Editors’ Picks Week 3: Poetry by Skylar Brown and Kathleen Hellen

by | Apr 25, 2022 | National Poetry Month, NPM 2022, Poetry

Editors' Picks, Week 2

Poetry by Skylar Brown and Kathleen Hellen

flamingos

by Kathleen Hellen

 

In yardland, not the back-side, not the hedge-side, 12 flamingos front their gaudy colors (pink-green-yellow—you get the picture) in plastic acrobatics (necks leaning in, long necks entangled—you get the picture) as if to flaunt the PDA. Twelve bawdy lawn adornments, not unusual per se, but here, where woodsmoke rings the crisp March air, where whiff of evergreen perfumes, flamingos are (just say it!)—anomaly. What if in some lush patch in Lihue, a palmy stand, there was a garden gnome as guardian? A wagon wheel? Or in the dirt in Butte a stone-cold, long-eared buddha? How will unsuspecting others know to slant the slang? Is it tote or poke or paper bag? Pop or soda? Gum or rubber band? How to know the when and wear of masks? Who to vote for? Who to hate? How to take out fare? Is it grits and open carry? Just when I think it can’t get any more absurd than flamingos placed afoul, two streets down, one across, two clowning black-beaked cousins cult that one-leg thing. The breed of some belief? I want to march up to the door and bang on it with fists, yelling, Hey! Where do you think you are? Tampa?

Jareen Imam author photo

Kathleen Hellen’s collection meet me at the bottom is forthcoming in Fall 2022 from Main Street Rag. Her credits include The Only Country Was the Color of My Skin, her prize-winning collection Umberto’s Night, and two chapbooks, The Girl Who Loved Mothra and Pentimento. Featured on Poetry Daily and Verse Daily, her work has appeared in Barrow Street, Beltway Poetry Quarterly, Brilliant Corners, The Carolina Quarterly, Cave Wall, Colorado Review, Gris-Gris, Harpur Palate, jubilat, Massachusetts Review, Mead, Muzzle, New American Writing, New Letters, North American Review, Painted Bride Quarterly, PANK, Poetry Northwest, Prairie Schooner, The Rumpus, The Sewanee Review, Spillway, Subtropics, The Sycamore Review, Waxwing, and West Branch, among others. For more on Kathleen, visit https://www.kathleenhellen.com/ or https://www.facebook.com/kathleen.hellen/

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 Edgar Moran on Unsplash

Editors’ Picks Week 2: Poetry by Anise Black

by | Apr 18, 2022 | National Poetry Month, NPM 2022, Poetry

Editors' Picks, Week 2

Poetry by Anise Black

Powderhorn Bench

by Anise Black

 

Child sits on a worn bench
facing the omnipotent glistening lake

Sun casts hazy ripples of Mother’s back
onto the broken piles of wrinkled soil

She sorrowfully gazes past the maverick of ducklings
compliantly trailing after their Mother

Quaking

Past the mass of children joyously frolicking
on the periodic playground

Laughing

Past the disengaged couples
reverently power walking in sync

Talking

They sit on the bench until slivers of splinters
dig into Child’s bow-legged thighs

Mother descending, unraveling
underneath the plastered sky
The lake hue turning from amber to ash

Father, prematurely engulfed by the same sky
Sternly cast into a trapped mortal inferno
A sky Child knew all too well

Envisioned

Drawn in orange crayon
while Father was still alive
Coloring in the lines
wishing for his immortality

Premonition

Child comforting Mother’s silent cries
Unkept, fractured, mourning

Mother and ducklings retreat
from the ashen lake to their warm nest

Child hugs herself tightly as a chill passes
over her and between her and Mother

Father sits beside her, above her
sheltering her in the warmth
of the archaic wooden bench

His presence soothes her
as he sings her favorite song

He cradles their water stained faces
cupping dried tears with hollow burnt hands

They sit on the bench
warmly embracing the Veil

Nesting
Staring at a gloomy and spirited lake
Unkept, fractured, mourning
Unkept, fractured, mourning

Jareen Imam author photo

Anise Black is a black poetess, writer, and recovering New Yorker who now lives cozily nestled in North Carolina. Anise once wrote an epic poem dedicated to each of her ferocious, loving felines (El Gato & Layla Ali). She loves to hike in the Blue Ridge mountains, watch cooking shows, and read science fiction.

