Chantarelle's Notebook

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 .

 

The Factory of Your Lungs

Smoke tastes like metal on my tongue
the foreman smiles in sulfur,
his eyes soldered to the conveyor belt of our bodies.
We punch in at dawn,
our breaths counted like rivets,
our coughs stamped “approved” or “defective.”

The machines hum lullabies of ash,
and the windows are painted with the sheen of regret.
Each exhale is a confession,
each inhalation a ledger entry
in the balance sheet of poison.

Hands blackened, nails brittle,
we measure our worth in soot and static.
The clock on the wall ticks like a heart in a cage,
and somewhere, someone calculates
how many lungs equal a profit margin.

Outside, children play under clouds of gray,
their laughter filtered through steel and smoke.
I swallow my own fear like water
in a well that never runs dry.

At night, the factory dreams for us:
gears grinding, hammers hammering,
a cathedral of iron where we kneel
and thank the smoke for teaching patience.
Our lungs learn the language of machines—
a hymn of industry,
a prayer of survival,
a poem we never wanted to write.

 

Subway Graffiti as Prophecy

Every tunnel wall bleeds messages
the letters twitch when the train breathes.
A spray of crimson whispers,
a name scrawled like a heartbeat,
a symbol curled around a pipe,
telling futures that smell of oil and rain.

The trains howl through the veins of the city
carrying commuters who read nothing
but glance at the shadows
and feel a pulse in their shoes.
Each turn of the wheel presses the ink
into the skin of the tunnels,
and the rats memorize it,
their eyes reflecting rebellions
that will never appear in newspapers.

Someone etched a ladder to the sky
behind a column of peeling posters,
letters stacking like bricks:
resist, dream, disappear.
I trace them with my fingertip,
wondering if the walls can bleed hope
or if we are only ghosts reading ghosts.

When the lights flicker,
the messages shimmer and sway
as if the city itself is rehearsing
a future that refuses permission—
a prophecy written not in stars,
but in scratched metal and soot,
and the steady, unignorable hum of rails.

 

License Plates of the Oppressed

I read the license plates as prayers—
each number a pulse, each letter a sigh.
Metal rectangles pass in lines,
each a sermon of someone who survives
in the shadows of cameras, of grids, of blue lights humming.

Some plates are poetry I cannot decode:
M4R7Y, L0STN, H0P3—
weaving grief into sequences,
hope into the geometry of the street.
A mother on the highway hums her child’s lullaby
through the radio static,
a father’s knuckles whiten on the wheel,
swallowed by fog and the hum of tires.

The cameras record, the sensors memorize,
but they cannot read the tremble in the blink,
the curve of a smile folded into anger,
the silent rebellion of a turn signal flicked thrice
as if Morse code could escape the ledgered eyes.

Every car a capsule,
every driver a testament,
every plate a petition to a god who may not exist
but watches anyway.
I trace them with my eyes,
I count them like heartbeats in exile,
and in the rhythm of passing steel,
I see all the faces they cannot hold,
all the journeys they cannot name,
all the prayers that will remain unsent.

 

The Census Tells a Lie

We fit into boxes
but the boxes leak our stories into the gutters.
A child counts her siblings on fingers
that the ledger refuses to touch.
Grandparents’ voices fold into margins,
their accents footnotes no one reads.

Brick by brick, the city swallows names,
keeps our histories in alleys
where pigeons remember better than maps.
The census taker smiles politely
and scribbles a zero where a heartbeat lived,
a comma where a street hummed with prayer.

We live in the footnotes of ourselves,
each apartment a stanza lost to ink and policy.
Our laughter is uncounted,
our grief unnumbered,
our hunger omitted like a line cut from a poem
that the world pretends it never wrote.

Outside, the census trucks drive past,
windows fogged with statistics.
Inside, the walls echo
with stories that leak like water from a broken pipe—
telling the world we existed,
even if the ledger never agrees.

We fit into boxes
but we spill anyway,
and somewhere beneath the official pages
the city remembers us in its gutters,
quietly, stubbornly,
in the only language that matters: being.

 

The Riot in Slow Motion

Sirens hum lullabies
broken glass reflects our parents’ anger.
The streets swell with a molten heat
that neither day nor night can contain,
our shadows stretch over asphalt scars
like history leaning on its elbows.

We move in slow motion,
hands trembling with inherited fury,
feet tracing the pulse of old rebellions
etched in the cracks of concrete.
Every shouted slogan
is a confession,
every brick a question hurled at the sky.

Graffiti bleeds on brick walls,
names we never knew yet feel
in the marrow of our bones.
Smoke curls from overturned bins
like ghosts learning to dance again,
and the wind carries the taste of iron
as if the city itself
were holding its breath,
waiting for us to decide
whether to forgive or remember.

Our mothers’ lullabies
turn bitter with fire,
our fathers’ silence
thickens into a drumbeat.
Time fractures; anger becomes a mirror,
and in each reflection,
we see the same hands,
the same knees,
the same unbroken vow
to never forget
how slowly, always,
the world learns to tremble.

Ismael S. Rodriguez Jr. (he/him) is a poet whose work explores labor, memory, resistance, and the spiritual residue of modern systems. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Nebo, Home Planet, Lost Lake Folk Opera, Pensive: A Global Journal of Spirituality & the Arts, Muse Literary Journal, and The DADvocacy Consulting Group Blog. He lives and writes in Florida, listening closely to what cities remember when institutions forget.

