Robin Gow, Jessica Nguyen, Danny McLaren, and Uma Menon
We are delighted to present this week’s selections from the Brain Mill Press Poetry Month Contest, Break Poetry Open, by talented poets Robin Gow, Jessica Nguyen, Danny McLaren, and Uma Menon.
We hope you’ll enjoy these editors’ picks as much as we did.
i had a dream they took out my uterus & handed it to me.
Robin Gow
my uterus was an ornate vase & i asked, “what am i supposed to do with this?” the doctor shrugged he was in a suite & tie & had lavender gloves he suggested i use it to collect something. i stuck my hand in deep to see if there was already anything in there, found a ring i lost maybe four years ago & i wondered how it got there. silver claddagh waiting scraping up against the glass lining of the vase. it had something to do with hope, i think a uterus does even if you take it out & discover it’s a shoe box or an urn or a vase. i tried other items, starting with buttons, snipping them off all my clothes so that i would have more. clear buttons, black buttons, brown buttons, red buttons, all of them inside the vase, i thought they might transform, i thought that might be the point of the strange object but nothing happened. i slept holding the vase & imagining what it was like inside me what kind of objects it hungered for. i talked it, i told the vase that i was sorry this was how everything had to happen. i bought flowers after flowers to let sprout from the vase’s mouth: lilies, carnations, roses & i’d keep asking the uterus, “are you happy?” but the vase wouldn’t respond. emptying out the greenish stem-water left over from the flowers i stuck my hand in again only this time i felt an ache in my chest as i did, a kind of phantom connection, a hand under skin. i wept, it was something about hope for something; a hand searching under skin for lost objects, the ring like a kind of opening for beetles or other insects to crawl through. i was scared it might always be like this if i kept the thing around. i had to break it. no, not in the driveway or the street, a push from the counter in the kitchen where all glasses & plates will eventually shatter. the pieces on the floor like teeth of an unknown monster. i apologized to the uterus as i cleaned up its pieces. i took a bowl from the cupboard & began filling it with buttons out of habit or maybe some kind of hope. from the buttons grew the stems of flowers, only the stems.
About Robin Gow
Robin Gow’s poetry has recently been published in POETRY, The Gateway Review, and tilde. He is a graduate student at Adelphi University pursing an MFA in Creative Writing. He is the Editor at Large for Village of Crickets, Social Media Coordinator for Oyster River Pages and interns for Porkbelly Press. He is an out and proud bisexual transgender man passionate about LGBT issues. He loves poetry that lilts in and out of reality, and his queerness is also the central axis of his work.
perks of a half-deaf wallflower
jessica nguyen
one. it’s so much easier to sleep lying in bed, on my “good ear” – whether it’s thunderstorms or my partner’s snoring, I am able to slip past silently through the night no baby can wake this baby up. everyone envies my mornings since they see no traces of dark circles under my eyes they’d ask, “what’s your secret?” who knew that my disability could be a celebrity-level beauty hack?
two. the drill fire alarm comes in-oh wait, that’s not a perk.
two. I can pretend to not hear you and use my deafness as a legitimate excuse. – this especially works when I am not particularly fond of you. this also works when I am not paying attention to something that I should’ve been paying attention to “oh, sorry. what’s that? I couldn’t quite hear you the first time. can you repeat what you said? thanks.” (smirks) I swear it’s the truth sometimes. . three. during trials and interviews, “we can’t hire you because you-“ oops, that’s not a perk either. . three. I got extra time on my ACT tests. didn’t think that having my time limit doubled would help me on this kind of standardized testing, since only one of the four of the subjects required listening to begin with… but I did get a small private room to myself with no pencil scratching and people breathing . four. I got the same ACT score as my last one. and I wasn’t even given the extra time last- wow, I need to stop. what is the definition of self-actualization again? . four. I am everybody’s right hand person. the ones who’ve passed my friendship test re the ones who remembered to walk on my left. you can tell who the strangers are – they are the ones who I dance tango with as I quickly sashay to get to their right side. . five. walking into every classroom I wore an fm unit like a prop, which consisted of a hearing aid for me and a microphone for the teacher to speak into, which means having to blow my cover as I approach
now, I could expect the spotlight to be on me – yes, the star actor who deserved an oscar for passing as a full hearing person, coming up on stage to deliver her speech: “I’d like to thank lip-reading and body language – I wouldn’t have been able to get to where I am today without them.”
all confused eyes would be on me, sometimes awkward silence, but mostly attention to the quiet girl sitting in the front because isn’t what being half-deaf means? getting all the special attention?
six. I can find my teachers easily when I need them. it’s great because if the teacher rushes out of the classroom, I always know where they go.
one time, the bell rang and it was the quickest I’ve seen a teacher leaving the room (I can understand his urge, though) the problem was that he was wearing my microphone so I had to chase him down. and of course, I thought it’d be cool to spy on what he was doing through my hearing aid. so, I did.
and what I first heard seconds in was the sound of of a stream, which lasted for…. a while. then, a toilet flushing.
