2020 Editors’ Choice Poems: Week 1

2020 Editors' Choice Poems

Week 1

We are delighted to present this week’s selections from the Brain Mill Press Poetry Month Contest. We have received a lot of wonderful work via our submission portal, and these pieces by Emily Bowles, Margaret Rozga, Sebastian Santiago, and Robin Long stood out.

We hope you’ll enjoy these editors’ picks as much as we did.

Cucumbering a Sunbeam

by Emily Bowles

 

1.

For most people, Margaret Cavendish is a footnote[1] in literary history.
For most people, cucumbers are not fruit or flower because they are green.

2.

She terrified Woolf—raging voices, staged in volumes of a length only the
Uneditable Elite might afford to print, her “paper bodies,” she called them.

3.

Her husband’s body had produced more ephemeral works, and a treatise on
horseback riding, as well as two daughters, both older than the Duchess.

4.

I’ve been that woman, the same age as a man’s daughter by his first wife, and
like Mad Madge, I relish in cucumbers as much as others like cake.

5.

They wrote for their father, for their coterie closet drama, coveting ambition,
writing of cake when surely their servants had their hands in that batter.

6.

We do not pick our mothers, although we try to write and rewrite them. They
revered one, ridiculed the other, and each became one, hating what was other.

7.

Margaret was accustomed to that misogyny or would soon be. Her desires were limit-
less, cosmic, a cucumber overgrowing its plot, her novels overgrowing their plots.

8.

She had stood before the Royal Society, spoke out before that audience of satirzable
pseudo-scientific Men, Pepys’ pen ready to render her as the Object of their satire.

9.

Swift wrote not of Margaret but of the men who were “extracting sunbeams out of cucumbers.”
He made light of their science, mad enough, unstable in a stable with Gulliver, eating apples.

10.

There are no roses, no carnations that can survive a lack of light like this, and so I kill
the plants in my apartment, eat a cucumber, imagine that sunbeam—for, from her.

—————

[1] Seventeenth-century writer Margaret Cavendish was of ambiguous origins before her marriage to the slightly foppish William Cavendish, Duke of Newcastle, whose daughters from his previous marriage bettered their father as elegant writers of manuscript prose and poetry.  Margaret self-published wide-ranging books on philosophy, science, and more, while also writing seemingly impossible-to-perform plays, a utopian novel that explored many of her scientific theories, and a wild autobiography.

[Footnote to this footnote: like Woolf, I have feelings for her that inflect my version of her Story, as has had Every Historian Who Has Ever Pretended Objectivity, for Cavendish beginning perhaps with Pepys and somewhat later Ballard but extending indefinitely.]

About Emily Bowles

 

Emily Bowles’s first poetry chapbook—His Journal, My Stella—examines Jonathan Swift’s shadowy Stella while using Stella to reflect on her own gendered embodiment and her disappearance in/among texts. She’s currently working on a project loosely tied to A Room of One’s Own that will explore patterns of order/disorder that create dissonance between women and perpetuate systemic forms of female misogyny even as we seek out space for community. These poems focus on four early modern women writers—Margaret Cavendish, her stepdaughters Jane and Elizabeth, and Anne Finch—in order to draw attention to the ways in which networks of circulation (from print texts and scribally copied manuscripts to modern social media posts) fabricate ideals of femininity that become naturalized, deeply sedimented, and dangerous unless we listen to each other’s stories. Instagram: @embowlden77

Alice Walks Herself Back through the Adventure

by Margaret Rozga

Don’t believe your sister when she says you were asleep
and merely dreaming. Don’t hang around waiting
for the queen to take your head. Even if it grins,
don’t ask directions of a disappearing cat.
Don’t take tea at a table with many empty places.
If, tired and thirsty, you forget and seat yourself,
hold on through the whirlwind that follows.
Even if answers are riddles, ask your questions.

You can’t be everybody.

Ask deeper questions: how is it potions and biscuits
just happen to appear as needed? If there’s no one
to ask, don’t touch. Don’t forget the solution
to one problem may be the start of another.
Give yourself some credit. You found
better ways to manage keys and size.

Don’t follow rabbits on the run.
Don’t think books without pictures boring.
Don’t forget that green little girl you used to be.
Recognize the limit to backwards:

don’t try to be her again.

About Margaret Rozga

 

Wisconsin Poet Laureate Margaret Rozga creates poetry from her ongoing concern for social justice issues. She is the author of four books, including Pestiferous Questions: A Life in Poems (Lit Fest Press 2017), written with the help of a creative writer’s fellowship at the American Antiquarian Society. A professor emeritus at the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee – Waukesha campus, she lives near Lake Michigan in Milwaukee.

