Chantarelle's Notebook

Alive
for Breonna Taylor

I have been driving this car with no
inspection sticker ever since I bought it
last year, and I have not been pulled over.

I have watched birds in the park
and no one called the cops on me,
no one asked me why I was there.

I unlock my own house with my
own key and no one accuses me
of trying to break in.

I go to sleep in my own bed
at night and
I wake up in the morning.

I have danced and walked and talked
in many neighborhoods
that were not my own.

I’ve gone into convenience stores, I’ve
taken a nap in my car, had worry beads
and air fresheners hanging from my
rear view,

I have played my radio too loud. I have
failed to signal a lane change. I have
been stopped for a broken taillight.
Headlight.

For speeding. Sometimes
I have gotten a ticket, and sometimes
I have not.

But I have driven away.
Every damned time.

Artist, educator, and poet Elinor Mattern teaches many aspects of creative writing on a freelance basis, after retiring from teaching English at Atlantic Cape Community College. She earned her Master of Fine Arts degree in Creative Writing from Fairleigh Dickinson University, and her poems and non-fiction have appeared in numerous journals and newspapers, including The Boston Globe, The Philadelphia Inquirer, Paterson Literary Review, and Tiferet, A Journal of Spiritual Poetry.

Nothing Much to Report Tonight

Just the light from the
moon’s 100 watt bulb, shining
through the trees, and the
wine and weed just now starting
to open up some
of the parameters of
perception, a bit
(to help facilitate the
free-flowing exchange
of thoughts and ideas). Just
the river gurgling
out the latest news from the
outside world (even
though we know it’s old news by
the time it reaches
us). Just this signal of a
wood fire beaming out
like a beacon in the night
to guide lost souls home
from their various tragi-
comic odysseys
and mis-adventures. Just the
dogs off in the woods
calling out for their long lost
distant cousins, the
coyotes, to come out and make
some noise while the stars
are shining. Just the distant
horn of a semi-
truck coming in from out there
on the highway, past
the hills on the horizon
(causing the cattle
to stir, briefly, from their sleep),
and then it’s gone. Just like that.

 

Jason Ryberg lives part-time in Kansas City, MO with a rooster named Little Red and a Billy-goat named Giuseppe, and part-time somewhere in the Ozarks, near the Gasconade River, where there are also many strange and wonderful woodland critters.

The Language of Keys

keys do not unlock doors anymore
they translate them
each turn carries a meaning
I cannot fully inherit
grief, maybe
or weather folded into metal
I keep them in my pocket
like small unfinished sentences
they clink softly
arguing among themselves
about which rooms
I am still allowed to enter
some doors respond
by becoming heavier
as if remembering too much
others open too easily
which is worse
because nothing waits inside
except the echo
of having been expected
I begin to understand
that access was never the point
only listening
to what the lock refuses to say

 

Domestic Astronomy

the ceiling studies me at night
mapping my breathing
into faint constellations
none of them are named
yet they insist on existing
a star misfires behind plaster
then corrects itself
as if embarrassed
the room becomes a slow orbit
around my stillness
even the furniture tilts
toward invisible gravity
I lie awake
listening to the architecture think
about expansion
about holding shape
about what it means
for light to remain
after its source has changed its mind
somewhere above me
darkness is being organized
into patterns I almost recognize
but never learned to read

 

Afterimage of a Doorway

every doorway I pass through
leaves a second version of me behind
standing just slightly out of focus
like a thought that forgot its ending
sometimes I hear it breathe
when the house settles
as if it is practicing my life
without committing to it
doors do not close
they hesitate
and in that hesitation
I multiply
not forward
but sideways
into versions that never fully arrive
I start to suspect
that leaving is not motion
but repetition
and I am always
somewhere in the middle of it
still deciding
whether to follow myself through

Khayelihle Benghu is a South African writer working across poetry and short-form prose. Their work explores perception, memory, and the quiet distortions of everyday life through image-driven and atmospheric writing

Cart

It is Saturday morning and I walk to
the café, avoiding the storm that rolls in–

black clouds hang from the luggage
cart wheeled from trunk to room.

There’s no place I claim on this Earth.
As soon as I settle, I am thousands of miles

from where I started, but when I look up
at night, stars find me here, in the same spot,

always.

