Editors’ Pick Week 1: ‘Eulogy’ Cycle by Trinity Richardson

by | Apr 13, 2023 | National Poetry Month, NPM 2023, Poetry

Editors' Pick, Week 1

'Eulogy' Cycle by Trinity Richardson

Eulogy

 

Do you remember
the night that
you got so stoned
I had to drive us home
I’d never driven your car
the seat was too low
and you kept
saying things
that didn’t make sense
or
at least
that I didn’t want
to hear
I drove five miles
with the emergency brake on
and when we got home
you asked if I’d ever
been to a funeral
I said I’ve given
a eulogy but
you didn’t ask who
the eulogy was for
just asked if I would
give yours

Eulogy II

 

You ask: How do you pay your rent?
And the answer is so much more
complicated than I care to disclose because
it’s Wednesdays after school
picking out candy at the supermarket,
and crosswords done in pen.
It’s late nights with Monopoly
and double-scooped butter pecan–
an extra 50 cents for sprinkles.
It’s Summers spent at the pool,
the smell of sunscreen and chlorine,
and the pleasant ache of sunburnt skin.
It’s years spent in hospitals,
sterile white rooms that reeked
of antiseptic and sickness,
and nurses rushing to and fro,
knowing they get to go home to their families.
It’s seeing him get worse instead of better,
skin-and-bones and get well soon balloons
tied up in cheery rainbow ribbon.
It’s an intubation tube because his wife
couldn’t pay the bills on her own,
begged him to stay, demanded he stay,
even though he was already gone.
It’s laughing at his funeral because
the pastor called him by the wrong name
and it’s too much to handle
and there’s no tears left.
It’s watching Star Trek by myself,
his rocking chair empty, knowing
I’ll never get to do anything
with him again.

Jareen Imam author photo

Trinity Richardson is a full-time student studying Communications and Creative Writing at the University of South Florida. They are a part of the Judy Genshaft Honors College, and a writer for Women in Technology International. Outside of art, their interests include writing, journaling, and faerie-hunting.

National Poetry Month

BMP Celebrates National Poetry Month

Happy National Poetry Month! For poets and poetry lovers—and perhaps for those who love poets—this is a special time. At Brain Mill Press, we like to celebrate all month long by sharing featured poets, and with our fee-free contest. This year, we’re thinking about poetry cycles, poems that speak to each other, forms that build on each other (like crowns), and the ways a poem can be a scaffold or foundation for other poems. Our words are often in response to other poems, and our own body of work is often an ongoing conversation. We speak to each other, with ourselves, and sometimes into the void—hoping someone will answer back.

Top photo by Lukas Rychvalsky via Pexels

Poetry Month Spotlight: Mauricio Kilwein Guevara

by | Apr 13, 2023 | NPM 2023, Poetry

Poetry Month Spotlight

Mauricio Kilwein Guevara

The White Top in the Basement

per Vittoria

This is what I remember: furiously pumping the wooden handle a dozen times, spinning the metal top in my grandparents’ basement until I made the universe, whir, release star-sparks. I can still recall the names of the newest constellations. Twist it Tight like a Fat Rat’s Tail. The Johnstown Flood. Watch-I’ll-Be-Hit-by-a-Car. Swallow of Fireflies. And my favorite, O, O, Camarón Tintantón.

My dervish threw sparks into space that were fairy green, match-strike yellow. Jinn were hiding in the threads of the azure sky.

Then always this before the aperture of a new day:

The asterism on the ceiling, close as untouchable, the shape of two arms folded, put me to sleep like music in a box:

تيتة

 

The Bridge

para Beatriz

His first surprise in this new America is unspoken:
Snow. It floats down out of the gray white up,
falling, touching his wings like puffs of chalk:
No more. More now. Falling cold slowly all
around him, like a million stars. He looks up
at his mother, who is changed.

……………………She is older in the snowlight,
smiling. Nieve. But her word comes only as a steam puff.
Language falling away, in the world becoming white.
The little beast is five years old. Everything
begins to shake and roar. Snow and beneath
his feet the world begins again. Ferrocarril,
she shouts out, like a horn or bell he cannot hear.

“The Bridge,” from Postmortem © 1994 by Maurice Kilwein Guevara, originally published by the University of Georgia Press, is reprinted by permission of Mauricio Kilwein Guevara.

 

Looking into My Mother’s Eyes, Waiting

 

with masks. ¿Can you tell,”
say the river emeralds,
“que estoy sonreindo?”

