Best of the Net Nominations 2020

Here’s what we nominated this year for the Best of the Net:

Poetry

Caolan Madden – Motherglut (originally in The Queer Body echap)

O medical establishment we are sorry to have been so sedentary
We are sorry about our bad memories
I am sorry that I poured the leaf lard on my memory
I am sorry that I do nothing nothing nothing but make
this enormous baby
to fill up my hungry cradle
Sorry the baby’s made of a thousand fat rats
teeming over the ward and swallowing the tinies
Sorry about its thousand mouths full of seed pearls
Sorry that I forgot and made a blowjob baby out of swallowing
If you could just lie down and do it the normal way
just remember to just lie down             but also do some light cardio
swimming for example, maybe some journaling

Rodney Wilder - To The Sakura That Called My Collarbone Destination Enough

The wound
is to locate joy an ever-quarry ever-out-
side of this ark I put my hand to & say
        adrift.

Teo Mungaray – Seven Attempts at Loving Myself

Someday, I won’t be afraid to smile in the mirror.
One day, I won’t do it to check for errant spinach.
Someday I’ll forgive myself, won’t live deep in my gut or tight in my jaw.
Someday I’ll forget to measure my affection, forget to hold onto shame.

Sadie Dupuis – Horse Haven Road

We charged five bucks for a mucosal postcard.
Ten for a kiss caked in bile.
This is how we grow the warmblood mountain.
Horses don’t have these concerns.

Samantha Duncan – Made Me a Meal

I want to live before the     identify in me a meal

broth me in the kitchen eat     under tree     reverse

my bones cloaked in earth     my children play

Jeni De La O – Do You Get Nervous on Planes?

here’s where you cry
here’s where you laugh
here’s where I break the fourth wall—
hoping they’ll be too dizzied by the speed and pitch of my voice,
too flustered by the sheer volume of all that crashing, to comment on
the placement of my jokes and why I chose things the way I chose them.

Fiction

Constantine Jones – Kairos

The bells are ringing out across the village.

Sunday morning on the island of Lesbos, 1940, and all the streets are empty. Down in the harbor, the fishing boats creak against the wind, all of them painted white and blue, sloshing against their little wooden docks. The sails are all withdrawn, heavy spirals of frayed rope draped across the decks. A lone dinghy drifting off towards a row of buoys, weighed down with empty jugs, chipped oars and netting—the name EIRHNH streaked in blue across its hull. The gulls too are at rest, wings folded on the cobbles, watching the light come in across the water. The sea coughs up its weeds onto the rocks.

Alex Z. Salinas – The Savage Screwball

I was at Starbucks sipping coffee, reading Roberto Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives, when a feeling hit me: Everything was perfect.

The sensation was so striking I put the book down.

I looked outside: the sun was smiling, birds chirped, traffic advanced smoothly. The world was a mid-century postcard.

Creative Nonfiction

Monique Quintana – Black Licorice

You’ll never know any woman that loves black licorice besides your grandmother. When you drink that absinthe at the hotel in Seattle, you’ll think about her hands, as you watch the sugar cube melt to your glass. You’ll regret not getting the morning flight home. You’ll go to the same conference every year after that and you’ll cry there every year, too. Your friend from Colorado will say it’s maudlin, and in spite of yourself, you’ll acquire the taste of whisky. She’ll never cut your sandwiches in diamond shapes after 1989. You’ll be embarrassed to eat in front of men you don’t love for the rest of your life.

Jonathan Russell Clark – Control the Echoes

“You were here when they told me,” she’d say, “and so you know that I’m not trying to do anything like they said I did, but they keep coming at me, and I don’t know who or what or where anymore, because there isn’t anything like that that I want, and I said that I was fine yesterday because I saw her over there, you know the young one, the one with the, oh what’s her hair like, and she wasn’t asking because like I said I wasn’t saying anything if I didn’t want to.”