About Jessica Nguyen/Nguyễn Thị Mai Nhi
Jessica Nguyen/Nguyễn Thị Mai Nhi is a world traveler, activist, and writer. Though having lived in the U.S. for most of her life, she hops from one country to the next in hopes of discovering pieces of home to fill her Asian American soul. Known to be a soft-spoken person in the real world, she often channels her feelings through her writing as she finds written words to be just as powerful as when they’re spoken. Jessica plans to publish her own chapbook, “softly, I speak” in the near future. To learn more about her current projects, please visit her website at byjessicanguyen.com or follow her @byjessicanguyen on social media.
Spark Joy
Danny McLaren
Do you ever wonder if your gender sparks joy? If it fits you like a glove, if you love the way the words sound in your mouth or leave your lips, How it feels to say ‘they’ with your own tongue And know better than anyone else how to say your own name?
Does your gender excite you? Does it hum in your veins, electric, ignited, Keep you up at night, tossing from panicked to delighted, thinking what if I’m a boy? or what if I’m nothing at all?
But ‘nothing’ seems scary. My gender isn’t scary. Sure, it’s loud, and it’s big, It takes up too many seats on the bus, makes the up-tight man on the left of me scoot over one.
But it’s dynamic, and powerful, and strong. It repels close-minded like a magnet, And pulls kind and ‘knowledgeable about feminist theory’ my way.
It’s ‘too many beers on a Saturday night’ euphoric, It spills across my clothes when I’m not careful, Or, on some days, when I try really hard to make it seen.
My gender beats in my chest when I run, or while I wrestle into my binder. Constricting my chest with freedom, just to look a little more me.
My gender kisses me goodnight, and greets me with the sunrise, And marks up my skin with ‘I love you.’
Do you ever wonder if your gender sparks joy? If you feel ‘just right’ with the words you choose to use To tell others who you are? Maybe you should Because it feels damn good.
About Danny McLaren
Danny is a queer and non-binary writer who uses they/them pronouns. They are an undergraduate student studying Gender Studies, and beginning to dabble in queer, anti-racist, and anti-colonial theory. They have an interest in exploring themes related to equity, resistance, and intersectionality in their work, and often write about their gender, sexuality, and mental health through these lenses. They can be found on twitter at @dannymclrn.
shopping for a necklace
Uma Menon
About Uma Menon
Uma Menon is a fifteen-year-old student and writer from Winter Park, Florida. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in the Huffington Post, The Rumpus, and National Poetry Quarterly, Sahitya Akademi’s Indian Literature, and the Cincinnati Review, among others. Her first chapbook was published in 2019 (Zoetic Press); she also received the 2019 Lee Bennett Hopkins Award in Poetry.
BMP Celebrates National Poetry Month — Break Poetry Open
For this year’s National Poetry Month, Brain Mill Press & Voices want to add to your #TBR pile, sing siren songs of unsung heroes, and signal boost living poets we should be reading more. By the end of the month, we hope you will have acquired 30+ new books of poetry and that they continue to multiply in the darkness of your library. Explore new voices & new forms — re-read some old favorites — play if you liked this poet, you’ll like... the old-fashioned way, algorithm-free — just poetry lovers talking to poetry lovers, as the Universe intended. Happy #NaPoMo2019 from Brain Mill Press.
Jessie Lynn McMains on the Poetry of Daphne Gottlieb
If it weren’t for Daphne Gottlieb, I wouldn’t be a poet.
That sounds hyperbolic, but it’s true. Okay, I might have been a poet even if I’d never read her work but my poems wouldn’t be as brave. Since the summer of 2001, when I bought Why Things Burn at Quimby’s in Chicago, her poems have given me a map for writing about the hard things—rape, addiction, mental illness—right alongside poems in praise of love, desire, rebellion. (But hard love, desire like a car crash, rebellion because you’d die otherwise; which is the way I’ve always experienced those things.) For eighteen years her poems have taught me ways to write the truths of how women, queer folks, and other non-normative bodies move through the world. How we armor ourselves, adorn ourselves. How we survive and find joy.
Daphne’s poems often involve an insertion of herself/the speaker into pop culture, history, or the literary canon. Much like Kathy Acker did in her prose (Daphne was a recipient of the Acker Award for Excellence in the Avant-Garde), taking source texts from the canon and making her hero(ine)s pirates and knights, Gottlieb’s poems ask: why can’t a girl be an outlaw, an adventurer, the author of her own story? Why can’t a girl be a Sal Paradise or Dean Moriarty, rather than just a Camille or Marylou?
Daphne’s poems aren’t easily categorized. Her work blends elements of performance poetry and “academic” poetry (as her official website bio states: “[Gottlieb] stitches together the ivory tower and the gutter just using her tongue”). Form-wise, her poems run the gamut from a more traditionally structured lyrical style to prose poems and other experimental forms. (I once nearly got into a bar fight with a dude who dismissed her entire oeuvre because she writes prose poems, and he said, “prose poems aren’t really poetry.”) So this is another thing Daphne has taught me—how to use my words as a bridge between school and street, stage and page. How to be both glitter and gutter, simultaneously.
Here’s a hard truth—sometimes people like us and those we love don’t survive. But maybe more than anything else, Daphne’s poems have shown me that I can use words to give my ghosts breath. Poems can be houses for the dead to inhabit, and every time someone reads those poems, they are again briefly, gloriously, alive.
