October 2023 | fiction
I once was the hot new thing. You too? The new kid who stirred the id. I had some cheek; the classroom and rehearsal hall were my geek. If hot was or is your lot, some snot lives who wish you were not. They snide and snark, hide in the dark seeing if our bite is as good as our bark. You and I have fans we won’t declare, who check us out, but all us chickens are so very devout. It’s a bubble with an X, a Y, and Ziminy ways it can break into trouble. Bearded and trim, they take a pass and check to see my hipless ass. Start the music playing, make it rock to kill the clock, or every head bye-bye says and cuts us dead. What a game we had with that bit of fame, excited, jotted, and besotted carved up and knotted. Boo hoo, ca choo if we put you in a stew because here comes the sun, and there’s more will to be done. It was a time so round, so fresh, so fully packed. Do it, take it, crate it, or fake it, juice the flavor, let it roast and coast, mature and savor before any boast. A quantum window flew upward in the day, and we tumbled in full to the brim. Six-winged seraphim busted out glory and joy on the In-Fi-niTE AM radio. It was the Hour Of The Word on a ’56 Chevy heard rumblin’ down a dirt road by the old quarry. That’s the story.
Jim Linnell
After attending schools on the East and West Coast, Jim Linnell taught theater and dramatic writing at a university in New Mexico long enough to be a chair and a dean and to have a play festival in his name. He published Walking on Fire: The Shaping Force of Emotion in Writing Drama, then had a catastrophic accident that, for a period, rendered him a quadriplegic. After gaining function with a walker, he published Take It Lying Down: Finding My Feet After a Spinal Cord Injury. He lives and writes in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
October 2023 | poetry
he passed through brackish streets
filled with disintegrated rubble
and dilapidated homes unmoored
from their footings strung together
by sagging electrical lines extinguished
of power and children’s playgrounds
with rusted jungle gyms lonely
and exsanguinated of their frivolous
vigor like some wandering itinerants
living in hollowed shells of their
former selves searching for morsels
of food for his quavering children
who hadn’t eaten since saturday
and even then it was only oily corn
from a rusted tin can salvaged from
an abandoned root cellar at a
devastated farm with poisoned
crops sagging in their furrowed
fields devoid of any identifiable
forms of life not even cut worms
or creeping charlie or redroot
pigweed and just six days removed
from burying their swollen mother
in that ashy soil on the outskirts
of some backwater town on the
shore of some wandering river
populated with unmoored tug
boats and land locked pleasure
vessels long ransacked and devoid
of any human usefulness what
with the rancid water and rotting
fishes peppering the swollen
shoreline like some biblical
plague of epic proportions and
all the while following the circuitous
route of some meandering railroad
line in an unmitigated effort to
to salvage another form of life
in an undiscovered land devoid
of suffering owing to its sheltered
location between two preening
mountain ranges while carefully
evading those roving bands
of demented marauders
James Butcher
James has published work in Box, Hole In The Head Review, Burningword Literary Journal, Rivet, Prick of the Spindle, Midwest Review, Cream City Review, Wildroof Journal, and Raw Art Review.
October 2023 | Best of Net nominee, poetry
Learning to Dance
Hooked on the two-four sorcery,
bass and drum, dances at St. Jerome’s,
I held up a wall for half an hour
before I could ask the one
whose eyes turned ice to water,
spun home through the dark
between the streetlamp pools of light.
Lost in a trance for a year,
I woke when the plane
bumped down into Luxembourg.
Lost the first day at the hostel,
I took the train to Zurich,
found an old Tolkien
jammed behind the seat,
carried him all the way to here,
hitch-hiked south and crossed
four days later near Chiasso,
rode a box truck into the Dolomites,
traded my boots for a sweater.
The new owner took me
to his family’s stone house,
steep meadows, barn filled with sheep.
For a week I was a shepherd,
combed pastures with the ewes,
saw why I had to go away.
Like a brother, he brought me
back to the road-fork;
I didn’t want to get out,
flatbeds and Fiats all the way to Venice.
