Our nominations for the 2016 Best of the Net anthology, which honors literary work that originally appeared on the internet between 7/1/2015 & 6/30/2016, are:
(And if you’ll be in the NYC area on Wednesday 9/21, you can hear Monica perform her work– along with seven other stellar writers– at our 10th Reading at Brooklyn’s Pacific Standard!)
{ X }
I KNOW THAT I WAS NOT MEANT TO HAVE YOUR TWINS,
theo and felicity, perfectly, preciously named, because we
would have conceived a tornado: artemis and she would have broken me into
postpartum and I’d have given her a life-long restlessness. I love you
still, and our daughter would have had your sea glass eyes and my wind-twisted,
night flight of curls, skin the color of brown feathered birds, and in her wake, always,
the scent of caribbean salt—but most certainly, a mouth unhinged—sharp & wise & legs always set to go and a hand unrelenting toward any necessary slay – yes we’d have created a warrior in flesh, alit & strong, but instead, I will birth her into words. and she will outlive our love, our could have, should have never been love. our love that would have quaked
a goddess to earth – one incapable of ever splitting herself into two.
STOP! THIEVES! THEY’RE PLAGIARIZING MY BOILERPLATES!
Come back with my clichés, those’re priceless family heirlooms…
Oh, no point in scolding the shameless, correcting the oblivious.
Like serenading the comatose, waterproofing the Hindenburg.
Did you hear they’re gentrifying the labyrinth? Even the Minotaur
can’t afford it anymore. At least they’ve diversified the donnybrook.
You can see one of my many-times-great grandmas photo-bombing The Garden of Earthly Delights…on the far right, near the rabbit.
Though I guess you’d call it “painting-bombing.” Hell is on the
right side of the picture. The viewer’s right. The damned’s left.
Please, don’t get me started on all those dingbats spooning
the Bill of Rights. Booby-trapping the English lexicon, they are!
And traumatizing the astronauts, keeping us too scared to stray
too far from Earth. Oh, and could you please forward me those
CliffsNotes for Steal This Book?
I can’t believe they’re re-booting The Clash—fucking auto-tuning
the revolution! I mean, whatever “the revolution” means anymore. The revolution will not be _____________. The revolution will not be.
I heard they had to start pixelating the food-porn in Santa Claus’s
Instagram. Kids were begging their parents to buy them expensive
& sexy food all year round. Wouldn’t it be cool if Elvis’d been alive
for Instagram? But when did he die again? Like 2009, right?
Of course they’re gonna weaponize the pacifists. Who else’s gonna?
Either way, once they monetize that eschaton, boy: watch out!
You mean the new show about the Marquis de Sade? Yeah I didn’t
think I’d get sucked in, but now I can’t stop hate-watching.
My hot-take is, there are some gargantuan plot holes in the story
of human evolution. Also, 78% of traffic jams are orchestrated
by Mongolian hackers. I think I should patent a guillotine
that uses lasers, but I have a hunch someone must’ve already.
I tell you, Philistines are a gaping wound, and we gotta
cauterize at all costs. Quarantines don’t need spoiler warnings,
they need all the info they can get. That’s why I’m constantly
subtweeting the Illuminati in all these self-published magazines.
There, you see? I’m utterly lost without my boilerplates! Those
clichés were irreplaceable! Here’s hoping these spare pieces
of small-talk my chauffeur found in the trunk of my limo
will suffice until the election.
{ X }
CLAUDIA ZANDERis a lighthouse keeper living in Long Island Sound, and the poetry editor ofFLAPPERHOUSE. Tweets @LaudedCzarina.
The grand finale of our Summer 2016 issue is Luis Galindo‘s nefariously groovy poem “The Prince of Darkness is cool, like Toshiro Mifune.”
{ X }
I WAS DRIVING a yellow Monte Carlo with a dark blue door
on the passenger side.
It had diamond tuck and roll interior
with eye of Horus buttons.
The prince of darkness asked me for a ride
to the corner store.
He was out of Kools and matches.
He wanted a Pepsi.
He looked like a Hispanic Toshiro Mifune.
He wore silver mirrored sunglasses,
a Foghat T-shirt,
black Levis and baby blue
snakeskin huaraches.
“Let’s roll, papi” he said
and tapped the blue door
with his fingernails,
long metallic grey talons.
I could hear him drumming along
to the song on the radio:
“The Cisco Kid,” by War.
“So what should I call you?” I asked.
“My name is Lucifer but they all call me Chato,”
he said in a low voice, sweet as raw honey.
He was sucking on a blue glow-in-the-dark lollipop,
it crackled and hissed when he took it out of his mouth.
His tongue, an electric eel, undulated and sparked.
He smiled like Conrad Veidt as he hummed.
His slick black hair was combed straight back, perfectly.
Behind the whites of his eyes were miniature angels
screaming and weeping, mouths agape
like mimes in an invisible box.
Their wings, ashen and fluttering like moths.
Tiny holy prisoners behind Chato’s eyes.
I FELT HIM STARING AT ME FIRST, then he bumped his scuffed cafeteria tray into mine.
The demon slopping out potatoes snickered
and drowned everything in an extra ladleful
of the Devil’s own gravy, a torture recent arrivals
and longtimers alike get to experience
–in all nine circles of Hell–on Thursdays.
