Chantarelle's Notebook

The ascension of newer stories

That glassy-eyed spire
was pinpricking the sky
all day. Here, a window,

and there, a windowless
form, defying the horizon’s
function. For years the eye

caught only the eyesore
and a glare. There are too
many stories to climb. This

structure fools itself, is not
a mountain. No other building
dared to stand so bright

blue with cloud white squares
in abstract. Not here, on this
choppy span of the Ohio.

 

Give us this

Much
gratitude
to the gape
of windows &
the gasp of spring.
Fresh berries smile back
while we dine on their aroma.
Thanks to warm streams of water
drowning dishes & the sudsy applause
of bubbles that bob like baubles in slow slosh;
diaphanous life jackets in the tumult of these after-
noon sea voyages. Let’s lovingly acknowledge waves

of nausea and pangs of day as we grip life’s hip
and lean into it as though it was our grand-
mother. And we sail on the air of anxiety
in our body’s attempts to not be a body.
Nobody knows how long we float
before we are adrift.

 

where am i

in this gloaming of foam-
white underbellies
below grey clouds? i sit
assuming their silver
will ring umpteen
hallelujahs as the sun
slips its yolk out of over-
cast shell. blue whispers
to dusk, hums cicada
& my legs have tiny
imprints from concrete.

 

Finding a cure for small talk

A petri dish
of weather clichés
with no marked
response. Test
tubes filled
with answers
to “What do you do
for a living?”

Litmus paper
I’ve used to draw
my results: LEAVE
ME ALONE. I can
share this finding
with former class-
mates in public
when they approach.

Please just spin this
centrifuge, separate
me from political
discussions every-
where: waiting
rooms, drive-
thrus, pick-up
lines.

 

K Weber is an Ohio writer with 11 self-published, online books of poetry. K writes independently and collaboratively, having created poems with 800+ words donated by more than 300 people since 2018. K has poems featured in publications such as Stone Circle Review, Writer’s Digest, and Exacting Clam. Much of K’s work (free in PDF and some in audiobook format) and her publishing credits are accessible through her website: kweberandherwords.com

 

Got There: Real Color

I have heard the refrain of goals
& endings & burials of the burst
& I’ve gazed upon the great works
that have never ended hunger,
that have never taken away oxygen
from the rich & warring minority
& I must ask, is all this gray area
a white compromise? If it can’t be
the sun, then we must set the fires.

I am not opposed to an ugly ending.
I’m outraged by anyone that claims
a new beginning. It’s all happened.
It’s all still happening. The fight
is to know it all, to wake up known
& knowing, to hue the witness.

Be early in the morning with me.

 

 

Got There: It Would Be Better if I Had No Place to Hide

The nature of light is misleading. It’s all fire,
flame or no. The smoky walls are unworried
& are conditional. The body suffers. Ugly is
an advertisement for art to do better
with the smell of things. Beauty is a promise
that things will never get better. I tell two lies
& a purple silk appears. The curtains are cute.
Upgather the gradient of this world
with a story of the divine. Lock the ending?

The cement path is a trap. I am on the lines.
I’m on each side of the lines. Clearly,
you’re distracted by the lights. I want to find
something other than myself, but all these
questions are about me. Everything modern
hides. The custodians can only sterilize.

Be something better reaching back with me.

 

 

Got There – Peace or Quiet

Vanishing is its own genre.
The idea of the mark being
on the body, on attempting
to leave the body but still
be called flesh is an owl
in the morning hunting frost.
The beauty comes from feeling
& the loss of feeling. The rush
of a needless flight matters.

Yes, I want the same as you.
I want my name to be said
out loud, but I have no interest
in being there when it’s said.
If you are brave enough to say
I wrote this poem, thank you.

Be what happened last with me.

 

Darren Demaree’s poems have appeared, or are scheduled to appear in numerous magazines/journals, including Hotel Amerika, Diode, North American Review, New Letters, Diagram, and the Colorado Review. He is the author of twenty-two poetry collections, most recently ‘blue and blue and blue’ (July 2024, Fernwood Press). He is the Editor in Chief of the Best of the Net Anthology and Managing Editor of Ovenbird Poetry. He is currently living and writing in Columbus, Ohio with his wife and children.

The Universe Does Provide
for Steve Bridgens

Even after the sun
has long since gone down,
the brutal, kiln-like intensity
of a day like today
(here, in this overgrown cow town
in late July) can still be felt
well into the night.

The sidewalks and driveways
and newly resurfaced streets
continue to throw off enough heat,
all our overgrown yards enough jungle steam
(due to a brief, but mean, little thunderstorm
this morning that not even
the weatherman had foreseen)
that our clankity old window-unit
is forced to shift down a few degrees
into a lower, more determined gear.

Still, something has called us all out here
to the front porch, tonight:

Maybe those recent reports of lightning on the horizon?
Constellations of fireflies churning before our eyes?
The tidal pull of a fat, blood orange of a moon?
Or, just the inevitable madness of tiny rooms?

All we really need to know
(here on this not-so-disagreeable night
in Kansas City, KS in late July)
is there’s an hour of Mingus
coming up on the community radio,
a fridge full of beer getting colder and colder
and a one-hitter already loaded up for you
and ready to go.

So, even though we all got jobs
that come calling way too early in the morning
and bills and debts that, over time, seem to have become
highly resistant to our attempts at neutralizing them
and despite all the headlines and sound bites
(detailing the latest home-grown inanity
or gruesome instance of international mayhem)
that appear to be conspiring to reinforce
the near-blasphemous notion that can
so easily lead one to believe otherwise,

from time to time

the universe does provide.

 

Joining the Game

Under a late sun, everything sour and wet,
a dog chasing ducks (who occasionally
turn and snap back), through the rust
and bronze colored leaves where
squirrels can also be seen, now
and then, joining the
game and then,
before
you
know
it,
Night
has brought
out all her
crickets and fireflies
and whippoorwills, and wants you to
stay up all night with her and her
strange carni children.

Jason Ryberg is the author of nineteen books of poetry, six screenplays, a few short stories, a box full of folders, notebooks and scraps of paper that could one day be (loosely) construed as a novel, and countless love letters (never sent). He is currently an artist-in-residence at both The Prospero Institute of Disquieted P/o/e/t/i/c/s and the Osage Arts Community, and is an editor and designer at Spartan Books. His latest collection of poems is “Bullet Holes in the Mailbox (Cigarette Burns in the Sheets) (Back of the Class Press, 2024).” He lives part-time in Kansas City, MO with a roosternamed Little Red and a Billy-goat named Giuseppe, and part-time somewhere in the Ozarks, near the Gasconade River, where there are also many strange and wonderful woodland critters.

On Being Compared to Jim Harrison

you could do far worse
but there are a lot of men
with one eye
& a fondness for rivers
who have trouble
sleeping through the night
men who gave up on shaving ages ago
to write love poems
whispered sweetly into the ears of barn owls
& the faded girls of memory on dirt roads
men who want nothing more
than to lose themselves
in overgrown fields
free of worry
as they listen
to the quiet
morning rain.

 

John Dorsey is the former Poet Laureate of Belle, MO. He is the author of several collections of poetry, including Which Way to the River: Selected Poems: 2016-2020 (OAC Books, 2020), Sundown at the Redneck Carnival, (Spartan Press, 2022, and Pocatello Wildflower, (Crisis Chronicles Press, 2023). He may be reached at archerevans@yahoo.com.

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.