Untitled, Black

January 2019 | visual art

Untitled, Black

Untitled, Black

 

by Stephen Curtis Wilson

Wilson is a graduate of the fine arts program at Illinois Central College, East Peoria, Illinois, and received his B. A. from the University of Illinois. He is a juried Illinois Artisan for Photography through the Illinois State Museum. During his 35 year professional career as a communication director and specialist, he was a generalist and executive ghost writer, photographer, designer, and media-relations manager. A regionalist photographer, his images have recently been juried into exhibitions in Rhinelander, Wisconsin; Portland, Oregon; Fulton, Missouri; Springfield and Freeport, Illinois, among others. His work can be viewed at stephencurtiswilson.com.

Requiem*

January 2019 | poetry

Outside

lone mockingbird

perches on oak branch

holds his early service

 

Inside

Requiem—

benevolent din

spreads her arms

around hushed church

 

Outside

wind whirls

whips crusty leaves at

anxious autumn

 

Inside

cloaked in mystery

harmonies brush callused fists

rub tear stained cheeks

tongues of light

dance radiant lament

through stained-glass

 

Outside

sudden quiet—

has earth stopped turning

all trees frozen, seas dried up?

 

Inside

Dies Irae wafts over

undulating shoulders

stooped in wooden pews

choir incants

endless tangle of Latin

sounds anguish me—numb

 

Outside

rain begins weeping—

aeternam, aeternam, aeternam

sobbing, bleeding onto fresh-dug grave

 

*Inspired by Mozart Requiem- Catholic Mass for the Dead
Dies Irae- Day of Wrath, Aeternam- Eternal

 

by Marianne Lyon

Marianne has been a music teacher for 43 years. After teaching in Hong Kong, she returned to the Napa Valley and has been published in various literary magazines and reviews including Ravens Perch, TWJM Magazine, Earth Daughters and Indiana Voice Journal. She was nominated for the Pushcart prize in 2017. She is a member of the California Writers Club and an Adjunct Professor at Touro University in California.

Meditation on the Nature of Reality

January 2019 | poetry

What’s here is here, almost none of the time—

no matter what clever slogan your coffee cup says,

 

no matter which way

the plastic flamingos are facing,

 

and even if there was a happy ending.

 

I’m nervous,

to the point of blurred vision.  My breathing feels

like a broken train of thought,

 

the actuality of my fears, derailed and spreading

 

small fires

all across town.

 

This realization that somewhere, far enough away,

those cataclysmic flames are just a distant light;

 

that even a mass extinction

is just a distant light.

 

Which is to say, somewhere else, half buried in the snow,

 

a dying coyote is hallucinating warmth

and maybe the Harvest moon,

hung by yellow rope

in a December sky.

 

Which is also to say,

despite our awareness of absent mercy,

every star is someone’s final illusion,

 

not a redeal,

but one last ember

of comfort.

 

by John Leonard

John Leonard is a substitute teacher and professor of composition. He holds an M.A. in English from Indiana University South Bend. His previous works have appeared in Twyckenham Notes, Poetry Quarterly, The Jawline Review, Fearsome Critters: A Millennial Arts Journal, and Up the Staircase Quarterly. He was the 2016 inaugural recipient of the Wolfson Poetry Award and 2018 recipient of the Josephine K. Piercy Memorial Award. John was recently appointed assistant editor of Twyckenham Notes. He lives in Elkhart, Indiana with his wife, three cats, and two dogs.

The Prison Forecast

January 2019 | fiction

“Welcome, Tim!”

“Great to be on the show, Jill!”

“So—what’s your outlook on today’s prison market?”

“Well, I’ve been bullish for a long time, and the private sector has done well by any metric. All is solid on the fundamentals. The U.S. has the highest incarceration rate in the world. More than China, more than Russia. Belarus isn’t even close. Cuba and Saudi Arabia can’t touch us. The numbers don’t lie. The smart investor can still hope to see a good return.”

“But can growth continue? Some people say that opioids have created a bubble.”

“Don’t believe the doomsayers! You hear lots of sensational things in the media, but I don’t think the market has peaked. Here’s an inconvenient truth for the hand-wringers, Jill: opioids bring repeat customers. It’s a very loyal base. We’re seeing growth in rural America that folks wouldn’t have dreamed of a few years ago. And that puts a premium on our product. Law enforcement needs us. And so do hard-working, law-abiding citizens. We’re renewing a vital infrastructure and we’re big job creators. Construction and security contractors, laundry services and independent catering—you name it. Forget the fancy talk. The hotel industry isn’t seeing this kind of growth. Theme parks are saturated. But we’re still expanding.”