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 Anthony Cantin on Unsplash

National Poetry Month Spotlight: Poetic YA Featuring Black Protagonists

by | Apr 15, 2022 | Book Review, Identity, National Poetry Month, NPM 2022, Racism, Reading, Representation, The Afro YA

National Poetry Month Spotlight: Poetic YA Featuring Black Protagonists

April is National Poetry Month, and one of the best ways to read poetry during this time is in young adult novels.

Not only are there novels in verse, but there are also books featuring poetry or lyrical writing that enhance the overall narrative. Last year, I spotlighted novels in verse by Black YA authors. Now, here are more poetic books to read to celebrate National Poetry Month.

Vinyl Moon by Mahogany L. Browne

Angel is a young woman who moves to Brooklyn after a romantic relationship hurts her. However, change can be hard when you’re far from the place and people you used to call home. Angel gradually gets to know her uncle and her classmates while discovering Black literature and a passion for creating music mixes. As time passes, Angel begins to fill the holes in her heart with friendship, family, and art.

In between chapters are poems that give you a peek into Angel’s head as she navigates the changes in her life. Some poems deal with self-doubt, while others take up thoughts on family and mindfulness. As the book progresses, you see Angel start to see herself and those around her in a whole new light. This is a tender, uplifting book that shows the how a community of friends, family, and peers is invaluable to personal healing.

 

Me, Moth by Amber McBride

After losing her family in an accident, Moth goes to live with her aunt, but she still feels alone. Soon she meets Sani, a boy with depression who is trying to figure out where he comes from. Together, the two of them take a road trip in order to find themselves and understand how each of their families’ histories shapes who they are now. This novel in verse is the debut book of Amber McBride and is considered one of the best books of 2021 by Shelf Awareness, NPR, and TIME.

 

Muted by Tami Charles

Seventeen-year-old Denver dreams of singing well enough to escape her small, white hometown. With her best friends Dali and Shak, she does just that by getting the attention of R&B star Sean “Mercury” Ellis. At first, the perks and the recording time seem worth it—until Denver starts losing her voice in more ways than one. Now, she must decide whether achieving her dream is worth the cost of being exploited.

Partly inspired by the author’s own experiences in the music industry, as well as by news stories, this novel in verse shows how friendship, family, and self-love can keep you grounded in an industry that seeks to diminish Black girls. The book’s honors include features in Essence, Marie Claire, and Bookbuzz.

 

Punching the Air by Ibi Zoboi and Yusef Salaam

Amal is a sixteen-year-old Black Muslim boy who, along with four other boys, is wrongfully imprisoned for a crime he didn’t commit. Through his gifts for poetry and visual art, Amal learns to hold onto his humanity and express the truth of what really happened to him. This is a story of how systematic racism impacts Black young men and how hard it can be to fight against it.

In addition to the talented Ibi Zoboi, the heart of this book is also written by prison reform activist Yusef Salaam of the Exonerated Five. This 2020 book is partly inspired by Yusef’s experiences as an incarcerated teen and the poetry he wrote during this time. Its accolades include being Shelf Awareness’s Best Book of the Year, a Goodreads finalist for Best Teen Book of the Year, and being a NYT best-seller.

 

Concrete Kids by Amyra León

An autobiographical novel in verse, this book tells the story of the author’s childhood as she navigates foster care, grief, and self-love. It is an inspirational book of resilience and dreams that is part of the series known as Pocket Change Collective. Pocket Change Collective consists of a series of small books by big thinkers on a variety of ideas and experiences, ranging from gender identity to Black womanhood to the plastic crisis. Concrete Kids has been an A Goddard CBC’s Social Justice Prize Nominee, as well as an A YALSA Amazing Audiobook for Young Adults.

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 Ron Lach

Editors’ Picks Week 1: Poetry by Liz Ahl and Nora Kirkham

by | Apr 11, 2022 | National Poetry Month, NPM 2022, Poetry

Editors' Picks, Week 1

Poetry by Liz Ahl and Nora Kirkham

Chairs

by Liz Ahl

 

My mother’s house has too many chairs.

I still take the pause of the initiate
when I say “my mother’s house.”

For how many more months or years
will I pause or stutter before saying,
“my mother’s house,” as if I am practicing
a new language, which of course I am?

Unlike her, I’m not immersed
in the country of that language

– the house – their house – her house –

though for her, even living there,
in the daily navigation of a geography of loss,
a steep learning curve, the receptors
for new language acquisition
burned out decades ago.

