Author: chantarellesnotebook

Letter to Joe Arcangelini, On Another Coast

The coffee was delicious and the rain is good to see.
Add enough mornings, get a long life.
Is fake profundity what you meant to wake to?
Some mornings, the nearly true is all I can manage.
I look out the window and wait.
Hard rain scattered the birds.
How bare is the shelter of a leafless tree?
A little less than necessary, little more than nothing.
If you think absence tastes like air, you haven’t breathed here.
The factories closed years ago, an old odor stays.
The blanket sky is tattered in gray places.
That blanket is older than today.
The clouds look younger and younger.

Mike James lives and works in Murfreesboro, TN. Recent poems have appeared in Asheville Poetry Review, Main Street Rag, San Pedro Review, and Laurel Poetry Review. His fifteenth collection, Journeyman’s Suitcase, was recently published by Luchador Press. He served as an associate editor for the Kentucky Review and as an associate editor for Autumn House Press. He currently serves as an associate editor for the prose poem journal Unbroken.

The Butcher Of Valentine Street

It’s been years since
sides of beef, gutted pigs,
hung in his frozen vault.
His knives and cleavers
are packed away in a trunk,
no longer shining.

There’s still a call for rump and sirloin,
but he’s not the one being called.
And bells jangle in places.
But not the friendly alarm
of his butcher’s shop door
when a customer came n.

He sits out on the nursing home porch
waving to people he doesn’t know.
They don’t stop in for chuck or trip,
or a pound or two of ground round.
And he can’t smell blood any more,
just death.

Look at his hands.
Worn and weary
but without the consolation
of a hard day’s work.
No slicing and dicing a shoulder of lamb.
No grinding out sausage after sausage.
His job is staying alive.
He’s something of a slacker.

He wonders whatever happened
to the stray black cat,
the one that devoured the liver scraps
he tossed its way.
Or the woman he married,
the one who lived off his sweat.

Sun goes down
and he dozes in encroaching shadows.
A crisscross of light and dark:
an ancient tradesman
should be seen that way.

 
A Winter’s Shore

It’s miserable outside.
An unruly wind batters the trees.
The last of the leaves slowly zigzag to the floor.
Grass and garden shrivel from the cold.
Just the thought of the bitter sea
trembles my nerves.
Darkness settles into its slow, long hours.
Through the window glass,
I can hear voices without names
tick softly on the window glass
like rain.
I draw the curtain,
add more wood to the fire,
maximize how it is in here.

John Grey is an Australian poet, US resident. Recently published in Sin Fronteras, Dalhousie Review and Qwerty with work upcoming in West Trade Review, Willard and Maple and Connecticut River Review.

Strange Angels

The week before my mother died
the house was full of wasps.
They buzzed and bumped along the ceiling,
got caught in the curtains and blinds.
Angry and in search of exit, yet refusing
every open door and window.

After the nurse came and told my mother
she would be dead in a week,
the wasps hovered near her
but never landed or threatened,
and she never swatted them away.

In witchcraft, a wasp is a strong feminine spirt,
a guardian and protector.
The caretaker, a deeply religious woman,
said the devil was in the house, unleashed
prayers and insecticide to down and drown them.
But these wasps were impervious,
resurrecting and wobbling back to the air.

The day after my mother died in hospice,
the husks of wasps littered the carpet,
seemingly fallen mid-flight.
Their manifest, tethered to my mother’s
mortal rage, gone out of them
along with the sting.

Terminal Agitation

The stacking and unstacking of pillows,
the pinning and unpinning of hair.

The rearranging and invention of words,
the unearthly cries and whispers.

Shouts and tears turn to low moans
then rev up to demonic growls.

Death has many faces, busy hands,
the work of leaving a kind of dismantling.

Maybe it is the sound and movement
of the soul coming unmoored

from its berth, the unsticking
and scraping away of one life for the next.

Collin Kelley is a poet, novelist, and journalist from Atlanta, GA. His latest project is co-editing “Mother Mary Comes To Me: A Pop Culture Poetry Anthology” forthcoming from Madville Publishing in 2020. www.collinkelley.com

Zuko’s Scar

her name is a nettle,
a trigger;
every time i see it
i still cringe—

there are some names
i can never like

tarnished by memories of you—

it’s been years,
and there are many oceans
parting us and many more moons;

yet the name natalie
still burns me like fire

leaves me with zuko’s scar

i want my honor back
yet somehow i know that is something
i must find for myself,
and it was nothing you could have ever
given me.

Linda M. Crate’s works have been published in numerous magazines and anthologies both online and in print. She is the author of six published chapbooks, and a micro-chap. She has a novel, also, called Phoenix Tears (Czykmate Productions, June 2018).

In case you were wondering

It’s like the speeding car
that hits at forty miles per hour
and sends you through the air
crashing into the windshield,
up and over, landing face first
into the asphalt.

It is the low tone of your voice
echoing like wooden heels down
an empty hallway filled with
crappy tile floors and flickering
florescent lighting.
Repeats over and over
leaves me bitter and broken
against the river’s chill.

It is mostly how I don’t hate you.

It is a conclusion drawn long ago,
over caffeine kisses and long sleeves
drawn to protect, pulled to not expose
what was left on a table, across a bridge.

It is the silence in my inbox,
the inevitable letdown.

Taylor Emily Copeland is a poet from Eastern Pennsylvania. She is the author of two chapbooks: “Caffeine kisses and long sleeves” and “Monarch”, both available from Maverick Duck Press. Her poems have recently appeared in Philosophical Idiot, among many others. She is a four time Best of the Net nominee and also was nominated for Best of the Web. She reads obsessively, likes pink things, drinks too much coffee, drives aimlessly and falls in love too easily. She is unashamed of all of it.