About Mauricio Kilwein Guevara

Mauricio Kilwein Guevara was born in Boyacá, Colombia, and raised in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He has published three collections of poetry and Autobiography of So-and -So, a volume of micro-fictions and prose poems. He has also published a book of literary translations in Madrid, Spain. His magical realist comedy, The Last Bridge/El último puente, received a fully staged reading Off-Broadway. He has taught fiction writing and poetry writing for many years in the graduate writing program at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee. In addition, he has been a visiting professor in Colombia, Cuba, Ecuador, and México. Excerpts from Kilwein Guevara’s soon-to-be completed novel, The Thieves of Guevara, have recently been published or are forthcoming in Washington Square Review, The Georgia Review, and Prairie Schooner. More at www.kilweinguevara.com.

National Poetry Month

Photo by Janet Jennerjohn

National Poetry Month

BMP Celebrates National Poetry Month

Happy National Poetry Month! For poets and poetry lovers—and perhaps for those who love poets—this is a special time. At Brain Mill Press, we like to celebrate all month long by sharing featured poets, and with our fee-free contest. This year, we’re thinking about poetry cycles, poems that speak to each other, forms that build on each other (like crowns), and the ways a poem can be a scaffold or foundation for other poems. Our words are often in response to other poems, and our own body of work is often an ongoing conversation. We speak to each other, with ourselves, and sometimes into the void—hoping someone will answer back.

Poetry Month Spotlight: Wendy Vardaman

by | Apr 5, 2023 | NPM 2023, Poetry, Reading

Poetry Month Spotlight

Wendy Vardaman

all my poems are old poems

 

all my poems are old poems, so during
the night I promise my trying-to-sleep & ruminating
self to write a sonnet this morning,
more or less to make the point that I still can.
even if I don’t choose to solidify experience
that way any more. they were snap shots, the poems I wrote.
a thousand or two. hundreds of sonnets.
notes on the children. marriage. rage. my aging

parents. to process my thoughts/
emotions/sensory overload. framed into hard
edged squares of story. I don’t know where this poem
is going. I never did. any more than we know
what’s next in life—the surprises, beautiful
and terrible. the constraints

 

meditation on impermanence

 

sometimes you’re zooming around scotland or barcelona. sometimes you’re home, looking out the window of your zoomroom while the rain falls, the ball of a clumsy left foot held by an office chair’s fork

sometimes you’re female. sometimes your feet stop working together

sometimes you’ve just had lunch with a friend at the Milwaukee Art Museum after falling for St. Dionysius. they summon you through vine & monstrance. you tell them you worry about the children, staggering toward adulthood. their story is your story

& then it isn’t

 

this is a story

 

one of us was echo
one narcissus

dear echo……..I miss

this is a story

both of us echo
neither narcissus

neither narcissus
nor echo
nor story neither

this a gap

…………this gap

………………….this

About Wendy Vardaman

Wendy Vardaman, wendyvardaman.com, works as a website manager and has published three collections of poems. In addition to poetry, her creative practice has focused on editing, prose writing, illustration, printmaking, book arts, and design. She served as poet laureate of Madison, Wisconsin, from 2012 to 2015 and volunteers as a designer, artist, and editor.

National Poetry Month
National Poetry Month

BMP Celebrates National Poetry Month

Happy National Poetry Month! For poets and poetry lovers—and perhaps for those who love poets—this is a special time. At Brain Mill Press, we like to celebrate all month long by sharing featured poets, and with our fee-free contest. This year, we’re thinking about poetry cycles, poems that speak to each other, forms that build on each other (like crowns), and the ways a poem can be a scaffold or foundation for other poems. Our words are often in response to other poems, and our own body of work is often an ongoing conversation. We speak to each other, with ourselves, and sometimes into the void—hoping someone will answer back.

Most Anticipated 2023 Reads

by | Jan 24, 2023 | Book Review, Identity, LGBTQIA+, Music, Poetry, Popular Culture, Reading, Representation, The Afro YA

Most Anticipated 2023 Reads

2023 promises some fantastic YA reads by Black authors.

One of my most anticipated favorites comes from promising author Amber McBride, while another book has been on my TBR for ages.

With life being what it is, I can’t promise that I will get to all of these books. Nonetheless, I will do my best to write about 2023 Black YA reads, as well as some older books that I have been meaning to get to. Without further ado, here are my most anticipated Black YA reads for 2023. 

