January 2024 | fiction, Pushcart nominee
By the time I realized why this sublet was so cheap, it was too late—I was being tortured by the Inquisition. In case you were wondering, it was nothing like the Monty Python skit. How awesome would that have been? Well, it doesn’t help that I started giggling when they told me to, “Confess the heinous sin of heresy.” Oh God, hah! Oh, hah, huh. Hmm, sorry, can’t help it, makes me snort every time I remember that bit. But yes, my burns are still healing. Dear God, who knew screaming into a small transponder would cause so much hullabaloo. I forget how touchy the early Spanish empire could be.
I mean, I grew up Catholic, for Christ’s sake, but I never had to learn Latin, thank you, Vatican II. So when they asked me to prove my religion by reciting a few prayers, I busted out what I thought as “Profession of Faith,” but these guys thought I was spouting heresy because I was speaking modern Spanish. I did forget my Babelfish, which may have saved my ass. Wait – is it even programmed for medieval Latin? Well, lessons have been learned, that is all I have to say.
And here they are:
(1.) Double-check that your sublet to Andalusia’s Golden Era is for BEFORE 1478.
(2.) Remember to look at the profile of the person you are subletting from to make sure they aren’t a bored, rich sadist who wants to watch you suffer a bit AND pay for the “pleasure” of it.
(3.) Always, and I mean always, remember your Babelfish. Modern languages are always a tip-off and can mess with history. Ah shit, did I just change history? Has my guest rating gone down? Thank God for the fixed term on the sublet and automatic return to our time period. Not sure how the empty shackles will be explained to the Inquisitors. Hold on, I am quickly checking Spanish history on the network to see if anything has changed dramatically. Hold please. Shit. Shit. Shit. Shit!
Which leads me to
(4.) Always do a thorough research of the current understanding of the history of your destination and write that shit down or copy it somewhere where it cannot be altered in order to do a thorough comparison afterward.
And if all else fails,
(5.) See if there is a cheap ticket back to the immediate past to prevent yourself from buying the sublet in the first place.
Heather Bourbeau
Heather Bourbeau’s award-winning poetry and fiction have appeared in The Irish Times, The Kenyon Review, Meridian, and The Stockholm Review of Literature. She is the winner of La Piccioletta Barca’s inaugural competition and the Chapman Magazine Flash Fiction winner and has twice been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her writings are part of the Special Collections at the James Joyce Library, University College Dublin. Her latest poetry collection Monarch is a poetic memoir of overlooked histories from the US West she was raised in (Cornerstone Press, 2023).
January 2024 | Best of Net nominee, poetry
His hair has grown the shock of sunflowers after rain.
The smell of those threshed stalks, nosegay against variant ills—
he also loves the man-fox after musty plum tomatoes
which, having brazened wooden stakes, now devolve seed-ward.
How his mother swells uneasily with every moon,
how she trails stale chocolate wrappers, coffee dregs
luring whatever’s hungry and curiously about.
Mornings she sweeps red golds from the stoop as he crouches in desire
his fox will reappear. These nocturnal dreams are an open door,
white ruff soaking up detritus cast by meteorites and stars.
Too young to stay awake all night, he’s been promised she will fetch him
at a pale quarter to five, bring him a basket of boiled eggs
light sepia in craquelure. Then the recognition scene:
sharp teeth will seize his wrist leaving a faint mark
that can never truly fade. He, the fiercest boy
on the bleak suburban road, child unrehearsed in loss,
can watch the animal devour yolk and shell. It is already and done.
A pewter sky rings harshly before the fall deluge
while the fox that threads its way beyond the fences
does what wild creatures do. Leaves a hint, a question
small puffs of incandescent fur, narrow footprints in the mud.
