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