National Poetry Month Spotlight: An Introduction to Novels in Verse

by | Apr 18, 2023 | Book Review, National Poetry Month, NPM 2023, Reading, Representation, The Afro YA

National Poetry Month Spotlight

An Introduction to Novels in Verse

It’s once again National Poetry Month, and novels in verse are some of the most thought-provoking ways to experience poetry.

However, some people may not know what novels in verse are and what books to check out. If you want to know more, then I’ve got you covered.

What Are Novels in Verse?

Novels in verse are stories told through the format of poetry. Instead of being told in chunks of paragraphs, the story is presented in the form of poems. Each chapter is a new poem that represents a character, their inner thoughts and feelings, and their interactions with other characters in different settings.

Why Read Novels in Verse?

Novels in verse enhance a story and its characters using imagery and different poetry formats. This allows the reader to immerse themselves in a story, because every word is meant to be felt rather than just read. 

Of course, novels in verse are also a good way to introduce readers of all ages to poetry. Depending on the book, it can also combine poetry with different subgenres such as non-fiction, contemporary fiction, and fantasy fiction.

 

Middle Grade and YA Novels in Verse by Black Authors

 

Moonwalking by Zetta Elliot and Lyn Miller Lachmann

Set in 1980s Brooklyn, this book tells the story of a punk rock–loving white boy with autism and an artistic Afro-Latinx kid who end up befriending each other.

Augusta Savage by Marilyn Nelson

This is a biographical book about the Black sculptor Augusta Savage, a major figure in the Harlem Renaissance. A starred review at Publishers Weekly states, “Moving poems convey Savage’s artistic ‘hunger/ to pull something out of yourself.’ ”

Brown Girl Dreaming by Jacqueline Woodson

This autobiographical book tells the story of the author’s childhood in the 1960s and 70s at a time where the U.S. was changing from the Jim Crow era to the Civil Rights Movements. The book also reminiscences on the author’s literary roots, from her struggles with learning to read to finding her voice by writing stories.

We Are All So Good At Smiling by Amber McBride

Using myths and folklore from around the globe, this book tells a powerful story about clinical depression and recovery. Whimsy, a Black hoodoo conjurer, loves fairy tales but fears a dark forest where her brother Cole went missing years ago. When she meets Faerry, a winged Black boy with struggles similar to hers, both of them must enter the forest once more to put their pasts to rest. I reviewed this book recently and loved it.

The Black Flamingo by Dean Atta

Heavily influenced by UK LGBTQ+ culture, this book is about Michael “Michalis” Angeli, a gay British young man with Greek Jamaican heritage. Growing up, his multifaceted identity makes him feel out of place. After deciding to attend a university in Brighton, Michael joins a drag club and slowly discovers how to combine his identities and his lived experiences to make himself feel whole. Check out my full review.

The Poet X by Elizabeth Acevedo

Xiomara is an Afro-Latina teen who learns to express her budding sexuality and burgeoning emotions in this emotionally palpable book. Amid a strict mother and religious upbringing, Xiomara finds solace in her school’s poetry club. Read my full review.

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.

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

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.

​

Buy the Book

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.

Favorite YA Comfort Reads

by | May 10, 2022 | Book Review, Identity, National Poetry Month, NPM 2022, Racism, Reading, Representation, The Afro YA

Favorite YA Comfort Reads

Everyone likes to reread certain books for various reasons, including comfort. There is nothing like rediscovering an old favorite book when you need some relief from bad times.

In the young adult genre, there are a variety of books that can become comfort reads depending on the reader’s tastes.

For me personally, I like both wholesome and low-stress reads as well as books that feature difficult subject matter in creative ways. From coming of age with poetry to becoming a magical girl in college, here are my favorite young adult comfort reads by Black authors.

The Poet X by Elizabeth Acevedo

The Poet X tells the story of Xiomara, an Afro-Latina teen who feels suffocated by her mother’s strict religious parenting and frustrated by the way the world perceives her as a brown girl with burgeoning sexuality. Initially, she writes down her thoughts in a secret poetry journal to have a safe place to express herself without judgment. Eventually, she joins the school’s poetry club and gradually learns to express herself openly.

Afro-Dominican poet Elizabeth Acevedo deeply moved me with this book. I felt I was seeing some of my younger self in these pages as Xiomara wrote poems about herself and the world around her. Since the novel is in verse, I also got to see Xiomara’s thoughts on things that would influence her poetry, such as other poets and music. This book is a reminder to never lose your creative voice, even when others try to silence it.

 

Let’s Talk about Love by Claire Kann

In addition to being one of the all too few YA books that feature a college-aged protagonist, this book also features a Black biromantic asexual lead named Alice. During an eventful summer, Alice must figure out what she wants to study in college while dealing with a crush on library assistant Takumi and the changes in her friendships with Feenie and Ryan.

