Country Road at Night, North Carolina, 1979

April 2021 | Best of Net nominee, poetry

Like eyes in a skull,

riveted on me,

I see the windows

of a white van

in my rearview

mirror.

 

I speed up

so does he

and we keep

going like this,

the sweat of fear

stinging my eyes

till I am racing,

a rabbit, with

a fox that covets,

gaining.

 

A sign for a business district–

the car, and my heart, slow

down.  I turn off, spy a gaggle

of little boys headed home

from Cub Scouts or Bible School.

Grateful to them, I stop, roll down

the window, tell the nearest child:

“I am being followed.

Could I use your parents’ phone?”

“OK”, the kid says “I live over there,”

pointing down the road. “Get in,”

I say, “I’ll take you all home,”

and seven small boys

climb in.

 

I am driving slowly

when the sheriff

curious

at the sight,

of a white lady’s car

bursting

with black boys,

stops me.

 

I look back and see

the white van

at the turnoff

to the town,

waiting.

 

 

E. Laura Golberg

Laura Golberg’s poem Erasure has been nominated for a Pushcart 2021 Prize. Her poetry has appeared in Rattle, Poet Lore, Laurel Review, Birmingham Poetry Review, Spillway, RHINO, and the Journal of Humanistic Mathematics, among other places. She won first place in the Washington, DC Commission on the Arts Larry Neal Poetry Competition.

Eugene Shin

April 2021 | visual art

Plural Cycles

 

Eugene Shin

Eugene Shin is a teenage artist living in Seoul, Korea. He has previously been recognized by the Scholastic art competition with several photographic works. He enjoys experimenting with various materials and recently he is expanding his interest from photography to drawing, painting, and digital art. He hopes to express himself with diverse artistic ways continuously.

Psych Experiment

April 2021 | poetry

Sitting in the isolation booth,

listening for the fading bell.

The headphones, leather-bound and lush,

are pillowy around my ears,

a vacuum of sound.

When I first signed up,

I thought it would be easy money.

But within the experiment,

there is always a double game.

 

Amidst a distant humming,

my eardrums gradually disconnect,

and another timbre insinuates itself.

Exclusivity is now unblurred into its primary coloring.

Causal potency, insistent and self-confident,

reaches across the small revolutions

of electrons and protons,

and the power embedded within the orbits becomes tactile.

If you calculate the empty space between the points of energy,

the sum will strain comprehension.

Layer on the emergent potential

and it will fold upon itself, numberless.

 

They want you to tell them what they already know,

but, there’s something else answered

in the darkening absence of sound.

As the soul machine re-dons

its practiced gait, momentum and mass

disguise the slightest remnant of a limp.

Metal shavings vibrate softly,

re-orienting to magnetic poles

with their interpretations.

 

Chris Innes

Chris Innes is a writer living in Washington, D.C. and has had poetry published in a variety of literary magazines, including The Wisconsin Review, The Cape Rock, Prairie Winds, Common Ground Review, The Pikeville Review, Descant, and The Mankato Poetry Review.

Danny Rebb

April 2021 | visual art

Out of the Darkness Shines a Light – no. iii

 

Danny Rebb

Danny Rebb is a disabled self-taught photographer who first picked up a camera forty years ago and currently resides in Dearborn, Michigan. His work seeks to evoke emotion in the viewer by portraying unexpected beauty in overlooked places and circumstances or to transform what at first glance seems to be grotesque into something beautiful. Danny was previously published in the Summer 2020 edition of Flora Fiction literary magazine. Additional images from his body of work may be seen in Instagram at @dannyrebbfineartphotography

How to draw a horse

April 2021 | Best of Net nominee, poetry

Honestly, I can’t be bothered to find out

Whether there is already a poem

About how to draw a horse,

The words brushed sleek as the roan mare

You curried the summer you were fourteen

And horseshit was a perfume you sniffed

Eagerly as lilac, as bread broken open,

The linseed funk of a boy two years older,

His voice beyond breaking; his long lashes

Pretty as a forelock. Stables call for pen and ink

And a sure hand; you can use charcoal for a canter.

How to draw a horse– you’re thinking the horse

Stands for something else and it may,

They come standard in quartets for an apocalypse,

Well-matched, ready for a chaise and four

Like Bingley had, along with Netherfield

And Darcy’s impossible friendship, fronting

A dusty stagecoach in the Wild West. You listen

For hoofbeats similar to your systole

If you are not terrified, in a tizzy, falling in love

The way I fall down the stairs in my dreams, endless,

The fall through clouds on a gas giant, pocked Jupiter

Or Bespin, an asymptotic descent I cannot complete.

 

How to draw a horse:

Simply,

Using your dominant hand,

Knowing the crest and the croup,

Still, breathless, tasting

The sweet green scent of masticated hay,

The antithesis of your adoration,

Knowing you will fail.

 

Daisy Bassen

Daisy Bassen is a poet and practicing physician who graduated from Princeton University’s Creative Writing Program and completed her medical training at The University of Rochester and Brown. Her work has been published in Oberon, McSweeney’s, and [PANK] among other journals. She was the winner of the So to Speak 2019 Poetry Contest, the 2019 ILDS White Mice Contest and the 2020 Beullah Rose Poetry Prize. She was doubly nominated for the 2019 Best of the Net Anthology and for a 2019 and 2020 Pushcart Prize. She lives in Rhode Island with her family.