We Are All So Good at Smiling by Amber McBride

This is a book I heard about through the Twitter grapevine last year. The premise alone had me sold—a novel in verse telling the story of a Black hoodoo-practicing, fairy-tale-loving girl named Whimsy as she navigates clinical depression and a mysterious garden from her past. However, my anticipation for this book increased once I read the author’s previous book, Me, Moth (briefly reviewed here), which featured clinical depression from a different perspective.

 

 

 

Cool. Awkward. Black., edited by Karen Strong

This YA short story anthology is dedicated to Black nerds and features all sorts of subgenres, such as fantasy, sci-fi, and slice-of-life. I found out about this anthology on Twitter the same day We Are All So Good at Smiling was released. Having been a Black teen nerd turned Black nerdy adult, this anthology is totally up my alley.

 

 

 

 

As You Walk on By by Julian Winters 

Y’all know that I have been a Julian Winters fan from the moment he debuted with the book How To Be Remy Cameron (reviewed here). Imagine my surprise when I found out on Twitter that he has a new book coming out this year. Described as “The Breakfast Club meets Can’t Hardly Wait,” the book tells the story of seventeen-year-old Theo Wright as he seeks refuge in an empty bedroom during a house party following a promposal gone wrong. While there, he meets other teens who are also avoiding the party and learns he is not as alone in his troubles as he thinks.

 

 

Nothing Burns as Bright as You by Ashley Woodfolk

I will read almost any author if they do a novel-in-verse, and Ashley Woodfolk is no exception. Of course, it helps that I enjoyed one of her previous books, The Beauty That Remains (review here). This particular book came out last year, but I still want to try and get it if the publisher ever decides to support the worker’s union. Described as “an impassioned standalone tale of queer love, grief, and the complexity of female friendship,” the book tells the story of two girls troubled by a tumultuous history. 

 

 

 

Fate of Flames by Sarah Raughley

This book has been on my TBR for so long. I bought it after I saw a Twitter post describing it as “Pacific Rim meets Sailor Moon.” Part of the official synopsis is as follows:

Phantoms, massive beasts of nightmare, began terrorizing the world. At the same time, four girls—the Effigies—appeared, each with a unique power to control a classical element. Since then, they have protected the world from the Phantoms. At the death of one Effigy, another is chosen, pulled from her normal life into the never-ending battle.

When Maia unexpectedly becomes the next Fire Effigy, she resists her new calling. A quiet girl with few friends and almost no family, she was much happier to admire the Effigies from afar. Never did she imagine having to master her ability to control fire, to protect innocent citizens from the Phantoms, or to try bringing together the other three Effigies.

The Afro YA promotes black young adult authors and YA books with black characters, especially those that influence Pennington, an aspiring YA author who believes that black YA readers need diverse books, creators, and stories so that they don’t have to search for their experiences like she did.

Latonya Pennington is a poet and freelance pop culture critic. Their freelance work can also be found at PRIDE, Wear Your Voice magazine, and Black Sci-fi. As a poet, they have been published in Fiyah Lit magazine, Scribes of Nyota, and Argot magazine among others.

Best Books to Give Black Readers This Holiday Season, 2022

by | Dec 6, 2022 | Book Review, Identity, LGBTQIA+, Music, Poetry, Popular Culture, Reading, Representation, The Afro YA

Best Books to Give Black Readers This Holiday Season, 2022

The year has been long and frightful, but the books I’ve read have been delightful.

I was especially surprised to enjoy books that I didn’t review for this column but enjoyed on my own time. I also can’t ignore the enchanting books that I have reviewed or written about, because they made my sporadic posts this year. At the same time, there are also promising books that I haven’t read but still want to promote.

Without further delay, here are the books I recommend to give as gifts to yourself or to your loved ones this holiday season.

 

All Signs Point To Yes: A Love Story For Every Star Sign by Cam Montgomery, g. haron davis, and Adrianne White

Released during summer 2022, this is a multicultural YA anthology inspired by love and astrology. A haunted Aquarius finds love behind the veil. An ambitious Aries will do anything to stay in the spotlight. A foodie Taurus discovers the best eats in town (with a side of romance). A witchy Cancer stumbles into a curious meet-cute.

Whether it’s romantic, platonic, familial, or something else you can’t quite define, love is the thing that connects us. All Signs Point to Yes will take you on a journey from your own backyard to the world beyond the living as it settles us among the stars for thirteen stories of love and life. These stories will touch your heart, speak to your soul, and have you reaching for your horoscope forevermore.

 

The Sound of Stars by Alechia Dow

Speaking of stars, this YA dystopian sci-fi book was one of my favorite reads this year. Two years after aliens known as the IIori invaded Earth and decimated a third of the population, a seventeen-year-old girl named Ellie Baker lives in an IIori-controlled center in New York City.

