Episode 143: Do They Still Have Bulletin Boards?

Episode 143: Do They Still Have Bulletin Boards?  

 

Our discussion of Alyx Chandler’s poems has us considering the liminal space between girlhood and womanhood, summer and fall, print and digital cultures, good bug and bad, Slushies. With these poems, we’re swooning over summer’s lushness, marveling over kudzu’s inexorable march, and thinking back to steamy afternoons running through sprinklers with skinned knees. Set at the end of girlhood, these poems makes us think of the Melissa Febos book of the same name. Jason is charmed by the poet’s hypotactic syntax and her control of the line. Be sure to take a look at the poems’ format at PBQmag.org.  

 

As our own summers wrap up, Lisa saves monarch caterpillars while Sam smushes lantern flies. Kathy shares her new secret for a solid eight hours of sleep. Looking to the future, we’re celebrating forthcoming chapbooks and books. Dagne’s chapbook “Falldown Lane” from Whittle, Jason’s book “Teaching Writing Through Poetry,”  and Kathy’s “Teaching Writing Through Journaling,” both from a new series Kathy is editing at Bloomsbury. As always, thanks for listening. 

 

 

At the table: Dagne Forrest, Samantha Neugebauer, Jason Schneiderman, Kathleen Volk Miller, Lisa Zerkle 

 

 

 

 

Author bio: Alyx Chandler (she/her) is a poet from the South who now teaches in Chicago. She received her MFA in poetry at the University of Montana, where she was a Richard Hugo Fellow and taught poetry. In 2025, she won the Three Sisters Award in Poetry with Nelle Literary Journal, received a Creative Catalyst grant from the Illinois Arts Council, and was awarded for residencies at Ragdale and Taleamor Park. She is a poet in residence at the Chicago Poetry Center and facilitates workshops for incarcerated youth with Free Verse Writing Project. Her poetry can be found in the Southern Poetry Anthology, EPOCH, Greensboro Review, and elsewhere. 

 

Author website: alyxchandler.com 

 

Instagram @alyxabc 

 

Love Affair with a Sprinkler

 

I’ve only got

so many days 

 

left to wet this face

to rouse enough

 

growl to go back 

where I came from 

 

to build a backbone 

hard as sheet metal

 

from the engine of 

dad’s favorite truck

 

the one I can 

never remember 

 

though it carried me 

everywhere I needed to go 

 

and of course

where I didn’t

 

short-shorts trespassing 

abandoned kudzu homes 

 

scraped legs inching  

up water towers

 

creeping down stone

church rooftops

 

girlhood a fresh-cut lawn

where secrets coiled

 

like a water hose 

stuck in kinks

 

spouting knots 

writhing in grass 

 

begging to spit at

every pepperplant 

 

sate all thirst

I want to drown

 

to be snake-hearted

again my stride full

 

of spunk and gall

half-naked in an 

 

embrace with the 

spray of irrigation jets 

 

their cold drenching

my kid-body good 

 

and sopping-wet 

in hose-water rivulets

 

under its pressure 

I shed regret

 

molt sunburn

squeal hallelujah 

 

in a hot spell—

such a sweet relief 

 

I’d somehow 

after so many years

 

forgotten.

Once I Lived in a Town 

 

where grocery stores dispensed 

ammunition from automated machines, 

 

all you needed was an ID and license,

the sign advertised, but there are ways 

 

around that, a cashier told me, snuff a bulge 

half-cocked in his cheek. But my target? 

 

The choose-your-own-adventure 

bulletin board. If you were brave,

 

you’d let some guy named John shoot 

you with their dad’s old Nikon film

 

camera. Girls only. No tattoos, the ink of

the red-lettered flyer bled. Those days 

 

I craved someone—anyone—to lock

and load my rough-hewn beauty like 

 

a cold weapon. Ripen the fruit of 

my teenage face. Save me. Instead I

 

washed the ad in my too-tight jeans,

let it dye my pocket grapefruit pink. 

 

Once I lived in a town where daily I

wore a necklace with a dragonfly wing 

 

cured in resin, gifted from a lover, 

a lifelong bug hater. Love can live in 

 

the crevice of disgust, I found, but 

lost it within the swaths of poison oak 

 

where I shot my first bullet into wide-

open sky and felt death echo its curious 

 

desire, automatic as the gun’s kickback. 

My legs mottled in pocked rash. Then a 

 

hole I didn’t know existed. A souring. 

Bitter and salt the only taste craved, 

 

a rotten smell in the fried fatback I ate. 

Once I lived in a town where the first 

 

boy I kissed in the wreathed doorway

of my childhood home left Earth too

 

soon from a single shot. I can’t ask: is

this what the military taught him? I only

 

know the cruel way high school relationships 

end, 5-word text then never again. His fine-

 

line dragon doodles and i-love-you notes 

still in my Converse shoe box in an attic,

 

twelve years untouched. I once lived in 

a town where obits never contained

 

the word “suicide”—everyone is a child

of Christ, and I mean everyone, our pastor

 

used to say, a joke staining his sincerity. 

God, how I undercompensate, use safety

 

pins for my grief when I need weapons-grade 

resistance, a cast-iron heart. Once I lived

 

in a town where I found a primed handgun

under the bed of a boy I cheated with.

 

Delirious, I buried it in a dumpster until

he cried that it was his great-grandfather’s,

 

an heirloom he couldn’t forget or forgive

and after that I never saw him again. I didn’t

 

have the language to ask him what I needed

to know, Prozac newly wired in my brain,

 

a secret I could barely contain. Once I 

crushed my trigger finger between the

 

door of who I wanted to be and who

I actually was; I let that town press me 

 

like a camellia between a book, inadequate 

as a cartoon-decorated band aid trying to

 

stop the blood flow from a near-miss bullet.

The Brooder

 

beneath nest boxes a squawk sinks out 

so docile it turns me over both startles and

 

settles me this sudden birdbrain 

how domestication is a brawl 

 

inside me: the cockatrice

papering my chicken heart with pockets of wire 

I peel back its cuticle remove the bloom

 

to clean the coop  

and find a little yolkless moon 

an eyeball I push open and memorize

then chuck over my roof

 

until a hen digs a crack with her beak

breaks speckled curtains 

 

of turquoise consumes her newest creation

without pity or

pause