Carol Alexander
Carol Alexander is the author of Fever and Bone (Dos Madres Press), Environments (Dos Madres), and Habitat Lost (CMP). Her work appears in About Place Journal, Another Chicago Magazine, The Common, Denver Quarterly, Mudlark, RHINO, Southern Humanities Review, The Summerset Review, Third Wednesday, Verdad, and elsewhere. With Stephen Massimilla, Alexander co-edited the award-winning anthology Stronger Than Fear: Poems of Empowerment, Compassion, and Social Justice (Cave Moon Press, 2022). A new collection of Alexander’s poetry is forthcoming in 2024 from Glass Lyre Press.
January 2024 | poetry
That evening you drove us out on the bruised southern beach
we lost the hope we’d find the words to match
the gold slant of sunlight’s sail across Gulf Coast swells and sand.
We stood in the empty lobby, luggage in tow full of secrets,
two people, houseless together, and the wind—don’t you remember? —
shoved us off the courtyard and boardwalk and shore
onto broken bits of orange shell and seaglass the foam white sand
absolved of its every edge. When we look back
through photos on the shiny screen of a phone,
we’ve slipped away from those patient guides, the pelicans
on updrafts off breakers where the sun never goes down,
and stepped into a groaning wind and chill light, two people
on earth, itself a straggler in a flight of planets touring the sun.
Apalachicola, February 2023
Michael Daley
Michael Daley, born and raised in Massachusetts, has published sixteen books, three of which came out in 2022: Reinhabited: New & Selected Poems (Dos Madres, Loveland, OH), Telemachus, a novel (Pleasure Boat Studio, Seattle, WA), and True Heresies, poems (Cervena Barva, Somerville, MA). He is managing editor of The Madrona Project anthology series. A retired teacher, he lives in Anacortes, Washington
October 2023 | poetry
There’s only so much you can change about yourself.
Like this morning, I dreamt I dropped a baby down the stairs and trumpets started playing
As it stared through me with my own eyes like I’d just suicided.
Flavors of trauma come with malleable parts.
Today, I ate an entire bag of chips and painted a watercolor octopus. I thought I had cancer.
I took my blood pressure three times. I told everyone of my fear… to practice saying cancer.
In public places, my neck strains like a dried sunflower curling down, looking for the stairs.
Hell is a dream full of music.
Brandyce Ingram is a writer, tutor, and jazz-head in Seattle, WA. Her work has appeared in High Shelf Press, Willowdown Books, Sand Hills Lit Mag, Wildroof Journal, An Evening with Emily Dickinson (via Wingless Dreamer), and elsewhere. Her latest search history includes “20th-century lunatic asylums women” and “how to use a crap ton of fresh mint pesto chimichurri sauces or soju cocktails.”
October 2023 | Best of Net nominee, poetry
It’s always the rot stench of the wound
that draws me in—the beetle to the Corpse Flower.
You were eager to unfurl your bruised blooms:
you told me about the poverty, the prison, your abusive,
alcoholic father. You winced to mention him. A palpable
stab. I ached to smell more of your festering, to share how it feels
to be birthed of betrayal. I wanted to open myself up
to you like a trench coat, show you the ax to my gut—
my mother. My vanished leg—my father. Now,
I wonder if the stalking, the drugging, the rape
was your wound reveal: This is the ghost
of my dead inner child. I’m here to show you
what can happen to children and how bad it can get.
The blood and feces in my sheets said, This bad.
Anne Champion
Anne Champion is the author of She Saints & Holy Profanities (Quarterly West, 2019), The Good Girl is Always a Ghost (Black Lawrence Press, 2018), Book of Levitations (Trembling Pillow Press, 2019), Reluctant Mistress (Gold Wake Press, 2013), and The Dark Length Home (Noctuary Press, 2017). Her work appears in Verse Daily, diode, Tupelo Quarterly, Prairie Schooner, Crab Orchard Review, Salamander, New South, Redivider, PANK Magazine, and elsewhere. She was a 2009 Academy of American Poets Prize recipient, a 2016 Best of the Net winner, and a Barbara Deming Memorial Grant recipient.
