We are delighted to present this week’s selections from the Brain Mill Press 2016 Poetry Month Contest. We received many outstanding entries, from which these pieces by Jessica Jacobs, Olajide Timilehin Abiodun, and Catherine Chen stood out. We hope you’ll enjoy them as much as we did.

It’s 10 p.m. Do you know whereyour children are? Well, there I was

with the remote, my thumb a die punch,a jackhammer’s relentless up and down

through a world of possiblelives—America’s Most Wanted, Nick

at Night, To Catch a Predator—in searchof prey worth pausing for. I slowed,

though, not for shows but for theirinterruptions: Bare shoulders. Wet neck. Rope

of hair glistening beneath a glisteningstream. Prell. Breck. So many ways to

get your hair glossy. So much skinjust off-screen

I tried to keep myself from wantingto see. I rapped my wrist

with the remote; pinched the undersideof my thighs, behind

my knees—a child’s small-fingered self-flagellation. I knew

only enough to know I should not wantthis. So I called myself names, donned

shame as my hair shirt. Though Inever once turned it off. Or looked away.

Fountain pens are expensive

Only a kobo lays in my pocket

Script-let books are scarce

I couldn’t found none

Internet is a necessity

I have no gadgets

The four legs of my table are ill

The carpenter storms with bill

Art needs audience

No one will listen to me

Busy are days

Time is rob by minutes

It left me only a minute of pace

to pour my world out on paper

Paragraphs are sans coherence

Sentences are hard to come by

Lines are porous

lacking the wit of poets

Even words are stiff

Like a drained-up river

They spring forth no water

Ideas seize to flow like rivulets

The muse proves stubborn

she only keeps silent in sober

Out of the reach of her master

I’m no poet.

There is a red brick wall at the very end of the street. You relieve it of form and enter the hole that remains. Infinity is here. Only in persistence can your body adjust to the conditions of precarity. Are you willing to tread past the point of identity? Take this sign. Die, then struggle. I ask you, “Where will you go from here?” What the hole of history obscures is the degree to which we have trained ourselves to live under the hypnosis of mythology. The hole has the circumference of a quarter but that is our approximation and the hole itself has no conception of currency. A quarter’s circumference is a dollop of honey is a rose is the imprint my index finger leaves on packaged meat at the supermarket. Say the things you could not tell your mother the night you realized her desires were born of her failure. Say her name. Say “Black Lives Matter.” That life continues today is no small achievement. Even as devastation lies with them in bed, the lovers’ bodies know how to derive pleasure from the fractal formations of the chandelier’s crystal blue lights: sunrise. I use dangerous language to distinguish myself. Keep treading. Use tools inaccessible to technology, like topographical memory or an archive of self-erasure or illegibility. Drones have been useful in mitigating the abscess that outlines the hole of history. Expansion, contraction. With every gasp and kiss, the lovers inhale the toxic fumes of another air strike. You too consume these chemicals. You too do not stop taking up space.

We are delighted to present this week’s selections from the Brain Mill Press 2016 Poetry Month Contest. We received many outstanding entries, from which these pieces by Shabnam Piryaei, Courtney Leblanc, and Sharon Brooks stood out. We hope you’ll enjoy them as much as we did.

after Jeanann Verlee

When he breaks up with you to return to his wife and his children and his life do not tell him you understand. Tell him goodbye and walk out the door. When you begin dating his gorgeous mixed-race friend do not gloat. The first time your father calls him a nigger walk out of the room. The second time he says it walk out of the house – his racism will grow and fracture your blooming relationship. You will regret this.

When he comes back and says his marriage is over tell him congratulations. Do not date him again, do not quit school and follow him to the Caribbean. He will break you every way he can for the next seven years. Do not regret or reconsider the restraining order. You were right to get it. He did not have the right to threaten you.

Do not let your mother make you feel guilty for the divorce. She is a pro at blaming you for her own issues. Your divorce is not a reflection on her. Do not feel guilty when your relationship with your mother falls apart. She fostered it as much as you did. You do not have to like her or even love her. It is not owed.