Three days later I started again,
no rides past Solesino, evening falling,
I laid in the grass, read
until the dark took it away,
ate the crushed bread and cheese,
slept in the field.
In the morning I sang Creedence,
waited for kindness
danced on the empty road.
Came as Ravens
Cloaks as black as widows
they strut the deck railing,
peer in the windows, leap away,
their shadows stream
across the ferns and rocks.
They come, peck at the doors,
smear saliva on the windows
that dries to a chalky cuneiform.
When I was small, she’d kneel beside me,
coach the story I couldn’t believe.
But last night, kneeling on the kitchen floor
sweeping up pieces of glass,
dust rolled from under the stove
and her voice came into the air.
They glide from tree to tree,
compile their inventories,
drift over the swath of light
I cut in the crowds of hemlock,
a shrine for the lost opened to the sun,
cast the ashes there like seeds.
The winged mourners scavenge
offerings I lay on the boulders,
a lamb abandoned by her ewe,
stiffened hens tired of winter.
I sit on the porch and sift the past,
see her folded hands,
the raised tracks of skin,
burn scars from the bindery’s vinyl-sealer,
listen to their guttural calls,
the clicked code they chant
high in the dead fir by the lake.
Mark Anthony Burke
Mark Burke’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in the North American Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Sugar House Review, Nimrod International Journal, and others. His work has recently been nominated for a Pushcart prize. Please see markanthonyburkesongsandpoems.com
October 2023 | nonfiction
The first human cremains I should have seen? What kind of question is that? I have an answer — my mom’s. I did not see them because when they were done (is that the right way to put it?) I was living 300 miles away. I had them overnighted to her mother, 1,200 miles away. The first human cremains I actually saw were on the east bank of the Susquehanna River in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Heavy-duty plastic bag, from a distance like sand. But then, label, name, death date, crematorium address. The name was Duka. I thought it was a cremated dog, like a female Duke. I regret this assumption but I volunteer at the dog shelter and they aren’t no-kill, so.
The next morning I returned, re-read the label, saw a surname. A person. Two coins by the bag. Fare for Charon? A straight shot to one of the islands, the afterlife. It’s a wide river.
I searched for an obituary, found none. Do I often search for obituaries? I’m not going to answer that. Saw references to the ethnicity. Nepalese. The city had accepted Nepalese earthquake refugees. They lit funeral pyres on holy rivers, part of the passage to reincarnation. I guessed that waterborne funeral pyres were not allowed in central Pennsylvania. I could picture elderly Nepalese doing the next best thing, ferrying ashes to the river’s edge, just setting them there. And the coins not for Charon, but maybe Lakshmi coins. Wealth.
I went back day after day and crouched by the bag, curious and sad. Who else visited? Is that a question you’re really asking?
I had this question: Why ashes? Cremains look like smashed coral. When have I seen smashed coral? When haven’t I. I kept thinking of the scene in Cheryl Strayed’s Wild where she tastes her mom’s ashes. I could not imagine putting this fine gravel of bone against my lips. I could envision reincarnation, however. Even Charon, I could imagine him.
What happened to the cremains? A flood, rafts of branches pummeled the bank, broke the bag. When the river level dropped to shallow, I could see a white swirl embedded in the mud, like a shred of a shroud. Wouldn’t the flood have taken it all away?
I hate your questions. Why not ask what compelled me to return and look.
Jen Hirt
Jen Hirt is the author of the memoir Under Glass: The Girl with a Thousand Christmas Trees, the essay collection Hear Me Ohio, and the poetry chapbook Too Many Questions About Strawberries. She is the co-editor of two anthologies of creative nonfiction. She is the editor at the Journal of Creative Writing Studies. Her work has won a Pushcart Prize, has been listed as “notable” in Best American Essays, and was nominated by Terrain for the John Burroughs Nature Writing Award. She is an associate professor at Penn State Harrisburg. Read more of her work at jenhirt.ink