About Jessie Lynn McMains
Jessie Lynn McMains is a poet, writer, and publisher. They are the author of multiple chapbooks, most recently The Girl With The Most Cake and forget the fuck away from me. You can find their personal website at recklesschants.net, or follow them on Tumblr, Twitter, and Instagram @rustbeltjessie
BMP Celebrates National Poetry Month — Break Poetry Open
For this year’s National Poetry Month, Brain Mill Press & Voices want to add to your #TBR pile, sing siren songs of unsung heroes, and signal boost living poets we should be reading more. By the end of the month, we hope you will have acquired 30+ new books of poetry and that they continue to multiply in the darkness of your library. Explore new voices & new forms — re-read some old favorites — play if you liked this poet, you’ll like... the old-fashioned way, algorithm-free — just poetry lovers talking to poetry lovers, as the Universe intended. Happy #NaPoMo2019 from Brain Mill Press.
“Nine Months,” “Cryptic Crossword LV,” “Her / Him / Our / Their / Us / Them / They Body,” and “Jaws Was on TV on a Saturday Morning”
Editors' Choice Picks
We are delighted to present this week’s selections from the Brain Mill Press Poetry Month Contest, Break Poetry Open, by talented poets Raymond Luczak, Holly Painter, henry 7. reneau, jr., and Mercury Marvin Sunderland.
We hope you’ll enjoy these editors’ picks as much as we did.
Nine Months
Raymond Luczak
mom still wonders how i lost my hearing she mentions having a miscarriage in april 65 & being surprised to find herself pregnant again in june 65 dr santini said id be born in january 66 instead i arrived in november 65 fully formed not a preemie i go home two days later
not long after my sister carole takes to reading out loud from a book she is learning how to read to me as i am trapped in my crib i have apparently cocked my ears to her voice laboriously decoding words
then mom changes her story she remembers having the miscarriage in march 65 it fell out of her while she sat on the toilet at 16 i constantly wondered if that was indeed possible a body expelling her own fetus
a heatwave in july 66 i turn pink & hot but everybody is hot anyway mom wonders maybe somethings seriously wrong at the hospital i am found to have double pneumonia & a high fever i look close to dying so a priest is called in i survive my last rites of death but my hearing doesnt
then mom changes details again she says she had a d&c done in february 65 when she felt her fetus wasnt growing it wasnt even two centimeters long no idea whether it was a boy or girl i no longer am sure what to believe
after i come back from the hospital carole reads to me again this time i bob my head around she doesnt realize ive lost most of my hearing no one has either she gets frustrated with me & gives up
by the time i turn 2 & a half mom asks her doctor why i havent begun talking he says maybe hes deaf she comes home & tells dad to stand me up & turn me so i can face the wall up in the tub since he was washing me i don’t respond to my name
research indicates a twin in the womb could miscarry leaving behind its other half in the 60s technology hadnt existed to detect such a tiny baby thats why moms pregnant test results in june 65 had so surprised everyone
up & down oak street where i once roamed the trees are mostly gone but the shadow of my other half still runs a mean yellow stripe right through the road of my life the mystery of never knowing him
Raymond Luczak is the author and editor of 22 books, including Flannelwood (Red Hen Press) and Lovejets: Queer Male Poets on 200 Years of Walt Whitman (Squares & Rebels). He lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota. His online presence includes: raymondluczak.com, facebook.com/raymondsbooks, and twitter.com/deafwoof.
Cryptic Crossword LV
Holly Painter
Holly Painter lives with her wife and son in Vermont, where she teaches writing and literature at the University of Vermont. Her first full-length book of poetry, Excerpts from a Natural History, was published by Titus Books in Auckland, New Zealand, in 2015. Her poetry, fiction, and essays have also been published in literary journals and anthologies in the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, China, Singapore, and the UK.
Her/Him/Our/Their/Us/Them/They Body
henry 7. reneau, jr.
henry 7. reneau, jr. writes words of conflagration to awaken the world ablaze, an inferno of free verse illuminated by his affinity for disobedience, like a chambered bullet that commits a felony every day, an immolation that blazes from his heart, phoenix-fluxed red & gold, exploding through change is gonna come to implement the fire next time. He is the author of the poetry collection, freedomland blues (Transcendent Zero Press) and the e-chapbook, physiography of the fittest (Kind of a Hurricane Press), now available from their respective publishers. Additionally, he has self-published a chapbook entitled 13hirteen Levels of Resistance, and his collection, The Book Of Blue(s) : Tryin’ To Make A Dollar Outta’ Fifteen Cents, was a finalist for the 2018 Digging Press Chapbook Series. His work has also been nominated for the Pushcart Prize.
Jaws Was on TV on a Saturday Morning
Mercury Marvin Sunderland
Mercury Marvin Sunderland is a gay Greek/Roman Wiccan autistic transgender man who uses he/him pronouns. He’s from Seattle. He currently attends The Evergreen State College, and his dream is to become the most banned author in human history.