Website: margaretrozga.com

National Poetry Month

Looking through a box of photos

by Sebastian Santiago

I hold a picture of my mother,
the one where she’s splashing in
an inflatable pool in her front yard,
an unabashed smile on her face.

Strange to think she was once
only a girl.

I whisper,

Life will not be kind to you.

I want to lay in that pool with her,
and hold her like a dream.

I’m damaged goods mijo

she once said, as she drifted
off to sleep.

I press my lips to this picture.

From the other room,
I hear her laughing at
something on television.

About Sebastian Santiago

I’m originally from San Juan, Puerto Rico, but grew up just outside of Detroit. I attained my English degree from Central Michigan University where the focus of my studies was creative writing with a concentration in poetry.

I was recently living in Prague teaching English, but have since moved back to the US due to the Covid-19 crisis and am actively looking to attend an MFA program where I’ll continue to work on my writing. I’ve recently had work featured in Poetry South (2020), Rigorous (January 2020), and The Emerson Review (2020) among others.

National Poetry Month

What a time spent trying now

by Robin Long

 

What a time spent trying now

the pillars of past days—tip—
until I am crushed beneath

through parched lips, glittering dust
She comes

“bereft I was, of what I knew not,” She says,
of course

but hiding message in a music
is affliction in the night

We all know that it lives

We all know where to look

so we seek, we search
and the quiet conscience rests somewhere
just outside the reach
of narrowed arms, busted knuckles

I still have days I wake,
tuck my chin into my breastbone,
and seize patterned sheets
to stretch across eyelids
for hours

and only when the air sours of spent breath

and I clutch my throat with both my fists—

does the buried alive fight for me
on a morning I, myself, could not

————————————————————— 

Dickinson, Emily. “A loss of something ever felt I—”

Circa 1865. Unbound sheets. Sheet 48.

FR1072, J959

About Robin Long

Robin Long is a queer poet, writer, and professor in Austin, Texas. Her poetry can be found or is forthcoming in the 2021 Texas Poetry Calendar by Kallisto Gaia Press, Alexandria Quarterly, FEELS Zine, Twist in Time, 8 Poems, Literary Yard, and 45 Magazine, as of late. She is currently expanding her fiction thesis on the life of Emily Dickinson, The Other Dickinson, so she can be found at theotherdickinson.com or in social media as @theotherdickinson.

National Poetry Month
National Poetry Month

BMP Celebrates National Poetry Month

For this year’s National Poetry Month at BMP Voices, we seek to celebrate the ways in which we’re interconnected — highlighting community, gratitude, and the ways in which creativity redounds upon itself, fed by collective energy and goodwill. Our fee-free contest is open to all styles and forms of poetry, with an eye toward our mission of discovering voices that are immediate, immersive, and urgent. Poems inspired by the work of others are welcome. We also welcome poems written to other poems or poets.

“O Villain, My Friend,” “A Song for New Orleans,” and “Would a farm and a frigid river be fitting for a girl?”

“O Villain, My Friend,” “A Song for New Orleans,” and “Would a farm and a frigid river be fitting for a girl?”

Poetry Month Selections

We are delighted to present this week’s selections from the Brain Mill Press Poetry Month Contest. We have received a lot of wonderful work via our submission portal, and these pieces by Anne Marie Wells, Maya Richard-Craven, and Rebecca Weingart stood out.

We hope you’ll enjoy these editors’ picks as much as we did.

O Villain, My Friend

by Anne Marie Wells

Obscure stranger,
O villain,
could we, for a moment,
even on an odd day,
an unholy day, take our right eyes from the cross hairs
and right pointers from the precipice
to acknowledge the thirst in one another?
I admit I’ve been a scoundrel opportunistic in my malice,
and I am so thirsty,
like you, your mouth a salt lick.
I have no sand left, and
if your camel pride can wait no longer,
could you touch your hand to mine?
My left, your right,
joined at the little fingers
to evolve from weapon-wielding mercenaries
into a single, dainty cup
from which we both
can drink.

Jareen Imam author photo

Anne Marie Wells (She/Her) of Hoback Junction, Wyoming, is a queer poet, playwright, and storyteller navigating the world with a chronic illness. In 2015, she published her children’s book, MAMÃ, PORQUE SOU UMA AVE? / MOMMY, WHY AM I A BIRD? (Universidade de Coimbra). She earned first place in the Riot Act Regional New Play Festival in 2017 for her play LOVE AND RADIO (AND ZOMBIES… KIND OF) and earned second place in 2018 for her play, LAST. ONLY. BEST. In 2019, the Wrights of Wyoming judges blindly selected four of her theatrical works for the statewide play festival in Cheyenne. In 2020, her play LAST. ONLY. BEST. was selected for publication in The Dallas Review, and her 10-minute play THE DOOR will appear in The Progenitor Art & Literary Journal.