Although she is reduced to a state of surviving rather than living, she also quietly rebels against the IIori by hosting an illegal library of books. When her library is discovered by Morris, an IIori commander who loves banned pop music, the two gradually learn to trust each other and turn their mutual quiet rebellions into a louder one.

(full review)

 

 

Star Lion: Thieves of Red Night by Leon Langford 

When you combine anime-inspired artwork with superhero schools, you get this fun book. Ten years ago, several of these superheroes gave their lives to stop the disastrous events of the Green Night. In the aftermath, a new generation of heroes are trying to do their part to fill the space left behind. One of them is Jordan Harris, a young Black boy with the power to manipulate gravitons. 

When he is arrested one night while doing vigilante work, he must go undercover at the superhero training academy Fort Olympus. While there, he discovers a world-threatening conspiracy that forces Jordan to work together in a team to save the day.

(full review)

 

All Boys Aren’t Blue by George M. Johnson

This powerful memoir-manifesto chronicles the author’s Black gay coming-of-age from his childhood to his teen and college years. It is a book about not only identity, but also family and community. This book had an unexpected personal impact on me as a thirty-one-year-old Black non-binary queer person, but I definitely could’ve used this book when I was a teen.

 

 

 

 

Right Where I Left You by Julian Winters

This queer and geeky YA read replaced Winters’s previous book as one of my favorite comfort reads. In fact, I called this book “the perfect summer vacation” in my review. It tells the story of Isaac Martin, an Afro-Mexican gay comic book geek who has been looking forward to spending one last summer with his best friend, Diego Santoyo.

The two of them were supposed to be attending Legends Con, the biggest pop culture convention in Georgia. When Isaac misses his chance to buy passes, he ends up gradually getting closer to his crush, Davi, and getting to know Diego’s gamer friends instead. However, as the day of the biggest teen Pride event approaches, Isaac finds himself drifting farther apart from his best friend.

(full review)

 

 

Me, Moth by Amber McBride 

Full disclosure: I’m still in the middle of reading this book. However, I am enjoying it too much not to recommend it.

This is a 2021 novel-in-verse about a young hoodoo-practicing, dance-loving Black girl named Moth and a Navajo boy named Sani. It is so lyrical, gorgeous, emotional, and nothing like any novel-in-verse I’ve read before. 

After losing her family in an accident, Moth goes to live with her aunt, but she still feels alone. Soon she meets Sani, a boy with depression who is trying to figure out where he comes from. Together, the two of them take a road trip in order to find themselves and understand how each of their families’ histories shapes who they are now.

The Afro YA promotes black young adult authors and YA books with black characters, especially those that influence Pennington, an aspiring YA author who believes that black YA readers need diverse books, creators, and stories so that they don’t have to search for their experiences like she did.

Latonya Pennington is a poet and freelance pop culture critic. Their freelance work can also be found at PRIDE, Wear Your Voice magazine, and Black Sci-fi. As a poet, they have been published in Fiyah Lit magazine, Scribes of Nyota, and Argot magazine among others.

It All Belongs to You: A Review of R. B. Simon’s The Good Truth

by | Aug 23, 2022 | Book Review, Feminism, National Poetry Month, NPM 2021, Poetry, Portaging, Reading

It All Belongs to You

A Review of R. B. Simon’s The Good Truth

R. B. Simon’s The Good Truth (Finishing Line, 2021) ends with the poem “The Good Truth,” but good truths are scattered throughout the pages. In the landscape/philosophy/cosmology (pick your preferred term) of this collection, good truths are those things the poet learns—difficult things, often, but in the learning she looks closely and engages with people, histories personal and public, and the natural world. The poem “Indelible” ends with a final image of a tattoo come to life: “riding my night sighs to find you, / returning to me, bearing your wordless benedictions.” It is a poem about loss; in it, the poet writes about being a close witness to that loss, unable to save the person they cared about: “I kissed your spittle-flecked lips / between compressions— / come back to me.” The loved one’s loss remains: “I am so heavy with you.”

The language of the holy in the everyday recurs often. “Lightning” tells of “the wife of an ex / of an old friend of mine /  . . . struck by lightning.” The woman is “lucky to survive” but terribly injured. As readers, we are asked to consider this particular injury, this awful aftermath: “the force of the blow / exploded her lower skull.” The first stanza begins with connection—how we know each other, how we would hear the news. The poem continues with how we are harmed, and how long it would take to heal, but it ends with questions unanswered:

What else does one do
when the very cells of your brain
have been shone through with sunlight?

