Author: chantarellesnotebook

Relax your body before impact:

the same fatherly edict for a roller coaster
or car crash. The Mamba’s black train cars

slithered up the element. Panic’s cold metal
kiss melded my knuckles to the grab bar

while Dad’s cloud-white hands hopscotched
the higher we ascended. Halfway to the sun,

the crowd below morphed into marionettes;
God steered their strings the same way

I bullied my Bratz: pliable plastic waiting
for its next commandment. Dad didn’t obey

God or gravity. If this is the end, let it be fun,
Dad preached on the behemoth’s back.

My father wasn’t religious, but he believed
in himself. I became a lifelong disciple

as we crested the lift hill, baptized
in the blaze of his smile. My hands followed

Dad’s beyond the heavens. We braved
the first drop together, our screams a psalm.

*Published with Talon Review in July 2022

 

Mother of Thousands

Propagations bud on the kitchen counter,
dead bodies without the chalk outlines.
Resurrections commence once the blisters
settle on their skin, a testament to their
strength. Crescent moons of loam
didn’t always lurk under my fingernails.
The instinct to nurture noosed me slowly;
I started with two succulents — Machiavelli &
Bugs — whose life expectancy was shorter
than my pandemic attention span.
The aloe and snake plant were housewarming
gifts (burdens). I struggled with self-care.
Seeds of unread messages spread weed-like
across my phone’s face; a drought plagued
my lips because the scabbed skin reminded
me I was alive. I suspected we would wilt
together in the Kansas winter. Their shamrock &
emerald skin thrived despite my neglect.
Water bloated leaves beckoned me into the kitchen
& taught me how to put the mother in nature.
Nowadays, I drizzle water from my Camelbak
into sour cream containers full of low maintenance
children. The windowsill hosts a family reunion.
Marbled pothos pinches pearls from Senecio
rowleyanus’ vines. Gold-toothed snake plant toddlers
scramble from their mother’s soil. Aunt Crassula
ovata slathers anthocyanin thick as sunscreen
on the burro tail’s braids. As I plant a present
for my new neighbor, I am reminded growth
happens with community & communities don’t
compete for light.

Published with Gabby & Min’s Literary Review in November 2023

 

Aubade on the Morning Routine

The phone’s organ music shakes me
from sleep. My eyelids creak open,
disturbed sarcophagi, while my fingers
find your bicep, a silent plea to stay
in bed. Your tombstone shadow
in the too bright hallway haunts me.
We perform our morning dance
in the crypt-cold kitchen to the clink
of cups, the coffee’s sigh
when the creamer kisses its forehead.
Mold rims the snake plant’s soil,
and I wipe it away while your chin rests
on the shelf of my skull. Our hearts
beat together through sweaters,
a secret serenade. Ribbons of russet
and goldenrod slither on the horizon,
streaks of sun like clock hands ticking.
It’s almost time to go. Your hand,
an anchor, on my thigh while we carpool
to work. My heart stands cenotaph empty
each morning the sun swallows you.

*Published with Peregrine Journal Fall 2022

 

Adrianna Gordey (she/her) is a writer based in Kansas. When she isn’t writing, Adrianna can be found daydreaming about the Atlantic ocean and assembling overly ambitious Halloween costumes. Her work has appeared in Red Noise Collective, Passengers Journal, Hunger Mountain Review, and elsewhere. Follow her on Instagram @by_adrianna_gordey.

Ricordo

The memories had little teeth
or were full of hot air.
They made me bleed
metaphorically speaking
or troubled my breathing.
Nothing good summarizes
the faded snapshots.
I feel like a hole sometimes.

 

Unseen, Unsaid

1

Where are your hands?
You keep them contained.
I tried to communicate to you
with gestures—improv
semaphores.
I no longer believe that your
door is open to me.
In words, say it in words.

2

When we sat in the movie theatre
and I rested my arm on your shoulders
what did you think about the movie?

It rains here when I’m feeling like this.
Time dilation is a thing.
My stomach ache persists.