Do not apologize for using the word fuck. Use it in any (every) poem. Read these poems to your mother. Do not flinch when she slaps you at your first public poetry reading. Pour that into a poem. Use the word fuck repeatedly.

what if we set aside

all of these illusions of love

the control

the holding at arm’s length

the perception of what will be

based on what was

what if we managed our expectations

what if we stopped blaming ourselves

for failure

and stopped blaming the other for

deceptions.

what if we just

trust

and consciously walk forward

with the grace we are each assigned

and loved the other

and ourselves

in power

and empowered the other to love

at the highest level

because this space between us is

safe

and fluid

and alive

what if love just is, and was,

and survived on the inhale and exhale.

what if we came together

hoped brilliantly

took that faith and made multiple trips around the moon

and stared straight into the sun

with eyes wide open

and just stopped judging

what we saw

stopped controlling what we want

stopped trying to own the other

and accepted

every ugly, selfish, thoughtless

flaw simply because

and what if we held the other

even in those ugly moments

raising the frequency of each

heartbeat until they connect

and beat as one

what if we became one

she and he into a we.

We are delighted to present this week’s selections from the Brain Mill Press 2016 Poetry Month Contest. We received many outstanding entries, from which these pieces by Imani Davis, Lynn Marie Houston, and Jiordan Castle stood out. We hope you’ll enjoy them as much as we did.

Visionary

          The American Museum of Visionary Art

On the side of Key Highway
a tree is hung with broken
light: diamonds, circles, squares
of glass on wire that glitter
in the January wind.
We stand before it.

Who would want to see a hundred
of ourselves refracted.

the elusive, touching,
the elusive, bitter light

what is elusive

The Elusive

will you elude me

Once, years before all this, I asked him for
his five favorite words.

This was the old language
that did not include

our child’s breathing,
or the warm weight of our

daughters in our arms
that did not include

this tree, all broken
light.

What compelled us

(to elude each other)

the first year of our marriage
when you were gone

when you lived across that ocean

What compels us

when we drive each other’s
voices from the room.

An argument: our selves refracted.

Who would know how
to navigate that past

how to envision this
present moment.

Twelve years together.

The tree’s glass edges shake in the wind.

Blue, yellow, purple glittering.
An always tree.

What compels us, now,
once I asked him,
he whose memory includes no
thing unspoken.

The glass tree so steady.

How to envision.

Memory a fugitive
Memory that glittering, transparent, broken tree—
its own language.

Now we turn to each other.
Will you–

Wrappers

You’re twelve and in love with the boy next door
only you don’t quite know it yet.
That tingle between your legs
is something you fumble for while your sister sleeps,
while you are awake and dreaming.
You play married, practice that first boy kiss
against your pillow, hide pennies under
your tongue to imagine his taste.

The next day you’re doing laps in the pool
and suddenly blood is everywhere.
You check the water for sharks.
You dead man float but no one comes
to save you. This is how you learn
you are a woman: a pool of blood,
underwear packed with toilet paper,
a grocery bag handed over without words,
filled with pads and belts, too many loose ends.

You grow into this, the best you know how.
Follow package instructions, listen in the halls,
peel tampons like popsicles,
meet a proper boy who peels you like a popsicle,
makes you bleed on his gold shag rug.
You think about buying protection, being protected,
being exposed like a grifter.

Later, you’re in college, geography, discussing faults
and shields, so you tell the next guy over you think
you are pregnant. You are telling the wrong man,
he is not the one who should help you,
he is as close as you will get. Your friends take you
for a drive so you can cramp and bleed again.

After this, the blood never stops flowing.
You’ve seen bad guys on Starsky and Hutch
die from less of a loss and here you are,
day after day,
chucking off soaked undies in the bathroom at the mall.
This is no cycle, this is two straight lines
off the horizon, this is the community blood bank,
this is thirty years of looking between your legs
and you too dumb to move.

You will bleed through two weddings, one divorce,
twelve intrauterine inseminations,
twenty-five pregnant friends,
half a dozen bloated tirades on the way to the movies,
the gas station, through the lipstick aisle at Sears,
a thousand reasons to reject science or god or both
until you’re done,
done in,
chewed up like a piece of sugarless gum,
bled out like an old brake line,
scooped out like a pumpkin,
all your insides dumped, bagged, tied with a twist,
taken to the curb,
your outside shell washed clean
and grinning.