Every year, Aster(ix) nominates some of our best work in poetry, story, and nonfiction for the BEST OF THE NET anthology. We are excited to showcase our nominations here and invite you to enjoy them, too.
The Best of the Net is an awards-based anthology designed to grant a platform to a diverse and growing collection of writers and publishers who are building an online literary landscape that seeks to break free of traditional publishing. This space has been created to bring greater respect to the continually expanding world of exceptional digital publishing.
http://bestofthenetanthology.com/
Poetry
- “Alight” by Sally Wen Mao
The arsonist in me salivates
when I see the chandelier made of matches
hanging from the hook at the Mattress
Factory. I imagine a flame kissing
its thousands of red charred nipples,
seeing the museum, the chairs, ignite.
- “Everything is Temporary” by Nicole Callihan
If I were face-up in the MRI machine, I’d see the cherry blossoms affixed to the ceiling.
But I’m face-down.
My arms are extended above my head.
A crane, I read this morning, can stay aloft for up to ten hours.
It barely needs to flap its wings.
- “Men Are Not Mirrors” by Caroline Cabrera
There is the movement I make and the shadow
of that movement and the memory of movement
which stays in the room for a while like lights-gone-off
burned into the backs of your eyelids. Not all scars
are permanent. Maybe I am walking at a pace
that makes me invisible to you.
- “Nation of Poets” by Ferrante Project
…How land is
made is how you became mine.
I want to offer you something
equal, and beauty concerns me
not. Maybe I will become yours—
we call that Nation. I arrived
with a war horse already
foaming in my mind; I come
with bullets glinting feelings
or memories—sometimes they
are the same: bullet, feeling,
memory. Ghosts I try to shoot…
Story
- “Once You’ve Gone Back Home” by David E. Yee
In the middle of the ten-minute bridge, under the framework where the barricades rise to a point out of view, it’s easy to feel a caged sort of safety from the green water a hundred feet down. But on the incline, the decline, the barriers are just low enough to see the danger below. As a kid, shuttled across it, I felt no fear, convinced that no man made structure built allowed harm to those inside it. Looking over the side now, the girders throwing shadows across the red paint of the hood, I thought about when that semi struck a car last year, sent it plunging into the water. How that woman survived, I wasn’t sure. I knew if it were me, I wouldn’t be so lucky.
- “The Agreement” by Ferrante Project
WHEREAS, the parties hereto were committed on a day when both X and Y were in a crisis. A low point in their lives where events forced an unlikely partnership.
X had fled from the Southwest to New York City to sober up from a love addiction with a man who secretly had a vasectomy. Imagine the feelings of betrayal. X, all her life, wanted children, to ensure the lineage of X’s mother’s family that could be traced back hundreds of years, to a time when the original colonizers had set foot on their land and ravaged her community. Her great-great-great-great-grandmother was one of the only survivors. It was X’s responsibility to make sure no one forgot what had happened to X’s people. They will pay, is what X’s family said every night at dinner instead of prayer.
Nonfiction
- “Spinal Column” by Ferrante Project
The midwife who caught my children years before tried to teach me a new technique called havening. She had me trigger the trauma, massage my own face with the tips of my fingers, and, hugging myself, do the same to the tops of my arms, replicating a mother’s touch; to mother myself. I was to repeat this mantra: “I deserve to feel safe.” I wanted it to work but admitted it did not. The trigger is too large, reasoned the midwife, the trigger is patriarchy, and all the babies being born to women in this era will inherit the fight-or-flight response through the umbilical cords of their mothers. Wait and see.
- “The Patient Records” by Ferrante Project
21. Rebellion happens in my eyes, which refuse to look up at the camera; my head is cast slightly downward, as if to say simply, No. If I am creating my own story, and I guess I am, the sunken forests, darknets, and shaded eyes are not where I gather my strength for resistance. It is here, in the light, with all of you, on the airy side of the blinded window alongside the micromonsters and everything else.