3

I can only imagine that many of
those stars
no longer exist where they are.
They exist as light perhaps, ultraviolet
waves, neutrinos, my physics
falters even as I see you fade in and out
of my reality when I try to fix you
in my thoughts.

 

Airborne Systems

The sky shimmered like a rainbow trout.
I tried to represent it on a sketch pad.
I have no talent.
I have something called pretense.
When I wear my usual mask
everyone knows who I am.
On those times I leave it on the shelf
I could be someone’s other self,
or a former sadness
that soured them for a stretch.

Everything changed in a second.
Someone died.
Someone was born.
Someone fell in love.
Someone fell out of the sky.
A parachute failed.
I still see his eyes.

Salvatore Difalco writes from Toronto, Canada.

SPLIT INFINITY

It was the split infinitive, to really live
-Edward Kleinschmidt

Waking up wasn’t a clean slate. The previous day stuck.
The little flares in the frying pan reminded us
How much we were alive, how the dropping bomb
Would blow out the day. Think of that tire
On the freeway, the driver holding on, white-knuckled,
All the atoms without crash helmets, the heart
Jumping to the throat. It was to split infinity, to really live.
To see inside things, make those X-ray glasses really work.
Splitting open the pear to its seeds. Pulling the apple core out
After minor surgery. The knife blade wiped off and clean.
I think of my father, that small space of time
He lived in, home from the doctor’s, his internal organs
Outlined in ball-point pen, pointing out what existed
Within. To really live. Heart. Kidneys. Spleen.
Blood cells slip through veins, making only a little noise
About being trafficked in this way. I mention this
Only because I think in circles. Winter ringing
Our ears with the cold. Summer buzzing insistent
As blood heating that which the vessels pass close to.
Though vessel seems a cold word, mechanical, passing
Under the sea, the ship’s prow riveted at the seam. Some
Pentagon code word for disaster. Code words we’d be
Remembering: Nuclear winter. Cold war. Weapons freeze.
Economic sanctions exposing countries to the cold. Cold rice
Caked on plates. A new sound in a minor country–are not
Light and gross bodies incontrovertible? Contrails vaporize
The sky. Some hole in the ozone warms things up.
I could think what it means to really live.
I could melt ice-cubes on my back. | could
Freeze blood, donate it to heat someone else’s body
After bullet-holes or surgery, small red
Explosions heating the bandages. I could cover my ears
Against the bomb, sound out the word
Hiroshima, a sound like fire filling the vacuum

 

Artists, Like Poets
for Alexandra

Artists like poets — though distant, they’re kin; twin spirits
Lighting paths for one another, complementary stars spun in
Elliptic orbit, colors on the color wheel. Red, green. Orange, blue.
Xeroxed like Warhol’s Marilyn. Endless diptychs, endless
Appositives lying side-by-side-by-side on the beach where
Night tangles sand into their long hair. They
Dream this starry night they want captured, whirlpool galaxies
Rendered impasto — all the rough constellations: Orion,
Andromeda, Pegasus. They want. They want to name them all.

 

WILLY NILLY

We don’t pitter patter. Our large bones pounce, thrash
through the underbrush, erupt flocks of small birds
from the field. Like bomb fragments, we’ve given up
our language to the sky, tipped the page in the right light
and let the words bleed off the page, soak
into the dust. Think of that ribbon of bats, streaming
from the cave, scattering into dusk — that’s us.
We’re uncivilized and refuse love, its spelling
the quick click of eggshell on frying pan, that audible
sizzle in time. Breaking up our words was easy,
it was cracking the atom — the Big Bang
theory we latched onto in high school, sensible as
steam, molecules bumping elbows, hot and
agitated. Without polite words, our mothers
disowned us, our brothers drank too much
and drowned — not enough jobs at the sawmill,
they said, not enough love. Now, we swim
in the river with nobody’s father, wear our coats
inside out so we may feel rough
leather against our skin and know. Before sleep,
we lie on leaves, let our hair fan out like stars, count
hand-prints we’ve left across the beach — hand-prints
that grow larger by the day until one hand raised
is a shadow on our faces, tipped ink spilling
back into that collapsed star of our heart.