Mercury is a 2013, 2014, 2015 winner of ACT Theater’s Young Playwright’s Program, a 2015, 2016 selected playwright for ACT Theater’s 14:48 HS, a 2016 winner of the Jack Straw Young Writer’s Program, a 2016 selected participant for the Seattle Talent Show hosted by Rainier Beach High School, and was hired as a paid representative of Youth Speaks Seattle in 2016. In 2017 alone, he was selected for and won the 2017 Youth Speaks Seattle Grand Slam, and went off as one of the top five youth slam poets representing Seattle at Brave New Voices 2017, an international slam poetry tournament treated as America’s national tournament, and was selected to perform slam poetry alongside former Seattle mayor candidate Nikkita Oliver at the University of Washington. In 2018 his illustrations were selected for While Supplies Last, an art show hosted by Anthony White, a Cornish College of the Arts graduate. In 2019 he received his first literary journal acceptance from Fearsome Critters Literary Magazine Volume Two, his second from the February 2019 issue of Marathon Literary Review, his third and fourth from Across & Through Literary Magazine, and his fifth from The Dollhouse Literary Magazine.
BMP Celebrates National Poetry Month
For this year’s National Poetry Month, Brain Mill Press & Voices want to add to your #TBR pile, sing siren songs of unsung heroes, and signal boost living poets we should be reading more. By the end of the month, we hope you will have acquired 30+ new books of poetry and that they continue to multiply in the darkness of your library. Explore new voices & new forms — re-read some old favorites — play if you liked this poet, you’ll like… the old-fashioned way, algorithm-free — just poetry lovers talking to poetry lovers, as the Universe intended. Happy #NaPoMo2019 from Brain Mill Press.
—C. Kubasta, Editor, BMP Celebrates National Poetry Month 2019
Winner
“what do i know about consent anyway” by Hannah Soyer
Short List
“A composing book, 1973” by Daisy Bassen
“FOR COLORED GURLS WHO HAVE CONSIDERED SUICIDE WHEN THE TWIST OUT WAS NOT ENUFF” by Levi Cain
“[mispronunciation]” by Uma Menon
Editors’ Picks
Week Five
“To: that nought in da jcemestry” by Penelope Alegria
“To Cry Out” by Cassandra Hsiao
“This Cosmic Dance” by Natasha McLachlan
what do i know about consent anyway
Contest Winner
Hannah Soyer
About Hannah Soyer
Hannah Soyer is a disabled creative writer and artist interested in perceptions and representations of what we consider ‘other.’ She is the creator of the This Body is Worthy project, which aims to celebrate bodies outside of mainstream societal ideals, and the founder of Freedom Words, a program to design and implement creative writing workshops specifically for students with disabilities. She has been published in Cosmopolitan, InkLit magazine, Mikrokosmos Journal, Hot Metal Bridge, Rooted in Rights, and her most recent piece, ‘Displacement,’ has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize.
The book is old. The book has a yellow cover. The book was given to me by my father. My father was a teacher.
The book is simple. The book is deceptive. Deceit is valuable. Deceit is proscribed.
The sentences are short. The sentences make a song. The sentences want involution. A clause has claws.
The claws are yellow. The claws are old. The sentences are about bombs. The sentences are about immolation.
The book belonged to a girl. The girl was a student. She learned about bombs. The yellow of immolation.
The sentences are about runaways. She ran away. The girl. Clawed.
About Daisy Bassen
Daisy Bassen is a practicing physician and poet. She graduated from Princeton University’s Creative Writing Program and completed her medical training at The University of Rochester and Brown. Her work has been published in Oberon, The Delmarva Review, The Sow’s Ear, and Tuck Magazine as well as multiple other journals. She was a semi-finalist in the 2016 Vassar Miller Prize in Poetry, a finalist in the 2018 Adelaide Literary Prize, a recent winner of the So to Speak 2019 Poetry Contest and was doubly nominated for a 2019 Pushcart Prize. She lives in Rhode Island with her family.
FOR COLORED GIRLS WHO HAVE CONSIDERED SUICIDE WHEN THE TWIST OUT WAS NOT ENUFF
Short-List Selection
Levi Cain
swear on my mama no–swear on something more simple and sacred. swear on my brother’s future mixtape, swear on pig fat in collard greens and freshly whipped shea butter, arroz con what the fuck ever– that the cracked cushion chair of my hairdresser’s closet is in fact a cathedral, packets of yaki and remy dotted with the same angels, skin the color of good brandy. the nollywood movies blaring on the thrifted television is the preacher. there is one constant truth– the half-room in waltham is a tabernacle for second generation girls who never learned how to cornrow.
a blackgurl’s bond with a hairdresser is tighter than the binding of isaac, requires more faith than you ever know how to give after years of lye being applied to your scalp, after years of being teased by whitegirls who crow that your hair looks like brillo pads that they wouldn’t let their housekeepers scour the sink with. the same whitegirls who now quiz you on coconut oil and ask you to anoint them with the wisdom of deep conditioning.
i and every other blackgurl who grew up in the suburbs are haunted by visions of hot combs and strangers putting their hands in our hair, pulling so sharply we swear we hear the echo of a whip crack.
but those ghosts have no place here, in this space that has only space enough for you, your hairdresser, and maybe her friend from haiti who you do not know the name of but who twists braids so gently it is as if she wants to be your mother.
this is an act of love, but all gods are not filled with goodness and so neither is the woman who stands with jojoba in her right hand, 84 inches of kankelon in her left, who asks why you never seem to have a boyfriend, who told you she would rather die than break bread with faggots but passes you plantains as communion, presses your forehead to her chest as madonna, calls you daughter, welcomes you with open arms to a rented room in a part of a town that would make a principal’s lip curl –this blackgurl bethlehem, this satin covered resting place, this plane of being where you are you are blackgurl, are celebration, are miracle, are nothing but holiest of holies.
