Author: chantarellesnotebook

Love is a destiny moving forward

We’ve stopped living inside ideas,
cloak the world in reality;

birds scream in light
and our love
and our love is
and our love is a crucible

of ash
of fire
of of of of

tell me again how you will save my life
how it
how it will
how it will change
explode like a supernova;

eyes too sensitive to see
in the dark
and a coat of many cloths and a car revving
in the middle of the night

an engine gunned
a warning sign
and half-a-world away a bird screams

and our love is
an Atomic Blaster®, a stereophonic radiation symphony;
nuclear rain pattering on a skylight left open by mistake.

 

Finding gratitude the day after my last day in Atomic City (Minneapolis Radiation Oncology)

Humidity warps the air,
I hear a siren’s distant wail
and remember

being pulled over; how they kicked
my legs apart then whipped me
around and against the squad,

cheek pressed against the roof
arms pulled straight behind my back
straining at the sockets

as they clipped the cuffs on
just-right-too-tight, then accidentally
so sorry sir, bumping my head

as they threw me in the back seat,
the steel thud as the door slammed
shut; knees to chin

face to face with the metal cage
theshamethefear
thedesperationtheabyss.

The siren Dopplers past, the aftermath
of radiation is grim, meds not quite
kicked in, overdue for sleep.

I watch a hawk arc across the sun,
that apathetic star making shadows of us
and feel something deeper

than sky or heaven or the black depths
of sea; I’ve returned home
and no longer hunger at all.

Alex Stolis lives in Minneapolis; he has had poems published in numerous journals. Two full length collections Pop. 1280, and John Berryman Died Here were released by Cyberwit and available on Amazon. His work has previously appeared or is forthcoming in Piker’s Press, Ekphrastic Review, One Art Poetry, Black Moon Magazine, and Star 82 Review. His chapbook, Postcards from the Knife-Thrower’s Wife, was released by Louisiana Literature Press in 2024, RIP Winston Smith from Alien Buddha Press 2024, and The Hum of Geometry; The Music of Spheres, 2024 by Bottlecap Press.

 

 

SPRING IS SOON

Before you say if to the road,
you have to draw the curtains
over every mirror. You have to
sanitize the voices in your mind.

The mornings are all the body
can feed on. They buzz like words
you have forgotten. A black beetle
jousts with your newest, crazy fears.

Maybe your breathing is an old habit
sold to pill bottles. Maybe daffodils
tease a few small bumblebees into March
while you crank a truck you don’t have.

 

FREEDOM SEARCHER, ARE YOU?

I’m not sure if the trickiest freedom
is in the dirt of our pioneer ancestors.
Or if it ever sings, and if it does, it croons
silently like a bucket of bruised apples
in the cellar, and that real cellar is buried
after a flood, ninety years ago, so you
lug around a metal detector, and if you’re
hoping for gold coins, the tone is different,
more of a buzz, like an intruder’s cry razzed
from eternity. Why else are you here
with all your settler myths?

 

Clyde Kessler has been publishing poems for more than fifty years, and during that time has published four books, most recently, Fiddling At Midnight’s Farmhouse in 2017. Also, during that time, he has done field research on birds, butterflies, moths, and dragonflies, and published a few scientific articles in natural history journals.

Maidens

Finally, a restaurant in our rural town
that isn’t local and family owned
a chain restaurant
something our parents say
like it’s a dirty word
which only adds to the allure
frantic excitement
inside the VW Bug
my friend wheels
into the lot of Pizza Hut

A day already mind blowingly cool
she passed her driver’s test
on the first attempt and now
we are going out for dinner
to a place with red plastic soda glasses
red and white checkered tablecloths
aroma of garlic, new carpet
salad bar, novelty of help yourself
so many options
ham cubes, grated cheese
croutons, bacon bits
dressings to be ladled
to heart’s desire

A perfect day like our lives will be
what could be more promising than us
in our sparkly tube tops and painter pants
Kissing Potion Roller Ball Lip-Gloss
Love’s Baby Soft Cologne
Frye boots, Monet gold hoops
Utopia just before it isn’t
before the pierce of bitter bullets
two girls, frozen, plates suspended
over lettuce in a salad bar basin
writhing with warning and worms

 

The Worst Part

After gym in middle school
we had to line up naked
wait our turn to shower
while our teacher took roll
pad and pencil in hand
her side grin infuriating
the whole spectacle amused her

She looked us up and down
worse for those with breasts
humble buds no longer
girls sprouting weird, curly hair
between their legs

If you had your period
you were excused
we all tried to have ours
every other week
never got away with it

Eyes glued to our feet we stepped
into a sterile green room
lined with silver faucet heads
porcelain floor tiles slippery as ice
water fell loud as thunder
it was like an execution

No one spoke
except that teacher
who barked orders
harsh as a dog
trapped in a tunnel
Wash under your armpits!

One girl never had to join in
though she needed a bath
rumor was her family
couldn’t afford hot water
that as a baby
she’d been horribly burned
in a house fire

Hands scarred
fingernails missing
skin on her forearms
like wavy, maroon leather
as her torso must have been
she sat on a scratched-up
locker room bench
as bad off as she was
to watch us shower
nothing but pure hatred
screaming from her eyes

 

Burial Day Elkland Friends Meetinghouse Shunk PA

Ashes for damp, black holes
parents, brothers, set down deep
the sun’s slanted tears

My forest cousins
wide arms, carved hearts, our circle
of tall, tender trees

Refill earth’s sweet mouths
tamp soil, hold hands, goodbye dead
hawks overhead swoop and swirl souls

I look back once to woods
sky globe large, grey squirrels, golden bees
my family swallowed, healed

Afterward at lunch
coffee and ham sandwiches, General Store
no one is afraid to laugh

 

Virginia Watts is the author of poetry and stories found in The MacGuffin, Epiphany, CRAFT, The Florida Review, Reed Magazine, Pithead Chapel, Eclectica Magazine among others. She has been nominated four times for a Pushcart Prize. Her debut short story collection Echoes from the Hocker House was a category finalist in the 2024 Eric Hoffer Book Awards, selected as one of the Best Indie Books of 2023 by Kirkus Book Reviews, and won third place in the 2024 Feathered Quill Book Awards. Please visit her at https://virginiawatts.com/

A Night Sky In Maine

A shooting star, my cousin says
I crane my neck up to see into the dark Maine sky
Stars as plentiful as pinholes in a cushion
But we see no more meteors

With our hazy young minds
We identify constellations
Slightly bent stories of stars sliding off our tongues
And I wonder if I can count them all

I’ll never see a wider sky
I won’t see half as many stars in Delaware
But tonight, I can lose myself
In a short eternity of a shooting starless sky

(previously published in Academy of the Heart and Mind)

Charis Negley is a historical fiction and speculative fiction writer from Wilmington, Delaware. When she’s not reading or writing, she enjoys crocheting, listening to classical music (particularly Tchaikovsky), and drinking coffee. She’s currently revising her debut historical fiction novel. Updates about her work can be found on her Instagram @charis.writes. Subscribe to her newsletter and receive a free historical fiction short story at tinyurl.com/bdf86mcd.

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.