By Flapper Press:
Flapper Press wraps up our Best of the Net nominations this year by honoring the many poets from around the globe who have submitted their work for consideration for publication on our site. Thank you for your artistry and for allowing us to feature you and your poetry in the Flapper Press Poetry Café!
A little about The Best of the Net Anthology:
A creation of Sundress Publications, The Best of the Net Anthology began in 2006 with the goal of honoring the world of digital publishing.
"We believe this effort is integral in decentering the literary canon as well as promoting and amplifying voices that are imperative to good literature, responsible culture, and the understanding of today’s social climate. We cherish these writers and publishers and hold digital publishing in high regards as a medium that creates access to a greater array of voices than the traditional publishing climate has allowed." — bestofthenetanthology.com
For more information about the contest, visit Best of the Net and please consider submitting your work to Flapper Press for future consideration!
In alphabetic order, here are our nominations for this year's
Best of the Net in Poetry!
Bartholomew Barker
Overnight at the Downs
(inspired by Round & Round by Alistair Little)
If that filly had placed instead of shown I'd be home, getting the lock off my door,
instead of sleeping on this wooden bench,
blanket of betting slips and the Racing Form.
I dream I'm a stallion, filling my nostrils
with dusty air as I gallop 'round and 'round, carrying some strange weight
on my back and never getting anywhere.
Hunger drags me awake before the false dawn,
mind spinning, I vow to pay better attention in the paddock so I can turn what little's left into a fortune before the fourth race.
Bartholomew Barker works with Living Poetry, a poetry group in North Carolina. He has published two collections and been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. www.bartbarkerpoet.com
Michael Brownstein
The War Lands
(inspired by Sanda by Alistair Little)
Somewhere in the torn lands of war
the air breathes in its best breath,
finds nothing to hold onto--
everywhere the tar of war,
everywhere the graying of cloud,
everywhere ash pits of bone.
Search hard into the horizon: the sky tries to color itself Antigua blue,
smothers itself with a smoldering of scars,
and the waterways feel its blood, a carving of earth and atmosphere, the soiled scent of war torn lands.
Michael H. Brownstein's poetry, A Slipknot to Somewhere Else (2018) and How Do We Create Love (2019) were published by Cholla Needles Press.
Laura Chalar
Exchange Student
(inspired by Departure by Alistair Little)
Early 1962: after a grueling trip,
a dazed teen lands in Michigan.
Getting off the plane in a suit and tie,
my father sees snow for the first time—
this lawyer’s son from Uruguay, shown
by his hosts how to flush the toilet
or turn on a lamp. We didn’t know what to
expect, the mom will tell him later.
You could have been an Indian! Still,
they get along, a taciturn love of sorts
growing between them. This will be Dad’s
golden year—skating on icy puddles with
his farm-raised friends, kids actually able
to afford a car with their savings—Detroit
just fields away, fierce in the glow of its heyday.
On his return he’ll promptly become
an orphan, and thus, too soon, employee,
breadwinner, late graduate—his own words,
still bitter years after. His hopes
for me: You always fly high,
please, even if it scares me.
Laura Chalar, a lawyer and writer, was born in Uruguay in 1976. In the USA, she has published Riversent (poems, 2022) and The Guardian Angel of Lawyers (short stories, 2018), among other works.
Prosper Ìféányí
My Father
The cough thundered in his chest with all its hands.
Pummelling and pummelling. His skull
was a hard helmet worn to pray. My father is yelling
somewhere at a broken spigot: come out, you fuck!
When winter was broken and he was staggering
his way home, he would stop by the payphone
to take a leak. Through static
my mother’s voice stayed calm. The city of mist
rising in her head never again flickering with light.
I talked to your mom tonight, he’d say.
His breath venom. He would drag himself
from the kitchen floor into his room sequined with disco lights.
He would nestle on his Lazy-Boy recliner,
face down; cocked shotgun with double-zero mouths
facing his chin (whose pellets he let escape into the body
of night owls and nightingales).
My father never taught me to woo a woman.
He only taught me his carpentry trade.
Once, when I held him staggering home,
we stopped to crane up a building and trace the frames
of windows falling away in rows. When we finished,
we sat by the lawn, watching a broken pipe leak water
all over the place.
The only thing I remember after that day
was my father, having briefly run a worn
oval of soap round his head, and dancing unclad
in the fizzling water, withdrawing into a patrol police car.
I couldn’t run after him. Couldn’t drop his
tool box strung over my neck.
And then I remember a woman, who was my mother,
come take me away in a shawl which smelt
like daisies and
boredom.
Prosper Ìféányí writes from Lagos, Nigeria. His works are featured or forthcoming in Black Warrior Review, New Delta Review, Salt Hill, The Offing, Indianapolis Review, South Dakota Review, Magma Poetry, and elsewhere.
Dana Henry Martin
Deliver Me
Deliver me from the insects that have consumed
my brain and left frass in its place.
Deliver me
from the sea louse attached to the base of my tongue.