 

Doomscroll

the screen grotesque again the news
oh Lord already old I am not in
the crosshairs but my mother is
my sister my girlfriend TV sticky slimy
sap sad and rotting in my kitchen
the entropy in the bedroom too
many windows the glass walls
could shatter now at his voice
your humanity will go with it
I am sorry your body
is the martyr and that
there have been hands
sticky slimy sap sad
and rotting all over
you as death began
and begins his
term anew

 

Daily Spiral

I have to be better. I don’t want to
lose you. I walk in the rain on New
Year’s Day, glints of purple from
a second floor apartment’s light
glistening in the puddles on
the street. Pigeon feathers, snips
of branches, and persistent cold
wind pushes me without
control back into my gray
block, the room that blocks
my secret waves.

James Croal Jackson is a Filipino-American poet working in film production. His latest chapbook is A God You Believed In (Pinhole Poetry, 2023). Recent poems are in Red Tree Review, Alabama Literary Review, and Sideways Poetry Journal. He edits The Mantle Poetry from Nashville, Tennessee. (jamescroaljackson.com)

Bethlehem in Minneapolis

The deer cast long shadows

on the pasture fence;

with three crowned heads,

they are wise creatures walking to the city

for the birth of a necessary miracle.

There is a murmuration of starlings

pointing fingers east.

The wind blows the alder’s branches

towards a war in crowded places.

 

Boots and guns are moving

through distant streets.

Far away a father hides a small girl

in a toy box; she lies next

to a raveled bear.

Her door is kicked in by masked men;

her mother turns up beseeching palms.

In the window a needful star

lifts too late.

 

Was this the child?

I pick up the phone in the night.

There is a vast web of connecting whispers

far away. It links building to building

and home to home.

I hear voices say

She is gone.

They were here.

Hide. This

is where they are now.

 

 

  

Because She Cannot Speak

(for Renee Good)

Tonight the rain drips in threads

from the barn gutters;

a silent crow sits on a post.

I am black as the neighbor’s rooster

that crows at midnight.

Poems rise slow from the wet ground;

they are Renee’s, another poet

lost.

 

My husband says she deserved it.

Outside the kitchen window

his bleak heart whistles up

his beloved collie, herding the sheep.

I see him lately

with the eyes of the ewe

that died in childbirth.

 

He asks why I always call

her “a mother”;

I say her children left at school

are all our children.

In the night hours, feeding a lamb,

I think that Renee

nursed every creature she could.

 

 

Lately, I feel the moment she died.—

I can no longer fully love.

Since then, I’ve been dark

as the bottom of a grave,

cruel as the bullet in the air

broken as her shattered face.

 

 

 

If the Center Does Not Hold

The snow is late this year. The farm is on

a soft rise, and deep drifts form over

the hay bales. The sheep crowd in the shelter;

the long pastures are full of nothing but wind.

 

The roads here are closed, but the black

highway stays clear. In the city smoke and fog

rise above the city lights, and grey sheets of rain

fall endlessly.

 

I’ve been reading the news;

there are missiles off Ukraine’s shore,

there will be no brokered peace.

All night I’m awake, listening to the wolves

call back and forth across the dark.

 

The power went out after breakfast;

for a moment I imagined an immense blast,

a broken mirror of sky, the reverberating sound.

I thought about radiation and then death at a crawl.

 

If it comes, we said we’d seal the garage door

and sit in the car in each other’s arms, listening

to the engine hum. With my last breath

I want to hold my husband’s face in my hands

like a prayer, and wind my fingers

through his coarse beard.

 

I imagine I’ll hear the rock doves calling

as his heart ticks down, and the

untroubled night falls.

We’ll walk the long pastures

and leave the snow undisturbed.

 

Kristin Roedell graduated from Whitman College (B.A. English 1984) and the University of Washington Law School (J.D. 1987). Her poetry has been published in The Journal of the American Medical Association, Switched on Gutenberg, and Ginosko. She is the author of Girls with Gardenias, (Flutter Press, 2012), Downriver, (Aldrich Press, 2015) and Lessons in Buoyancy (Poetry Box Press, 2026). Her chapbook The Rural Road is forthcoming from Farm Girl Press. She lives on a farm with six cats, fifteen sheep, and an arthritic border collie. Her website can be found at kristinroedell.wikidot.com .