Friday, October 25,, 2024; Jan Steckel's "The Fire Game"

 

The Fire Game

I didn’t set out to be a rage-a-holic,

but it crept up on me, what with

certain friends and family

turning out to be rabid

abled supremacists and all.

I didn’t start out with burning contempt

for my fellow Americans, for other poets,

for Republicans, for the entire South,

for the unvaxed, the unmasked.

I just smoldered until I burst into flame.

I want to smother it in human kindness,

but every time I start to get there,

another disabled or elderly friend

drops dead, or the ERs fill up,

or somebody gives me shit

for wearing a mask to a party,

and I just want to unhinge my jaw,

yell “Dracaris,” and incinerate

the whole freaking fiesta,

then crawl back in my cave.

© 2024 Jan Steckel

Jan Steckel’s debut fiction collection Ghosts and Oceans came out from Zeitgeist

Press in 2023. Her poetry book The Horizontal Poet (Zeitgeist Press, 2011) won a

2012 Lambda Literary Award. Her poetry book Like Flesh Covers Bone (Zeitgeist

Press, 2018) won two Rainbow Awards. Her fiction chapbook Mixing Tracks

(Gertrude Press, 2009) and poetry chapbook The Underwater Hospital (Zeitgeist

Press, 2006) also won awards. Her creative prose and poetry have appeared in

Scholastic Magazine, Yale Medicine, Bellevue Literary Review, Canary, Assaracus and elsewhere.

She lives in Oakland, California.

Friday, October 18, 2024: Cynthia Linville's " This Connection is Not Private," and " Alone at Midnight: In a Field in the Rain"

This Connection is Not Private

She feels like she’s been struck

breathless

into a blue so intense

she can’t imagine any other color

She seems to be standing on a river

The sky is falling in a thousand tiny rainbows

salted with stars

She tells herself, it’s just a story:

Cinderella bootstraps

Overnight sensation

a story that repeats

over and over

in a meteor storm of falling stars

She feels like a star

maybe already falling

She tries to bring the stars inside

tries not to dissolve inside that storm

But she, too, is story

maybe just a story

just another story on the internet

Alone at Midnight: In a Field in the Rain

Lightning sparks a repeated prayer

against darkness. In the thunder,

she senses a path between centuries,

a narrow approach winding through shadows.

She feels a repeated blue presence

floating languidly.

Flickering starlight, seen only

in deepest darkness, is leaving traces

everywhere, is pulsing inside her:

a god’s strange silver feet

dancing across the sky,

dissolving what once was.

She feels ravenous, eating nothing,

overjoyed to be turned upside down,

enfolded into the sacred. Scarred,

but not scared. When asked about it later,

she doesn’t have to answer.

Her psyche is shaped differently now.

© 2024 Cynthia Linville

Cynthia Linville’s work has appeared in numerous poetry anthologies, and her two books of collected poems, The Lost Thing and Out of Reach, are available from Cold River Press. She served as Managing Editor of Convergence: an online journal of poetry and art for ten years and as Poetry Editor of Poetry Now for two years. She has received three mini-grants from Poets & Writers to perform in collaboration with musicians. Linville has taught in the English Department at Sacramento State University since 2000. You can see more of her work at CynthiaLinville.com.

Friday, October 4, 2024: Beverly M. Collins's "Cost of Knowing" (with accompanying art)

 

“You can’t take on everyone’s confusion and wear it. Don’t ask so many questions. The answers may surprise you in a bad way,” Sylvia’s grandfather barked down at her, as he held her hand on a walk home from school when she was six years old.

“They may indeed,” She whispered softly to herself, at age 43.

On this New Jersey cool early-autumn day, she remembered that childhood moment while seated, like a cat ready to pounce, on the edge of the bed in her bra and panties, with a tan- colored bed sheet loosely tangled around her. The sound of water assured that her husband

Aaron was still in the shower. Finally, a moment to spy at the call history in his phone. To look was to question. She wished she had not looked and didn’t know he was, once again, calling “that woman” almost every day. Sylvia ached so bad that her hands trembled and let go of the phone. It slipped down the side of the covers and into the floor.

She didn’t know which part was worst, the bitter taste or the texture of betrayal. This was her second attempt at happily-ever-after. Her first marriage of 4 years had ended over, (you guessed it) infidelity.

Does anyone marry and not cheat? After all of the talks and promises. She once hoped their couple’s therapy had worked wonders and ended his tryst. But, knew what this information meant for their 14-year union.

Gripped by fear at the idea of another divorce, her heart pounded as she suddenly jumped up, raced to put on her oversized sweater, sneakers, and blue jeans. She wanted to run, stomp, kick, and scream. but for now, would settle for a run. A chance to pull herself together, flee the anguish momentarily and dash through nature; old trees, life that had planted itself, pushed down

deep roots and was happy in their spot.

Many times, she had leisurely strolled this path. This time, along with the quick pounding sound of her steps, Sylvia noticed the sharp movement of birds from one spot to another, dust and seeds that sailed in need of a new place to take hold, they were like her. Everything in her felt jittery and uprooted. The “knowing” was already doing a number on her chronic twitch in her cheek.

The Broken-hearted-first-things-first. Sob hard where no one can listen. Everything else; the confrontation, the heated arguments, the packing, uncertainty, loneliness, the expressed concern from relatives, the lawyers, the reshuffle of who-gets-to-keep-who of their longtime friends, hurtful division of assets, the giving-back-of-each-other’s-family members, rumors of what happened, and the long road to healing, would begin later. Just for now, she ran as hard as she could and let a rivers-flow-of-tears dry from open wind.

