We’re super super excited to announce our 2015 Best of the Net Anthology nominations:
Poetry
Darryl Sleeps Through the best sunrise by Lynne Marie Houston
The fly claims no vertigo sitting on the sill by Leslie Rzeznik
For Life by Chrislande Dorcilus
Cellar Violin by Meg Matich
Prose:
Five by Mandy Rose
Worse Things by Taylor Sykes
*nominations are taken from works published during the period of July 2014 through June 2015
You hated the
dovecote &
its confusion
of ladybirds
that bit & stunk
& mother
loved so dearly.
You snuck
foxglove
in with the feed &
of it they ate &
we carried them
to the tailwater
wrapped limp
in gauzy dresses
& watched them
flutter dead down
river. What was
so goddamn easy
about watching,
about intimacy,
brother? &
after was hushed
like a small snail
suddenly stuck
to my knuckle
—too easy
to brush off
with no stone perch
of anvil,
no grip of lock
and dam.
I
Busia’s fly at least bit you
when she tickled your ribs, her fingers
crawling past your sternum, to dance
under your chin, your delight
feigned as surprise or disgust,
begging “do it again”
until she told you the golumpki
wouldn’t roll itself.
II
as you spend the day mulling,
the day spends itself without you.
navel gazer, lint-spinner, snooze slayer –
carpe something, lest you circle,
mindless in your windowed cell,
sun filtered through glass and fronds,
blind to the takings
you’ve relished so long.
III
did you know, my love,
that while spiders spin seven
kinds of silk, only the cribellates comb
their multi-stranded sticky leavings
until wooly enough to catch hairy fly legs
then hide, watching their webs bounce
with the struggles of prey
who never fail to answer?
I named my hoo ha Judith, just like Judith told me to.
She has curly hair, a little home, and an attitude, that tastes like whiskey.
And if you’re nice, Judith may give you a whiskey kiss.
Whiskey kisses don’t come easy. So you have to be careful.
Sometimes they’re sour but most other times, they burn bookish the way sinfulness should.
A whiskey kiss is not a wine kiss or a vodka kiss and for heavens! Nothing like a beer kiss!
(beer kisses are unacceptable. too much stout.)
Judith with fame has made many a good man and woman, cry in her search for happiness.
Enough about that. Let’s talk about me.
I first met Judith as an 11-year-old woman. We did not get along.
She made me toss and turn in bed, like a pig being prepared for slaughter.
And when she murdered, I felt a putative warmth oozing out my lungs.
A cancerous warmth, the way snuff snuggles into a snuffbox made of white dove.
Judith and I, we love each other now. Except when it snows.
Our whiskyness stood upright always, in case of a parlor visit.
But old girls we are. No more ashamed of being ashamed.
And old girls we will remain, passing down our alcoholism to our daughters.
Because I have no need for whiskey at 82.
Eloquence would say:
“Once upon a time there was a girl with a tube
of tomato paste in her stomach and one day she wore
really tight jeans and it squeezed fruit jelly
out her American pie. She gave birth to secret sweetness.”
Eleven, behind the grey couch,
my eyes afraid of my mother’s back,
I couldn’t figure anything out, except
stiffly answering to “You’ve been sleeping all day?”
with “I got my period.”
Nothing more exquisite then brown blood in time, blue jeans
and a bottomless pain; shredding, sharp,
perpetual to the blondness of the English teacher’s
bullshit: Capulet, Romeo, Juliet, etc.
If I stand will they
see? Smell?
It must be the same with mangoes,
robins: their bodies,red tinted, blush at us:
onlookers lusting their ripeness.
She never gave her heart away.
Fair prince did not a dragon slay
for the hand of Alice Faye.
You might think he’d swept her off her feet,
laid her on a crisp white sheet.
Startled so – she could not speak.
His hand tender upon her breast
felt the lumps that did infest –
the ones missed by her doctor’s tests.
You almost saw her blush at this
as if instead he’d placed a kiss
within a bed of marital bliss.
He traced a scar to her pelvic mound.
Later deep beneath he’d sound
a cavern never child-bound.
In modesty she’d lived her life –
neither mother nor a wife.
Now silently she serves the knife.
He holds her heart – still – in his hand,
sets it gently in the pan,
records “700 grams.”
We’re our own ancestors – courted by swarms of pollen on rivers of amber honey
– excerpt from hymn to the bee goddess austėja
He takes the glass from my hand,
interlaces his fingers with the berryvodka
sweat, tongues the fallen honeydrop from my blouse.
The mattress reeks, though the straw is fresh.
Fuck my body, not my mind,
he begs against my temple,
kissing the hollow behind my ear–
my pulse like a smoking hive.
We draw the moon
through bleached shutters,
pierced hearts reflected
on his calf, my shoulder.
Earthy, raw – his goaty
smell clings to my chin.
I’m done tracing the outlines of ghosts
he says
finished with rusty voices,
dusty footfalls.
Firesmoke drones before muted
laughter. He zips his jeans, tucks
the sheet around me, rubs his thumb
across my cheek, tastes his salty
fingerprint. I’m careful not to stir
as he eases the ring from my finger.
for Darryl Breaux, 1972-2011
Lafitte is socked in by orange fog.
Sunrise surrounds us, a pink I can taste,
a someone-call-9-1-1 red:
the sky has cracked open its head and is bleeding.
Like Darryl does, years after I move away,
after he takes two pills for asthma
and falls asleep while driving.
But the morning of the best sunrise I’ve ever seen, he lives.
On this rosy dawn, earth turns over
on a vat of purple grapes for making wine
and Darryl sleeps in a shotgun shack along a brackish bayou
where the unhurried channel tide
brought us sleek, blue catfish for supper.
That morning as Darryl sleeps, I drive past the docks
where tired fishermen will give up their catch,
and I reach forward to turn up loud
a song about being too young,
too dumb to know what you have to lose.
We stand loud in the pubescent
musk of the blue locker rooms
against the pink walls of
Palm Beach Gardens High School.
She hands me the Japanese comic books
their grey pages wafting sticky rice, edible.
The sun smells of
the paprika center in the
yellow tinted sugar marble I call
Vietnamese Candy, accents atop vowels,
the crumpling shout of the wrapper
not helping me pronounce its name right.
She watches me eat it, her small mouth
spreading atop an overgrowth of teeth into a smile
We rode a million miles away, together.
I am a neon marshmallow chick melting,
on the sidewalk
the wind is blowing debris, whirling grasses
through soft flesh, splinters sticking to me
Can you see the ants of memories marching
away from the grainy pickings? Is that you on
their backs? Crumbling out of me. I imagine:
She will wear a red Ao Dai, gold
cloth dripping from collar to musical
fringes brooming the floor.
I hear it, the future.
The offering alter in front of her
her groom in a matching dress coat
offering the oranges,
patchouli incense to
the sepia picture of her
grandfather.
His stern forehead lines
indefinitely disapproving.
A man and his wife pluck a rose red shell
There is no time for sleep, no time for bread
They do not speak as I sound the death knell
Hysteria, the burning carousel
Hand by hand I hold, foot by foot I tread
A man and his wife pluck a rose red shell
But their fear upon fear, I cannot quell
I kiss them each on ear nose cheek and head
They do not speak as I sound the death knell
Children’s stories we will always retell
These hospital beds now swallowed in dread
A man and his wife pluck a rose red shell
Apocalypse, our breaking citadel
Such youths, why was I not taken instead?
They do not speak as I sound the death knell
Are we masochists? Are we infidel?
From whom to seek solace if not our dead?
A man and his wife pluck a rose red shell
They do not speak as I sound the death knell
Alyss 