Uncle Frank
The car is hot, hot, too hot,
we can’t roll the windows down fast enough
Everyone is, already.
Already annoyed, already hot,
sweaty, damp with irritation
and that’s when Mom glances down at her phone
and says that Frank is dead.
Frank is finally dead, she announces,
tone casting for a response
that doesn’t arrive.
Tongues are just clicking
and foreheads are just ker-thunking
against the windows that won’t roll down.
Frank is thinner in death than I ever knew him to be
(are they ever fuller? Finally sated?
Leaning back from the dinner table
with a contented sigh
and an exaggerated yawn?).
As I study him from across the room,
I can only think about the night I followed
Charlie and Nolen,
headfirst
and then the rest of me,
naked into the lake.
Three very pale fish, thrashing, gulping air
like they knew what to do with it.
Trinity
The enormity of that town across the Atlantic –
It was often lost on me.
All brick cities feel ancient when you’re drunk,
and we are keeping the stars in place
with pushpins and thumbtacks.
Swirling through streets that want nothing to do with us
and how loudly we are laughing, back
to our castle towers, high,
and too-small beds,
and all the wrong shapes in the walls.
Clay-Baked
This summer, you are freshly ten,
knees sliced raw by cornstalks
and skin crawling at the foreboding melody
of your father’s rat-bone wind chime.
He made you watch him snuff out a rattler yesterday.
It writhed around after being cleaved in two, two.
Two parts of the same whole,
confused as to where this space in
between them came from.
You draw star patterns in the blood-stained dust
with your bare toes.
There was a kind of resolute reverence to the place,
a perpetual late August.
You cut your tongue
from licking rolling paper,
and compare scabby legs
with the neighbor’s kid.
Dusk crawls into bed with the evening around you,
the sun slinking below the horizon line
with no complaint, legs spread in soundless acquiescence.
Time is three snakes, laid end to end, fangs clamped around the next one’s tail
Time is coiled in my gut
Three venomous lengths
Spiraling around
Again and again
Becoming tighter and tighter wound.
Book of Tricks
She tells me her aunt cheats at cards as we scrape grass
and green stains from our knees
Gazing into an eyeless and horrible sky,
The sun a roseblush,
a pink-like-gray.
The ends of our hair kissing
like
lovers,
I pray to the pink-gray nothing
we will be gnarled together when we sit up —
so knotted that no water
or flaxseed oil
or peanut butter
or any good southern remedy
can separate us.
In fact, my mama’s good fabric scissors,
so heavy and silver-sharp,
will snap into cold halves as she tries to shear us apart.
And she’ll curse us,
to hell and back,
Muffled by mirth as attic stairs swallow steps
We cannot move without our elbows touching
and we are ignoring my mother
leaking tears over scissors below us
And they can’t untangle our hair, can they?
And we’ll just have to share my pillow, won’t we?
My grandmother’s embroidery
will be mirror-stamped on her cheek in the morning
and I won’t think she could ever be more lovely.
Rebecca
There’s a deep, troubled sense
That old issue of memory
Rememory, the wife of Isaac
Relivery, the grip of eye sick
Me, sick with failure of memory.
Unable to conjure, impotent
No more party trick spark
I can still feel fingers running down my back,
Only partway, halfway, all the way there now.
But this is how you begin and end, to me, just yet –
Limp intangibilities.
I think I’ll finally snap at the upstairs neighbor,
Pant and howl at odd hours of the night.
Adeline Bryant is a recent graduate of Comparative Literature from the University of Georgia. From a formerly small, now medium-sized southern town, she has been writing since she could grasp a crayon in her hand.
Chantarelle's Notebook 