Author: chantarellesnotebook

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

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.