Poetry Month Spotlight: Amanda Reavey

by | Apr 20, 2023 | NPM 2023, Poetry

Poetry Month Spotlight

Amanda Reavey

The Attrition of Luz

 

Home #1.

……………..In the beginning, there were no orphans, but God created a cloud which burst into a thousand pieces and it rained. The sky littered with diamonds.

Home #2.
…………….Language is a curious thing. How to shape her lips to fit this. It could be a flood or a dam. Her yaya said, “and she cries and cries and cries. Because that’s what Luz is.”

Home #3. Ormoc City, Leyte, Philippines
…………….Luzviminda knew something would happen two days before it did. She went outside where the air smelled like pig roast, sampaguitas and shit, and meditated on a stoop along the Malbasag River. She realized the circumstances of her birth were not unlike the baby Jesus. Her mother: unwed, pregnant. There was no father because she was immaculately conceived. No, there was a father; her father was god.

Home #4. Tacloban, Philippines
…………….She didn’t learn of her divinity until she was eleven years old, but others had already begun to suspect it when she was four. Her foster father, drunk on San Miguel and an unbearable sun, lunged at her with a karambit knife and the next thing she knew she was crouched down on all fours on the highest branch of a jackfruit tree.

…………….“She flew! She flew!” the housemaid shrieked.
…………….“She didn’t fly, she floated!” her foster mother said.
…………….That evening, at exactly 7:00pm, a social worker arrived. After three hours of trying to coaxing Luzviminda out of the tree, they decided to saw it down. Once on the ground, she looked up and shook her little fist: “Ako si Luzviminda. Huwag mo akong kalimutan.” I am Luzviminda. Don’t you forget me.

Home #5. Angono, Rizal, Philippines
…………….She knew then that she could grow wings. Once, she flew to the top of the Bay Leaf Hotel where there was a restaurant overlooking Manila Bay. She watched as the owner’s son snapped his fingers and a servant was immediately there. The Don Papas flowed freely from a carafe. How beautiful it must be.

Home #6. Taytay, Rizal, Philippines
…………….The process of becoming an adult happens very quickly. In a night that turns the blackness to lemon green, the moon ashen. Irises the shape of discs transmute into crescents. A shooting start fixes forever on the retinas. This is the moment he asks you how an Asian leopard cat moves and you immediately drop to the ground on all fours. This is Luzviminda. Before she bends, she whispers, “ako si Luzviminda. Huwag mo akong kalimutan.” I am Luzviminda. Don’t you forget me.

Home #7. Metro Manila, Philippines
…………….Luzviminda can’t think in the way you want her to. If you try to push her into talking she’ll start rocking –– an outrigger canoe several knots from where it started –– staring at the wall until she sees herself reflected back. The caretaker calls the children to the table for dinner. When Luzviminda doesn’t turn, the caretaker taps her shoulder. She flinches. Sensation hurts. What can we do? We stop. Instead, we wait. At the limit or point beyond which the thinking begins. Ako si Luzviminda. Huwag mo akong kalimutan. I am Luzviminda. Don’t you forget me.

Home #8. Metro Manila, Philippines

…………….

…………….

 

Home #9. Muntinlupa City, Philippines
…………….Days later, in a different house, she awoke to discover the white linens had turned red and she bled for six days. After, she climbed an iron fence and found a garden where she picked lemons from the tree and squeezed them, letting the juices run down her face, her neck. To cleanse the body.
…………….That day the Pasig River reversed itself and flowed upwards. Taking her towards the sky. Along an orange-red blue. What does it mean to switch hands? To go. …………….Again. To go. Again. To go. Again. Again. To go.
…………….Ako si Luzviminda. Huwag mo akong kalimutan. I am Luzviminda. Don’t you forget me.
Ako si ––. Ako si ––. Ako si ––.
…………….I am. I am. I am.

 

This poem was previously published at TRUCK.

