April 2023 | poetry
Why must everyone mumble?
I read lips, but peering at a soft-talker
across a cave-dark room, his mouth
concealed by a jungle of facial hair…
I feel like a doomed glacier— shrinking.
My husband tosses his stained shirt on a chair.
I glance at him in the bathroom mirror, remind him,
You aren’t alone, as I pluck gray hairs
from my comb. I shed like a Persian cat.
Bones as brittle as yesterday’s toast.
I’ve shrunk three inches in height,
lost core-strength, grip-strength, memory.
Not just names—even simple words,
common phrases. Has my brain gone soft
like some worn-out bicycle tire?
Ten years from now, will I recognize
my own children, recall where I came from?
If you call my name, will I look up?
For decades I made hand-thrown pottery,
pressed my fingerprints onto vases, teapots, mugs.
Fired to white heat, my pots emerged from the flames
dressed in colors of sun-baked canyons, moon-lit lakes.
Historic artifacts, our pottery outlasts us.
Now I work at my keyboard— archeologist
on a dig into my buried past.
My future…?
Johanna DeMay
Johanna DeMay grew up in Mexico City, the bilingual child of American parents. In love with the power of language, she began writing poems to bridge the gap between her worlds. Resettled in New Mexico, she made her living for forty years as a studio potter. Now retired, she divides her time between writing and volunteering with the immigrant community. Her poems have appeared in numerous literary journals and two anthologies. “Waypoints,” a full collection of her work, was released by Finishing Line Press in 2022.
April 2023 | poetry
Hey Google
Search for Wordle.
Search for five-letter words that begin with s-l-o.
Search for ways for this day to begin with a win.
Search for the name of the black-feathered birds
with flaming red and yellow wings
perched outside the window
whose call vibrates the air
and shakes something loose inside you.
Search for the length of cherry blossoms blooms.
Search for meditation apps.
Search for quiet moments before
the world begins to stir.
Hey Google
Search for resources for aging parents.
Search for nourishing meals during chemo.
Search for protein shakes.
Search for your father’s will to fight.
Search for activities for people with dementia.
Search for large-print puzzle books.
Search for recognition in your mother’s eyes.
Search for quick dinner ideas.
Search for shrimp scampi recipes.
Search for Medicare.
Search for bedside rails for seniors.
Search for home-health aides near you.
Search for help.
Search for a deep breath.
Search for air.
Search for more.
Search for time.
Search for more time.
Search for the strength
to keep searching.
Hey Google
Search for presence.
Search to connect.
Search to hold onto the love that gives these moments weight.
Search for your mother’s hand.
Search for the tender palms your tiny fingers
would get lost in as a little girl.
Search to be lost in her again.
Search for the way time has carved countless new lines
but the soft, fleshy creases of her grip
feel the same.
Search for your father’s laugh.
Search for the way it catches in his throat before rushing out,
a whisper before the roar.
Search for the sound of his laughter reverberating through the room
settling heartbeats with its joy-filled rhythms.
Search to be filled by this communion.
Search to lay down your exhaustion
and be resurrected by effortless togetherness.
This sacred togetherness.
Hey Google
Search for highly rated weighted blankets.
Search for NPR book reviews.
Search for the best time of year to plant sunflowers.
Search for garden gnomes.
Search for a season when you can tend to seeds
and watch life come into its prime.
Search for oil pastel drawing ideas.
Search for natural hair tutorials on YouTube.
Search for why fireflies flicker.
Search for bioluminescent fish.
Search for light.
Search for reminders of the world outside these walls.
Search for glimpses of yourself.
Search for tiny moments
between searches
that are yours alone.
Search for wonder
again.
Kimberly Goode
Kimberly Goode is a writer based in Seattle, WA. When she is not creating, she enjoys listening to the songs of birds and the sounds of rain. Her work has appeared in River Teeth, Crosscut, Dillydoun Review, and South Seattle Emerald.