About Levi Cain
Levi Cain is a queer writer from the Greater Boston Area who was born in California and raised in Connecticut. Further examples of their work can be found in Lunch Ticket, Red Queen Literary Magazine, and other publications.
[mispronunciations]
Short-List Selection
Uma Menon
i try to pull out a chameleon’s tongue from inside my throat, change the color, change it all before another ……………[mispronunciation] leaves my colorless mouth
instead i find my mother tongue stuck inside my throat, a lump forgotten only by me & i find a desire, tucked away, to strangle her and choke myself before another ……………[mispronunciation] escapes without explanation
i am afraid that i have stained the english that i speak that it yearns to be bleached in cold sand
i watch my mother chug down womanhood, let it slide through the grip of her mother tongue, into the stomach of America ……………[& her mispronunciations]
About Uma Menon
Uma Menon is a fifteen-year-old student and writer from Winter Park, Florida. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in the Huffington Post, The Rumpus, and National Poetry Quarterly, Sahitya Akademi’s Indian Literature, and the Cincinnati Review, among others. Her first chapbook was published in 2019 (Zoetic Press); she also received the 2019 Lee Bennett Hopkins Award in Poetry.
To: that noght in da jcemetsry
Contest Editors’ Pick
Penelope Alegria
Th city light s r beutiful 2night. Sky twinkles starligt on sidwalks with cracks that almost shape like ur sillhouette in twinkling moondust. Clay polish tatters blu on ashes of cigar wrappers flickering burnt blac n im thinkn of the time u rolled roun in somebody else’s ashes in that gravyard next to the church with the clouds rdy to snow upside down crosses.
Did u kn o th grass smells lik tequila n th boys breaths smells like lilac flickering burn t blqck sparks n my legs feel like pillow n l8ly it dpens’t feel right wrapping myself up in white bedsheets bc they dont feel wuite as electric as ur fingertips n m drunk
Im drunk im dunk m drnk n i want u nex to me w legs like pillows n breath like lilac burnt black n u rollin around in someboyd else’s ashes n i dk y u wouldnt want that eithr
About Penelope Alegria
Penelope Alegria has participated in Young Chicago Authors’ artistic apprenticeship, Louder Than a Bomb Squad. Her work has been featured or is forthcoming in La Nueva Semana Newspaper and El Beisman. Penelope was among the top 12 poets in Chicago as a Louder Than a Bomb 2018 Indy Finalist and was awarded the Literary Award by Julian Randall. She has performed spoken word at The Metro, University of Chicago, and elsewhere.
To Cry Out
Contest Editors’ Pick
Cassandra Hsiao
yellow: the cold echo of collapse muddled muddied house of decay return to the ground that bore me grow betrayal roots below mold my fingertips bleed flag i no longer show pale yellow: crayoned sun shine shield i risk changing colors if i don’t yellow: aroma that does not lie trapped in tin pots roasted crisp red brown duck i can taste home cannot find home sell home know home remember touch of yellow: lazy tongue remarks sting firecracker never cool enough to swallow yellow: taste morning hours sunrise son rise sweet victory to open shop open bells jingle lucky cat licks its paws yellow: eyes glass over cat looks white yellow: light
About Cassandra Hsiao
Cassandra Hsiao is a rising junior at Yale University, majoring in Theater Studies and Ethnicity, Race & Migration. Her poetry, fiction, and memoirs have been recognized by Rambutan Literary, Animal, Claremont Review, Jet Fuel Review, and National YoungArts Foundation. Her plays have been selected as finalists for national playwriting competitions held by The Blank Theatre, Writopia Labs, Princeton University, Durango Arts Center, California Playwrights Project, and YouthPLAYS. Her work is currently being produced in theaters across the nation. She has also won a Gracie Award for her entertainment journalism and was recognized as a Voices fellow for the Asian American Journalists Association (AAJA).
Natasha McLachlan is a poet currently living in Southern California. After losing her speech in 2018 due to unforeseen circumstances, she fell in love with reading all over again, as it helped her cultivate self-care–this, she hopes, will be a cure for others in a hectic and frantic lifestyle. She was a first-generation college student, graduating from California College of the Arts with a bachelor’s degree in Writing and Literature. As a minority, she takes pride in breaking the barriers and stigma around individuals of color by simply being herself. When she is not writing, she is spending time with her family or bonding with her 9 siblings, whom she considers her best friends. Her inspiration comes from the moons and stars around her, nature being her greatest muse.
BMP Celebrates National Poetry Month — Break Poetry Open
For this year’s National Poetry Month, Brain Mill Press & Voices want to add to your #TBR pile, sing siren songs of unsung heroes, and signal boost living poets we should be reading more. By the end of the month, we hope you will have acquired 30+ new books of poetry and that they continue to multiply in the darkness of your library. Explore new voices & new forms — re-read some old favorites — play if you liked this poet, you’ll like... the old-fashioned way, algorithm-free — just poetry lovers talking to poetry lovers, as the Universe intended. Happy #NaPoMo2019 from Brain Mill Press.