For both of us, then, still dreaming
in the mother-tongue—
the language where my father,
who designed this house, has not died.
We stumble back and forth long-distance
across translation’s porous membrane,
awkward, tender, misunderstanding, lonely.

At least I’ve got the certainty
the house was never mine—
designed by dad and built
long after I’d spun into my own life—
a welcome place to visit, but
I’d never claimed it, never had
my bedroom painted with my particular
childhood, though some furniture,
certain lamps and paintings, certain chairs,
kept through many homes, many moves,
still project a soft aura of kinship,
an enclosing our of memory.

His recliner is still angled towards hers,
hers towards his, casting blueprint lines
towards an invisible spot out there,
where they eventually intersect,
just on the other side of the picture window
which frames exquisitely the lacquered peaks
and the deep, flat fjord.

In the basement (his, always, still)
of that house (hers),
still perched atop a dusty rattan shelf,
is the perfect scale model of the house
he rendered precisely in white foam-core
complete with cut-out windows,
so he could hold it aloft to understand
how the light would fall into each room.

Jareen Imam author photo

Liz Ahl lives in New Hampshire. Her book of poems, Beating the Bounds, was published in 2017 by Hobblebush Books. Previous collections include the chapbooks Home Economics and Talking About the Weather, published in 2016 and 2012 by Seven Kitchens Press. Her second chapbook, Luck (Pecan Grove, 2010) received the New Hampshire Literary Awards “Reader’s Choice” in Poetry Award in 2011, and her first chapbook, A Thirst That’s Partly Mine, won the 2008 Slapering Hol Press chapbook contest. Her poems have also appeared in Sinister Wisdom, Lavender Review, Prairie Schooner, Court Green, Crab Orchard Review, Measure, Cutthroat, and other journals. She has been awarded residencies at Jentel, Playa, The Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, and The Vermont Studio Center.

From the Grass

by Nora Kirkham

 

We are on the train home from Aberdeen:
the hills are beginning to spring. You trail gorse
along a smudged window and spot deer,
a whole family of them, folded in a field.
Unfolding before your eyes, you thought
they were hares or birds. I wondered
how many creatures we had passed, how many
lived and died by us without ever knowing
they were seen, and if this matters, anyway.
In June I was in Salisbury, on a bus cresting
up a hill. Beyond the cathedral, a gold-leaf
glow spilled from glass windows and
I saw antlers flying, or maybe I dreamed.
From that bus window, I held on
to three light seconds of hooves lifting,
to the twisting of clover roots and soil
spreading only a millimeter further than
where it had been before.
Perhaps none of this mattered,
but I did not want to arrive at the next stop,
I wanted to turn back, I did not want to go
home. Some might call this haunting, how
these hidden lives breathe their way
up through new strands of grass—
they pass through us all the time. Sometimes,
from a window, we find them,
then forgetting is what makes them fly.

Jareen Imam author photo

Nora Kirkham is a poet from Maine currently based in Scotland. She was raised in Japan, Australia, and Eastern Europe. She holds an MA in Creative Writing from University College Cork, Ireland. Her writing has been featured in Rock & Sling, Ruminate Magazine, Tokyo Poetry Journal, and Topology Magazine.

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 Daniel Watson on Pexels

BMP Voices Celebrates National Poetry Month 2022!

by | Apr 1, 2022 | National Poetry Month, NPM 2022, Poetry, Representation

BMP Voices Celebrates National Poetry Month 2022

Poetry Contest: Poetry of Space/Place

Open All April – Fee Free

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.

In terms of poetry and creativity, we are interested in reading poems that speak to engagement with space/place, the architecture of the page, voices both on the page and off.

At Brain Mill Press’s pop-up magazine for National Poetry Month, we’ll be sharing posts from poets & creatives that speak to the above theme, as well as inviting entries for our fee-free contest organized around it.

Brain Mill seeks to highlight and platform the voices of underrepresented writers. We are inclusive and progressive, with a desire to read a variety of forms, aesthetics, and styles. Through curated featured poets posts, and our fee-free contest, we seek work that speaks to space/place.

Poems selected for the weekly Editor’s Choice selections, as well as for the Prizes will have the option to share their work as video/audio files, as well as text.

Submission Guidelines

Please submit 1-3 poems of any form or style that speak to space/place. Submissions will be reviewed for suitability by Brain Mill Press staff.

Those poets whose work is selected agree to grant Brain Mill Press the limited right to reproduce your piece on Voices. They retain all other rights to their work.