April 2023 | poetry
Having ousted all rivals, I take possession
of suburban hostas and road-running squirrels,
and strike rare birds from recorded histories
of ponds. It is time to decommission causeways
now that the marshes have flaked. I design
the cities higher and higher on softening
foundations. I stack the insecurities of wealth,
and endorse both its guardians and armed
intruders. Whenever I like, I lift the streets
to patch the gas lines. I manage a land of millet
ground under a thumb into flour deflowered
by wind, and reroute buckets of effluvia
to a shrinking lake. I pilot the riverboats
that navigate waters between snipered cliffs,
and transport every iteration of spoiled fruit.
I standardize dejection marooned on a rugged
portage, and refit the ships that lost the Pacific
to microscopic plastic. I host a ceremonial dance
of cleats and hatchets that blends ecstatic worship
with the infant mortality rate. I beset the ancient
temples with mudslides. I put minor holidays
up for auction, and unclasp obligations so they fall
like fistfuls of worry beads. I am default, the very
last god who speaks the vernacular language.
Alan Elyshevitz
Alan Elyshevitz is the author of a collection of stories, The Widows and Orphans Fund (SFA Press), a full-length poetry collection, Generous Peril (Cyberwit), and four poetry chapbooks, most recently “Mortal Hours” (SurVision). Winner of the James Hearst Poetry Prize from North American Review, he is a two-time recipient of a fellowship in fiction writing from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts.
April 2023 | Best of Net nominee, poetry
This town has a rusted roof gas station,
a store shelf where you would find
charm and shame sitting side-by-side,
as inseparable as lovebugs,
buy-one-get-one for the last 50 years.
You can still buy a scratcher ticket – or twelve,
and sit, welcomed, on the sidewalk
with your dreams of a less-debted life,
or watch as barefoot beauties walk west to work,
carrying babies bulging with
Dollar General budget-nutrition.
Don’t forget your manners if you’re just visitin’,
one proper and polite nod to say,
“just like my daddy did,”
to all those with their collars blue
just like the sky-paint on the gulf.
“Poor, rural, and southern”,
is meant by most
to sound scary and scabbed
just like the shallow intimidation
of pitbull pups scratching and slobbering
against their chain-link boundary lines.
But to me it sure looks a lot like
lovin’ and learnin’ that the things
worth having take the most time,
saturating slowly like sun tea
brewin’ in the porch-pitcher.
I spent a decade patting makeup
onto the warm red tones of my neck
to conceal a crime of culture,
instead of questioning
why moving up
had to mean moving away.
These memories had a lesson for me,
like a neighbor pulling my ear
back to my mother for new wisdom,
chastising me for talking to strangers,
forgetting my manners,
and not listening to my father.
These memories are like mangrove mud,
hugging my ankles until I am stalled,
anchoring me to mindfulness of a moment
tinged with something sour,
like that sulfuric smell across the marshes,
that is hard to romanticize – yet still cues a smile,
when its rotten earthiness tells me that I am home.
It is only in this pause,
the stillness before a shifting tide,
when I can clearly recall and recite
the scripture –
the allegory of me,
and where it was written.
It was composed here;
In the nimble thank you wave,
at a neighbor kind or neglectful enough
to turn an eye as I swiped citrus slices
from yard overhangs,
to rub into my vulgar mouth,
with dirty hands.
On the sweet-wind steeped from
magnolia blooms and orange blossoms,
the perfect perfume to compliment
a blushing heat-sick face.
It was spoken over the rumble of thunder,
during the can’t-miss primetime storm watch,
hurricane season 2004,
sung with the intoxicating breaths
of the gulf stream,
scented with pheromonic petrichor.
They say that one man’s white trash
is another’s treasured upbringing,
and through the catharsis of return,
a lowbrow renaissance,
I know both to be true.
My only infallible faith is in the
beauty visible from the gutter,
and I will celebrate each day
in the midst of a perennial
impoverished holiday,
like the Christmas lights draped
on fences, roofs, and trailer tops,
hanging on with staple-gun hugs,
all year ‘round.