The Matador Review, an online literature and art quarterly, launched in January 2016 and is physically based in Chicago, Illinois. Their purpose is “to promote ‘alternative work’ from both art and literature,” and they regularly publish poetry, fiction, flash, nonfiction, and art features. In seeking work from both emerging and established artists, publishing interviews, and continuing to promote the work of their contributors through the Matador blog, The Matador Review seeks to be a “cultural conservationist for the alternative world.”
Perusing the The Matador Review, its literature and imagery, is a sensory pleasure – there are the voices and bodies we inhabit. Sutures are evident, as are scars.
For this National Poetry Month, we invite you to explore The Matador Reviewand discover it for yourself: the Spring issue is available now.
torrin a. greathouse is a genderqueer trans womxn & cripple-punk from Southern California. She is the Editor-in-Chief of Black Napkin Press. She is a Best of Net, Best New Poets, & Pushcart Prize nominee, and the author of one chapbook,Therǝ is a Case That I Ɐm (Damaged Goods Press, 2017). When they are not writing, their hobbies include pursuing a bachelor’s degree, awkwardly drinking coffee at parties, & trying to find some goddamn size 13 heels. torrin was recently given a shoutoutby Kaveh Akbar in The Paris Review‘s Poetry Rx column, and readers can read much more of their work at https://tagreathousepoetry.wixsite.com/home.
BMP Celebrates National Poetry Month 2018
Maybe you have lines living in you. Maybe you’ve been walking around like the speaker in Maggie Smith’s “Good Bones”: “This place could be beautiful, / right? You could make this place beautiful.” Maybe you’ve been inspired by Isobel O’Hare’s erasures, and have an urge to address some things. Maybe you’ve woken up in the spiked night, with a line swimming out of the deep. Maybe you have a story to tell. Or, maybe you memorized Jericho Brown’s “Colosseum” and have been repeating to yourself: “I cannot locate the origin / Of slaughter, but I know / How my own feels, that I live with it / And sometimes use it / To get the living done . . .”
These poetic efforts have touched me in the last few months, in that strange trigonometry of language, chance, and seeking, that we readers and writers do. Brown’s lines resonated with me, brought me low, and offered something – if not quite comfort, then a kind of recognition.
I’m thinking of a photograph of a cactus blooming in the desert.
That is always the way I will think of you and your work. It has nothing to do with any kind of cliché of prickliness, because I have never seen a sharp point to you. Maybe you have sharp points like most of us do, but that is certainly not a feature of your spirit or your work. The cactus is full of life. It is green, so green. It curves in a perfect vessel which soothes and delights the lost, the thirsty, the weary. Maybe this sounds over-the-top or sycophantic (God I hope not) but one thing I love about you and your work is that it doesn’t shy away from the joy of expressing joy and a kind of love that meets the stranger on the path with a big smile and open arms. Sometimes people doubt it when a person shows up that way—maybe people have been hurt and are suspicious and maybe cynical. But I mean it, I see you and your work this way—like a vessel full of life and light.
I feel this wondering about the self and its capacity for violence and harm in your work, too. But also that grace for others and the self.
So I missed something Elliot tried to tell me when he was eight. Then he told me again at fifteen and I was still a little wary. But he said LISTEN TO ME, MOM. and I did. I turned to face him and I listened and I said yes to everything in him. He was and is so beautiful. Now he is at the University of Iowa, and when I see him sometimes for lunch or when he texts me or calls, my heart jumps and I feel so happy. He is the most beautiful being.
One of the first books I got immediately after he spoke to me and I listened with an open heart was Troubling the Line. I wanted to be a good mom, so of course, I ordered a bazillion books on being trans the next day: nonfiction, self-help, clinical/academic, fiction, memoir, and poetry.
That’s where I found you. I’m certain of it now. I then signed us up for a poetry workshop at Naropa. I got Elliot in the LAST SPOT for Eileen Myles’ workshop. I took Thurston Moore’s workshop because he was my childhood idol and I wanted to confront him (with grace) for a certain patriarchy I grew up with in the punk scene and kind of felt annoyed at (“Kill Yr Idols”). (I ran away from home as a teenager and found a home in punk rock and poetry.) And I thought meeting you and talking to you outside of a class face to face would be a really meaningful way to connect with you. So Elliot and I met you at SNARFBURGER and I was both beaming at Elliot and doing the proud mother thing and also spilling my soul all over your space. I bought Gephyromania.
You exuded light, just like your poems did. You talked about grace and you spoke the language of my childhood religion in a way that liberated the language from its terror and transformed it into this authentic questioning—the kind of question mark that the wise sages say we should live in. You made space in your workshop (which Elliot and I got to sit in on one day) to dance in the question. Literally, dance, move, embody! I was so scared of my body. So scared of myself, still, after forty-something years, still a scared little girl who wanted to be a brave and loved little boy, and now I had a trans son and he was a blazing light and I was immersed in all this light and felt both overjoyed and fearful, too, in turns.
You exuded light, just like your poems did. You talked about grace and you spoke the language of my childhood religion in a way that liberated the language from its terror.