© 2024 Beverly M. Collins

Bio: Beverly M. Collins, author of the books, Quiet Observations: Diary thought, Whimsy and Rhyme, and Mud in Magic. Her poems and short stories have appeared in publications based in USA, England, Ireland, Australia, India, Berlin, Mauritius, and Canada both in print and online.

Winner of a Naji Naaman Literary Prize in Creativity (Lebanon). Collins, three times nominated for the Pushcart Prize, and a prize winner for the California State Poetry Society; One of three winners of the June 2021 Wilda Morris Poetry Challenge (Chicago). Her photography can be found on the cover of Peeking Cat 40 (UK), California Quarterly, on Fine Art America products, iStock/Getty images, and more at beverlym-collins.pixels.com. 

Wednesday, October 2, 2024: Best of the Net Nominations (2025)

Best of the Net Nominations (2025) 

 POETRY 

Patricia Walsh “Conversations in the Foyer” 

Barbara Anna Gaiardoni “Flower Moon” 

Natalie Itzhaki “Perhaps a Bird” 

Jan Steckel “Indivisible” 

Carole Mertz “Ashes”

Ellen Cantor “Joy” 

FICTION 

Lynne Bronstein “The Road” 

ART

Ellen Cantor “Seeking” and “Seeking 2” 

Marie C Lecrivain “Crone 3” 

Good luck, and congratulations to all the nominees.:)

 

Thursday, September 19, 2024: Jennifer M Philips's "What Rises?"

What Rises?

Over us hangs the savior sans serif,

no longer watching us, all broken curve and slump

into what flesh was, into what flesh could be,

the soul's encumbrance but not its devisor.

When light enters, darkness solidifies,

moves up out of the margins. That old stain

lifts from the cloth to run, lurid again

in the gutters, the great tergiversator.

Terror's imp and impulse fortifies

the weak against all council or compromise,

plies damage, but knows no collateral,

and keeps uneasy company with ghosts.

The ancient malevolence prompts the dogs to run wild,

jabs a knee in the back that forfeits a man his life,

prods a leader to deny people their livelihood,

and re-labels chaos as just our neighborhood.

The ignorant armies are not those bearing swords

but those wielding words to dissemble, trip, and steal

meaning and kindness from language itself, and boast

messiah-like of their power to crush and to rule.

Grief watches at the tomb for an undefiled

light to emerge, a squaring to come later,

a risen body of real and common good.

© 2024 Jennifer M Phillips

A much-published bi-national immigrant, gardener, Bonsai-grower, painter, Jennifer M Phillips has lived in five states, two countries, and now, with gratitude, in Wampanoag ancestral land on Cape Cod, Massachusetts. Her chapbooks: Sitting Safe In the Theatre of Electricity (i-blurb.com, 2020) and A Song of Ascents (Orchard Street Press, 2022). Two of Phillips' poems are nominated for this year's Pushcart Prize.

Thursday, September 5, 2024: Christal Ann Rice Cooper's " Eve’s Poem of Renewal"

 Eve’s Poem of Renewal

“I Know Everything”

As we walk in the morning dew

My Father activates something within me

lightning, visions, dreams

of Noah’s Rainbow, Abraham’s vision

of who Isaac was symbolizing,

Moses’s flame in the blooming bush

While the men work in the fields

I sculpt my children, grandchildren,

and great grandchildren

male and female

I sculpt them

At night as they lay in their beds

I tell stories to my children, grandchildren,

and great grandchildren

female and male

I tell them stories.

I teach my sons how to make baskets

and collect corn

I teach my daughters how to took for rainbows

and pour oil over heads

When no one is looking

I dance for Him

on my knees I face Him

my 70 x 7 Grandson

who calls me sister.

I am not like Thomas

I don’t need to look at His hands, feet or side

for proof.

I know it is His Him,

and finally, I know everything.

© 2024 Christal Ann Rice Cooper 

Christal Ann Rice Cooper is a newspaper writer, feature stories writer, poet, fiction

writer, photographer, and painter. She has a Bachelor’s in Criminal Justice and completed all

of her poetry and fiction workshops required for her Master’s in Creative Writing with a focus

on poetry. She maintains a blog at www.christalannricecooper.org She, her husband Wayne,

sons Nicholas and Caleb, cat Nation reside in the St. Louis area. She can be reached at

email caccoop@aol.com and Facebook https://www.facebook.com/car.cooper.7

Friday, August 15, 2024: Jackie Chou's "The Mother I Never Became"

 

If I were a mother

I would not be cool at all

I'd talk way too loud

even for dim sum

drop the shrimp dumpling

between my chopsticks

I'd not know new songs to sing

to the car radio 

belt out too much Green Day

not enough Olivia Rodrigo

I'd wear odd prints and sequins

from the Ross clearance racks

and have no job for my kids 

to tell their friends about 

I'd be the kind of mom

that makes her children say

"Why can't you be 

like other moms?"

© 2024 Jackie Chou

Jackie Chou holds a BA degree in Creative Writing from the University of Southern California, where she studied and held the position of vice president in a cultural organization, an experience she looks upon with nostalgia which still influences her poetry today. She has published two collections of poetry, The Sorceress, and Finding My Heart in Love and Loss.