Amanda Chiado

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Guillotine Girl
 
after Shivani Mehta
 
wants to smile more. She wants to wear a different gown, a brighter perfume, less like the scent of endings. God will make her different the next time around, but she must make the most of her oblique life, of her innate ability to kiss bodies goodbye. She is well-versed in the tenderness of necks, like a mother who has memorized the veins, and folds, and hinges of the pearled bones of her newborn. She most likes to rest in the first light of sunrise and reflect on her tailored potential. She doesn’t always think of herself as a threat or a warning, although she understands the worth of having those qualities hidden under her petticoat. In this life, Guillotine Girl asks forgiveness for how men use her. In another version of her body, she shaves men’s facial hair so close, their cheeks gleam like a baby’s bottom. She dreams of a life with a musical score that doesn’t end with a thud. 

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The Devil, the Dahlias, and The Baby
 
I ran into the devil at the flower shop. I was picking up a bouquet for my friend who just gave birth to a baby boy. The devil was deeply sniffing each bunch of flowers like it was his last hurrah. “Hey, funny seeing you here,” I said. He appeared hurt or offended, like he didn’t deserve beauty. His cheeks looked like fireball candies that everyone would like to lick. “Doesn’t everyone deserve the smell of beginnings?” He asked. “I thought you’d be smelling those in the cemetery, if anything,” I scoffed. “Even flowers get sad,” he said. “And the ones at the cemetery smell like tears,” he said. “I’ve got enough sadness.” “Oh, I had no idea that everything depends on context, even when it comes to flowers,” I said. “They smell like the awful tears-sobby, salty ones.” He dropped his head. “Want to help me pick a bouquet?” I asked to mend my offense. The devil’s eyes brightened like imploding planets. “I’d love to.” He smiled a toothy smile that was both enchanting and more magnetic because he was filled with hope. “These are the first flowers that the baby will ever smell,” I said. “The flowers can’t wait,” he said, and his eyes grew glossy, but he held back the tears so the flowers wouldn’t catch his perpetual gloom. He led me to the Dahlia’s. “My treat,” he said. They were the color of fresh blood. For a fleeting second, there was no death, only the smell of new babies, and the type of blossoms that unravel sadness.
 
**
 
The Invisible Horses

The invisible horses arrived when we ran out of food. My father said, “The moon ate it all, just look how fat he is.” The invisible horses ran through the house and knocked over every ugly, naked baby sculpture my mother had collected at yard sales. There is no way to be sad when you have a stable of invisible horses. Sometimes their stable is the empty fridge, and the invisible horses shrink and whinny in the fluorescent light. We eat hay together in the night hours when the crickets don’t know how beautiful their legs are. The invisible horses tell me I am a constellation, and that is why I am so frail. Tomorrow, there may be milk the color of the Camarillo horse. I will wish on the falling stars of my body for chocolate the color of the Paso Fino. The myth of the invisible horses is about outrunning hunger.
 
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Acting Drunk
 
When I was sober, when I wanted to talk like an intrigued sense of starlight to strangers, when the strippers sliding through the strobes didn’t butter me bothered, when I sat like a wife, like a wide-legged unbothered man, when I cowboyed, when I sank into the blur like a barrel slug, I pretended I was drink, pretending I was drunk, when I floated new I remembered my first tethering, when I swung umbilical, when I shamed my mother and disappeared into her hope, when I slung myself over my own shoulder and sloppily made love to my wasted flesh, when I was a hungover art film I always watched the first half second, drunk-slept the second half first. I woke up, I tell you, but sometimes I pretend I’m drunk, a new kind, where you cry to fill the dried rivers, and wake up like a Macy’s day parade, where you blister under a fiery ghost of beginning, the kind of drunk where every season you’ve been waiting for finally sings your name.
 
**
 
The Suicide Expert

No one wanted to hang out with the suicide expert. His conversations began as weather forecasts and ended in tutorials on knots. I’m not saying I don’t respect the expertise. I’m saying all the darkness has a brick-feel, and I’m going for wing-feel these days. He is a “special kind of church of individual empowerment,” he says. I want instead to know about waking up from hypnosis, about jumping from optical illusions, about being doubly inside and outside the thing. He listens well about my expertise of birds and the quality of feathers and bones, light and brittle. There can be flight in fragility. We go on a date at one of those places where you dine in the dark. They call it the “blindfolded restaurant experience.” We understand the facial structures of each other over charcuterie and touch. I didn’t love him, but I love his longing for the idea of being lost. We were two wings from the same macaw.

