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