About Amanda Reavey

Amanda Reavey is an Emeritus Poetry Fellow at Black Earth Institute and the author of Marilyn (The Operating System, 2015), which won the 2017 Best Book Award in Poetry from the Association for Asian American Studies. She is a member of the Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets and holds an MFA in Writing & Poetics from Naropa University. She curates the Tabi Po! Poetry Series & Open Mic every third Sunday of the month at County Clare Irish Pub in Milwaukee. More at www.tabipopoetry.com.

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.

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.

National Poetry Month Contest Winners 2022

by | May 6, 2022 | National Poetry Month, NPM 2022, Poetry

National Poetry Month Contest Winner 2022

Andrew Najberg

In reading the rush of poems for this year’s #napomo contest, I tried to keep first & foremost our call — to think about navigating space & place — alongside the concerns of poetry: well-wrought language, lines and phrases that engaged, an urgent voice. It is always so hard to choose a poem from the poems that call out for reading and re-reading, and this year was another year of poems that made it so so difficult.

 

The selected poems below, both the winner and the very Honorable Mentions, engage with spaces & places that are intimate and public. The switch in each of the poems between those modes—what others may see or hear, and what the speaker knows—are integral to how the poems work. In the winning selection, “Fighting Fermi” by Andrew Najberg, the poem begins with a response to Fermi’s paradox and casts the poem’s consciousness wide to think about life elsewhere: other planets, other galaxies, and beyond. It then telescopes in to one hospital room, a solitary man so worn by grief-in-action that he is undone by a vending machine, to the moments after loss when what we have to contemplate is not so much cosmic, but minute—the hands of the beloved and how to show care. The poem takes up space on the page, and earns that space.

In the Honorable Mention poems by Dina Miranda, Shana Ross, C. Prudence Arceneaux, and Carl Boon, there exist again these shifts between intimate spaces and public places—what is meant by voice? how are we bound? how is land and memory delineated? how do we use language to protect and distance? In the hands of these powerful poets, these large questions are handled deftly.

Please also read the Editor’s Selections shared throughout April to engage with more extraordinary poems & poets responding to our call.

—C. Kubasta, Editor, BMP Voices Poetry Month

Winner

 

“Fighting Fermi” by Andrew Najberg

Fighting Fermi

by Andrew Najberg

 

Jareen Imam author photo

Andrew Najberg is the author of the collection of poems The Goats Have Taken Over the Barracks (Finishing Line Press, 2021) and the chapbook of poems Easy to Lose (Finishing Line Press 2007). His individual poems have appeared in North American Review, Asheville Poetry Review, Cimarron Review, Another Chicago Magazine, Nashville Review, Louisville Review, Yemassee, and many other journals both online and in print. His short fiction appeared in Fleas on the Dog, The Wondrous Real, Bookends Review, and Psychopomp Magazine. He received an MFA in poetry from Spalding University, an MA in creative writing from University of Tennessee at Knoxville, and he is the recipient of an AWP Intro award. Currently, I teach for the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga where he also assists with the Meacham Writers’ Workshop.

 

Short List

 

“bite the tongue” by Dina Miranda

“It is the nature of knots to tighten” by Shana Ross

“Just Inside the Gate” by C. Prudence Arceneaux

“Adverbs in the World” by Carl Boon

bite the tongue

by Dina Miranda

 

one phoneme dictates

an othering; a slip

of the tongue cements

a hole in the ground.

quiet, you old precious

throat, ancient gold dripping

between your jaws. we must

take what we do not want

to keep what we have.

feet planted firm and lips

shut over smiling teeth

gritted for your and my

and their sake, a future,

an un spoken promise

of the mother land. but

what would she want more

our flattened vowels or

our flattened bodies.

tears sound the same in

every language but even

our island eyes run dry.

Jareen Imam author photo

Dina Miranda is a Filipino-American high school student from Southern California. Anything involving words has intrigued them from a young age, from reading to spelling to, recently, writing. Presently, you can find them knitting or listening to all sorts of music. You can find them on Instagram @bewildre.

