Chantarelle's Notebook

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).

A Living, Breathing Nest

Your sound is faultless
pure and round
         holy
almost profound
—Gregory Corso, from “For Miles”

The way you lay on your side—
nestled, burrowed into bundles in bed
leaning too hard on one asleep hand
‘til the numbing pricklies take over,
I feel that, too, in an iciness ironing my arm
And when we bite from the same block of cheese
your psychic spearhead pierces the dreamscape
a sort of Mary Poppins-esque side-scrolling animation
our glossy faces whistling to our own snazzy tune

In this mighty space—
ricochet your rhythmic wheezes
let the uncovered windows bathe this basilica in light
Our spirits motionless targets, still, for the passing celestials
Ted needs to get his flaming chariot home
before his sleigh ignites the barley fields

We be two trees growing together—
or in my case, a forgetful squirrel
and her a literate squirrel, carrying a map and spade
lodging in the branches of a gorgeous oak
Sprouting its grove, thriving in symbiosis

Outlast the daisy, out-live the fly
do it dozens then hundreds of times

Snuggle in blankets down close next to me
bring forward this atheist prayer
Snuggle in these moon-soaked sheets
let’s love triumphant there

 

Annual Heat Death

The chill breath of fall is a misnomer—
in autumn the world stops breathing.

Direct the hallowed serenity that is hibernation,
temporary widespread death of grasses,

blue flag iris shedding its fingers
before being utterly buried in leaves

which themselves wet and lay—
its crushing blanket eliminating oxygen

transfer—the butterfly weed and fly carcasses
and hedgehogs and bats all stop breathing.

The lobelia cardinalis is a red trumpet no longer,
but crushed petals under preparing mama bear.

And when that first frost snap hits the ice,
beautiful and bountiful, covering twigs and browning

grasses, frost webbing slewn across the canvass—
a shame so many eyes are closed.

Tell me when the last breath is uttered
if things will still be beautiful when I die, too.

 

Unnatural Comfort

We loved that couch: cream-colored, firm, soft. What a wonderful thing to have firmness to rest the ass into, how warm to have the German Shepherd leaning against your arm while Cheers cascades across the living room. That supportive firmness is a measure of home—one of the few stable foundations of a house cracked by alcoholism. Imagine our confusion when our stepfather pulled that cream-colored foundation onto the porch to vacuum, but instead of sweeping he laid next to his bottles on the basement concrete. My sister and I weren’t strong enough to pull it back in, though we tried. The living room carpet was muddied with the heavy, treaded work boots used to anchor our prepubescent counterweights. And we couldn’t wake the drunk before the thunderstorm—so saturated, it sat on full display for the neighbors to see from April ‘til September, collecting its new ecosystem. What a meal for children to digest: that supportive tissue shredded and ignored, like a dog told how good they are before the family heads off for vacation and the sitter doesn’t show. How curious to witness the one comforting aspect of home defiled, our home’s amenities soiled due to neglectful carelessness. What an impactful revelation to tell the world that we lacked a place to sit in our own home.

sunrise—
among the trash
bugs inject eggs

you can never give a suicidal your condolences

my uncle liked to dump sugar in soup
or replace a fruit salad’s grapes with olives

and whoever told him “hey, you got the wrong bowl,”
well, they profoundly misunderstood his intentions

hard to get this across, but. SSRI’s or not,
it’s less sad to miss heaven than many learn to interpret, so think

a dog heading into the woods to die
is not the same as one licking a bee-stung paw

nor is St. Vincent’s emergency lock-up ward
the kind of sunrise promised by clear mental health

 

Backyard Poverty

we’ve got this self-obsession with entertainment
installing seven elevens and cash for gold places

picking up microwaves and busted fridges
to hawk with whatever Rod surfaced

jacking copper piping in roach bundles
bound and tossed in a nondescript rusted truck bed

let’s watch — the wreckage from the bay window’s getting old
faster than cedar grows, every neighborhood falling down

each cornfield now its own Brooklyn back alley
because here’s the god-honest truth—

while Ruth and Bruce are struggling to pay dues
and their kids act out through slammin’ vodka, smashin’ mailboxes

that community isolation and into-the-fray-cation
from East 54th all the way to the train station

just know the hooker in his polka-dot bra
who smells too much like curdled yogurt never saw himself here

he wanted to be a fireman or a scientist
who besides the greedy

think we work the Walmart and Wawa for fun?
who thinks the enchilada slinger

Taco Bell pays Jennifer eight twenty-five an hour
means she’s lazy? why the people

the gripers and cultural snipers kite
high-minded nonsense about cutting back

on our seeded breads and special coffees
then ripen new trite like how long

drive thrus have become. what is you?
who, besides the needy,

could possibly understand?
when will they purposely buy postage stamps

before things fall apart
before the great winds come

end at a roadside produce stand, gun in hand
so those sprouts worming toward your heart die with —

what is leftovers
if the fridge was left open all weekend?

what are kids when they grow up and ask
what on Earth went wrong?

 

Jeremy Jusek is Parma’s poet laureate. He has authored three books: We Grow Tomatoes in Tiny Towns, The Less Traveled Street, and The Details Will Be Gone Soon. He hosts the Ohio Poetry Association’s podcast Poetry Spotlight, runs the West Side Poetry Workshop, and founded the Flamingo Writers’ Guild. For more info, visit www.jeremyjusek.com