Chantarelle's Notebook

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.

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.