my daughteris messingwith her hairwith her newbody
at the mirror
old dogwarming my sleep
and a memoryheld betweenthe fingertips
smoothpurple glassbead
ii.
how slowly
my heart and lungs
the shining reeds filled
with grey sunwith lichen stone
if i scrub the linensif i apply the maskbrush out the knots –oh
dusty banjo
your voicea spiderleg ahummingbirdwing
iii.
at the edge of the playground the ice was forming its beautiful shapes and crackling up under a black spruce where i could tell that it wanted to love me that it could not did not love me but there were all sorts of voices roaming around in the sunlight in the crystals and i caught one and dropped it into my pocket where it remained i can still hear it burning there
iv.
envythe gardena white rosebrowning
photographserrated leaf
and grandfather’sprize mountain goatsharpeninghorn
and it was earlywhen i followed youinto the languageinto the circle of men
with my thick hide
and smokethe censerhuffingbeardtongue (a certainviolet)
chanting
v.
no, noflux
this morninggreylight
— far away the girlis dead —is dead is dead is
deadeadeadeadeadeadead
robinin the yard
vii.
my riverwalk my thinleaf my alder my rhododendron fungus and canker and salmonberry ghost in and out of the goldleaves with her button jar with her jam jar jelly jar pie tin the ground is the same ground moving and loving and the faraway roar of the river i walked in the dieback root rot duff and sweet humus woven into my skin my palms my spine my heartaloneafraid i was just a kid myself in the autumntime in the leafmold in the shame the detritus
viii.
daughteryour slim waist
at night
the gardenarrivesso lovely so
your cuppedhands
the stubborn nasturtium
Born and raised in Anchorage, Caroline Goodwin moved to the San Francisco Bay Area from Sitka, Alaska, in 1999 to attend Stanford as a Wallace Stegner Fellow in poetry. She teaches at California College of the Arts and the Stanford Writer’s Studio and is currently serving as San Mateo County’s first Poet Laureate. Her most recent work is Peregrine from Finishing Line Press.
BMP Celebrates National Poetry Month
If “love calls us to the things of this world,” then poetry too can call us to think about challenging questions, difficult situations, and social justice, implicating and engaging the reader with the world we live in, in the hope that this engagement is a step toward wrestling with our better selves.
We are delighted to present the winner of April’s Brain Mill Press Celebrates Poetry Month Contest for 2016:
“Grave Robber Digs with a Pen” by Imani Davis.
We received submissions from nearly eighty individual poets of a very high caliber, from which poetry month coordinator C. Kubasta selected the winning poem, as well as short and long lists of finalists (see below).
We are grateful to C. Kubasta for her hard work in organizing our poetry month event, as well as to all of the contributors, contest entrants, and readers for making this such a rich and wonderful month. If, after reading Imani Davis’s winning poem, you’re in the mood for still more wonderful poetry, check out our editors’ choice picks for week one, week two, and week three, and investigate the full list of poetry month essays and poems.
–Ruthie Knox & Mary Ann Rivers, Brain Mill Press Publishers
***
And what an April Poetry Month it was. Here at Brain Mill we posted poems and essays, conversations between poets and lovers of poetry, and shared love far and wide. Entries for our poetry contest arrived from all over the world, keeping us nourished all month long.
I remember once when I misspelled “playwright” my teacher gave me this helpful device: It’s playwright, like wrought iron, because that’s how hard they work on their craft. (He was a theatre person. I never misspelled it again). But why don’t poets, then, have some difficult-to-predict spelling? Something that suggests red-glow-heat, twisting metal, long-handled tools and the long cool in the ashy water?
No matter. The poems I kept coming back to did just this. The tension between language and form was always there, deftly handled, turned and smoothed until the poem could not be in any form but this one. And here and there the wright left barbs for the reader to find, a moment that stops her mid-line, breathless, the body of the poem waiting with her.
