Metaphysical Exam

January 2024 | Best of Net nominee, poetry

She begins:

How have your spirits been?

Tell me your name. Where we are right now. The day of the week.

Have you noticed any smells that others around you cannot sense?

Such as the smell of charred toast—

or honeysuckle?

Do you feel this?

 

She touches across my face.

How’s your vision?

Last night, when headlights fanned across your bedroom floor, did you feel clean? Or did the light catch in your curtains and remind you of being watched? Everything the light touches proof that the window is all that keeps you from the outside.

Can you hear this?

 

The sound is alive and mechanical and whirls like a machine.

 

Smile, like you’re trying to convince someone of something.

As though you’re trying to produce in me a change– the starting edge of which I won’t notice until I leave this exam room, gone home for the day, and let my car idle in the driveway

a minute too long.

When you slice your finger with a knife,

the blood rarely appears as quickly as you’d expect.

Puff your cheeks, now–

 

her hands against my face as though to test the strength of an inflated balloon.

 

Very good.

 

 

She pulls out a pen light.

Follow this light with your eyes.

 

She spells out H E R E T I C with her pen.

 

My eyes roll around in my head.

 

Now–

put out your hands as if to see if it’s raining. Like you’re the first person at the picnic to feel a drop.

Close your eyes.

Think about the grandfather you never knew. He was a preacher and a liar. Your father sang you to sleep with The Bankrobber by The Clash so you would know what he couldn’t tell you.

Very good.

 

Liz Irvin

Liz Irvin is a writer and second-year medical student at the University of Massachusetts Chan Medical School. She holds a B.A. in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies from Barnard College at Columbia University. Her essay “Seasick: Lessons in Human Anatomy from Hyman Bloom’s The Hull (1952)” appeared in Hektoen International. She lives in Worcester, Massachusetts.

Featured Artist, DM Frech

January 2024 | visual art

Montana Tree

Storm Approach

Sun and Sea

DM Frech

DM Frech holds a BFA and MFA in dance from the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University. She has worked at the Governor’s School of the Arts in Virginia and is an active member of several writing organizations, including The Muse Writers Center, Hampton Roads Writers, Poetry Society of Virginia, and The Writers Guild of Virginia. DM Frech writes poetry, children’s stories, fiction, nonfiction, and screenplays. Her photography was showcased on the Streetlight Magazine website in October 2022 and featured in the New Feather anthology in April 2023. She has won multiple nonfiction awards at The Hampton Roads Writers Conference. Both her poetry chapbooks Quiet Tree and Words From Walls, published in 2023 and 2022 by Finishing Line Press, featured her photography.

Featured Author, Ditta Baron Hoeber

January 2024 | poetry

Untitled (Coke was taller than most women)

 

Coke was taller than most women and moved in a way that somehow provoked anticipation     watching
her cross a room you wondered if this splendid thing would actually happen to you     same with her voice
with everything she’d say and I remember that her eyes were grey

and Jimmy     once Jimmy kissed me     I couldn’t have been more than fourteen when Jimmy kissed me
his mouth seemed to take me over and afterwards I ran away     but stayed kissed all afternoon

I saw Coke on the bus wearing a mink jacket one morning and big diamonds looking a handsome late
thirties on her second marriage twelve year old child and she says Jimmy’s got his masters degree and his
wife’s a nurse and Coke says that Mileage whose black moon face and joke on you laughter used to
frighten me     has passed away

 

Untitled (when things get bad enough)

 

when things get bad enough

I start wishing I would die.

 

actually, I had intended to say,

 

when things get bad enough

I start wishing other people would die

 

so I would be left

the pleasures of abandonment.

 

you mentioned the word suicide today

I caught it in my teeth and

 

carried it home to put in a poem.

I am not respectful enough its true

 

of me of you

but thank you for the word.

 

Untitled (I have a small book)

 

I have a small book with yellow covers and half translucent pages.     I thought of using it as a drawing
book but never did because I imagined the drawings would bleed through to each other in disturbing
ways.  but now I have the idea of making my first drawing on the last page of the book, so I can see it as I
draw on the page that comes before.     that way I can design that second drawing to relate to the first.
and so on.

 

Ditta Baron Hoeber

An artist and a poet, Ditta Baron Hoeber’s poems have been published in a number of magazines including Noon: journal of the short poem, Gargoyle, the American Journal of Poetry, Juxtaprose, Pank, Burningword Literary Journal, the American Poetry Review, and Contemporary American Voices. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and her first book, Without You, is forthcoming in March of 2024. Her photographs, drawings, and book works have been exhibited nationally and acquired by several collections in the US and the UK.

Jack Bordnick Studio

January 2024 | visual art

Facing It Together

Facing It Together

Jack Bordnick Studio

Bordnick’s interest is to create meaningful works of art that all people and cultures can enjoy. As a photographer and sculptor, he has been able to share his professional experiences in ways that benefit both business and community projects. With over twenty years of experience, he has successfully designed, fabricated, and installed a wide range of projects. He is an industrial design/sculpture graduate of Pratt Institute in New York, where he has had his own professional design business and has been a design director for numerous companies and local government projects. They included a major children’s museum for the city of New York and the Board of Education.

A Death of Logic

January 2024 | poetry

In another dimension, it is me & not Dostoevsky

who claims 2-plus-2 can equal 5.

 

I have pressed TV rewind enough times

to see how toothpaste can slide right back into the tube

 

after dissolving across teeth & draining into the sink.

The vomit gurgitates itself back into a glass of kegged beer.

 

I have seen blood pour itself back into the vein, from wine.

 

& who is to say that after her father laid himself to rest

under the commuter train that he didn’t lift his body

 

back into another world

 

where we are still twelve years old

at Fenway Park. At the seventh inning stretch,

 

he holds both a beer, & a camera

to capture our sweet Caroline smiles.

 

O, ode to the Jeremy Bearimy!

 

To be a dot in the I

& repeat that one life

 

forever and without time.

 

A place where nothing never happens.

 

I mean, if Leo himself can climb through a dream

inside a dream, then why not me?

 

There could be a galaxy in which I’m seen.

In which my body was never taken away from me.

 

A world in which I can spot love

3 trillion miles away.

 

I can hold it in my palms:

a crystal ball of intimacy.

 

A life in which your death is only a death in flesh.

& when your bones crumble to ash, they will

 

sprout with the grass,

germinate with the morning dew.

 

Yes, you will be reborn in a different world –

you will arrive again, as you.

 

Lis Beasley

Lis Beasley (she/her) is a licensed mental health counselor. She was previously published in the Worcester Review. A lifelong writer, her poetry often explores the intersection of family, mental health, substance abuse, and incarceration. She can be found on Instagram @lisbeaspoetry.