Elizabeth Curley
Elizabeth Curley lives a dual life as both a poet and a social work researcher. Elizabeth received a Silver Medal from the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards in 2012 and is still writing a decade later. Elizabeth’s time is spent consuming, collecting, carrying, crafting, and quantifying the human experience.
April 2023 | poetry
Months after I had cleared her clothes from our apartment
and delivered them to a homeless shelter as was her wish,
I drove to our cabin in the mountains to gather her last shirts
and sweaters, socks and tights, sneakers and slippers. I was
weary of all the searching, finding, sorting, folding. Weary even
of the touching. I could not stomach one more trip for charity.
Death, you see, had made me a coward. I just jammed everything
in three thirty-gallon black plastic bags, which I tied off tightly,
left for next morning pick-up at the end of the driveway,
flanked by six-foot banks of ice-skinned snow. An hour’s nap later
I saw through the window that crows had come, torn open the bags,
dragged their contents all over, confused perhaps by wisps
of sweat and perfume, thinking who in his right mind would put
anything but chicken bones and pizza crust in such beguiling sacks.
One had her lace panties in its beak, shaking it like a battle flag.
Another was chewing the sleeve of her pineapple tee shirt.
A third was back at the bags, manically scrounging for more.
I walked out calmly with a shovel. The birds flew away.
I had visions of leaving it all for a next storm to bury,
re-collecting the debris after spring thaw and burning it into
a biblical pillar of smoke, soaking the ashes in the stream out back.
Instead, I climbed the crusted banks, roamed the neighbors’ yards
and snowbound streets, picked up the pieces, placed and cinched them
in new bags, left them as before. The birds came again and again.
Again and again I gathered, each time working more slowly, each time
the pieces smaller. Until the sun was gone and I stood by the last bags
I owned, slightly less full. I stood there all night, the crows laughing
and I laughing back, their amber eyes flashing in the new moon dark,
neither stupid nor cruel, though I had thought them both.
At first light, men with boots and gloves came in a green truck.
One said Good Morning. Another took the bags away.
Ken Haas
Ken Haas lives in San Francisco where he works in healthcare and sponsors a poetry writing program at the UCSF Children’s Hospital. His first book, Borrowed Light, won the 2020 Red Mountain Press Discovery Award, won a 2021 prize from the National Federation of Press Women and was shortlisted for the 2021 Rubery Book Award. Ken has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and has won the Betsy Colquitt Poetry Award. His poems have appeared in over 50 journals and numerous anthologies. Please visit him online at http://kenhaas.org.
January 2023 | poetry
My mind is
a cluttered cupboard
a hoarder’s den
skyscraper-stacked
bits and chits
shiny scraps strident notes
on skin when there is
no room at the inn
no vacancy
for one more guest
nor even space
for oxygen
thirst is the strongman of needs
with many ways to drink
morning news with morning joe
the Times they are a-changing
podcasts preachers PSAs
Sirius no longer lit
but air-waved and ever-on
any cracks in the stacks
I fill with pages beloved
books poems of my own
and others (who I’d like to be)
all this mess
magpie-made
I’ll use it someday
but the cows stray
I’m too busy to fence
my mind is at capacity
I fear the thoughts
will overflow like the gentle man
I saw yesterday
at 4th and Main
deep in conversation
with the gentle man
in the glass of the bookstore window
Ann Weil
Ann Weil writes at her home on the corner of Stratford and Avon in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and on a deck boat at Snipe’s Point Sandbar off Key West, Florida. Her work has been nominated for Best of the Net and appears in Crab Creek Review, Bacopa Literary Review, Whale Road Review, Shooter Literary Magazine, Eastern Iowa Review, DMQ Review, and elsewhere. Her first chapbook, Life Cycle of a Beautiful Woman, will be published in 2023 by Yellow Arrow Publishing. Read more of Ann’s poetry at www.annweilpoetry.com.