January 2024 | Best of Net nominee, poetry
She begins:
How have your spirits been?
Tell me your name. Where we are right now. The day of the week.
Have you noticed any smells that others around you cannot sense?
Such as the smell of charred toast—
or honeysuckle?
Do you feel this?
She touches across my face.
How’s your vision?
Last night, when headlights fanned across your bedroom floor, did you feel clean? Or did the light catch in your curtains and remind you of being watched? Everything the light touches proof that the window is all that keeps you from the outside.
Can you hear this?
The sound is alive and mechanical and whirls like a machine.
Smile, like you’re trying to convince someone of something.
As though you’re trying to produce in me a change– the starting edge of which I won’t notice until I leave this exam room, gone home for the day, and let my car idle in the driveway
a minute too long.
When you slice your finger with a knife,
the blood rarely appears as quickly as you’d expect.
Puff your cheeks, now–
her hands against my face as though to test the strength of an inflated balloon.
Very good.
She pulls out a pen light.
Follow this light with your eyes.
She spells out H E R E T I C with her pen.
My eyes roll around in my head.
Now–
put out your hands as if to see if it’s raining. Like you’re the first person at the picnic to feel a drop.
Close your eyes.
Think about the grandfather you never knew. He was a preacher and a liar. Your father sang you to sleep with The Bankrobber by The Clash so you would know what he couldn’t tell you.
Very good.
Liz Irvin
Liz Irvin is a writer and second-year medical student at the University of Massachusetts Chan Medical School. She holds a B.A. in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies from Barnard College at Columbia University. Her essay “Seasick: Lessons in Human Anatomy from Hyman Bloom’s The Hull (1952)” appeared in Hektoen International. She lives in Worcester, Massachusetts.
January 2024 | visual art
Montana Tree
Storm Approach
Sun and Sea
DM Frech
DM Frech holds a BFA and MFA in dance from the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University. She has worked at the Governor’s School of the Arts in Virginia and is an active member of several writing organizations, including The Muse Writers Center, Hampton Roads Writers, Poetry Society of Virginia, and The Writers Guild of Virginia. DM Frech writes poetry, children’s stories, fiction, nonfiction, and screenplays. Her photography was showcased on the Streetlight Magazine website in October 2022 and featured in the New Feather anthology in April 2023. She has won multiple nonfiction awards at The Hampton Roads Writers Conference. Both her poetry chapbooks Quiet Tree and Words From Walls, published in 2023 and 2022 by Finishing Line Press, featured her photography.
January 2024 | poetry
Untitled (Coke was taller than most women)
Coke was taller than most women and moved in a way that somehow provoked anticipation watching
her cross a room you wondered if this splendid thing would actually happen to you same with her voice
with everything she’d say and I remember that her eyes were grey
and Jimmy once Jimmy kissed me I couldn’t have been more than fourteen when Jimmy kissed me
his mouth seemed to take me over and afterwards I ran away but stayed kissed all afternoon
I saw Coke on the bus wearing a mink jacket one morning and big diamonds looking a handsome late
thirties on her second marriage twelve year old child and she says Jimmy’s got his masters degree and his
wife’s a nurse and Coke says that Mileage whose black moon face and joke on you laughter used to
frighten me has passed away
Untitled (when things get bad enough)
when things get bad enough
I start wishing I would die.
actually, I had intended to say,
when things get bad enough
I start wishing other people would die
so I would be left
the pleasures of abandonment.
you mentioned the word suicide today
I caught it in my teeth and
carried it home to put in a poem.
I am not respectful enough its true
of me of you
but thank you for the word.
Untitled (I have a small book)
I have a small book with yellow covers and half translucent pages. I thought of using it as a drawing
book but never did because I imagined the drawings would bleed through to each other in disturbing
ways. but now I have the idea of making my first drawing on the last page of the book, so I can see it as I
draw on the page that comes before. that way I can design that second drawing to relate to the first.
and so on.
Ditta Baron Hoeber
An artist and a poet, Ditta Baron Hoeber’s poems have been published in a number of magazines including Noon: journal of the short poem, Gargoyle, the American Journal of Poetry, Juxtaprose, Pank, Burningword Literary Journal, the American Poetry Review, and Contemporary American Voices. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and her first book, Without You, is forthcoming in March of 2024. Her photographs, drawings, and book works have been exhibited nationally and acquired by several collections in the US and the UK.