I really liked how some of this book focuses on a “coming-to-terms” rather than a coming out narrative around sexuality, because you can still have some complicated feelings about your orientation even after coming out to yourself and others. I also like how love is examined through different relationships and things besides romance, and how Alice unabashedly indulges in her love of pop culture and food.

 

The Stars and the Blackness between Them by Junauda Petrus

Told from the dual viewpoints of an African American queer female teen named Mabel and a Trinidadian female teen named Audre, this book tells the story of two girls finding comfort in each other when each of them experiences bad events. I originally borrowed this book from the library a year or so ago, but I was so moved that I eventually bought my own copy.

This book is unabashedly Black and queer, featuring Mabel and Audre extolling the virtues of things ranging from Whitney Houston to Afro-Caribbean herbal healing. They also live their lives regardless of what others deem respectable. One line from this book sticks with me: “The stars and the blackness between them is the melanin in my skin.”

 

The Summer of Everything by Julian Winters

Nothing says comfort like a book set in a bookstore. This novel tells the story of Black gay comic book geek Wes, whose summer plan of working at the used bookstore Once Upon a Page are interrupted by looming adulthood. Now Wes has to figure out how to balance his crush on his best friend, Nico Alvarez; helping out with his big brother’s wedding planning; and saving his favorite bookstore before the end of the summer.

This book felt like the summer vacation bookstore version of the teen film Empire Records. You’ve got a quirky cast of characters, a homey atmosphere in the bookstore, and a coming-of-age story that is fun and poignant. If Once Upon a Page were a real bookstore, I would totally visit it.

 

Magnifique Noir Book 1: I Am Magical by Briana Lawrence

The first book in Briana Lawrence’s Magnifique Noir series tells the story of college student and gamer girl Bree Danvers. After having a few run-ins with monsters and a mysterious magical girl named Galactic Purple, she is invited to become a member of the magical girl team Magnifique Noir.

This visual novel combines illustrations, mini comics, and text to tell a colorful, cute, and down-to-earth magical girl story with an all-Black and queer magical girl team. In between battling monsters with frosted cupcake attacks and 8-bit video game graphics, the women also tackle things like street harassment, dysfunctional families, and misogynoir. Throughout it all, these Black women support each other and help each other remember that they are magical.

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.

Top photo by No Revisions on Unsplash

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

Editors’ Picks Week 4: Poetry by Katie Chicquette, Karen Mandell, Annie Diamond, & C. Prudence Arceneaux

by | May 2, 2022 | National Poetry Month, NPM 2022, Poetry

Editors' Picks, Week 4

Poetry by Katie Chicquette, Karen Mandell, Annie Diamond, & C. Prudence Arceneaux

Why It Is So Hard To Meet a New Student at the Alternative High School

by Katie Chicquette

 

On day one they enter, cagey
and tight-eyed, uncertain. My room
is in a whole other building–the old
high school is miles away. This place
is meant to be separate, special,
different–better. They are meant
to meet this place with hope.

But they walk in across the eggshells
of other people’s opinions of what it means
to now be a student at the school for bad kids.
They have lived behind profile pics, cameras off,
for a long time now; they might have forgotten
who they are, that they are corporeal.
They might curl down their shoulders and spines
as far as they will go to reduce the obviousness
of their presence. They may crow loud as a
lost boy across the room to hide
the size of their trepidation and fear.

It is so hard, on day one,
to meet this new person, not because it will take time
and a delicate, powerful kind of energy
to build the bridge they need
from lost to found, from not okay
to holy shit, I can’t believe I might
be okay—no, the hard part is resisting
the urge to forge a rapid short-cut,
to circumvent the necessary,
confounding patience and exchanges,
to stop myself from delivering
a monologue, including assertions like
I really believe you will have success
here, and I will help you no matter what,
and it probably seems impossible to you
that we will end up joking and swapping
musician & movie recommendations
and discussing how good the local shoe
repair guy is and I will probably teach you
to knit and you will enjoy it a little and
just so you know I absolutely do
have books about hunting and queer history
and eating disorders and ghosts and
whatever it is, you can absolutely tell me:
I can’t promise it won’t get worse
before it gets better but then again
most tornadoes do.

I hold my tongue; I know I can’t bring such
cocky fire to the first meeting, or even such
cloudy, saccharine support. I wouldn’t trust
that, either. I say as casual as linen in a tone
and volume that implies, don’t worry,
I will let you wallflower for a few days,
“Hey—come on in. Sit wherever you’d like.”