Look, I know this doesn’t sound academic and like the proper kind of intellectual level of critique and analysis—but I’ve never been able to pull that off. I once wrote a paper about post-structuralism that was just gibberish repeating “signifier and signified” over and over again in every other sentence. I got an A+ but what I really loved in that class was my professor, Lydia Gasman, who survived the Holocaust and would quote Kabbala before class. I loved her.
I love you. Not in a creepy, stalkerish way. The world is dangerous and you’ve got to have good boundaries and sometimes survivors of abuse have trouble with boundaries, which can be a curse but also a GIFT. Because sometimes you meet fellow survivors and they’ve been through so much bullshit they’re like, can we just be real with each other? Like, we’re all going to die, so can we just love each other and mostly extend grace, unless someone proves to be harmful—in which case you have a right to protect yourself. But I just felt like my soul recognized you, first in your poems and then in your self. So whether I ever see you again, face to face, I think of you as a friend in the space of the world. The big beautiful desert and you’re out there blooming.
I just felt like my soul recognized you, first in your poems and then in your self… I think of you as a friend in the space of the world. The big beautiful desert and you’re out there blooming.
I want to be real with everyone I encounter on this big blue planet with its vast deserts of air and light and rocks and blooms. I really do love you all the poets reading and want to meet you and be open to you. If I can break the fourth wall a second and speak directly to the audience reading this—TC is an EMT!!! TC literally meets people in their most broken, scared places and tends to them and always has, in workshops, on the page, in dance, in the wilderness with Outward Bound, with my son, with students, friends, and strangers. Let’s all do that, please, to the best of our ability with all our crankiness or fears or suspicion (born rightfully by our experiences). Let’s be brave and love each other and extend one another grace.
Here’s one of my favorite poems of TC:
What Space Faith Can Occupy
By TC Tolbert
I believe that witness is a magnitude of vulnerability. That when I say love what I mean is not a feeling nor promise of a feeling. I believe in attention. My love for you is a monolith of try.
The woman I love pays an inordinate amount of attention to large and small objects. She is not described by anything. Because I could not mean anything else, she knows exactly what I mean.
Once upon a time a line saw itself clear to its end. I have seen the shape of happiness. (y=mx+b) I am holding it. It is your hand.
About Heathen Derr-Smith
Heathen/Heather Derr-Smith is a punk rock Sufi genderqueer poet with four books of poetry. s(he) lives in Des Moines with (he)r family of beautiful human beings and dog and cat animal-people. Heather’s most recent book Thrust, won the Lexi Rudnitsky Editor’s Choice Award and was published in 2017 at Persea Books. Derr-Smith is also the founder/director of the nonprofit Cuvaj se, supporting writers in conflict zones and post-conflict zones and communities affected by violence and trauma. So, you may find Heathen wandering around the United States, Ukraine, Bosnia-Herzegovina, or Kurdistan walking beside survivors and resisting authoritarian and fascist bullshit.
BMP Celebrates National Poetry Month — Break Poetry Open
For this year’s National Poetry Month, Brain Mill Press & Voices want to add to your #TBR pile, sing siren songs of unsung heroes, and signal boost living poets we should be reading more. By the end of the month, we hope you will have acquired 30+ new books of poetry and that they continue to multiply in the darkness of your library. Explore new voices & new forms — re-read some old favorites — play if you liked this poet, you’ll like... the old-fashioned way, algorithm-free — just poetry lovers talking to poetry lovers, as the Universe intended. Happy #NaPoMo2019 from Brain Mill Press.
One thing I love about you and your work is that it doesn’t shy away from the joy of expressing joy and a kind of love that meets the stranger on the path with a big smile and open arms.
I am not being eloquent. I just had to spell-check the word eloquent. I grew up without books, in a home where books were viewed with suspicion, but even more than suspicion, total neglect. So were children. I was a child in a house with no books and adults who were hurting and angry and left plumes of violent hurt and anger all over the house, in the rooms, and who roped me in with it and wouldn’t let go.
I grew up scared and then angry and then full of a fight that was both a curse and a gift. I spent a long time trying to fix myself. This is a love letter to you, not me, though! Except—you’d want it to be to me, too. That’s what I got from you and your work.
I don’t even remember exactly when I found you or the first poem or how. I’m pretty sure it was when my son, Elliot came out as trans the second time. The first time he told me, I don’t remember it, but he says he was eight and I guess I didn’t hear him or understand. I wanted to be a good mother. I was so overjoyed with my children and I felt such deep love for them and I was happy to create a home for them that would be a safe place and a haven. I also knew I couldn’t be perfect, because that would put too much pressure on my kids and I’d fall right back into the narcissistic traps of it being all about me. Am I being narcissistic now? How’d I get from Elliot to MY children to ME? This is all to say that I think the self exists on a spectrum between toxic narcissism and healthy self-love and grace all in between and around like a desert. Not a wasteland. The desert is teeming with life and beauty. I feel this wondering about the self and its capacity for violence and harm in your work, too. But also that grace for others and the self.
I feel this wondering about the self and its capacity for violence and harm in your work, too. But also that grace for others and the self.
So I missed something Elliot tried to tell me when he was eight. Then he told me again at fifteen and I was still a little wary. But he said LISTEN TO ME, MOM. and I did. I turned to face him and I listened and I said yes to everything in him. He was and is so beautiful. Now he is at the University of Iowa, and when I see him sometimes for lunch or when he texts me or calls, my heart jumps and I feel so happy. He is the most beautiful being.