**
 
My Ex-Boyfriend’s Memory is a Broken Mirror

I fall off a truck bed every time he dreams of me. I can tell because the bruises look the same-like overgrown plums that stain your hands with psychotherapy ink blotches meant to unveil your daddy issues. My dead father is knocking on the door of this poem now, and he says he’s all better now. I will be too. I interrupt this previously scheduled broadcast for a crying fit without the glory of baptismal tears. The disease of love will wear you shatter-sharp. If a man slaps your mosquito bites so hard it starts a wildfire, for better or worse, he must be sacrificed to the wolves. I hold vigil for the charred life swallowed up by my desire. I disappear into the gift of my ex-boyfriend’s violent smoke blur. I am the blood-red aftermath horizon. Yes, it’s like that when you are born again. I’m hanging up now.

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This poem first appeared in Anacapa Review, 2024.

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Pumpkin Soup with Van Gogh

I whispered in the ear he eventually cut off. Van Gogh was nothing like the books say. He had this ravenous style of eating. “Slophouse,” he called it. “I like gravy and sauce because it reminds me of paint,” he said. At brunch the hollandaise looks like a dash of buttery sunrise on his upper lip. I told him Everlee was no good for him. She was rumored as a ruiner; dead-crow in-a-dream-like, but who really listens to a bearded lady. I do embrace my lot of hair prickling from my chin down round my turkey neck. Beauty is in the eyes. I thought Van Gogh loved me because he would often startle me alive from behind corners or in dark rooms. “You could be brilliantly present,” he said.  Van Gogh liked sex limericks, so I memorized a few for our date, but he ended up crying into his pumpkin soup and leaving me high and dry to pay the tab. I drank his soup riddled with his salty tears. I still remember the used pillowcase smell of his frazzled hair and the moonlit taste of his sadness.

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This poem was first published in Sho Journal, 2024. 

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Marilyn Monroe Wants to Listen to the Birds

Marilyn Monroe was pacing the rockery. I was glad she wasn’t in the iconic white dress because I’d have to find wind. I was dressed like a messy bed, and my phone was thankfully dead, or I’d otherwise be obligated to my persona, consumerism, and dressing up some Insta- reel. I wanted to touch her hair, but you can’t go around giving your hands this type of permission. “I’m paving a walkway,” I said. “You?” “Patio,” she said. “I want a clear path to heaven,” I said. “I want a place to sit and listen to the birds,” she said. “I read they only sing when there are no predators around,” I said. “I’m lonely,” she said. The rain came on quickly, then like a miracle, and we aimed for a thicket like birds do. Her mascara was running, and my wings were wet. Rain makes it all right to cry. We both felt like singing in the pitter-patter.

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This was first published in Sho Journal, 2024.

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Peace Be With You, Pee-wee Herman 

I put it in reverse and become a cartoon. I can be smashed and exploded and spring back to life anew. It was a hoot, but then, the cops arrested me for stealing, which I’d only stole my own body. It was mine after all, but they gave me a felony, and I had to be housed with a clown who cried nonstop because his mother never brought the cake make-up she’d promised. I read to find a way home and I regret to say the Bible didn’t get me there. I wanted it, the liberation. Please don’t jump on your white horse and hang me. We are all acting our way toward wholeness. I found the neck tattoos had repaired me well to move through the gates, and I could again be propelled from oven to table. In Peewee Herman’s Big Holiday, they asked him at dinner to say a word, and he said, Encyclopedia, Pimple, and Hairball. Pray for the holy ability to find your own cherry red convertible to draw you toward your supreme sherbet-coloured sunset.

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This poem first appeared in The Tiny Journal, 2024.

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Bad Mothering Starts with Sugar and Ends with Salt

Don’t get therapy, so you can be a carnival of repeated mistakes. Keep winning the goldfish that will die in a week and don’t teach the children about prayer or proper burial. Grow yourself a cinderblock fence around your heart, the kind that encircled your house on the westside where your mother lived between the ink blotches in books, afraid of who would break in this time. Bad mothering begins with sugar and ends with salt, and don’t forget the food, so fast the children are transported angrily into adolescence. Provide the right malnutrition. Famish them. Tell them rich lies for dinner. You should be drunk too- on whatever makes you blind. Don’t ever listen, not to their heartbeats or tears, or wonderings, and god forbid you keep the lie of magic alive. Get them walking quickly, send them out the door into the wastelands. Deadbolt their dreams. Talk about orphans and war, and how many monsters the darkness holds. Remind them how much beasts drool. Never, never let them sleep in your bed because they sleep like sweet-smelling starfish, like big cracker crumbs. Leave a packed bag for them by the door so they never have peace.

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This poem first appeared in The Tiny Journal, 2024.
 
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Amanda Chiado is a writer, poet, teacher, and arts advocate. She holds degrees from the University of New Mexico, California College of the Arts, and Grand Canyon University. Amanda won the Press 53 Poetry Award 2026 for her prose poetry collection Today I Wear the Bear Head, and is the author of the chapbook Prime Cuts (Bottlecap Press, 2025) and Vitiligod: The Ascension of Michael Jackson (Dancing Girl Press, 2016). Her poetry and fiction have been published in DMQ Review, The Account, Southeast Review, RHINO, and others. She lives and works in Hollister, California.