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

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Episode 143: Do They Still Have Bulletin Boards? is an episode from Painted Bride Quarterly’s Slush Pile by Painted Bride Quarterly.

This episode is 47:13 long.

This episode was published on Oct 1, 2025.

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