Poets’ submitted work and profile will be published on bmpvoices.com and promoted on our social media outlets. Your post will contain your headshot and bio, as well as information you may wish to include about recent work and your website and social media links.

Brain Mill Press strongly encourages submissions from people of color, women, LGBTQIA+ writers, First Nations writers, and disabled writers. Please direct inquiries not answered in this call to inquiries@brainmillpress.com.

Prizes

Four times in April, the Brain Mill Press editors will select one or more submitted poems as the editors’ choice pick(s) for the week. Editors’ choice selections may choose any poetry title from the Brain Mill Press catalog for their prize. In early May, the editors will select a winning poem, and the poet will receive the full collection of Brain Mill Press poetry titles for themselves, as well as a second collection to gift to an organization of their choice.

Submit Now

Top photo by Max Ostrozhinskiy on Unsplash

National Poetry Month Contest Winner 2021: Avalon Felice Lee

by | May 4, 2021 | National Poetry Month, NPM 2021, Poetry

National Poetry Month Contest Winner 2021

Avalon Felice Lee

Judging poetry is ineffably difficult – there are so many ways to share an experience in language, and how that sharing affects a reader – emotionally, intellectually, as well as through the magically osmotic process that we poets often recognize but cannot really explain – are dependent on so many factors. I’m continually amazed by the seemingly endless tools & choices that poets bring to their craft, from the shape of their poems to the variety of line endings, to the voices that animate those lines, the choices about language. I was drawn to each of the poems because of the way the poets shaped their work as the perfect vehicle for their message.

Our winner is Avalon Felice Lee’s “Gershwin & Sons” – the poem unfolds as a consideration of immigration, wrestling with pressures of assimilation, anti-Asian hate crimes, the imagery of America writ large, and all juxtaposed with the story of another immigrant, George Gershwin – now known for his music, but his biography eclipsed. The percussiveness of this poem. Like the way we forget that a piano makes its music with hammers. Sharp lines, riddled with pinpricks, consonance and sibilance, tearing holes in the middle of utterances and perceptions.

Our short list of Honorable Mentions should be called Extraordinary Mentions. Sara Maher’s “goddess bless the USA” wants to be read aloud, experimenting with breath, alternating cadences, and varying speeds; it belongs both on and off the page to catch its nuances. Angelita Hampton uses allusions and quiet talk in “Capitol Offense” – how loud those moments. Mallika Khan’s “Queer Crucifixion” (an Editor’s Pick) depicts the speaker’s queer as a tangible thing, held in hands, kept hidden or safe, a thing that mother’s hands hold in a language of squeeze. In “burn” by Deborah Pless, a memory of being fourteen, risking death to learn survival, like other unremembered histories that make us. “Ashes to Ashes” by Laya Reddy is a disjointed dream of a poem, where everything is both familiar and completely unsettled. I was drawn, finally, to those short declarations – the way they speak to maybe-losses, to maybe-survival. The poem ends with “Sister, sister. I still. Lazarus walks again.”

I still. After this long year of 2020, we still (both meanings of that). In all these poems, images reach across some divide we’ve noted and noticed, attempting contact. Please read these missives from this April, from this last year – from this space where poets make this world out of what they’ve been given. Thank you (each of you who shared your words) for holding space with us.

—C. Kubasta, Editor, BMP Voices Poetry Month

Winner

 

“Gershwin & Sons” by Avalon Felice Lee

“Gershwin & Sons”

by Avalon Felice Lee

A tooth
        	scrapes Gershwin
off vinyl.
        	Maybe this time
these eyes
        	will inherit
the blues.
        	See, I crawled
the wrong ocean
        	to reach
this glittering
        	country where even
your sun
        	is blond
and thoroughly
        	American.
Bandolier
        	-striped flag,
bullets
        	to fatten
the westward
        	tumor.
America
        	aim sure and
let one sing
        	a spangled
anthem
        	into my ready
mouth,
        	let it carve
a rod
        	of starlight through
the temporal
        	lobe so that
my before
        	bleeds out:
Cantonese
        	by the pint.
Teach
        	these arteries
the alphabet
        	each letter
a fraction
        	of your liberty
and mine.
        	Oh, America
a truth
        	forgets itself
by us
        	forgetting.
Yet your sons
        	remind us
in every time
        	our heritage
is bastardized
        	into a disease.
In a brick
        	bursting
the glass
        	of the uptown
herbal shop.
        	The hands
that show
        	an elder
the taste
        	of asphalt.
As if to say,
        	Understand
you are here
        	but not hers
not anglicized
        	into a golden son.
Only an orphan
        	with no homeland
still spinning
        	on a record
in the Pacific.
        	A blues
away.
Alanna Shaikh headshot

