Author: chantarellesnotebook

Peppermint Summer

Miniature treasures hidden in my grandmother’s purse.
My fingers scouted out the red and white discs,
and anticipation crackled with the cellophane.
It created a snowball fight on my tongue.
The summer heat dissipated from skin
and coolness slid down my spine,
leaving me in a winter flurry in the middle of July.

 

Besides

When I finally get home,
you are leftover boxes and loose keys.
My unanswered texts become junk mail

left in my phone.
It is so empty
that my heartbeat echoes

and I search for the noise
of your breathing in the empty cabinets.
You left me

stripped down to bare walls and palms.
I need to learn to be
without your language.

Stretch myself along the walls and find balance
on a floor with no elephants, eggshells or egos.
When I finally get home,

I open the door
and walk into myself once again.

 

Bus Stops

The bus passed the spots where we had:
our first date, our first kiss, our anniversaries

and our final goodbye.
All boarded up buildings with gravestone windows,

and I left pieces of your ghost
wailing and stomping its feet

at the front door of each of them.
I snipped away your memories

one bus stop at a time.
The hardest part of separate ways

wasn’t the final farewell,
but when I needed to sever myself

from your favorite song, your outline in the bed,
and your name.

Amanda Hawk is Best of the Net-nominated and Pushcart Prize-nominated Poet. She lives in Seattle between the roaring planes and the city’s neon lights. Amanda has been featured in multiple journals including Eye to the Telescope, Rogue Agent and the winnow magazine. She released her first chapbook in 2023 called Rain Stained City. Recently, she placed second in the Seattle Crypticon Horror Short Story contest.

 

 

 

On mornings

Before they die mornings taste like mint toothpaste.
I had been asleep before, safe from sad news,
rocking myself dead by the sink.
The splintering of smoldering water
snapping like guitar strings in the marble bathtub
& autumn’s peach light through the slant of patterned window
pull my eyelids open, pink and thinning like rice paper.
News from the radio downstairs and the metallic clank of oven plates.
A male voice: the earthquake in Afghanistan
and Israeli soldiers in Gaza.
Over a thousand dead, he says. But first, Trump’s plans for 2024…
My feet are cold. I am sorry.
I let the water run and a tiny voice inside me goes on
and on & on, narrating the color/texture of the sky/
the strands/location of hair on the tile floor/the scent of warm garlic bread.
I cherry-pick the ripest words, their insides fresh with tangy pulp,
pluck them from inside my brain stem, trace them in the palm of my hand.
I tell myself I can write this goddamn poem.
The water is running and draws up in white wisps &
I look into the sweating mirror and by habit, tell myself to stay alive today,
forgetting what I think of the sky, the hair, the bread,
and no, I suddenly cannot write this goddamn poem anymore.
Ridiculous how depression takes the place of beautiful thought.
At least I have the dog-eyed faith of God.
I’m telling you, love is almost religion, and writing is love.
I remember begging him for a talent and he handed me a life
And I took it as a sign.
Whatever. I will not forget next time.
Downstairs, an ad on Pantene shampoo.

(Previously published in Lumina Journal)

 

 

Texas in Summer: Let’s Have an Hour Underneath the 8pm Sky

I. Prologue

I know I have
a good poem lodged in me
somewhere.
I open the hungry mouth of door & the sky
is changing hands
between twilight and evening.
Sit down with me, your bones are tired.
The voices from the house are like how you want death
to sound: faraway enough to forget.
A wobble of branches has
the same wind that turns up the
the dirt from streets of Paris.
The trees wave and throw
up leaves in applause.
Everything collapses back home.

II. Epiphany

The place, you would not know
until light. June is an
ugly month, but the breeze from
elsewhere loves me enough to brush
my hair, the mosquitos to pick at my flesh.
The incandescent glow from the last
porch light stretched,
elastic and tender, band-like, to mimic
a smoldering fire.
The clouds that cap us from falling into the atmosphere
play their final verse (most people mistake them for crickets).

III. Epilogue

This place, you would not believe
until light. June is a
soft month. The glint of stop sign metal
in the afterglow of streetlight &
the trees throw up their hands again,
this time in ash. The cough of plane engine
overhead, choking on blue sky.
Perhaps this flight is not mine to take, but I will have it
anyway.

Michelle Li has been nationally recognized by Scholastic Art and Writing and the Rising Voices Awards. She is an alumna of the Kenyon Review Young Writers Workshop and her work has been published in Blue Marble, Masque and Spectacle, and Aster Lit. In addition, she plays violin and piano and loves Rachmaninoff and Sylvia Plath. You can find her website at michelleli.carrd.co.

the warmth of burning

we need fire—
to shine a little brighter,
to feel a little warmer.
gathered for a friend’s birthday,
we each search for flame.
is there no match in the cake box?
does anyone have a lighter?
in the dictionary of fire,
there is no word for progress.
humanity evolved with fire,
but fire itself has never changed.
no one returns from being burned.
a witch is simply another word
for one who cannot come back.
still, we need fire.
we need something to burn.
why do we celebrate birthdays?
is it to snuff out electric light,
light candles,
& sing songs?
the first person to discover fire
stood before the vast, consuming blaze,
mouth agape,
terrified—
wondering if this inferno
could exist inside them.
they returned to their people,
mimicking the flames,
& were embraced gently.
the patterns of smoke
left their mark in fingerprints.