When a Black ______ dies and they last breath is played on repeat, must we still paint the forest? I debate this with my hands.
They say Ain’t nobody else to remember the blood. I say they ain’t the ones bleeding.
I interrogate every poem about the dead. There they go, robbing the grave and settling in the boy’s place.
What do we grow with this? While I ask, the poem picks lilies off the casket.
The grief is not all (a) mine.
Vulture’s talon ( be ) artist in my hands say look how the skull shines in your light.
Watch: ____. _____. You ain’t flinch? How you used to forcing reincarnation?
I get it. Shut the news off and the screen’s a mirror. You don’t ask to be reflected in the black of its pause.
You here though: Dense tangle of light hostage
in God’s 3 dimensions. Or maybe not You. (the faces all blur together,
Ghost shadowed and inadequate. It’s hard to tell the difference.)
My hands mimic a bullet’s carnivorous twitch. Say it ain’tme, but it could be. It ain’t meyet.
I say the fear of the bullet is not the bullet itself.
Some folk never get the chance to flinch. I translate the body of a boy into language.
The lines will never break as clean as his bones.
After the show, the check cuts like the scalpel do.
I eat. I buy my mother something
she can never lose. It is not security.
Imani Davis is Black magic. She currently works on Urban Word NYC’s Youth Leadership Board. Her poetry has appeared in Rookie Magazine and the occasional trash can.
Poetry Month Contest Finalists
Shortlist
“There ain’t nothing like Breck for Stop n Stare Hair” by Jessica Jacobs (also an Editors’ Choice Pick)
“The Frequency of a Periodic Function” by Jen Karetnick
“Watching the Glassmakers” by Daniel Lassell
“Waves Like Breath / There Is Finally Quiet” by Meghan Sterling
BMP Celebrates National Poetry Month
If “love calls us to the things of this world,” then poetry too can call us to think about challenging questions, difficult situations, and social justice, implicating and engaging the reader with the world we live in, in the hope that this engagement is a step toward wrestling with our better selves.
and as the hiss of the last can of Sprite sizzles from your hand
I will drink your extra Sprite and I will walk your dog I will
love you under the yellow basement lights of the DMV
I will let you feed me foreign candies in the taxi to the airport
and on the plane I will give you the window I will let you
hold the Skymall and someday the lap pool darling someday
the smallest book lamp you’ll ever need I will never read Home
& Gardens I promise you I will never let the literature of housewives
bring us down even with an apron or a minivan I will
still spank you gently and always tell you love you when
you are walking towards the door I never love you more than then
Tracey Knapp’s first full-length collection of poems, Mouth, won the 42 Miles Press Poetry Award in 2014 and was published in September 2015. Tracey has received scholarships from the Tin House Writers’ Workshop and the Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fund. Her work has appeared in Best New Poets 2008 and 2010, Five Points, Red Wheelbarrow Review, The New Ohio Review, The Minnesota Review, and elsewhere.
If “love calls us to the things of this world,” then poetry too can call us to think about challenging questions, difficult situations, and social justice, implicating and engaging the reader with the world we live in, in the hope that this engagement is a step toward wrestling with our better selves.
I stopped being a writer; today I have the words to tell you why.
I don’t write because I’m being watched. I turn off the words; I numb the feelings; I avoid the associations; I distract the thinking; I step away from the situation. I am here to document the ways in which I have chosen silence over action.
Community
The first time I went to Friday prayers after moving to Chicago, no one said salaamto me. I thought, “Is this how a Desi gets treated in a predominately Arab masjid?” I remembered Dad telling me about the young, connectionless men at his masjid. He said, “They keep coming and going out of nowhere – they must be spies. No one talks to them.”
He asked me, when I told him about volunteering at an Islamic nonprofit, where their charitable donations went. He said these organizations get in trouble for sending their money abroad and their members get labeled terrorist sympathizers.
