October 2023 | poetry
There’s only so much you can change about yourself.
Like this morning, I dreamt I dropped a baby down the stairs and trumpets started playing
As it stared through me with my own eyes like I’d just suicided.
Flavors of trauma come with malleable parts.
Today, I ate an entire bag of chips and painted a watercolor octopus. I thought I had cancer.
I took my blood pressure three times. I told everyone of my fear… to practice saying cancer.
In public places, my neck strains like a dried sunflower curling down, looking for the stairs.
Hell is a dream full of music.
Brandyce Ingram is a writer, tutor, and jazz-head in Seattle, WA. Her work has appeared in High Shelf Press, Willowdown Books, Sand Hills Lit Mag, Wildroof Journal, An Evening with Emily Dickinson (via Wingless Dreamer), and elsewhere. Her latest search history includes “20th-century lunatic asylums women” and “how to use a crap ton of fresh mint pesto chimichurri sauces or soju cocktails.”
October 2023 | Best of Net nominee, poetry
It’s always the rot stench of the wound
that draws me in—the beetle to the Corpse Flower.
You were eager to unfurl your bruised blooms:
you told me about the poverty, the prison, your abusive,
alcoholic father. You winced to mention him. A palpable
stab. I ached to smell more of your festering, to share how it feels
to be birthed of betrayal. I wanted to open myself up
to you like a trench coat, show you the ax to my gut—
my mother. My vanished leg—my father. Now,
I wonder if the stalking, the drugging, the rape
was your wound reveal: This is the ghostÂ
of my dead inner child. I’m here to show you
what can happen to children and how bad it can get.
The blood and feces in my sheets said, This bad.Â
Anne Champion
Anne Champion is the author of She Saints & Holy Profanities (Quarterly West, 2019), The Good Girl is Always a Ghost (Black Lawrence Press, 2018), Book of Levitations (Trembling Pillow Press, 2019), Reluctant Mistress (Gold Wake Press, 2013), and The Dark Length Home (Noctuary Press, 2017). Her work appears in Verse Daily, diode, Tupelo Quarterly, Prairie Schooner, Crab Orchard Review, Salamander, New South, Redivider, PANK Magazine, and elsewhere. She was a 2009 Academy of American Poets Prize recipient, a 2016 Best of the Net winner, and a Barbara Deming Memorial Grant recipient.
October 2023 | poetry
They finished each other’s sentences about the differences
between ’56 and ’57 Chevies, how they rebuilt transmissions,
how the Hurst shifters needed a hole drilled in the floorboard,
as I sat in the back seat hearing tales of another country.
Their dads knew how to build houses and get the right tools,
took their boys to the seances of men huddled in a circle
who spit as they called forth the spirits of wrenches and vises,
while I slept each night on the living room couch overhearing
Mom and Sis whispering in their beds about curlers and creams.
I learned about how to bounce drops of water on the heated pan
telling what size flame would make the pancake batter not stick,
and to speak about love and hurt, and not bolt it down inside.
The soft voices of poets and writers speaking sadness and joy
let me wander in places far away from that sofa in the night,
and I liked myself knowing the things that other boys didn’t
as they lay under cars with friends finding power in engines.
No dad, I sank lower in the back seat hearing how men loved
mastering gears, electrodes, filters, valves, and carburetors
like there was a way of friendship with the tribe of machines
always scary to me, who hissed I was not one of them.
Glen A. Mazis
Glen A. Mazis taught philosophy for decades at Penn State Harrisburg, retiring in 2020. He has more than 90 poems in literary journals, including Rosebud, The North American Review, Sou’wester, Spoon River Poetry Review, Willow Review, Atlanta Review, Reed Magazine and Asheville Poetry Review, and the collection, The River Bends in Time (Anaphora Literary Press, 2012), a chapbook, The Body Is a Dancing Star (Orchard Street Press, 2020), and Bodies of Space and Time (Kelsay Books, 2022). He is the 2019 winner of the Malovrh-Fenlon Poetry Prize (Orchard Street national contest).
