2016 Editors’ Choice Poems: Week 1
We are delighted to present this week’s selections from the Brain Mill Press 2016 Poetry Month Contest. We received many outstanding entries, from which these pieces by Imani Davis, Lynn Marie Houston, and Jiordan Castle stood out. We hope you’ll enjoy them as much as we did.
Grave Robber Digs with a Pen
Imani Davis
About Imani Davis
Imani Davis is Black magic. She currently works on Urban Word NYC’s Youth Leadership Board. Her poetry has appeared in Rookie Magazine and the occasional trash can.
Fall Break in Paris Was a Mistake
After you’ve done all the things in this world once, you just
want to sleep. Like after you land in Paris and realize you don’t
really want to be there, that the man you’re travelling with is a
bore, on his best days, and that Parisian restaurants are too
chi chi frou frou to serve la chasse, fresh game meat paired
with Brussels sprouts and mashed roasted chestnuts,
which you can get everywhere in neighboring
Switzerland when the Beaujolais Nouveau
arrives in November.
It’s like this with all the things you’ve ever longed for—
hungering for flesh from the Jura Mountains, you wind up
eating bean cassoulet at a tourist cafe. You desire a partner,
a significant other, and end up with a guy who, while you are
trying to sleep on an Intercontinental flight, keeps
tickling your nose with the end of his scarf asking,
Are you awake yet? Are you awake?
About Lynn Marie Houston
Lynn Marie Houston‘s poetry has appeared in Painted Bride Quarterly, Blue Lyra Review, Melancholy Hyperbole, and other journals, as well as in her first collection, The Clever Dream of Man (Aldrich Press). She has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and twice for a Best of the Net Award. Her poems have received distinction in contests sponsored by Broad River Review, Whispering Prairie Press, Prime Number Magazine, and the National Federation of State Poetry Societies. She is currently in the M.F.A program at Southern Connecticut State University and runs Five Oaks Press.
SWEAR Girls
Jiordan Castle
About Jiordan Castle
Jiordan Castle is a writer from New York living in San Francisco. Her work has appeared elsewhere in print and online. She gets personal at nomoreundead.tumblr.com and can be tweeted @jiordancastle.
BMP Celebrates National Poetry Month 2016
If “love calls us to the things of this world,” then poetry too can call us to think about challenging questions, difficult situations, and social justice, implicating and engaging the reader with the world we live in, in the hope that this engagement is a step toward wrestling with our better selves.