2020 Best of the Net Nominations

Each fall we nominate contributors in fiction, nonfiction, and poetry for the upcoming Best of the Net Anthology. Featured here are Blackbird ’s picks from v18n2 and v19n1.

The last time he had come by for his stuff hadn’t been goodbye at all. She’d gone into her bedroom to retrieve his slippers and he’d followed her in and they’d made love on top of the comforter and he’d left empty-handed. . . .

I am thirty-seven years old, and my youngest daughter wants to stay in this house. She is too young to understand back taxes and memories that want to be repressed but can’t. She understands the magic of nooks and crannies and wide-open spaces, things our two-bedroom condo in the city lacks. I don’t know what my oldest daughter wants . . .

when Jesus comes back, and we’ll see what really happens to one another’s bodies. I mean, will we get some relief? Will we fade to ether, or will it be more like: the body as dog wants in so badly and, finally, you don’t just let it in, you carry it in, all mange and burr and fat deer tick, all thousand ditches slept in, and you think, That there is my body . . .

I followed Willie around the counter and down a narrow passageway. He stopped in front of another curtain, a black one, and told me to stay close to him as he pulled it to one side. He tugged my hand as he did so, urging me to follow him into the shadowy space the curtain created . . .

Every night, I trowel a handful of soil on the grave and still it will not fill. . . .

Was it I who invaded the day, or the day who invaded me? I do, I undo, I redo. I enlarged the figure till it was a mountain—I don’t fear the sublime— and I cut off its head . . .

Dreamer was the first to go to church. I always knew he would be. He was looking for premium mammon to redeem for cash at the Highway City pawnshop. He pried the steel bars of Christ’s Victorious Worship . . .

A sign of summer the red strawberries on both of your knees white salt lingering on the upper lip. Old mattress under third-story windows, jumping spirit first, one at a time, like wingless black doves. . . .

I wanted to have a sheep farm in Vermont with ten border collies. Floss and Phoebe, Lucy and Rose: I could give you their names, their colors and markings—I could say how they’d thrill to my voice, come running . . .

I had rented a little cabin on the lake. It was peaceful and beautiful there, but there was very little to do, which suited me fine. Moose came in the early morning to bathe and drink and at night skunks rooted around for garbage . . .