Each and every Thursday. Forever.
At first I was turned on by how direct he was,
but then I needed insect repellent.
Me and my tendency to turn people into piss ants
and bee sting their tiny heads by telling them
all they seem to do is buzz in front of the tube
that someone else created,
as if they’ve lost all desire
to create their own shape.
He puppydogged me
all the way to the corner where I always sit.
There’s a nice little peephole and sometimes
you can just make out
the slow freefall of a newbie. I think of myself
as something akin to the welcome mat,
(telepathically) sending out: Welcome to Hell at the flaming, discombobulated wretches
as they fall.
IMAGE LIQUEFIED, drawn
through a stem
metaphysical experiment
the beaker
below
I drink the pixels
50Mbps
taste like
Horror
taste
like Comedy
taste
like
we talk
all the time
but I never
met you
our failure
as Mystery,
as little theatrical machine that assembles analogy this is
what is it is
to live
with you,
to cast
my spell
into
the endless
blur
SHE SAYS IT AS IF IT WERE SIMPLE: Silence exacts its pound of flesh.
But it’s years on now.
We know nothing else to be truer.
There was a time to speak,
to turn over tables
and throw bud vases
set out only for facade
against drywall. To dent
the flow of air.
To chirp against the rain.
To scream the floors awake.
Children do not wash easily down the drain.
They clink inside pipes, backlog sinks.
Drown in puddles of want.
Expand when we cannot save them.
Sensual, Proustian memories meet everyday magic in “How Often We Confuse Ovens for Rabbit Holes,”Kailey Tedesco‘s wonderfully surreal poem from our Summer 2016 issue.
{ X }
IN GROCERY STORES, I HATE THE SMELL OF RAW
roses by the dozen. Suddenly, I’m seven
and you’re pulling me out of school, or I’m
fourteen and the mortician hands me a tissue
that I hold, unblown, like my friend, light-
as-a-feather-stiff-as-a-board. What I’m getting
at is I’m sick of sitting in pews doused with
grocery store petals — they affront and I’m sucked
into a whirlwind of pollen. It’s disturbing how
stamen can make such associations, but I can’t
get the local magician out of my head. He pulled
a carnation from his lopsided top hat, elastic strung
haphazardly around his unshaven mug. As he extends
the flower, his face too close to mine, I wonder if he
wears the top hat all of the time– even while eating
beer-dipped sardines poolside? Did I ever tell you
I used to play in the carcasses of whales? They were
washed up all over the tree-line, and I, in my
communion socks, counted the paces from mouth
to tail until the whales became too stuffed with
fungus or the magician pulled up in his rose
gold Hyundai to ask me if I need a ride. A good
witch won’t offer you chewing gum, and I’m not
crawling in, but I am fattening up. And we can
spend our whole lives shouting Bloody Mary
into mirrors, hoping she’ll pop by and bring
us through the other side, but chrome is as murky
as any above-ground pool. All my life, I’ve been
chasing the vermin home, only to wake up
exactly where I started.
AND AFTER THE THREE GODS CREATED humans from two paired trees;
after they broke down the body of Ymir:
his skull the sky, his brains the clouds,
bones unbroken into mountains,
his blood all oceans, flesh flensed clean
into all the mortal world,
the maggots came
feasting on unused parts:
the brow, the spleen, the lining of arteries.
Such is the nature of maggots,
to clean up the messes of giants.
The gods wished to continue creating
to fill up the chaotic void unperturbed.
And so, the gods cast their random plan—
Immoral maggots banished
as a race of chthonic trolls—
may a hint of daylight render them to stone.
The maggots deemed moral found
a place to flit about somewhere between
Earth and Heaven, lovely fairies of light.
{ X }
“Legacy of Strega”
HIS FATHER DIED IN CORSICA. Natural causes. When a man gets stabbed, naturally he bleeds. When a man gets stabbed more than once, naturally he bleeds more. When all the blood bleeds out, naturally he dies.
His mother died in Corsica. On a full stomach. She sucked up all the husband’s blood, her lips on each stab wound. Then she found some daggers and plunged them into herself.
Into the tomb they went, his dead mother and him in her womb. Self-sufficient in a dead space in a dead space. Self-delivered from a dead space into a dead space. Then he climbed out. It was night.
From dark place in a dark place to wide open dark place. To dabble with goblins. To make a new race. To suck. To scour. To ghoul and gyre. To hunt nocturnal. On moors. Crags of rock. Pale to the moonlight.
{ X }
photo by Kaeti Wigeland
CHRISTINA M. RAU is the author of the poetry chapbooks WakeBreatheMove(Finishing Line Press, 2015) and For The Girls, I (Dancing Girl Press, 2014). Founder of Poets In Nassau, a reading circuit on Long Island, NY, her poetry has appeared on gallery walls in The Ekphrastic Poster Show, on car magnets for The Living Poetry Project, and most recently in the journals Queen Mob’s Teahouseand Meniscus. In her non-writing life, she practices yoga occasionally and line dances on other occasions. She blogs at http://alifeofwe.blogspot.com and does everything else at www.christinamrau.com.
CLAUDIA ZANDER is a lighthouse keeper living in Long Island Sound, and the poetry editor of FLAPPERHOUSE. Tweets 
The grand finale of 
FLAPPERHOUSE 