An avid storyteller, she performed in and won several Cabin Fever Story Slams and was selected by The Moth to perform in a ‘Main Stage’ event in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, in 2019.

Anne Marie’s poems have appeared or will appear in In Parentheses, Lucky Jefferson, Unlimited Literature, Soliloquies Anthology, Muddy River Poetry Review, Variant Literature, Poets’ Choice, Meniscus Journal, Changing Womxn Collective, and The Voices Project.

Website | Facebook | Medium | Instagram | Twitter | Pinterest | Tumblr

 

A Song for New Orleans

by Maya Richard-Craven

Each street is covered in mud,
stray dogs search for their owners bodies
they toss and tumble through the wreckage
like dendrites, millions
of branched extensions pile in the streets
a nightmare from hell. Blue gray
bits of flesh become one with murky water.
The population size diminishes down
to the size of a single axon,
the stadium its terminal.
Black arms above rooftops, seeking a signal,
a recognizable sound, of no one is coming,
capillaries at fingertips lose their color.
When the waiting sleep, it is in waiting.
When given refuge, it is in waiting.
Children make finger guns amongst
each other, emulate officers
in black and blue who refuse
to come and get them.
Like cell walls,
New Orleans is permeable.
Cells walls protect
organelles of the cell
but sometimes water gets through
and when it does the ark is flooded
and the animals run loose
or fields are flooded and
people start to drown
having waited atop rooftops
black arms raising in the air
waiting for someone, anyone,
to come and stop by
so the children keep playing
making finger guns but
the men in black and blue
the men with guns and power
they don’t come
so the blood continues to run.

Jareen Imam author photo

Maya Richard-Craven is an American journalist and poet, who has opened for California Poet Laureate Dana Gioia (2013), and has spoken before the USC Board of Trustees (2015).  Her work has appeared in New York Daily News, The Daily Beast, USA TODAY College, and The Hollywood Reporter. In 2014, Richard-Craven was named best college columnist by The National Society of Newspaper Columnists.

Would a farm and a frigid river be fitting for a girl?

by Rebecca Weingart

I see myself up there
by the bridge that sways
over the frozen lake.

Winters so long
you forget spring is coming.

This is where you choose to live.

Keep driving north and you’ll find it.

I once bought 2 lbs.
of cranberries
at a farmers market

in late fall.

I’ve driven to the nearest rental video store
in the snow. You drove to the nearest rental video store
in the snow.

We listened to the same song and heard two different lyrics.

You’re making me feel like I’ve never been wrong.
You’re making me feel like I’ve never been born.

I wanted to have never been wrong.
You wanted to have never been born.

———

Note: Title is from poem 3.14 by the Roman poet Sulpicia, translated by me. “You’re making me feel like I’ve never been born” is from the song “She Said She Said” by the Beatles.

Jareen Imam author photo

Rebecca Weingart is a high school English teacher in St. Louis, Missouri. She is an MFA candidate at University of Missouri-St. Louis and has a poem published in NonBinary Review. She can be found on Instagram and Twitter as @antbeea.

National Poetry Month

BMP Celebrates National Poetry Month

For this year’s National Poetry Month at BMP Voices, we seek to celebrate the ways in which we’re interconnected — highlighting community, gratitude, and the ways in which creativity redounds upon itself, fed by collective energy and goodwill. Our fee-free contest is open to all styles and forms of poetry, with an eye toward our mission of discovering voices that are immediate, immersive, and urgent. Poems inspired by the work of others are welcome. We also welcome poems written to other poems or poets.

“Distance & Temerity” and “Ken”

“Distance & Temerity” and “Ken”

Editors' Selections

We are delighted to present this week’s selections from the Brain Mill Press Poetry Month Contest. We have received a lot of wonderful work via our submission portal, and these pieces by Samn Stockwell and Caleb Nichols stood out.

We hope you’ll enjoy these editors’ picks as much as we did.

Distance & Temerity

by Samn Stockwell

The sparrows were enamored
but sounded like a congregation of worried mothers.

Distance and Temerity flew
from Central Park to the bakery.
Like dark flakes, they fluttered to the ground
and ate crumbs of coffee cake and cinnamon buns.

Everyone emerged from the bakery
with white paper bags held out like lamps
and hot cups of coffee jiggling in the other hand.