Avalon Felice Lee is an Asian American Californian. Her work is published or forthcoming in Kissing Dynamite, JUST POETRY, Right Hand Pointing, Bluefire, Plum Recruit Mag, and elsewhere. She has been recognized by Scholastic Writing Awards, Leyla Beban Young Writers Foundation, National Poetry Quarterly, The Lumiere Review, and Ringling, among others. You can find her and her kitten, Esky, on Instagram at @avalonfelicelee.

Short List

 

“goddess bless the USA” by Sara Maher

“Capitol Offense” by Angelita Hampton

“Queer Crucifixion” by Mallika Khan

“burn” by Deborah Pless

“Ashes to Ashes” by Laya Reddy

“goddess bless the USA”

by Sara Maher

Not to be dramatic but this year carved me open and
used my organs as fairy lights and red flags flaming in
the moonlight before the plague I thought I knew what
people meant to me before but when I morphed into an
island I sunk cocooned as underwater volcano submarine
fissure and I caught Stockholm syndrome with my own
meat cleaver brain and I forgot
got so busy saving myself taking notes seeking clues
interrogating the yellow wallpaper and my bathroom
mirror I forgot that the-that the fire spread to me because
goddammit I’m an American and the soulless bastard of a
year threw a match in the US of A’s light fuse and woo look
so beautiful there’s a tire fire outside but baby I’ll be your knight
in shining armor coming up on a stallion tits out hair down no guts
all glory blood fleeing my severed flesh to find a new home just to
make room for you my baby angel darling I’ll rescue you US of A I’ll
dip you down and give you surprise butterfly kisses and there may be
a tire fire but me and the rest of the ghouls last year nurtured will put it
out with our own bodies our plasma a potassium bicarbonate fire extinguisher
and not to be dramatic but this last year incarcerated incinerated took everything
from me and we’ve got nothing to lose and even less to prove so love me America
I’ll be your heroine your heroin your anti-heroin chic I’ll be your brown woman savior
your mistress and I’ll burn patchouli sage incense in the steaming graveyards and we’ll
toast gold champagne scorching down my throat dribbling down onto the dirt and I’ll say
I love you America and I’ll look you deep in your red white blue eyes and you’ll look at my
tits and you’ll swear to goddess to me that next time next year will be different that you’ll really
change and that’s because I and the other ghouls saved you and for a split lone brilliant second
I’ll believe you

Sara Maher is a writer from Georgia. She pulls from her experiences as a woman who grew up in a Muslim enclave in a small town in the deep South. Sara has written about masculinity, technology, and ethics in various academic outlets.

In her free time, Sara likes to read, hike, and seek the silver linings. You can find her on Instagram at @sarsoura_isdoingherbest.

“Capitol Offense”

by Angelita Hampton

Twice, she said on the phone this evening 
hell in a handbasket 
what is the world coming to?
she sounded tired. but from standing still,
out of breath without exertion. 
she told me I didn't want to know:
I suppose you didn't hear 
	what's going on 
		in Washington today?
I hadn't. I was usually the last to hear.
the world reverberates too loudly, echoing inside me like shouting canyons firing into the darkness.
I stayed out of the world for days.
but still, I know it. it does not hide or change. it's not even as slick as the devil or half as smooth.
and my mother knows me. her thinking I shouldn't know tells me it is something breakable.
something fragile. this side is not up anymore and everything is in pieces now.

she said my sister had been crying. my brother had come to the house,
she would have to move her car into the driveway later.

yesterday I started a poem about Martin, Malcolm, and Medgar.
the air was already cold in the coincidence of winter. I had been thinking about carports.
and stalking. shooting. podiums, balconies and slow driving Cadillacs making widows. rifles and casings.
skulking off.
Jareen Imam author photo

Angelita Hampton is a writer, visual artist, activist, sister, and daughter. Her undergraduate studies in Psychology and African American Studies at Earlham College and graduate studies at The Ohio State University, along with her time living abroad in Mexico, deeply inform her creative work. She identifies as a Black queer feminist revolutionary inspired by and dedicated to social justice.

