Author: chantarellesnotebook

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.

Emily as Lamp-Lit

We are two charged forces
becoming ghosts
& luxury, freedom

& the witness of freedom.
The terrible night is ours
& it’s not so terrible.

Give me a loose connection
to the world
& give me Emily. Perfect.

 

Emily as a Museum

I want to have sex
with Emily
every damn day

of this life,
but she has gathered
all of the Emily

& kept it for herself
& once a week
the doors open

for the general public
& I’m very lucky
to be there

when they do.
Too much of this
world is kept

in beautiful buildings
named after white
women that come

from money.
I love this one,
but it needs

to be said.
She is the art
& the gift shop

& the owner
& the tax write-off
& the city is better

because of her
& apparently, I work
in tourism

& every time
I’m there I see her
& then I dream of her.

 

Emily as Yep

A lithe body
means heat
& this world

can be so cold
& I’m not tired
of explaining

her strange animal
as a ricochet
towards existence

because I know
only one truth
& the rest

of everything
is just profanity
& death.

Darren C. Demaree grew up in Mount Vernon, Ohio. He is a graduate of the College of Wooster, Miami University, and Kent State University. He is the author of twenty-three poetry collections, most recently “So Much More”, (Small Harbor Publishing, November 2024). He is the recipient of a Greater Columbus Arts Council Grant, an Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award, the Louise Bogan Award from Trio House Press, and the Nancy Dew Taylor Award from Emrys Journal. He is the Editor-in-chief of the Best of the Net Anthology and Managing Editor of Ovenbird Poetry. He is currently working in the Columbus Metropolitan Library system, and living in Columbus, Ohio with his wife and children.

 

Another Estate Sale

Gravel showers the windshield
of pollinated pick-up
shining bed and body black as the bible,
my body in the passenger seat frail as
faith. Forest fires rage on up north, but
not here at home.
The shroud of truth covers me with
second-hand smoke and my second-hand
dress, embroidered pink sparrows fraying
close by the collar, birds,
stitched by the steadiness of a human hand—
swooping underneath the cirrus
of my sternum.

White dress yellowed as a marriage license,
or a love letter kept in its coffee-stained envelope.
Objects in mirror are closer than they appear
I am warned from the passenger side.
I watch the grass that surrounds
the graves grow
as we circle the cemetery,
just driving the dirt roads to
talk about tomorrow.

I cannot bear to touch
the shape of my shadow, nearer than God to me.
I have a cheap golden heart
I wear around my neck.
It turns my throat green,
itching allergy to self.
The hole I keep your fading face in—
a locket
or a coffin?
I click it closed.

Checking my frills
in the lacustrine silver
of rearview, I exhume your goodbye
from the glovebox like a crucifix,
use it to ward off the dusk that trails
the truck like a thin hound
teeth bared, barking into the exhaust.
I am afraid as any other animal.

I roll down the window.
I’ve worn this chain,
with its hearts and crosses, medals of saints,
since it appeared on my nightstand
as a little girl, and now I and toss it
into the wafting
summer gloam.
There is only one wish—
again.

 

Dwarf Planet

The moon is my mother. She is not sweet like Mary.
My mother’s milk is space dust, its own element.
I suckle mercury, and it makes me into an alien.
I speak a language nobody knows
and never grow up.

After the nightmare, my hand over my heart.
In the dark, I mistake my own
arms for Saturn’s rings.
Outside the window glass,
star-spat cloud buds into bright flower,
petals blue as Earth.
I ellipse the black garden like Pluto,
harvest Hiroshima ash into my apron.
The grasses whispering their griefs to my ankles
as if they could fell me like a fawn
take me out of the trap and make me their god.
Maybe I could make it rain all the time.
I use the water as a mirror,
comb the uranium out of my hair.

I would like to believe in tenderness.
The moon is no one’s wife—
she is a white-knuckle, an empty hand.
The moon is a fist.
There’s radon in the well water.
It has already killed a calf
and wasted my body.
Bedridden with War,
the sun, that hairy lioness, catches my fevers.

Or moon is my death mask. I know her name.
she throws the sea over her shoulder like salt,
pockets an infant’s caul in her night gown.
There is no loneliness like longing.
Every constellation as an effigy,
candle-lit by nebulas,
all distant as saints.
Every face you see in a dream is a face you’ve seen before.

Laura Ingram is a young poet who lives and writes in rural Virginia. Her work has previously appeared in over one-hundred literary magazines and journals, among them Juked and Gambling the Aisle. Laura is the author of six collections of poetry; The Tafeta Parable, Junior Citizen’s Discount, Mirabilis, Animal Sentinel, The Ghost Gospels, and the Solitude of the Female Preying Mantis. Laura enjoys most books and all cats.

Dear Mom

When you met Dad, you were nineteen.
A tiny woman, blushing hair and skin

the colour of San Francisco summers.
He saw you in front of the olde-time movie house,

a Charlie Chaplin film miming in the background.
Dad wielded a Nikon and snapped

your photo. Did the flash burn your eyes?
Did the air have the tang of confetti?

The day was sunny with a chance of lightning.
You went for cocktails, tea at the Empress. I imagine

you ordered the Old Fashioned, simple.
Or rather, Dad ordered for you.

Later, you planted chili peppers on the balcony,
string beans on the porch. You mixed sugar water

for hummingbirds, held my head and the small
of my back as I learned to swim.

Toweled me off so the salt wouldn’t sting
my pores. You served us raspberries

from the garden – leeks and lemon balm.
You laid your palm on Dad’s forehead

to stave off migraines. I only wonder,
did you ever regret?

From your hospice room at the Royal Jubilee,
Dad in the chair beside you, fingers

in yours, did you ever wish
for one more drive over the Golden Gate?

Windows down, salt and the city’s blur
in your hair? Or did you look back at him,

the man who gave you three daughters,
and think these flavours fill me.

 

Yellowjackets

In the final days
of Mom’s life, we cram
six adults and one oblivious toddler
into my parents’ house.

The front yard grapes
rot on their vines.

We eat what we can and yellowjackets
come for the rest.

There’s nothing to do
but buy groceries, take
out the garbage.

We used to own backyard
chickens, each egg
a bit of sunrise.

I used to run
the Assiniboine.

I used to have a husband
who called yellowjackets flying cunts.

Mom used to walk us to school
down Lochside Trail in safety vests.

Some days I miss everything
sharp as lemon rind
under my ribs.

 

Dear Gretta

We used to joke about being pregnant
together, two skinny women with cantaloupes
under our shirts.

We’re almost 40 now, it’s not going to happen
and we’re each – in different ways –
filling in those hollows.

When we talked on the phone yesterday, the wind
came cold off the river, but I tried
not to feel it.

So much has changed
since I last saw you. You’ve built a cabin, furnished
it with quilts, watering cans, an easel. I see you

in the sun, your skin
deep amber like it turns every summer.
I was crying when I phoned you.

I see us at 16, you with pixie-spiked hair,
labret, raver pants you sewed yourself.
You already lived with your boyfriend, and God

were you the paragon of cool.
Dear Gretta, I hope
you know I still idolize you.

Do you remember our rambles
through Mount Doug, that wilderness pocket
between our two childhood homes?

How we tramped those muddy
and vertical trails, up to the summit
where the lone arbutus stands?

We draped ourselves over its barkless arms
just for the fun of it, and to rise
off the ground as high as we could.

Danielle Hubbard lives in Kelowna, BC, where she works as the CEO of the Okanagan Regional Library. Her poetry has appeared in CV2, The New Quarterly, and Prairie Fire, among other places. When not writing or working, Danielle spends most of her time cycling.