Electricity, Yes

Matt Dennison

Always more comfortable among the strange,
prone to jump the garden fence at any startle,
I tossed no flowers upon my father’s grave
as he tossed no flowers upon my mother’s.
From eloquence to secrecy’s sublingual
inconsistencies of faith, I would, like math,
a more exotic womb in which to place
our fathers’ tongues for jaw’s own faults—
that vault wherein we all, gentle as a glass
of thunder in facile rat-skin glory, are born.
Death, that dog best undisturbed, that wonderfully
suffered child, Devastation’s blackened pit bull
enlarged by solvents’ hollow change, will gnaw
upon our moldering names.

Beginning at the Golden Panda

Ashley Kunsa

this skin traded for fortunes
unknown   a nice cake
awaits you   the morning
after, an envelope steamed open
by disbelief   you are the only
flower of meditation
in the wilderness   a fire
that tastes like knowing   we want
to have a testimony but don’t
want the test  laps up
desire with the urgency
of fate   you are about to become
$8.95 poorer, $10.95
if you had the buffet

Trump as a Fire Without Light #93

Darren C. Demaree

White gold, time alone, this bison tips over at the idea of actual wind.

The Morrigan Rides

KB Ballentine

Caul of night invades the Black Valley,
 crow roams the still-warm thermals,
Gap of Dunloe stained red with stonecrop.
 Dundee masked beneath MacGillycuddy’s Reeks,
Coosaun Lough slips low, Wishing Bridge creaking,
 groaning as doves keen in the pilings.
Blackthorn spikes horizon’s fire, an owl swiveling
 its neck, eyes wide at the coming dark.

Bon Mots vs. Witticisms in Four Rounds

Mark Budman

1. Their kiss was cunning in its entirety—not a slow, amateurish smooching or a quick, pornographic slither-like darting of the tongues—but like the expertly interwoven strings of a loom produced not by an overworked laborer at a Chinese factory but by the proud hand of an American master craftsman.

2. Gaius Lucius Serpentis, his muscles ripping under their own weight, raised his gladius above his head in a mocking salute to his opponent who, being a Gaul, just mispronounced morituri te salutant in his ingrained desire to keep the Gaullic language free from the foreign influences, and now was about to be condemned to death by the vulgar Latin-speaking audience.

3. When the ship emerged from hyperspace, lieutenant commander Dated found with horror that his finger that he had picked his nose with just prior to the warp jump, now was inside the shirt of Dr. Natalia Chekhova, perhaps guided there by the forces of Smith’s law that dictates that males are attracted to females at the rate that twice exceeds the gravitational speed; but fortunately it was prevented from sliding further down not by Wilson’s law making space travel possible, but by the tightness of the good doctor’s pants.

4. Blinded by the blue rays of the planet Avatar, the craft overshot the base, clipped the top branch of the Tree of Life, was swallowed by Shmeleopterix, passed through its digestive tract, was cut from the theatrical release and left in a pile of guano waiting for the director’s version.

Notes on a Modern Cinderella

Cassandra Farrin

This version will not be as ugly as poor Berlioz who slipped on sunflower oil at the turnstile, the one who fell under the train steered by a Komsomol girl. Let’s say worse than the Grimms’ toes but not so horrendous as heads. Trains do pull into stations, but no one dies under them. Although, in a serialized novel Sanshiro circa 1900 Tokyo, even then a woman might be heard crying from the track, oh oh it will all be over soon, and this edition shall have roughly the pathos of that.

[quantum]

Mark Cunningham

“Here are the test results. It contains only calcium.” “What percentage?” “Ninety percent.” Standing naked out in the middle of the woods, I couldn’t remember a poem, only the assurance that, “when everything else has been taken from you, a memorized poem remains.” His middle initial stood for no name.

[quantum]

Mark Cunningham

They told her she had a limited personality, and she said that’s the whole point of personality. We told him he shouldn’t feel too slighted: most kidnappers have ulterior motives. When I said I had two obsessions, she told me to get back in touch when I was ready for serious commitment. Turns out the billboard slogan Your life. Your style. Your way. was for a funeral home.

Autumn

Sarah Gridley

Autumn was too close to solemn.

The silent n,
too understated for the season.

When a metallic feeling bit the air,
Americans called it fall.

Let down
the dusk-blue grapes.
Let out the scope of chapters.

Fall was the real deal.
Fall was the way forward.

You had only to look at the light of God
oiling lengths of the rural guardrails.

Or the centerpiece of fuller’s teasel
the kids spray-painted gold.

2017 Best of the Net Nominations

Congratulations to our 2017 Best of the Net anthology nominees!

Poetry

Fiction

Non-Fiction

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