July 2018 | Best of Net nominee, poetry
We are all lined down;
deep and thick in a pit;
so black there is no other color
where pleas and prayers cannot escape
but seep down this jail of flesh.
There is no room to bleed.
Our ghosts scoff, “Show us your chains.
Give us your screams and your wails.
Tell us your stories and tales
of the ocean, of sales,
of fields, of bales,
or we don’t know you.”
Children barter unearned coin
with unmarked hands
and forsake God for gimme and gold
to buy peace from the secret sin.
They covet another color;
any other color.
What I hate about my color is my hate.
What I hate about my color is my sorrow.
What I hate about my color is that color
is so precious to the Beast.
God made us black.
The Beast made it matter.
Still, our ghosts scoff, “Show us your chains.
Give us your screams and your wails.
Tell us your stories and tales
of the ocean, of sales,
of fields, of bales,
or we don’t know you.”
What I love about my color are my mothers.
What I love about my color are my brothers;
sanctuary, survival, solace, and succor.
I may scale the strong walls,
and stronger walls that we build
with guilt, blame and shame.
and exorcise ghosts
that scoff and boast.
by Stuart James Forrest
Stuart James Forrest developed a passion for creative writing while attending the Stanford University Continuing Studies Program. He enjoys writing poetry and short stories and hopes to develop enough skill to be a strong, creative representative of his generation of Black Americans who lived through a very tumultuous period in American history.
July 2018 | poetry
Aum Ah Loka Ah Hung
Jah Sirocco Loam Shekinah Sirrah Sung
Slippers and Tea
Flippers and Thee
Hi Dee Ho / Hi Dee Hee
Tee Hee Tee Hee
Bless me Holy Father for I have pinned
thy priests’ performance to a document of sins:
from raping little children to enslaving Indians,
from enflaming witches, to left freezing street denizens;
a bejewelled hierarchy,
women blamed and excluded;
the task overdue: Ask forgiveness — please the dead —
for doctrine of discovery, terra nullius, indebted payments
for lands and autonomy stolen, coloured citizens
fallen to a cross on one hand, larcenous sword of Jesus in t’other.
pray for the wind for the curtains that bulge at windows
breeze to cool the fevers of memory
More, you say, more…. Economy’s profit, the crop tall and green;
but mono-, not poly-, lone farmer on empty plain,
without bison or predaceous partners: no wolves, no bears —
no gophers, no hawks; fields of one plant, ahh Christ,
how’d I get stuck here, no neighbours, no helpers,
just me ‘n’ this bleedin’ time-delimited scheme?
pleasant little creek from the glacier’s tongue
meanders even froths through high meadow
tasting the soil its knowable limits
Pipe wrench and wires, screw threads and welds,
mechanico-industrial pumps roaring out dulled life, pitting
worker ‘gainst worker, race against race,
cis- against genders of any other;
theft division and greed engrained industry’s
employment, wage slaves the norm, boss above workers;
owners on holiday, counting their harm.
oh lord won’t you grant me…
a seat round the fire
In the systems of robbery blue notes drone, counterpoint
to a march of military gore — the ordinary scheme of things.
Jazz rocks through agonies of approved comportment,
belies the instructive stance, upsetting the conditioned woes;
unseating the ministers to the dance floor of doom, the generals,
the hireling politicians chanting choruses after chorus
where the blood red river flows.
sing the silk road sing the desert and mountains
horses and camels elephants and yaks
sings with the animals sings to the distant sea
oh hear the answers
Bludgeoned laughter
not so funny;
all that piss pot
full of money.
Sort out the good ‘uns,
kill all the bad;
lever up the leavings
for the little buggered lad;
lever up the leavings
that the women never had;
lost it on the shore,
lost it in the war,
tore up the deed
to the burning store.
by Philip Kienholz
Philip Kienholz studied creative writing at North Dakota State University and received a B. Arch from the University of Manitoba. Publishing credits include a 2016 book, Display: Poems; two chapbooks, The Third Rib Knife, and Born to Rant, Coerced to Smile, as well as poems in journals: Whirlwind, Windsor Review, Greenzine, River Dhamma, Links, Poetry Halifax, Global Tapestry Journal, NeWest Review, Cutting Edge, Quarry, Atticus Review, Whetstone, Prairie Fire, Ecospeak, and Crazy Horse.