It is the nature of knots to tighten

by Shana Ross

 

in water; this is important to untangling
thoughts. I think about the stacking
(and submersion) of vessels.
It is the nature of water to lighten

the top bowl in the nestled dishes
even stuck together with yesterday’s
sauce, every grain of rice long gone.
It will float away from what’s beneath

(the other vessels), no longer weigh down
upon the others. If a train leaves the war
traveling at a constant speed, what
is the question again? I cannot stop seeing

the strollers, empty and queued politely,
left at the station by mothers. I think of
objects we say have no souls, things waiting
to be needed, to be claimed. Some vessels resist

the passive tense, they wait, they want, they will hold
a baby who has been held: tight to a chest
with a prayer of arms stretched from point a to b.
Calculate the tensile strength of the guardian

at arrival. What else was carried? I watch birds
rise into air white with hoarfrost at dawn.
The ice crystals float, the birds do not. You can
seetheir beating wings, the strain of will,

the assumption of muscle and heart.
Whatever it takes to defy the nature
of falling, a snare tied, a noose. The water here
is frozen. I myself have just arrived in a new land.

Jareen Imam author photo

Shana Ross is a poet newly arrived in Edmonton, Alberta after 25 years in New England. Qui transtulit sustinet. Her work has appeared in Chautauqua Journal, Ruminate, Gone Lawn, Kissing Dynamite, SWWIM and more. She was awarded first place in the 2021 Bacopa Literary Review Poetry competition, received a 2019 Parent-Writer Fellowship to Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing, and serves as an editor for Luna Station Quarterly. Her first chapbook, Heavy Little Things (Finishing Line Press) is now available. She holds both a BA and MBA from Yale and rarely tweets @shanakatzross.

Just Inside the Gate

by C. Prudence Arceneaux

 

C. Prudence Arceneaux, a native Texan, is a poet who teaches English and Creative Writing at Austin Community College, in Austin, TX. Her work has appeared in various journals, including Limestone, New Texas, Hazmat Review, Texas Observer, Whiskey Island Magazine, African Voices and Inkwell. She is the author of two chapbooks of poetry– DIRT (awarded the 2018 Jean Pedrick Prize) and LIBERTY.

Adverbs in the World

by Carl Boon

 

Suddenly, because
gradually evades us. Gradually means
that extra hour in the evening,
the children in bed,
the Sunday crossword

only half-complete
and folded on the counter
beside the untried recipes
for Flounder Tempura and Shrimp Nagasaki.

Suddenly’s how things happen,
when they happen, why.
We awoke to a war on a rainy Thursday.
Simpson’s wife disappeared.
Little Susie broke out with hives,

and it must’ve been
the Mediterranean Mackerel.
If only we would’ve known—
if only had we tried the Teriyaki Scallops.

If only, only being that shred of glass
thought vanished that pierces
the heel at midnight
when Monday becomes Tuesday.
It was only a joke.

It was only the devil in me
who decided on the Lobster Scampi
instead of the Crab Broulee.
I’m sorry for the world and its adverbs.

They tell me Shanghai is starving,
that it’s merely a matter of nights
until Melitopol falls to the Russians.
They say it happened so suddenly.
They say it quickly, then go away.

Jareen Imam author photo

Carl Boon is the author of the full-length collection Places & Names: Poems (The Nasiona Press, 2019). His writing has appeared in many journals and magazines, including Prairie Schooner, Posit, and The Maine Review. He received his Ph.D. in Twentieth-Century American Literature from Ohio University in 2007, and currently lives in Izmir, Turkey, where he teaches courses in American literature at Dokuz Eylül University.

National Poetry Month

BMP Celebrates National Poetry Month

As the pandemic has continued into its second year, we at Brain Mill are thinking about spaces & places: how we exist in space, the importance of access, and the particulars of navigating places. We have gathered together in ways that may have been new to us over the last few years, greeting each other in small squares of connectivity, developing relationship and care with virtual check-ins, follows, and voices translated via technology. In our best moments we have learned to listen; in our worst, we have been caught up by all the ways we need to do better and think more deeply about community systems and for whom entry is barred.

Top photo by Chris Karidis on Unsplash