Traveler’s Therapy by Lennart Lundh

Shadows on the road grow long,
become shadows of themselves
within the fans of headlights
when the sun is gone.

Moving west through some state,
right-angled to the new moon,
the concrete snakes through forest
like a lover heading for a mistress.

Six weeks on the road with six to go.
He’s tired of sleeping in strange towns.
He lies in bed, looking at her picture,
the one she sent two nights ago.

She is leaning against their headboard,
wearing a camisole with one strap
slipping off her shoulder. He dares
imagine boy shorts below the photo.

The paisley cloth is a Rorschach to him.
He sees her breasts, one boldly bare,
the other peeking timidly through hair,
a country river flowing down it.

 

Lennart Lundh was a poet, short-fictionist, historian, and photographer. His work has appeared internationally since 1965.

Saturday online book club

I do that thing where I sip Riesling
from a coffee mug, blow on the surface,
cradle the ceramic to my chin as if nursing
the warmth. My cheeks flush nicely.

This book club is an act
of deep inveiglement. My sister tells me
white wine is best for daycare parties
because it looks – at a glance – like lemonade.

My husband walked out this morning
with only his backpack, like a five-year-old
off to school, that bounce in his step.
We’ve been fighting a lot lately.
He may or may not come back
at the end of the weekend.
I’ve been running my hand
across the carpet all afternoon,
smoothing out his footprints
and feeling – just feeling – the texture.

I’m feeling my age today, all 37 years.
My laptop and I sit on the floor, little friends.
The bones above my eyes throb –
the place on the human skull where mothers massage
when they think about their children. I don’t
have children, so I can afford to focus
on the carpet, the carnation decal on this mug,
whatever book we’re supposed to be discussing.

 

Stigmatized property

A man named Shilo Jacobson shot himself in the jugular
at the kitchen island of the condo
my husband and I bought in Kelowna.
Stigmatized property, said the letter of offer.

We didn’t own the place when this happened,
when Mr. Jacobson walked home on a Tuesday evening,
along Brandt Creek, with mallards skittered
out of his way across the trail.

He climbed the 21 flights of stairs – his custom.
Opened the closet beside the gas stove
and polished his Remington 700 on a tea towel
before going for the ammunition.
Bits of cartilage all over the backsplash.

I heard from a neighbour it took him 48 minutes to suffocate.
Our strata documents had other details:
window coverings must be cream or white.
Pets not permitted to urinate on common property.
A reasonable number of fish or other small
aquarium animals permitted.

We repainted the kitchen cream.
I bought an aquarium and populated it
with half a dozen freshwater angelfish – reasonable.

Evenings, I boil fettuccine, sauté chanterelles,
pan fry pork chops until they spit hot oil and gristle
that clings to the backsplash
and I have to step out to the balcony
to catch my breath. My husband

stops eating once he’s two glasses down.
To him, the kitchen is no obstacle.

 

April afternoon on the Inner Harbour

A float plane pedals up.
I used to live in this city, used to dance
at Swan’s Hotel and Brewpub –
live bands and alive.

I nurse a honey lager overlooking
Johnson Street Bridge, cyclists,
seagulls coasting the breeze. Across the water,
the Delta Grand rears like a toy castle.
My undergrad sweetheart used to meet me
at the harbour ferry dock after his shifts
and just over there, off Wharf Street,
my friend Mishka poured candles for a living.

I used to think I could never
be unfaithful.

My backpack carries my laptop
and dirty Nikes. I’m here for work.
I want extravagance this weekend,
this April afternoon.

Mishka now sells silk-screened dresses.
This morning, she plied me with a black one
printed in dandelions and bicycle spokes.
I cinched it around my ribcage, waist,
all the soft organs I can’t name.

I have a gentle crush on our graphic designer,
Tegan – the phantasm of his hand
on my elbow, stepping into my office,
holding each other,
and letting it be only that.

He flirts with divorce, I do too.
But there’s already been so much
breaking this year.

What aperitifs do I bring to the table?
Bubly water, lemon meringue, resentment.
Everything that starts out sweet
then charbroils in the back of your mouth.

My husband’s tongue
is the colour of drip coffee and suspicion.

The conversations of other drinkers
mishmash to rhubarb and glossolalia.
I want innocence like Vaseline.

What if I were to stay
at Mishka’s apartment tonight?
In Tegan’s hotel room?
I’d listen to the seagulls
either way, and sleep.

Danielle Hubbard lives in Kelowna, BC, where she works as the CEO of the Okanagan Regional Library. Her poetry has appeared in Grain, The Malahat Review, and Prairie Fire, among other places. When not writing or working, Danielle enjoys cycling, swimming, and exploring the Okanagan Valley.

Muscle Memory

How many people have refolded this same page
that I am folding now above a poem
clean as the mountaintop? A vantage point
that connects aloneness with everything?
Even my bones know what I’m going to do before I do it.

 

Rinse Repeat

Why are we humans so forgetful? Every spring
is the first spring. Every winter is interminable.
When I am tired, it is the first time. My brain
equates tiredness with sadness, my brain thinks
it has never been comforted. Every tear is the first—
every poem is the last I’ll ever write.

Esther Sadoff is a teacher and writer from Columbus, Ohio. She is the author of four chapbooks: Some Wild Woman (Finishing Line Press), Serendipity in France (Finishing Line Press), Dear Silence (Kelsay Books), and If I Hold my Breath (Bottlecap Press). She was nominated for a Pushcart Prize by Hole in the Head Review, and she is the winner of the Women of Ohio 2025 Poetry Award.