When a fingertip of god
touches the soft tissue and reminds you:
you too, child, you too are mine?

Many of the poems refer to pain or trauma and what happens after. Several use the imagery of the natural world and its damage or destruction to talk about new growth. The poems weed and destroy; they talk back to thunderstorms, then quiet to listen. In “Prairie Fire” we learn about annual fires to root out invasive species and encourage regrowth. The Ho-Chunk practice kept the land healthy, and when white settlers came they brought disease and “larceny disguised as / gratitude,” and the prairie fires stopped. From this, the poem coalesces: “to destroy something so / very precious to you, / some part of what you call home, / is to let it return to you / filled only with / the essence of all / it was ever meant to be, / black and bare, / seeded / and ready for spring.”

The essence of Simon’s collection are the poems situated in childhood, and many of the poems speak of an unwelcoming place; she writes, “the entire planet is my homeland / but I claim no home.” “schools” tells of the casual racism and cruelty of children, compounded by the teachers’ inattention and shaming; in it, the child’s loneliness, her anger and her strength, are palpable. It’s also clear how common this occurrence was: the taunts, and the strategies she employed to get through each day. When “jolt—the shrill of the recess bell” interrupts the scene, and the reader feels a small relief, the stomach drops again when “a teacher awaits her, scowling. / you are always so slow! why don’t you exercise? she knows / she cannot win their games, but nods, and follows the current.” The poem utilizes a semi-regular long line, with copious quotations from speech and a third-person point of view. The effect is detailed, something like a fish-eye lens with all the focus on the girl on the swings, “opening her eyes to slits to find a way through.”

From there, the poems travel to a bar in Rosendale, Wisconsin: an Elvira pinball machine, Orange Nehi soda, and the men at the bar. The voice of the poem reassures us, “but always I stand / cocked, one-eyed, towards them / positioned just so / between the bar and / my younger cousins . . . always I note who is swaying, / who is slurring first.” Although still in the poems of childhood, this poem points to later poems where this speaker will become a protector, a lover, a mother, the person who cares for others, even as she’s navigating her own pain. These are parts of the good truth, too. Part of the message of those natural metaphors sprinkled throughout. The way creeping Charlie (the plant) is a way of talking about other invasive things, and loss in “Creeping Charlie (or, Late Summer, Post-Diagnosis, Pre-Hospice).” There, the poet wants to root things out but also “toss it all among the / compost, to spread among the irises / and grow you one more day.” As in “Indelible,” the ephemeral is made tangible, with ink and needle. Throughout R. B. Simon’s poems, there is this transmutation of experience—often painful experience—into ink and needle. These are the things that have happened and made me; written down, this is what they look like; consider metaphors of prairie fire, or lightning strike, or wind; but also—

—consider if instead of causing each other pain, we cared for each other. Those are the alternatives Simon offers in her poems. Instead of rejecting each other, instead of the violence of racism and hatred, instead of dangers of sway and slur and threat. “Traditions” recounts what the poet learned from her mother—both said and unsaid. In “Second Harvest” the poet addresses a child of the next generation. As with the collection’s opening poem, she notes the daughter is “lost in a rough country of ancestry,” but the second stanza begins: “I want to bring her baskets of our fruit  . . . tart with her lineage, / sweet with the pith of who she will become, of / how she was rooted a thousand years ago.”

……………….And I am no master gardener
unskilled at pruning or coaxing bud to blossom,
…………..I can’t tell sly weed from straining sapling
………………………………except for this one
………………………………………..glorious shoot.

R.B. Simon is a queer artist and writer of African and European-American descent.  She endeavors to create poetry centered in the mosaic of identity, the experiences that make us who we are in totality. Having battled mental health issues, substance use disorder, and trauma throughout her life, she is now in recovery and studying to become an Art Therapist, supporting others on the same journey.  She has been published in multiple print and online journals including The Green Light Literary Journal, Blue Literary Journal, Electric Moon, and Literary Mama.  The Good Truth is her first book.  Ms. Simon is currently living in Madison, WI, with her partner, daughter, and four unruly little dogs.

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C. Kubasta writes poetry, fiction, and hybrid forms. She lives, writes, & teaches in Wisconsin. Her most recent books include the poetry collection Of Covenants (Whitepoint Press) and the short story collection Abjectification (Apprentice House). Find her at ckubasta.com and follow her @CKubastathePoet.