July 2018 | poetry
Grievance is impatient;
Grief is patient.
On the sidewalk outside the Millgate Inn,
in a baseball cap, with a catcher’s mit,
it waits at 4:15 P.M. Father had promised
the dunes sculpted by wind and water
last summer and all autumn then
Persona of the displaced roots,
the tiding stem that broke ground
in winter before one last freeze,
Only a slip of a feral bud speaks
but the scent of its voice drowns
in the evening bustle of bawdymen
roughhousing toward homekept ladies.
On the pavement so many once like itself
spread from the factory gate like Jews
rushing from Cossacks; the furnace
of the mill is the eye and the heart
of the Czar. The feral bud
waits for the thick hand
of its planter to pluck it up
into the swirl of homerush,
the scent of its voice on the ear
of the old man whose grace
levels the pavement. Today,
it will say, will we go Dunes–
to the dunes and write in the sand.
A strange rough cloth stands behind
the bud; it is the messenger
who carries the charred boot.
Dew on the first petal of the flower;
winter comes again. The street
empties while the petals unfold.
The tiding stem woodens;
it is a line pointing, a ray outward
toward the center, pistil and stamen.
Like a lump of slag, the seed planter
in a steel vase is lowered, is planted.
The sapling headstone erect without word.
He had wanted no words on him.
Give me a tree on my chest; it is best,
for I have made roots where there were
once none.
So I shall stand forever in the tree,
in one place.
Sea-oats imported, planted on dunes
that had long squirmed like a worm’s
belly on hot pavement, going nowhere.
The sea-oats’ dying blackened dunes
with their dust; they have reddened
sunsets with pollen, done the work of ages.
The dunes are a place or remnant of place
before the sea-oats worked it, drained
the tidal pools, and flattened the world
as it was. The sea-oats shaded the grass,
nurtured the feral buds,
became food for trees.
Be no flower on another man’s lapel,
he had said; be a wild rose
thorny and elegant and wild
like the grass at the dunes
The trees became houses then homes.
History began in these homes,
repeated the world as it was,
and that world as it was then
became the world as it is now
The Dunes. Sculpted by wind.
The furnace fires.
My father’s tree,
my tree, its roots in place.
by John Horvath Jr
Mississippian John Horváth Jr publishes internationally since the 1960s (recently in Munyori Review (Zimbabwe); Broad River Review (print). Pink Litter, and Olentangy Review). After Vanderbilt and Florida State universities, “Doc” Horváth taught at historically Black colleges. Since 1997, to promote contemporary international poetry, Horváth edits www.poetryrepairs.com.
July 2018 | poetry
it’s near winter solstice;
I’m checking out
so I ask
what happens to them
they open the bags of seed
are there nests?
everywhere
in the metal rafters
and water?
they find their own…
these birds of Lowes
*
panoramic views,
surveillance
keep your hat on,
brim low
by Tom Lavazzi
Tom Lavazzi’s poetry and criticism appears in such journals as American Poetry Review, Postmodern Culture, Women in Performance, Performance Practice, Post-Identity, Reconstructions: Studies in Contemporary Culture, Symploke, Talisman, Midwest Quarterly, South Atlantic Review, The Little Magazine, Mantis: Journal of Poetry, Criticism, Translation; Rhizome: Cultural Studies in Emerging Knowledge, and Sagetrieb, among others. His work has been anthologized in Finding the Ox: Buddhism and American Culture, Volume I: Breaking Out: The Emergence of Buddhist American Literature (SUNY Press), Dialogism and Lyric Self-Fashioning: Bakhtin and the Voices of a Genre(Pennsylvania: Susquehanna University Press), Modernism and Photography (Praeger), Synergism: An Anthology of Collaborative Poetry and Poetic Prose (Boshi Press), Carl Rakosi, Man and Poet (National Poetry Foundation), Contemporary Literary Criticism (Gale), Poetry Criticisms 42 (Gale), and Jumping Pond: An Anthology of Ozark Poetry (Sand Hills Press), among others. He has published three volumes of poetry: Stirr’d Up Everywhere (collage poem/artist’s book, A Musty Bone), in collections at MOMA/Franklin Furnace, the Brooklyn Museum of Art (featured in recent group show, “Working in Brooklyn,” 2/3-4/16, 2000), Cleveland Art Institute, Banff Centre Library–Canada, Yale University library, Archive for New Poetry-UCSD, Rare Books–Columbia University, Poetry/Rare Books–SUNY-Buffalo; Crossing Borders (Mellen, 1996), and LightsOut (Bright Hill Press, ’05; BHP chapbook contest winner). A book of experimental critical performances, Off the Page: Scripts, Texts and Multimedia Projects from TEZ (a performance group he founded in 1995) is forthcoming from Parlor Press’s Aesthetic Critical Inquiry series. He is Professor of English at CUNY-Kingsborough.