Francois Chan received a MFA in Creative Writing at San Francisco State University and has had publications in The North Dakota Quarterly and The Santa Clara Review.

Running (from) the Asylum

We did not call the doctors to ask
permission to see our loved ones this time.

That’s the only thing the past can be good for:
a repertoire for (mostly) idiot proofing oneself.

We tried to enter through the back.
The doors were locked;

we had to coach our loved ones
like they were criminals

(apparently, it’s dangerous not to know
your own name anymore, even when no one
has reminded you in ages who you are)

to undo the latches. It’s hard to explain
from the outside, especially if you’ve never

seen the lock before. When they finally let us in—
of course they did not trust us—we sang to them

until they walked with us out under the blue
in the sky, burning with summer, and crows plotting

on telephone lines. You wouldn’t have known
who among us was free and who was patient.

 

Bullet-Point List

Two high-school boys in my hometown
plotted
.    mass death
.    in secret
·    for over a year.

Their plans undiscovered,
they released a ghost
and the columbine
got a permanent identity change.

I didn’t know it was a flower
until two decades later.

I’ve heard ghosts are good teachers,
but all I’ve learned is
.     how to be rigid,
·     vigilant,
·     always check for exits
as soon as I arrive,
· always read the last page
of every book
just in case.

And all I know is that

·     it’s been a generation
since teenagers—

kids only four grades
ahead of me at most—

lost their lives
as they were heading to lunch,

·     and that last day of innocence
still feels like yesterday.

Because it is.
And it will be tomorrow.
Everywhere and everywhere.

 

Megan Wildhood is a writer, editor and writing coach who helps her readers feel seen in her monthly newsletter, poetry chapbook Long Division (Finishing Line Press, 2017), her full-length poetry collection Bowed As If Laden With Snow (Cornerstone Press, May 2023) as well as Mad in America, The Sun and elsewhere. You can learn more about her writing, working with her and her mental-health and research newsletter at meganwildhood.com.

Left Over

She wears her mother’s winter coat, reflects
on the life her mother never had—all the sacrifices
the husband that was never there,
and when he was, he wasn’t the one she’d imagined

married at sixteen years and so much in love so
flamboyant, faded photos on the mantle
a smile no one ever saw, collapsing seduction
fading into the gray woman who held her daughter
and cried. And now

the woman looking at the old photographs
has become her mother, wearing
her clothes and fighting against this natural
orientation. She remembers the small woman, grown old
in this same house, lawnmower
squealing banging in the back yard, echoing her father’s

private mantra of muttered terror. It’s easy to forgive
now, after all this time, and again,
she thanks God they had the sense
to keep guns out of the house.

 

Sparkling

I’m practicing becoming his shadow, taking two steps back so that I follow him
close enough to answer his questions, nod appreciatively at his comments
mutter “hm” and “oh, sure” at the appropriate times. One has to follow close enough
that he knows you’re together, but not so close that if he stops, or moves his arms wildly
he might trip over you, clock you with an elbow, hurt either of you in some way.
Knowing the distance between bodies required to be a shadow is a learned skill.

I’m practicing becoming invisible, reducing myself to a shadow when not in use
some unseen force dancing in front of the stove, the sink, a ray of sunshine when needed
anywhere that’s dark in the house. My arms bristle with baskets of dirty laundry,
my hands are full of dirty dishes, my mouth is full of comforting words
every step I take has a purpose, I am always on my way to fixing something
cleaning something, I am proving I belong here, I am worth keeping.

Holly Day’s poetry has appeared in Asimov’s Science Fiction, Grain, and Harvard Review. Her poetry collections include Where We Went Wrong (Clare Songbirds Publishing), Into the Cracks (Golden Antelope Press), Cross Referencing a Book of Summer (Silver Bow Publishing), and The Tooth is the Largest Organ in the Human Body (Anaphora Literary Press).