Chella Courington- Three Poems

Brief Biography: Chella Courington is a writer and teacher. She’s the author of three poetry chapbooks and three flash fiction chapbooks. Her poetry and stories appear in numerous anthologies and journals including SmokeLong Quarterly, Nano Fiction, The Los Angeles Review, and The Collagist. Her recent novella, The Somewhat Sad Tale of the Pitcher and the Crow, is available at Amazon. Reared in the Appalachian South, she now lives in Santa Barbara, CA.

Lynette’s War

Cousin Lynette says she’s tired from cleaning 

East Main houses of rich bitches. They don’t even shit 

like us, got toilet seats that float to the bowl, 

never make a sound, & she hands me the baby 

over the front seat. Days off Merry Maids 

we like to drive her ’97 Trans Am to Gulf Shores—  

kd lang over eight speakers. 

I’m tired too, tired of being the babysitter. 

Leah, grabbing my earrings, covers me in crumbs. 

She bites off the heads of animal crackers. 

Only eats heads.

Don’t know why I hang with her. 

She’s like the girl who cut my hair at Cinderella’s 

saying I had the ugliest strands she’d ever seen.

I kept going back for more till Lynette blurted  

you don’t need to pay for that kind of shit. 

And Lynette says outright 

she’s sexy & I’m not. We both know it.

Junior high she called me a mutant. Boobs 

like raisins on a fifteen-year old’s wrong. 

Mama took me to the doctor & he shook his head. 

At least Lynette is a good mother.

When the kid has fever, Lynette won’t go 

to work. I’d rather lose my job 

than leave a sick baby at daycare.

Guess that’s why I hang with her. 

She might call me names, but let somebody else do it,

she’d scratch their eyes out. At the Sonic, 

some boy from Crossville leaned in the window, 

drop the fat chick & let’s go driving.  

She clawed his left cheek & screeched away, 

tray still on the car, cokes & fries flying.

Son of a bitch thinks he can dump on you and have  

a good time with me. Stupid bastard. 

I thought Lynette would always be the one to leave. 

Good looking. Smart. She never let anybody 

walk on her, or me, though she did

what Cochran girls do after getting their 

driver’s license. She got knocked up. 

Wouldn’t tell a soul who the father was. 

We all thought it was Sonny Cruz. 

He went to Iraq in August & emailed Lynette every day.

Like they were junk, she’d hit delete. 

He started writing letters she stacked on her dresser—

unopened. Keeping in touch with soldiers 

is talking to the dead. Sonny could come back, 

I say. Lots of boys make it. Lynette turns away 

he might, but he won’t be the Sonny I knew.  

After homecoming she carries his letters out to the grill. 

They catch on the third match.

Every last word. 

PBW (DVD). Ed. Richard Freeman. (December 2015)

 

The Pond Heron

The dead don't write

but my cousin's letter arrives three days 

after he's blown away by some kid 

in his own platoon.

Maybe another Georgia boy 

who's never been so far from home

so scared he shoots at anything

moving in shadows.

The letter feels light 

for my cousin's voice.

He speaks of sheer petals rising

out of muddy fields 

spreading before the sun. 

Of a copper heron in shallow water

who dips his black-tipped beak

to spear his prey.

King Log 7.1 (Spring 2004). 

 

Flight

The first thing I had of Winston Walker 

is that Saturday afternoon he shot me

in the eye. BB the size of a mockingbird

iris and about as yellow. Arm draped 

over the fence, I watched him walking

toward me. Cock. Pop. 

Wasps nested. Screams covered me.

Ice cubes froze the sting blue. Weeks later

my sight, sharp as ever. But the pasty scar tissue 

turned my head down, hid the eye behind 

cloud cover. No meteor showers 

visible.  Just an ugly white 

glob Winston Walker called an accident

no doctor could erase till I was sixteen

and had moved to Atlanta. He scraped clouds

off blue iris—ashen crater in its place.

When I raised my lid, the sky appeared.

After thirty years Winston Walker telephoned.

Honest to God, I just wanted to scare you.

Said he dreamed I shot him full 

of Adriamycin exploding under his skin

infrared starbursts burning every breathing cell.

Then, in November, I expected him at New Hope 

to be cremated, ashes scattered where he hunted 

whitetail deer. In a simple casket he 

was lowered near his mother as shadows 

passed through us.

Flying South (Poetry Chapbook). Kind of a Hurricane Press, January 2015.