July 2018 | Best of Net nominee, poetry
Google News tells me academics in India are robbing literature of any personal touch. Poor literature breeds poor syllabus breeds poor literature, a vicious cycle while banner ads of Clarks walking shoes keep stomping across my laptop. Page down leads to Baltimore cops reading Plato and James Baldwin. Then: No bombs, no guns, just 90 minutes of football. As Google knocks, I learn that cinnamon may help attack fat and obesity. Scrolling up to schizophrenia, the subhed says angry avatars help people stop hearing voices by shouting at them. Meanwhile, Ohio State rallies past Michigan, Pakistani authorities order a media blackout and Easter eggs lay hidden in the new Senate tax bill. Are millennials narcissistic? The evidence is not so simple, says Google News. Silicon Valley, Black Friday, Donald Trump and the FCC. Badgers football, tobacco companies and the Pope in South Asia. I can still hear Google knocking. What to click? I choose the one that says Buddhism includes everything, even comic books.
by Gary Singh
Gary Singh was recently a Steinbeck Fellow in Creative Writing at San Jose State University. As a scribe, he’s published over 1000 works including newspaper columns, travel essays, art and music criticism, profiles, business journalism, lifestyle articles, poetry and short fiction. His poems have been published in The Pedestal Magazine, Maudlin House and more. For 650 straight weeks, his newspaper columns have appeared in Metro, the alternative weekly paper of San Jose and Silicon Valley. He is the author of The San Jose Earthquakes: A Seismic Soccer Legacy (2015, The History Press). http://www.garysingh.info
July 2018 | poetry
Plum light unfolded
between the dense brush
of my backyard
the morning
of the day
dad died.
The night before,
he refused
even one mouthful
of lemon meringue pie.
Words were stones
and old stories
were one-sided
casting an umbra
of gray-green.
That’s how I knew.
The outline of morning
broke the uneasy sleep
that formed between the memory
of years of tart pie
and seasons of losing
dad in the thickets
of dementia.
The sunrise’s glamour
that day glittered
off the world
in all its weightiness.
Shallow puddles
from a thundershower spread
across the thirsty dirt.
And the only hunger
that day
inched forward
between the ticks
of the clock.
by Teresa Sutton
Teresa Sutton is a poet and a teacher. She has taught at Marist College for ten years and high school English for 28 years. She lives in Poughkeepsie, NY and has two grown children. Her poems appear in a number of literary journals including Stone Canoe, Fourteen Hills, and Solstice. Her second chapbook, “Ossory Wolves,” was a finalist in the 2014 Bright Hill Press’ Poetry Chapbook Competition. Sutton’s third chapbook, “Breaking Newton’s Laws,” won first place in the Encircle Publication 2017 Chapbook Competition; it was a top-12 finalist in the 2015 Indian Paintbrush Chapbook Competition, a finalist in the 2016 Minerva Rising Chapbook Competition, and earned an honorable mention in the 2015 Concrete Wolf Poetry Chapbook Competition. One of the poems in the collection, “Dementia,” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. The final poem of the book, “Confiteor 2,” was honored with second prize in the 2018 Luminaire Award for Best Poetry by Alternating Current. The Poet’s Billow recognized her work as a finalist in the 2015 Pangaea Prize and a semi-finalist in the 2014 Atlantis Award. The Cultural Center of Cape Cod recognized her work as a finalist in their 2014 National Poetry Competition. Two of her poems won honorable mention in other poetry competitions: Whispering Prairie Press and California State Poetry Society. Sutton earned her MFA from Solstice Creative Writing Program at Pine Manor College. She has a MA in literature from Western Connecticut State University and a MS in education from SUNY New Paltz. She earned her BA in English from SUNY Albany.