Best of the Net Nominations 2026

Best of the Net awards are an annual anthology of outstanding poems and stories from online literary journals honouring online publishing, hosted by Sundress Publications.

We are proud to nominate fine writers for this fine anthology.

You can learn more at this link:

https://bestofthenetanthology.com/

Huge congratulations to this year's nominations in The Mackinaw: a journal of prose poetry.

Big Island, by Sherry Abaldo
The Urn, by Carol W. Bachofner
The Old Men at Walmart, by Paul Juhasz
Blood Sisters, by Wendy Kagan
Kintsugi, by Barbara Krasner
A Pearl is the Autobiography of an Oyster, by Gerry LaFemina
Lost Cord, by Brooke Martin
One Red Koi Fish is Enough to Change Your Life, by Baruch November

**

Big Island
 
I was going to tell your family you died happy, the documentary filmmaker says. I slog up the coarse beach at Mahukona, tugging at my orange one-piece with black squiggles, high-cut thighs. He had written Pack plenty of bathing suits. 

No documentary ever gets made, but we crew swim all the time, like clockwork. Coffee and papaya breakfast, swim. Tamari-drizzled cottage cheese on avocado lunch, swim. Beer cheers to the sunset, swim. I learn kahunas and kupunas (elders), aumakuas (family gods), how to body surf – not bad for a haole.
 
One afternoon, a bale of green sea turtles. I swim next to the largest, the granddaddy, the king – not touching him coated as I am in Dr. Bronner’s castile soap and sunscreen, but I gaze into his wizened ancient eye which stares right into me. Enchantment.

Turtles head for cooler deeper water, out to sea. I follow. Sun sinks. Wind lifts. Suddenly I notice the entire bale has disappeared, shore nowhere in sight, fellow swimmers in a bar by now. I am alone in the Pacific. All I have to do is turn around, swim in the opposite direction. Against salty 4’ waves. I dream the turtle’s eye (in his realm now, not mine), alternating strokes – overhand crawl, back, breast, side stroke. Are those roadside ironwoods ahead, or clouds?

Finally, sand. My toes dig in with relish, clasping earth like hands. The filmmaker waits in the dark, jeep high beams on, relieved smile, same old coral shorts. Only later that night, in the warm burnt sugar and night blooming jasmine scented air, in somebody’s hot tub drinking flowery wine, I realize what a risk I took: almost turned forever haole – without breath. I tremble in the water, hide it. Full moon bluely lights my browned skin, asking if my mistake was innocent.

Sherry Abaldo

**

The Urn

She sits in the back pew and listens. His voice is a jet of blood, a tribal uttering, a startled song. It is a tongue no language can translate. God’s five senses magnified. The invitation had been forged. None of the usual mourners are present, the ones with faux hearts bleeding at the wake. No. But she, nearly consumed by algor, will dance for the burned, the ashed, the damned. It’s been said: someone dances for the damned to cast a spell on the living. She waits. She has a gift for shadow: a violet fragrance shaking from her hair confirms it. She had died in childbirth. She had crossed the Pyrenees by elephant. She had run along the bottom of the sea. She had climbed into her own womb to wait for this moment. It is her turn. The ashes shift ever so slightly. Her dance begins with a low fever. The tide stands on its hind legs, a cat flies into the moon.

Carol W. Bachofner

**

The Old Men at Walmart
 
It is not the witching hour, nor anything akin to that, for there is no magic here. Still, there is something solemn about these early Saturday hours; an indifferent gathering, like a storm drain assemblage, when the single old men do their shopping away from the glares and stares, from the wonderous judgment of community. They wander down their lonely aisles, wondering how it came to this, while silently assembling a paltry pile of items. Barely enough to justify a cart, but pride still keeps them away from the finality of baskets. There are no children, begging for candy or toys, at this hour. No wives or partners parsing through future-laden lists and dinner plan promises. There are just the old men.
 
They do not buy much for they have lost most of it already. They wander down their lonely aisles, wondering how it came to this, wondering whether they should count out their days in microwave burritos or in pot pies. The hardware section nothing but a vague, shadowy echo of days as distant as the Cretaceous, as mythologized as Valhalla. The clothes section sped through, a forced and fated indifference grabbing for shelves (for it no longer matters whether boxers or briefs). Some stay outside, huddled in the lea of the storefront, furtively smoking in passive suicide, but most shuffle, fatigued and silent, within; wandering down their lonely aisles, wondering how it came to this.

