We Were Only Boys, by Kyle Yandle

Prose, poetry, chapbook, 32 pages, from Bottlecap Features. Refusing to remember adolescence through rose-colored glasses, We Were Only Boys treats memory like a physical, tactile place, full of unfinished business. A place where the past still possesses the weight that the body still remembers and the mind aims to smooth over. The chapbook follows boyhood into adulthood through small, emotionally charged moments: museum field trips with words left unsaid, motel rooms where the illusions of innocence fade, church fellowship halls, gateways where intimacy arrives and disappears—fleeting. These pieces weave lyrical narratives with prose poems attempting to answer the same question: how does loss first manifest in the body, mind, and spirit? And how do those early lessons leak into the way we process the way we love, what we want, and what we fear? Memory isn’t often tidy or polite in this chapbook—it pushes back with doors that won't open, locks that won’t quite turn, and hands that reach and never find warmth. Quiet, intimate, and unsentimental, the book asks what is leftover when innocence is gone, and what it means to keep loving from a distance once closeness becomes hurt. Kyle Yandle is a mid-thirties book nerd, a working-class dreamer who loves telling stories, and an all-around geek—a badge he wears proudly. He lives in the mountains of western North Carolina with his wife and children. His debut novel, Finding Sound, is forthcoming from Moonshine Cove Publishing (February 2026). His short fiction has been published by After/Thought Literary and Down in the Dirt.