Joggers zoomed by in black tights and headbands.
Fleet, said Distance.
Sweet as plums, agreed Temerity, inhaling.

After the joggers, the businesswomen, the businessmen
dragging brown briefcases
or swinging them like dull missiles.

Then, children going to school, the girls in pink and purple,
the boys in blue and red, with secrets like feathers.

The sidewalk was getting thin, a few shoppers and the homeless.

A snarl of chaff left as they leap?
Yes, remarked the other, they light and thunder.

Is there a sparrow waking at 2 a.m.,
knowing he’s alone? No.

Samn Stockwell has published in Agni, Ploughshares, and the New Yorker, among others. Her two books, Theater of Animals and Recital, won the National Poetry Series and the Editor’s Prize at Elixir, respectively. Recent poems are in Gargoyle & The Literary Review and are forthcoming in Plume and others.

Ken

by Caleb Nichols

Unsubscribe from everything, save hummingbird wings
and the waves of plague grass that salvage an afternoon.

Aim to create half as much as you maw, and
ken ye well a language not your own.

Face it once a day, the ebb tide, how even as it wanes
it pushes in, endlessly, until the moon unspools, unwinds.

Mute everyone, unfollow. Track daylight by the shadows on the wall.
Listen to the plague wind, savaging the afternoon, raising the dust.

Jareen Imam author photo

Caleb Nichols is a writer and musician from California.  His poems have appeared in Unstamatic: A Micro Lit Mag, and his music has been featured on Paste and Out.  He records music along with his husband as one half of the indie pop duo Soft People, and tweets @seanickels.

National Poetry Month

BMP Celebrates National Poetry Month

For this year’s National Poetry Month at BMP Voices, we seek to celebrate the ways in which we’re interconnected — highlighting community, gratitude, and the ways in which creativity redounds upon itself, fed by collective energy and goodwill. Our fee-free contest is open to all styles and forms of poetry, with an eye toward our mission of discovering voices that are immediate, immersive, and urgent. Poems inspired by the work of others are welcome. We also welcome poems written to other poems or poets.

BMP Celebrates National Poetry Month 2020!

BMP Celebrates National Poetry Month 2020

 

Poetry Contest: Interconnection & Community

Open All April – Fee Free For this year’s National Poetry Month at BMP Voices, we seek to celebrate the ways in which we’re interconnected — highlighting community, gratitude, and the ways in which creativity redounds upon itself, fed by collective energy and goodwill. Our fee-free contest is open to all styles and forms of poetry, with an eye toward our mission of discovering voices that are immediate, immersive, and urgent. Poems inspired by the work of others are welcome. We also welcome poems written to other poems or poets.

Submission Guidelines

Please submit 1-3 poems in a single document, a doc, docx, or PDF, free of identifying information. If your poem does respond to another poet’s work (by using an “after” form or any of their work as excerpted text) we require not only the name of the poet you are responding to but also the title of the original poem. Additionally, if a submitted poem quotes lines from another poet, we ask that the source text be properly attributed as an endnote. In the cover letter, please include contact information, a short bio, description or explanation of the poems (as appropriate), social media links, and a headshot (optional). Submissions will be reviewed for suitability by Brain Mill Press staff. For submissions selected for reproduction on BMP Voices, you will receive a contract granting Brain Mill Press the limited right to reproduce your piece. You will retain all other rights to your work. Your poetry and profile will be published on bmpvoices.com and promoted on our social media outlets. Your post will contain your headshot and bio, as well as information you may wish to include about recent work and your website and social media links. Brain Mill Press strongly encourages submissions from people of color, women, LGBTQIA+ writers, First Nations writers, and disabled writers. Please direct inquiries not answered in this call to inquiries@brainmillpress.com.

Prizes

The Brain Mill Press editors will select one or more submitted poems as the editors’ choice pick(s) approximately once a week through the month of April. Those authors whose poems are editors’ choice selections may choose any poetry title from the Brain Mill Press catalog for their prize. In early May, the editors will select a winning poem, and the poet will receive the full collection of Brain Mill Press poetry titles for themselves, as well as a second collection to gift to an organization of their choice.
National Poetry Month

BMP Celebrates National Poetry Month

For this year’s National Poetry Month at BMP Voices, we seek to celebrate the ways in which we’re interconnected — highlighting community, gratitude, and the ways in which creativity redounds upon itself, fed by collective energy and goodwill. Our fee-free contest is open to all styles and forms of poetry, with an eye toward our mission of discovering voices that are immediate, immersive, and urgent. Poems inspired by the work of others are welcome. We also welcome poems written to other poems or poets.