 

deer and the glass

on a clear day, in the biting cold,
from afar, the cry of a deer.
into the hollow of its antlers,
the cold seeps in.
unable to drive it away,
unable to welcome it,
the deer walks,
feeling the cold,
now one with its antlers.
sometimes, it cries as it walks,
though no one listens.
& if anyone might be listening,
it falls silent,
its untouched cry
still pure.
on a clear late-winter morning,
i opened the window,
& the chill touched my face.
even after the cold freezes & dies
inside the antlers,
the deer trembles still,
shaking its head,
its antlers swaying,
two arcs of quiet burden.
i, without antlers, cannot know
the cold they carry.
i walk,
the cold walking beside me,
tapping, tapping.
on the table,
a glass shivers at the flick of a nail,
its soft cry fading,
until it blends perfectly
into the stillness around it,
settling into silence.

Jennifer Choi is a passionate high school student. Her work has previously been published or is forthcoming in Altered Reality Magazine, Academy of Heart and Mind, and Culterate Magazine among others.

 

Danang 1967

The dresses they wore,
long silk affairs
in residential streets
shaded by trees.
As if snatched from sky
to earth, blues and greens
yellows and golds,
silken rainbows
with backdrops of white
where in daylight and dusk
you wouldn’t know war’s
destruction, war’s ashes.

The long dresses of girls
and women in doorways
of houses, shops.
Silken rainbows on the path
along the river.
I took her hand
as she stepped from the barge.
Her dress of orange rose
with the wind to reveal
a backdrop of snow
in this city where
snow never fell.

Peter Mladinic’s most recent book of poems, Maiden Rock, is available from UnCollected Press. An animal rights advocate, he lives in Hobbs, New Mexico, United States.

After almost twenty years

I.

in your orbit I realized you were never the sun—
or that maybe I was actually now in some distant
galaxy and you had become a red giant surrounded
by gas planets. Light years away, I developed rituals
to stop worshiping fading stars, found something
more sacred. You always praised a person’s evolution.

II.

Here is the moment of truth: One winter morning I woke up.
I knew I couldn’t attend another party where you and your besties
eager to be sucked into a whirlpool of booze, shared stories
of shitting stars after a weekend bender on ecstacy and cocaine.
It occurs to me, your ex was the more interesting one at your parties.

III.

You present us with Barbie birthday cake—a cake you and #becky
both dreamed about, coveted. Some jokes have the same punchline.
Barbie has been defiled, is now drowning her youth
and reality in whiskey and vodka. Barbie is vomiting
sprinkles onto purple fondant. Barbie is smeared makeup,
from sweating and purging. Barbie is a glutton for alcohol
and the dizzy mess it creates. Barbie is a true mirror.
Your Barbie is another flashing warning sign.

IV.

On the drive home, I tell our friend, next year
I will prepare you a feast, and we won’t have to pick
at the fast food your bestest orders mostly for herself.

The menu:

prosciutto and sweet pea crostini
rack of lamb with figs and pomegranate glaze
sticky apricot chicken thighs
ratatouille tart with dollops of goat cheese
semolina, pistachio and rose cake

Upon reflection, I wanted you to see me.

V.

My therapist asks if I enjoy being a spectator.
Not really.
I courted loyalty over the years:
unfriended those who fell out of your favor,
tolerated your sycophants. Wondered why
you kept such insipid fools around.

Realization is a switch:
Their adoration a banquet; you have a never-ending
appetite for constant, desperate displays of worship.

VI.

Memories of slights and offensives
stack up: birthdays you didn’t show up for,
never came to tea at my house, or visited—
I want to say, we are both at fault here,
but I don’t like lying to myself.

VII

I am sickened by the narcissism of one of your followers,
(for years, I wondered how you never noticed their patterns).
I am spitting seeds of truth: another friend is submerged
in grief, here comes the navel gazer to interrupt the conversation,
take detours to show how they minisculely can compare, they lay
a thousand subtle insults at the feet of the anguished.

Others notice, but say nothing. One of our friends encourages me,
but will not enter the fray. No one dares spark your wrath.

I have just learned to let my voice carry beyond the confines
of my throat; I am learning how not to be afraid.

VIII

You send me to the corner to think about my words,
Let the scheme continue.

I see the root: this is not my home; I was always a tentative
guest. I book a train ticket, a room on a spaceship to speed
through the universe.

IX.

You believe you are a master of shunnings.

Leaving me alone in silence always gives me clarity.
Others have made the same mistake before you.

X.

Tell me how you didn’t see this coming.

XI.

After I walk away, I dream. Versailles is a metaphor:
Beautiful. Glittering. I’m invited to stay the night.
I leave; it’s filled with too many ghosts. They remind me,
courtiers used to piss and shit in marble hallways.

XII.

Maybe you will never say my name again. Let me be forgotten,
never brought up. Maybe your grudge will be buried deep
in the pores of your bones, working—eating its way through
them like osteonecrosis. Maybe there will be reconciliation,
though I doubt it. I prefer to exist thousands of light years away.

 

Marisa Silva-Dunbar’s work has been published in Dusk Magazine, Querencia Press’s Winter 2023 Anthology, and Not Ghosts, But Spirits Vol. 2. Her second chapbook, “When Goddesses Wake,” was released in December 2021 from Maverick Duck Press. Her first full-length collection, “Allison,” was published by Querencia Press in 2022. She is currently working on her third chapbook and a hybrid memoir. You can find her on all socials @thesweetmaris. To check out more of her work go to www.marisasilvadunbar.com