Starting the Garden

January 2023 | poetry

The usual builders’ rubble, buckled screws,

snapped trowel-heads, small chunks of plank,

the strips of broken two by two, the bottle-caps.

(Images of blokes in spring and summer sun

drilling, fixing, tamping, swigging.)

A foot or two, a generation lower,

the first sheep’s bones. My farming cousin

confirmed their species, and this had been

the slaughterhouse field, where sheep, pigs, cows,

would wait their entry to the abattoir.

(My father’s gang, living a street away as boys,

would listen to the squeals and bleating,

before the thud. The sudden laden silence.)

I wondered about those bones. So how

did they escape the slaughter? And for what?

Then suddenly a skull, a flat crushed skull

(my cousin said a lamb of two years old).

So what obscure extinction?

My daughter, nine years old, dealt with it

earnestly, calling the remnant “Larry”.

We buried him between the compost and the beans

and raised a simple cross.

Robert Nisbet

Robert Nisbet is a Welsh poet whose work has appeared widely in Britain and the USA. He won the Prole Pamphlet Competition in 2017 with Robeson, Fitzgerald and Other Heroes. In the USA he has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize four times in the last three years.

Not Like a Poem

January 2023 | poetry

Life is and is not like a poem.

The poem enters a room with variable dimensions

And all at once I feel it sway.

My feet enter a room and its colors are always the same.

A line comes dressed with the surprise of sudden stops

And redresses itself with every turn it makes into the next;

There is no dirty laundry hanging on the line.

A day without lines is a day filled with boredom.

An average line escapes like a melodic flute or trombone

Towards the back of an orchestra;

In my everyday world it’s the only instrument I play.

I pay out the line as the poem comes near to its dock.

A poem has a theory of movement and each movement a sign;

A life has more movements and hopes for more time.

Michael Salcman

MICHAEL SALCMAN: poet, physician and art historian, was chairman of neurosurgery at the University of Maryland and president of the Contemporary Museum. Poems appear in Arts & Letters, Barrow Street, The Café Review, Hopkins Review, The Hudson Review, New Letters, and Poet Lore. Books include The Clock Made of Confetti, The Enemy of Good is Better, Poetry in Medicine, his popular anthology of classic and contemporary poems on doctors, patients, illness & healing, A Prague Spring, Before & After, winner of the 2015 Sinclair Poetry Prize, and Shades & Graces, inaugural winner of The Daniel Hoffman Legacy Book Prize (Spuyten Duyvil, 2020). Necessary Speech: New & Selected Poems was published by Spuyten Duyvil in 2022.

Larena Nellies-Ortiz

January 2023 | Best of Net nominee, visual art

Jaywalking

 

Turn Your Back to Sea

 

Larena Nellies-Ortiz

Larena Nellies-Ortiz is a photographer and arts educator who lives in Los Angeles, California where she loves to color, texture, and shadow hunt in the early morning hours. Her photos are featured or forthcoming in Barren Magazine, Burningword Literary Journal, Local Wolves Magazine, Stonecoast Review, 3Elements Review, and Sun Magazine.

What the Squirrels See

January 2023 | fiction

I’m up my favorite tree in our woods and I get to see what squirrels see,  then Dad walks into his man cave right underneath with that neighbor lady who brought that board with butter and stuff smeared on it to the block party and she says he’s handy and then she makes noises like she’s running on hot sand and he shushes her and then he says Oh, God, Oh, God and I wonder was that in vain, then she says Oh, God, it’s already six-o-clock and she rushes out then he leaves, and at dinner Mom asks Dad why wasn’t he home early because when she tried to call he didn’t pick up and she called his assistant and they said he already left, and Dad says my assistant can’t keep track of anyone she watches those flash mobs all day and he yells you don’t know how hard I’m working and Mom cries, and my cousin said that’s what my aunt and uncle did before they got divorced they yelled but the main thing is my Dad lied, and when my cousin kept asking my aunt why did she get a divorce from my uncle my aunt kept saying we both love you very much and it’s not your fault, but finally my aunt told my cousin, he lied, that’s why, your Dad lied.

Michelle Morouse

Michelle Morouse is a Detroit area pediatrician. Her flash fiction and poetry has appeared recently, or is forthcoming, in Midwest Review, Prose Online, Best Microfiction 2022, Touchstone Literary Magazine, Faultline Journal of Arts and Letters, Litro, Unbroken, and Paterson Literary Review. She serves on the board of Detroit Working Writers.

Ice Fishing

January 2023 | nonfiction

The grey trout flops on the ice and stills, its blood clotted. Dave holds the rigid fish trophy-high, and I snap a photo to prove our lives are as full as the trout’s thick belly. The fish’s mouth gapes, its body wall-mounted stiff.

It’s late, this fishing. This casting into the dark maw of lake with spider-web lines that glisten in the lowering sun. I stamp the membrane of ice, knowing we forged a two-foot hole with the hand auger, yet wonder if it’s strong enough to hold us. My silhouette stretches across the surface, strange and taffy-pulled. I raise my shadow hand; I’m still here.

Frozen fish stuffed into our bag, we mount the snowmobile and fly past gnarled scrub brush teetering on the edge of the timberline. Cold bites my jutted kneecaps. I want to release my arms hooked around Dave’s waist and soar into the darkening expanse, but instead, I brace harder and close my eyes. I am a plane, a roller coaster, a train barrelling south.

The moon is a silver-scaled bowl, the sky brilliant black. Dave cuts the engine at the cabin, our silence heavier than the snow. Northern Lights peek around a ring of clouds and trawl across the sky in purple, green, and yellow tendrils.

Inside, the woodstove spears heat into each corner. Knife poised beneath a gill, he guts each fish and drops the rubbery heads into a bucket, a hollow sound, and I wonder if that’s the sound of falling out of love, not sharp and sudden, but quiet. Slow. The row of headless trout fans across layers of outdated Northern Times; warmed blood blurs the newsprint. I press my thumb to the warmth and edge the paper in a line of fading whorls, like roses, until they vanish.

Dawn Miller

Dawn Miller’s most recent work appears or is forthcoming in Cleaver Magazine, SmokeLong Quarterly, Fractured Lit, Typehouse, Jellyfish Review, Guernica Edition’s This Will Only Take a Minute anthology, and The Maine Review, among others. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She lives and writes in Picton, Ontario, Canada. Connect at www.dawnmillerwriter.com and on Twitter @DawnFMiller1