“How’s that look from the inside? Break it down for me. What’s hot and what’s not?”

“It’s a question of vision, of keeping up with changes in today’s world. Some people hear the word “prison” and they think: rapists and murderers. Armed robbery. Arson. To their mind, that’s the brand. OK, that’s our legacy, sure, but in reality there’s so much more—for instance, we’re seeing an uptick in incarcerations of undocumented people. For a long time it was a sleeper sector, but lately we’ve been tapping an unrealized potential. There’s less red tape involved, compared to regular prisoners, which brings a promising margin for the savvy provider. I’m bullish on the undocumented.”

“How about juveniles?”

“Depends. Investors need to do their homework. Different states have different codes. Overall, though, progress is being made, because we’re getting some leadership from the top. Nobody with skin in the game really wants bureaucratic meddling.”

“Terrorism? Where does it fit into this cycle?”

“We’re growing partnerships internationally, and domestically, we’re probably going to see some movement. I don’t have a crystal ball, but indicators suggest that we can expect more activity in this area. Nobody wants to think about it, but professionals in the field are rolling up their sleeves and they’ll be ready. A big part of our value added is being poised so that the rest of America doesn’t have to think about it. People sleep better at night knowing that the invisible hand has long arms. Count on us, Jill. We’ll be there!”

“Thanks, Tim. We’ll take a commercial break, and next we’ll hear from Micah Stevens about a controversial new pet food. The kitty kibble wars are heating up! Come back and learn all about it.”

 

by Charles Holdefer

Charles Holdefer is an American writer currently based in Brussels. His work has appeared in the New England Review, North American Review, Chicago Quarterly Review, Slice and in the 2017 Pushcart Prize anthology. His recent books include DICK CHENEY IN SHORTS (stories) and GEORGE SAUNDERS’ PASTORALIA: BOOKMARKED (nonfiction). Visit Charles at www.charlesholdefer.com

Lobster in Broth

January 2019 | Best of Net nominee, poetry

One night, we don’t know how, he slips the bands

that bind his claws and sets to work.  If fast or slow,

it doesn’t matter—whether, in a rage

of thrashing action or, methodical

(the slow precision of a diver bent

on patient reclamation from the sea),

he stalks and disassembles each bound mate

he’s harbored with, and snaps off limbs and pries

between the overlapping plates their shells

can offer only for their weak defense.

He rips them up, thrusts toothed appendages

into the soft connective flesh, and feeds.

 

All through the night his work transpires until,

in morning’s white fluorescent light, he lies

revealed: an armored, glutted emperor,

a sated cannibal astir within

his muddied lair, his realm acloud with limbs

adrift and picked and gnawed to fringe along

the edges of their shells, and tissue ripped

to pennant threads and litter at his feet.

 

Consider how we care for him: the creature we’d

have eaten without thought, though he contrived

to feast before us, had he not consumed

the meat we’d meant to satiate ourselves.

And now, the empty tank near tenantless,

do we declare the victim we’d have made

our own a criminal among the just, or call

him reprehensible in spite of us?

 

by Gregory Loselle

Gregory Loselle has won four Hopwood Awards at The University of Michigan, where he earned an MFA. He has won The Academy of American Poets Prize, the William van Wert Fiction Award from Hidden River Arts, and The Ruby Lloyd Apsey Award for Playwriting. He was the winner of the 2009 Lorian Hemingway Short Story Competition, The Robert Frost Award of The Robert Frost Foundation, and the Rita Dove Prize for poetry (where he won both First Prize and an Honorable Mention) at Salem College. He has won multiple awards in the Poetry Society of Michigan’s Annual Awards Competition. His first chapbook, Phantom Limb, was published in 2008, and another, Our Parents Dancing, in 2010, both from Pudding House Press. Two more, The Whole of Him Collected, and About the House, were published by Finishing Line Press in 2012 and 2013 respectively. His short fiction has been featured in the Wordstock and Robert Olen Butler Competition anthologies, as well as in The Saturday Evening Post, and The Metro Times of Detroit, and his poetry has appeared in The Ledge, Oberon, The Comstock Review, Rattle, The Georgetown Review, River Styx, The Spoon River Poetry Review, The Pinch, Alehouse, Poetry Nook, Sow’s Ear, and online in The Ambassador Poetry Project, among others.