Jareen Imam author photo

Katie Chiquette is a writer and at-risk ELA high school teacher in Appleton, WI. Her work has appeared in Portage Magazine, Wisconsin People & Ideas, First Review East, Torrid, Bramble, and elsewhere. One poem is a Pushcart nominee, and another received an Honorable Mention in the Wisconsin People & Ideas Poetry Contest in 2021. She assists with Poetry Unlocked and Storycatchers; her passion is for her students and her community to feel connected to themselves and each other through stories and language.

Those Things

by Karen Mandell

 

Martin’s tailor store was a good spot
for searching out treasures, the detritus
of pockets. Suit jackets, blazers,
pants, their treasures abandoned
in the changing stall at the back.
A gold metal bow watch that you
pinned your shirt. It worked
for a while. Coins Martin put in a jar
on the linoleum counter. Chocolate
Necco wafers in an unopened roll
left on the bench. On a shelf
underneath the counter an orphaned book.
There was only ever one. Nana, faded blue
cover, soft with age, pages slightly furry
with handling. I never had a book
that wasn’t from the library. At the front
a list of illustrations. Was Emile Zola a woman
or man? For adults only judging
from the length and small print.
On the last page a black and white sketch,
a woman lying naked in bed, her privates
Exposed, black dots scattered on her skin.
Everywhere. I knew exactly what it was—
a sickness given to her because of Sex.
No other explanation needed.
Maybe knowledge embedded in my cells—
This Is What Happens When You Do Those Things.
I put the book back and washed my hands
again and again with the jagged sliver of soap
Martin kept on the bathroom sink.

Jareen Imam author photo

Karen Mandell has taught writing at the high school and college levels and literature at community senior centers. Her stories and poems have appeared in various literary magazines, such as Indianapolis Review, Notre Dame Review, Atticus Review.

Endemism

by Annie Diamond

 

The ecological state of a species being
unique to a defined geographic location:

fringed spineflower endemic
to the San Jacinto Mountains.

Cosmopolitanism the opposite, refers
to species that occur on all continents

save Antarctica. Humans, cats,
orchids, lichen parmelia sulcata.

I wonder if some species started out
cosmopolitan, then became endemic,

finding the location that best suited.

Jareen Imam author photo

Annie Diamond is a poet, Joycean, and breakfast enthusiast living and working on the traditional unceded homelands of the Council of the Three Fires. She has been awarded fellowships by MacDowell, Luminarts Cultural Foundation, The Lighthouse Works, and Boston University, where she earned her MFA and taught creative writing in 2017. Her poems have appeared and are forthcoming in No Tokens, Yemassee, Tar River Poetry, Western Humanities Review, and elsewhere.

Navigation

by C. Prudence Arceneaux

 

“She doesn’t want to live on a boat, in a tent, or on a truck. Not on bicycles either. She’s a middle class straight person who has fallen in love with a guy who wants to be a modern- day aborigine. No one is to blame, it just happens.”—from The Happiest Man in the World

To be clear—he never asked her to live
in a tent or on a boat. But she could feel it coming:

the way he shuttered his eyes at random times
during the day, their bright green fogged,

like the blinds on the windows, the lids
had to click four, five times to distinguish

her brown skin from the brown sheets of his bed,
her face from the smudges of everything else.

The uneasy quake when she entered or left
the trailer, in retrospect, seemed like training

for the unsteady heave of tides. She realized
at some point she no longer noticed, her weight,

her gait adjusted, she realized she no longer cared
whether or not the neighbors could see

their naked shadows cross the windows, whether or not
they ignored the list, the creak when she stayed the night.

She figured they were all out to sea in the trailer park.
But he showed her land once. Behind the wheel

of a truck, one hand on the back of her neck,
he drove with purpose, leagues from the familiar

following the sun star, his thumb rubbing
a biology lesson on her spine, then harder still;

the knotty bones—a worry stone. He spoke of “grass”;
she remembered not to correct him: “weeds.”

He offered her food: tomatoes, overripe, fluerdels
recurled, still growing; slow finger circles help peaches

free of skin; they gnawed meat from rib bones, laughing
as she wiped her face with her wrist. He eyed her wistful.

Yet every time she stepped up to the mast of him,
he stepped two states away, until there was no more land.

Then when there was no more water, stepped into the sky.
She waited, for a time, for him to fall from the dark—

……..eclipsing moons, shooting stars, solar flares—all the signs.
This is her test of endurance; she stands in the night,

knees locked, shielding her eyes as if from a bright light,
to see if she could find him, because surely if he didn’t tumble

back to her, he must still be there. She knows he’s gone.
……..But she can’t help herself.

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.

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.

Photo by Zoltan Tasi on Unsplash