Deliver me from the samurai beetle, the death’s head
hawk moth, the heike crab, the human-faced carp,
and the skull-back spider.
Deliver me from the duck embryo
boiled alive and eaten in its egg.
Deliver me
from the marmot cooked in its skin with hot stones
arranged inside its carcass.
Deliver me from auks
laid inside the hollowed-out body of a seal.
Deliver me from the rocks placed on the seal’s
body. Deliver me from the months in which the auks
are stored in this manner. Deliver me from the day
the seal is uncovered. Deliver me from the minutes
in which the auks are pulled out one by one
and eaten raw.
Deliver me from ash, salt, quicklime,
rice hulls, and clay.
Deliver me from the sheep-head
that my head has become.
Deliver me from the tentacle
in my throat.
Deliver me from the tuna’s eyes,
which have replaced my own, and from my eyes,
which float in brine.
Deliver me from the cow’s feet,
from her head, and from her stomach.
Deliver me
from the durian fruit and from its kidney-shaped
segments of flesh.
Deliver me from the fish filleted
while alive and served to guests with a beating heart.
Deliver me from pork blood, from milk, from rye flour,
from dark molasses, from onion, from butter.
Deliver me from pale, plated cockscombs.
Deliver me
from the occipital bone, the parietal bones, the frontal
bone, the temporal bones, the sphenoid bone,
the ethmoid bone. Deliver me from the bones
of the cranium and mass the cranium contains.
Deliver me from the singing penis, the bifurcated
penis, the four-headed penis, the clasping penis,
the dueling penis, the y-shaped penis, the spiral penis,
the giant penis, the detachable penis, the pseudo-penis,
the barbed penis, the surprise penis, the slapping penis,
and the penis that regrows before each mating season,
sometimes even harder than the year before.
Deliver me from words—alluvial, bromine, burr, callus,
capsule, coccyx, cud, plasma, pollen, scud, sequin, spore,
stone.
Deliver me from binomial naming.
Deliver me
from brain signals that tell me to run fast and hard
and away, always away.
Deliver me from my body fat,
which is already being called home by gravity, the way
a dollop of lard slides down an upright spoon.
Deliver me from an overdose of organ-destroying
skunk cabbage, from a plateful of toxic buttercups,
from the topical burn of the giant hogweed,
from the blood disturbance caused by a tongue-tip
worth of death camus. Deliver me from angel trumpets
fashioned into biological weapons. Deliver me
from the spiked canes of Himalayan blackberry,
from the stinging Gympie-Gympie tree,
from the neurotoxic tree nettle, from spur laurel’s
biocides, and from Red Tide algae that stills
the lungs.
Deliver me from the Fibonacci sequence
of my fingers, which allows my hand to curl into a fist.
Deliver me from wild horses turned into horse meat,
from intestines behind the processing plant that meander
like dunes. Deliver me from the carnation reds
and off-whites of the fresh entrails and the rubies
of those dumped the previous day. Deliver me
from the need to catalog days by color until
there is no more color, only shades of brown
in the cooling air. Deliver me from the hay laid
over ceca and intestines, over colons and rectums.
Deliver me from the heart of the animal, from the head
that stares into the distance.
Deliver me from electrodes
and optical coils, from the cage and the restraining chair.
Deliver me from brain-mapping, sterilization,
dissection, and genetic profiling. Deliver me
from available space and profit margins.
From the dry casks of Yucca Mountain.
From the love I still feel for my own body
in the long shadows of evening light.
Deliver me from any or all of these.
Deliver me
from nothing.
Open the door and deliver me.
Dana Henry Martin, a poet, weaver, musician and birder who lives in Utah, is from Oklahoma and longs for Kansas. Martin’s work has appeared in Barrow Street, Chiron Review, Cider Press Review, FRiGG, Muzzle, New Letters, Stirring, Willow Springs, and other journals under the names Dana Guthrie Martin and M Ross Henry. Her collections include Toward What Is Awful (YesYes Books), In the Space Where I Was (Hyacinth Girl Press), and The Spare Room (Blood Pudding Press).
Indira Hiyas Tiongson
A Letter From The Homeland
This country robbed my father of his limbs. He no longer walks with his head up or holds me like home. Instead his palms are firm and calloused from work so my small, soft ones can carry the world weightlessly. My father cut his legs off, tied them into a ribbon of sacrifice, and gifted them for my feet to slow dance in places he could only dream of seeing.
In Indira's own words:
"My name is Indira Hiyas M. Tiongson, but I go by Ira. I’ve been writing since I was ten years old and [have] participated in various writing competitions. My mother was the first person to spark my love for books and words as she herself is passionate in writing. I currently live in Topeka, Kansas, where I am in my senior year of high school. I’ve only published one original book online in Wattpad and mostly write as a mental outlet, which is shown through my poems and essays. I love connecting with people, especially sharing their creatives."
*Update: Recently, Ira earned a scholarship from the Martin Luther King "Living the Dream'" Inc.
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If you have questions or would like to submit your work, please carefully review our Submission Guidelines and contact us at: info@flapperpress.com
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