Paul Juhasz

**

Blood Sisters

We coveted cuts, self-inflicted pinpricks. A picked scab was kismet, a chance to press our crimson together. By mingling plasma, we sealed our sisterhood. Mere friendship wasn’t enough—we needed that bloodbond written in the skin. Just before AIDS made everyone afraid, we solemnly merged cells: For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you. Our schoolyard romps revolved around a set of twins, blonde & Gothic, in matching hair bobbles. A mythic closeness we could only imagine. Fate gave us brothers with dirt bikes & cowlicks & smoldering silences. We craved doubleness. Bubble-lettered our longing on scented stationary at sleepaway camp, along the ruffled edges of Maine lakes where the loon would call her lonely call. Bloodoath unbroken. Wounds reaching for each other, soft as pines across the wilderness.

Wendy Kagan

**

Kintsugi
 
If only I could fill the chasms of my life with silver or gold. The open veins caused by lack of companionship, the silences of no one to listen. If only I could mortar the space between tesserae with granddaughter giggles and hugs around the neck. If only I could batten the noise with the softness of stuffed animals and the ankle socks my mother used to fill with kosher salt to cure an earache. If only I could breathe deeply with Vicks VapoRub® to unlock my nasal passages and feel the mentholated heat on my chest. If only I could pour my mother’s chicken soup with mashed up matzoh balls into the skeins of my memory, loosen the phlegm in my throat when I cry out for her, seventeen years after her death. If only I could back out of the garage without hitting the goddamn plastic garbage can and without taking out half the weather-stripping of the door frame. If only I could make myself whole once again, stitch together that skin that’s eating me alive since the Moderna booster fool’s gold. 

Barbara Krasner

**

A Pearl is the Autobiography of an Oyster
 
As with so many stories, this one starts with a singular hurt—some slight or harsh words, a profound irritant that can never be spat out. Instead it remains, a sharp sand grain held against the tongue for decades. Imagine how it sits and shifts, scratchy, cutting. Imagine how it scrapes and how, too, over time it loses its edge, gets smoothed over even as it grows and calcifies. A hurt like that defies logic. It gains luster there on the sea floor, hidden and sealed shut, waiting for the young woman who can hold her breath the longest, the one who dives down to pick from the beds, plucking mollusks ‘til she gathers a whole mesh sack of them. And later, shucking them open, that smooth and simple iridescence must astound her. Picture her rolling that small orb gently between her fingers, wide-eyed by the opalescent beauty of endurance.

Gerry Lafemina

**

Lost Cord
 
Give me my baby  I beseech you  It’s not good for you to touch him scolds the doctor  or for that matter even see him   The sheet splattered in blood blocks my view It covers my legs held in stirrups Your forceful kicks ceased yesterday I already knew       The scent of cherry tobacco drifts into the operatory In the doorway Otto puffs on his pipe   Agnes he barks Get on with it dear Lord    I am convalescing on the maternity ward where days dissolve into nights It is time for feeding every two hours The nurse hands out pink faced bundles left and right to the new mothers She walks with dispatch past my bed  averting her gaze  Home at last I step into the nursery   Empty   Your cradle   The oak rocker  Gone     Even the circus wallpaper  stripped away   Where’s the maple dresser  Each drawer neatly stacked with your embroidered baby gowns   I used a fine gauge needle and silk thread to stitch you an entire menagerie  I was most proud of my needlework on your duckie smock   Although it ended up in the bottom drawer  to hide the unsightly stain from my pricked finger    At breakfast Otto barricades himself behind newspapers On weeknights dines at his mother’s in the village On weekends flyfishes in the stream      withdraws to his workbench to perfect his lures     All day I hear the hollow sound of my footsteps pace the wooden nursery floor Or the rhythmic creaking as I sit on the rigid chair  rocking   rocking   Weeks go by   I implore Stanley our coachman to drive me to the village  People stare as I  alight from the carriage  cocooned in black   I hear a baby wail behind me in line at the mercantile exchange I turn around   There    a young mother soothing her little one who’s dressed in chalk-white linen      An unquiet sensation rushes into my breasts   There    I found it  Your delicate smock     A faded splotch of my blood mars the duckies on parade
 
umbilical cord
incinerated remains
tethered to my heart
 
Brooke Martin

**

One Red Koi Fish is Enough to Change Your Life

One red koi fish is enough to change your life, darting into view then taking all it has changed back into the darkness below the surface, below understanding. It has found the infinite because it is beyond sight and everything is possible. In fact, the koi fish has become Schrodinger’s cat. It is both there and gone— dead and alive. 

It might surprise you to know that koi fish have become frustrated with us because we do not think of the infinite enough and our skin lacks the great lustre of the closest star.
​
Baruch November