails from Salt Lake City and currently lives and works in the San Francisco Bay Area. They spend their free time beachcombing, gardening, quilting, and thinking about thinking.
