Tag Archives: Kelli Charland

THIS LIFE OF MINE

There’s a peculiar kind of sunshine in your bones,

she tells me, like that of a soft spring

evening. I am sitting on the bathroom floor

using the soggy bath mat as a blanket

rocking back and forth—

A sudden premonition, a wide-eyed gut feeling:

this is not a good thing.

On those nights, my father and I

would sit and wait

for the bats to wake.

It has been a dozen years

and yet, a sob.

My girl, she calls,

what’s this life of yours

about? Out with it! You think

you’re evil, a goblin in human skin, just say it,

and let me rub the knots from your neck.

Oh, I don’t know I don’t know sometimes

I feel like I miss all the meaning    the baby lies

on the edge of the bathtub and cries      and cries

this life is not mine

and yet, it is.

And I know it’s true, we miss all the meaning,

let us trace a face in life’s foggy mirror

A dozen years, or more

we trace the blue tile

We slug down bath water like a lifestream, cold

and mean

with wrinkling skin and yellowing teeth

missing all the meaning, and so on.

But no matter, she says.

No matter those poisoned guts, no matter

the heartache. No matter.

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Kelli Charland (she/her) attends SUNY Plattsburgh for English literature and creative writing. She has worked as the copy editor for North Star, SUNY Plattsburgh’s student-run literary magazine, and as an editorial assistant and social media manager for Saranac Review. One of her essays appears on Saranac Review’s blog. She was awarded 1st place for the Robert Frost Memorial Poetry Prize in May 2024 for her poem, “A letter to my amygdala.”

SILT HAS COLLECTED IN MY CELLS

S.J.M.

The print on my favorite shirt

crackles off,

gone soft

together with my nerves.

A new age rests

on his shoulders.

My fondest memory—

twisting snow peas

off the vine.

A new kind of

loneliness sent off

down the river toward

the geese in the heat

of July

and yes,

a gentle hand cupping a nape

under the cover of

silence and sky.

It’s all fragmented.

There were no words

for the longest time until

a finger was plunged

into the deep to poke

at a river snail

and we realized it’s stupid

to guard feeling by burying it

in the marrow of our

bones.

---

Kelli Charland (she/her) attends SUNY Plattsburgh for English literature and creative writing. She has worked as the copy editor for North Star, SUNY Plattsburgh’s student-run literary magazine, and as an editorial assistant and social media manager for Saranac Review. One of her essays appears on Saranac Review’s blog. She was awarded 1st place for the Robert Frost Memorial Poetry Prize in May 2024 for her poem, “A letter to my amygdala.”

TRAVEL-SIZED MAP TO THE ANTIDOTE FOR MISERY

To get there, find an old abandoned sandbox

with C+L4EVR carved into the NNE plane

of its chipped frame. Plant your knees down

into the grit and dig                   dig

until your

finger pads bleed.

Fingertips.

The air turns to pink gossamer spun

from the sound of Neptune’s rings.

Two squirrels squawk and chase each other up

and down the telephone pole that you are unsure was there before

until it tips but does not

fall.

Slowly                slowly

your knees will disappear and your fingers will be grated to knuckle

and somehow before you know

it what you knew

melts down                      down

into the grass and you will see a little blue-gray fuzzball

who just three days earlier

dozed under your breast

and you will erupt in tears at the loss but keep

digging. No more elbows and no more femurs,

mince everything all the way to the quick, gored

into carmine mud.

Destination:

the merciful unfolding of the cerebrum.

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Kelli Charland (she/her) attends SUNY Plattsburgh for English literature and creative writing. She has worked as the copy editor for North Star, SUNY Plattsburgh’s student-run literary magazine, and as an editorial assistant and social media manager for Saranac Review. One of her essays appears on Saranac Review’s blog. She was awarded 1st place for the Robert Frost Memorial Poetry Prize in May 2024 for her poem, “A letter to my amygdala.”