One of the first books I got immediately after he spoke to me and I listened with an open heart was Troubling the Line. I wanted to be a good mom, so of course, I ordered a bazillion books on being trans the next day: nonfiction, self-help, clinical/academic, fiction, memoir, and poetry.
That’s where I found you. I’m certain of it now. I then signed us up for a poetry workshop at Naropa. I got Elliot in the LAST SPOT for Eileen Myles’ workshop. I took Thurston Moore’s workshop because he was my childhood idol and I wanted to confront him (with grace) for a certain patriarchy I grew up with in the punk scene and kind of felt annoyed at (“Kill Yr Idols”). (I ran away from home as a teenager and found a home in punk rock and poetry.) And I thought meeting you and talking to you outside of a class face to face would be a really meaningful way to connect with you. So Elliot and I met you at SNARFBURGER and I was both beaming at Elliot and doing the proud mother thing and also spilling my soul all over your space. I bought Gephyromania.
You exuded light, just like your poems did. You talked about grace and you spoke the language of my childhood religion in a way that liberated the language from its terror and transformed it into this authentic questioning—the kind of question mark that the wise sages say we should live in. You made space in your workshop (which Elliot and I got to sit in on one day) to dance in the question. Literally, dance, move, embody! I was so scared of my body. So scared of myself, still, after forty-something years, still a scared little girl who wanted to be a brave and loved little boy, and now I had a trans son and he was a blazing light and I was immersed in all this light and felt both overjoyed and fearful, too, in turns.
You exuded light, just like your poems did. You talked about grace and you spoke the language of my childhood religion in a way that liberated the language from its terror.
Look, I know this doesn’t sound academic and like the proper kind of intellectual level of critique and analysis—but I’ve never been able to pull that off. I once wrote a paper about post-structuralism that was just gibberish repeating “signifier and signified” over and over again in every other sentence. I got an A+ but what I really loved in that class was my professor, Lydia Gasman, who survived the Holocaust and would quote Kabbala before class. I loved her.
I love you. Not in a creepy, stalkerish way. The world is dangerous and you’ve got to have good boundaries and sometimes survivors of abuse have trouble with boundaries, which can be a curse but also a GIFT. Because sometimes you meet fellow survivors and they’ve been through so much bullshit they’re like, can we just be real with each other? Like, we’re all going to die, so can we just love each other and mostly extend grace, unless someone proves to be harmful—in which case you have a right to protect yourself. But I just felt like my soul recognized you, first in your poems and then in your self. So whether I ever see you again, face to face, I think of you as a friend in the space of the world. The big beautiful desert and you’re out there blooming.
I just felt like my soul recognized you, first in your poems and then in your self… I think of you as a friend in the space of the world. The big beautiful desert and you’re out there blooming.
I want to be real with everyone I encounter on this big blue planet with its vast deserts of air and light and rocks and blooms. I really do love you all the poets reading and want to meet you and be open to you. If I can break the fourth wall a second and speak directly to the audience reading this—TC is an EMT!!! TC literally meets people in their most broken, scared places and tends to them and always has, in workshops, on the page, in dance, in the wilderness with Outward Bound, with my son, with students, friends, and strangers. Let’s all do that, please, to the best of our ability with all our crankiness or fears or suspicion (born rightfully by our experiences). Let’s be brave and love each other and extend one another grace.
Here’s one of my favorite poems of TC:
What Space Faith Can Occupy
By TC Tolbert
I believe that witness is a magnitude of vulnerability. That when I say love what I mean is not a feeling nor promise of a feeling. I believe in attention. My love for you is a monolith of try.
The woman I love pays an inordinate amount of attention to large and small objects. She is not described by anything. Because I could not mean anything else, she knows exactly what I mean.
Once upon a time a line saw itself clear to its end. I have seen the shape of happiness. (y=mx+b) I am holding it. It is your hand.
Heathen/Heather Derr-Smith is a punk rock Sufi genderqueer poet with four books of poetry. s(he) lives in Des Moines with (he)r family of beautiful human beings and dog and cat animal-people. Heather’s most recent book Thrust, won the Lexi Rudnitsky Editor’s Choice Award and was published in 2017 at Persea Books. Derr-Smith is also the founder/director of the nonprofit Cuvaj se, supporting writers in conflict zones and post-conflict zones and communities affected by violence and trauma. So, you may find Heathen wandering around the United States, Ukraine, Bosnia-Herzegovina, or Kurdistan walking beside survivors and resisting authoritarian and fascist bullshit.
BMP Celebrates National Poetry Month — Break Poetry Open
For this year’s National Poetry Month, Brain Mill Press & Voices want to add to your #TBR pile, sing siren songs of unsung heroes, and signal boost living poets we should be reading more. By the end of the month, we hope you will have acquired 30+ new books of poetry and that they continue to multiply in the darkness of your library. Explore new voices & new forms — re-read some old favorites — play if you liked this poet, you’ll like... the old-fashioned way, algorithm-free — just poetry lovers talking to poetry lovers, as the Universe intended. Happy #NaPoMo2019 from Brain Mill Press.
Recent Comments