You Tell Me You Started Eating Apples

For your health. When we go out late at night,
I walk on the outside of the sidewalk

& I wonder if the cars careening around the bend
will misconstrue this configuration as pure chance

& I peel a clementine for dessert as we go,
but the citrus tings where the flesh of my lips split

like chicken skin and muscle
under the knife. Breadcrumbs

the texture of gooseflesh. Metaphor
wrapping the hot meal on its hot

plate, warming my aching.
I am the same fragile shield

when I lay, silently counting your breaths,
from the outside edge of a twin bed

& when the doctor shakes shakes shakes
his head, and I take notes like a good lover.

Getting Married and Having Kids

It has all been playing over in my mind
Again. I am going home
to face the things I thought
I had left behind:
the way my knuckles knock
the headboard when I stretch
in the morning, a soft animal,
just the same as in childhood,
the floral wallpaper unchanged.
My mom’s questions
echo what I suppress.
What do these words mean
for my family? I forget
what a daughter can do.
My mom still remembers, no matter
how many times she walks in
the bedroom, her mom
splayed on the floor
stripped naked by paramedics.

Fairy House Lost To The Woods

Earth-eaten and slung around a stump, walls / tilt themselves apart like parties at war / the fairies only half-know what they’re losing in the marine clay / the house slant-stands, a model of the beautiful Pope-Leighey / complete with acorn lumps for usonian shape, writing space, built-into-hill cooling, two-point-five kids, a carport for one / and ambling moss flat roofed / rot from the inside out, eviction notice is coming / fairies see the kitchen turn to compost / withered away from their needs in the first place / now they prod the earth, and trace blueprints to carve out their own ringed hollow / the house of whittled and woven bark sits in cicada song / borrowing space until the rent for this life is no longer paid notice.

Charlotte Van Schaack is an early-career writer whose work has been published in Screen Door Review and WWPH Writes (receiving a Best Of The Net Nomination). She is currently an associate creative nonfiction editor for JMWW Journal. They were the editor-in-chief of their undergraduate literary magazine at American University (AmLit). In 2024, Charlotte was a writer in residence at The Inner Loop’s summer residency.