Angelita is an Indianapolis native who enjoys the arts, nature, and maintaining close ties to family. She has self-published several books of poetry in addition to having poems published in Rigorous, Bay Windows, RagShock, and Coffee People Zine.

“Queer Crucifixion”

by Mallika Khan

I do not know loss, but I have lost to God.
Several times. Never by choice. Now, I hold
my Queer under my palm. It squeezes
itself between my fingers, clawing back
across the dining table. A spidery hand
slowly making its way to my mum.

I cannot let my Queer crucify my mum.
We interlock fingers around the table. Thank God
for the meal. Pray for my family to come back
to me instead. I ache from reaching out my hand,
knowing that my aunty will not hold
it anymore. Another death. The grief squeezes

my chest through my ribcage. She squeezes
her eyes shut, quickly. Before my mum
finds out. My gaze pierces my impure hand,
knowing all the perverse love it can hold
when I am with Her. Perhaps, I could ask God
why my Queer carries a hammer and nails. My back

should be hunched over. Instead, I lean back
to find more than a chair. Shame that squeezes
me into a tight embrace. How does it hold
me closer than my family ever would? Surely God
could reconsider this sin. I know my mum
carries my cross behind her. Her hand

covered in splinters. The same weary hand
preparing peace offerings. Meals to bring back
the relatives that denied me thrice for God.
For they don’t know me at all. I watch my mum
ask for mercy with every spoonful of rice. Squeezes
leftover grace into plastic containers for them to hold

onto as they pass over. She tells me to hold
my tongue when they speak death. Her hand
clutches my Queer firmly as they leave. Mum,
I wish I wasn’t something to fight for. It squeezes
out of me, a thought. That turning her back
meant they died for her too. Forgive me, God.

Truth is, I fear I will lose my mum to God
every day. But for now, I hold her hand
while we pray. She always squeezes back.

Jareen Imam author photo

Mallika Khan is a 22 year-old queer Pakistani poet and artist based in Bristol. They study Psychology with Criminology at the University of the West of England. They believe that where sorrow lies, resilience and strength is always there too; and this is the main focus of their work. Mallika’s poetry has received recognition from Bristol Women’s Voice and Art Within The Cracks, however, this is their debut poetry publication.

More information on Mallika’s work can be found on their website at: https://mallikakhan.wixsite.com/studio.

“burn”

by Deborah Pless

there’s a curve in the road by Tony Tally’s Auto Towing
where I stood, fourteen and full of rage,
and flung myself between the passing cars
a low-cost form of self-immolation

the kids at school
they
where you going crazy bitch
threw food at my skirt when I passed in the hall
and I burst into tears at the thought

that no one would remember the solemn faces I saw in our history book
in a hundred thousand years
because
death is a distant country
and forgetfulness is a gift

breatheonetwo – run
run like your life depends on it because
the cars aren’t stopping and
no one will be there to identify the body
out back by Tony Tally’s

see the headlights, spot the curve, run as it crests the hill
and for the glorious moment know
you have survived

Deborah Pless lives in rural Western Washington. Her work has previously appeared in Kindred Magazine, quiet, The Canopy Review, and MTSU’s Shift, among others.

“Ashes to Ashes”

by Laya Reddy

The grand piano fell on the street. I was pushed down.
I got up. I knew fists. The meat of them.
Slow-roasting. I died slowly.
I breathed again. A man had crashed his car. They had stolen
my sister. She had flown away. Scars as anklets.
Lacerations for bracelets. They beat me down. I hobbled
back up. A child walked into the traffic. Quiet massacre.
Grandmother sleeps. She is crescent moon. Fetus
curled up in waiting. Quiet mouth and loud eyes on a still body.
Wake up. I go down the stairs. Sirens call me outside.
Tornado says enter. My feet are in cement. Leap now.
Brother’s hand circles my wrist. I close the door. Hold my peace.
Ghost enters through the back door. Woman says she knows me.
We have small faces. I let her in. Kitchen trembles softly.
My body is seizing. She grasps the inside of my elbow.
Sister, sister. I still. Lazarus walks again.

Laya Reddy is a South Asian writer and high school senior from the Northern Suburbs of Chicago. Her writing has been recognized by the National Scholastic Arts and Writing Awards and the Adroit Journal. Her poems have been published by the Live Poets Society of New Jersey, Canvas Literary Journal, elementia literary magazine, and more. She enjoys experimental cooking and acrylic painting in her free time.

Top photo by Kareem Hayes on Unsplash