Author: chantarellesnotebook

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.

Virtual Engagement

you have no name except the one you change
your next wish casts rainbows like a diamond ring
while the guys in pop songs demand your story
or your silence—whichever provides the most
interesting mirror

you can murmur to the dead, but they rarely
speak back even when you leave news for them
tucked in the crevices of a wall like prizes
studded in breakfast cereal from someone else’s

childhood and still what is there to do but
like, post, subscribe, make yourself into a sticker
that peels up from the edges but proves
impossible to full remove without leaving
a residue.

 

Ritual

a beeswax candle glows while
the oven radiates molasses

you could draw something soft
into your lap feel its weight

the cups keep spilling, fills with
sticky liquid, perhaps

you’ve collapsed under your fear
the next step is:

but fear is a cold hand
to be removed delicately

finger by finger
your sobs have strengthened

your shoulders
the skeleton you carry

is always grinning
how silly it looks without a nose

 

poetic equivalent of the nude

a word on the page
rarely
has the same visual
impact
as a pert bum
whatever I’m doing
it’s not painting
my flesh
aided
by a mirror
instead I list
various meanings
of bare
prickling cold
a flash
of teeth

Allison Burris grew up in the Pacific Northwest and currently lives in Oakland, California. Her poems embrace the whimsical and cozy, explore human connection, and affirm the power of stories. She received her MLIS from San Jose State University and her poetry appears or is forthcoming in various journals, including Instant Noodles, Heartline Spec, Muleskinner, After Happy Hour Review, and The Marbled Sigh. Connect with her via https://linktr.ee/allisonburris