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.
July 2019 | nonfiction
Her parents, for reasons she did not fully understand, didn’t attend church. Ever. Her father said nature was his church, but, on the other hand, so many millions believed otherwise, who was he to judge the merits of indoor, group-oriented worship? He drew the line at smoke bombs and hocus-pocus; he wouldn’t even read fiction because he only wanted to learn facts. Her mother saw no point without such evocative pageantry, but she didn’t want any trouble at home.
They didn’t want to deprive the girl, their only child, of wholesome church-going social normalcy, nor, certainly, any possibility, however remote, of everlasting life. So, at 11, she was left to the mercy of, briefly, the Pentecostals and later, more lastingly, the Nazarenes. (After all, moderate factions don’t recruit.) She was as good a Sunday school student as she was a student-student, the girl who grew up to earn a PhD and three master’s degrees, and her teacher, Mr. Meadows, offered her the unprecedented opportunity to prepare and teach a Sunday school lesson to her peers.
What was he thinking? They paid her elaborate, lavish inattention, doodling, passing notes and chatting with one another, sighing and fidgeting as if she weren’t there, until Mr. Meadows broke in and took over. She stayed, she had to, they carpooled rides home for orphans like herself.
She could not, however, muster the perspective to return. A month later Mr. Meadows, jilted lover, appeared at their door, to say that one day she’d be a wonderful teacher. As her father jumped up and stood, spread like an X in front of the card table littered with ashtrays and beer cans, she understood.
Julie Benesh
Julie Benesh’s fiction has been in Tin House Magazine, Bestial Noise: A Tin House Fiction Reader, Crab Orchard Review (receiving an Illinois Arts Council Grant), Florida Review, Gulf Stream, and other places. Micro-memoirs are forthcoming from Journal of Compressed Creative Arts and Green Briar Review. She has an MFA in fiction from Warren Wilson College and lives in Chicago.
July 2019 | nonfiction
I press the button attached to the IV attached to my arm, and the sweet burn of morphine runs through my veins. The drip, drip, drip drowns the music of newborn cries, coming from down the hall. Obstetrics, gynecology. Same wing. Same floor. The baby nursery is right next door.
Maybe I should count sheep.
One little lamb. Two little lambs. Three …
“Don’t be greedy.” My surgeon’s words on speed-dial in my brain.
“You have three healthy children.”
This is what he tells me, when he tells me my cervix has to go.
Three little lambs. Four …
The lights on the ceiling, flush mounts they’re called, look like breasts, breasts heavy with milk.
Polished nickel nipples, ready to feed.
There’s an army of ants. Yes! An army of tiny black ants climbing the wall across from my bed. I laugh. The newborns across the hall wail. Time to press the button for more morphine.
Four little lambs. Five …
My father used to call me shefele. That’s little lamb in Yiddish.
Six …
And then there was Jay. Met him in July,1976. The summer of the Bicentennial—a good sign, if you believe in those things. I was just fifteen.
Married in 1983, when Ronald Reagan was President and Sally Ride, the first woman in space. “Every Breath You Take” had just highjacked the airwaves.
Why do I feel I can’t breathe?
Seven, eight little lambs …
“Even nuns get dysplasia,” that same surgeon tells me, after he tells me I have cancer, the unruly
child of a runaway STD.
“Even nuns have affairs,” the words of my Catholic-school friend …
Nine, ten little lambs. Eleven, twelve, thirteen …
Jay and I were each other’s firsts.
I thought I was his only.
Fourteen, fifteen, sixteen …
The nurse comes in. I pray she won’t notice my brave six-legged friends, climbing the hospital wall.
Seventeen, eighteen …
- Jay had just ended his second affair.
Bill and Monica’s story broke that January, amidst semen stains and cigars.
Arnold had fathered his housekeeper’s child.
The year prior, Kathy Lee—and the world—found out that Frank was fucking a flight attendant.
So many men wielding their fleshy swords …
I’m afraid I’ve lost count.
I look up at the tiny soldiers. They’re busy, those ants, driven to move in their stick straight line. I wonder how they do that, march so fearlessly, black against a cold white sea.
What would it be like to be so bold, to move forward, even at the risk of being seen?
Diane Gottlieb
Diane Gottlieb received her MFA from Antioch University Los Angeles where she served as lead editor of creative nonfiction and as a member of the interview and blog teams for Lunch Ticket. Her work has appeared in Panoply and Lunch Ticket. You can also find her weekly musings at https://dianegottlieb.com.