Family
I text my sisters that I have a thing to tell them that’s not bad but I feel weird telling them on the phone so remind me to tell you when we all next meet (days, weeks, months?) so whoever the FBI has assigned to read this group text won’t find out (can’t I have some secrets, FBI agent?).
Love
Before we got married, Neema seriously asked me if I was an FBI agent. “You’re perfect,” he said. Too perfect, he didn’t say.
You could say we’re paranoid; but we’ll say we’re up-to-date on our news and have learned our histories. Connection is risk.
Heart
I decided to practice radical empathy after Michael Brown was shot. I did not and do not have a hard time feeling empathy for protesters, for rioters, for the rage that leads people into the streets or for the rage that leads them to want objects to burn. I never wrote that I felt this way but I do feel this way and have no difficulty conjuring these emotions (but do struggle to make them disappear).
I practiced empathizing with George Zimmerman and with Darren Wilson and with Timothy Loehmann and with the officers of Waller County Jail and with Dante Servin and with the Baltimore Police Department and with Jason Van Dyke and with and with and with and with and with
I didn’t like it and I succeeded. But that’s a different story.
I am going to qualify here because if I do not you will wonder that having empathy for someone does not mean excusing someone.
I tried practicing radical empathy after James Foley was executed.
I am trying not to stop myself from writing this.
I tried practicing radical empathy after James Foley was executed. That empathy exists as a heaviness in my chest and a shortness of my breath. That empathy pushes at the edges of my heart but I am scared to let it in. I feel it as a failure of my humanity and I fear it as a failure of our humanity. I do not Google ISIS because I do not want anyone to know I Google ISIS. I do not know the stories or motivations or language of the humans-not-monsters who constitute ISIS because I do not think I can subsequently assert their humanity without putting my own into question. Empathy is risk. I am not a monster.
Mouth
But I will own to being a coward; by now you know this. In my circles we talk about strategies for change: sometimes you want to be a Malcolm and sometimes you want to be a Martin. Mostly I am a chump choking back both my words of violence and my words of peace.
I remember back to my ethics class in journalism school. The question was whether journalists should not publish information that the government asks them not to publish for security. “Well of course,” said the class, “for security.”
For. Whose. Security?
I do not remember agreeing to value our lives more than their lives. I do remember my question knocking up against the insides of my teeth as I kept my mouth shut. I do remember remembering Abu Ghraib and air strikes against civilians and the Pentagon Papers and the people like me who were killed for the security of people like me. I do remember not saying that I thought our allegiance as journalists was to the truth.
I grew out of wanting to argue to argue. I do not hold these ideas as objects in my mind with dimensions I can manipulate and play with. I feel them in my gut and they bubble up as bile in my mouth. I do not want to taste this publicly in our class discussion or over coffee or as a Facebook comment. I do not want the acid that is burning holes in my stomach to sting in polite company. Would you even understand that while I skinned my knees on the same playgrounds as American soldiers and while my livelihood is tied up in American interests they serve, my mouth also prays the same prayers as those Arabs and Afghans and Pakistanis and Persians we are meant to fear? Maybe you could not understand me but you do suspect me in my skinny jeans and brown skin.
Hands
Understand this: I have written. And I have deleted. And deleted and deleted.
Eyes
I know I am watched. As a consequence, I decided to restrict my speech and my press and my pursuit of happiness. I have been silent, but I have not been blind. I, too, have been watching.
When I was a kid, I used my indoor voice a lot, even when I was outside. It didn’t feel natural to me to be loud, to yell. My mom taught me that I don’t need to be loud to get my point across.
My mom also taught me and my siblings that it’s important to call people out on their bullcrap. “I hate injustice,” she would say. Unfortunately, when you’re a woman—especially a woman of color—speaking your mind about things that are wrong is deemed a problem.
When you’re a woman—especially a woman of color—speaking your mind about things that are wrong is deemed a problem.
In Blythe Baird’s slam poem “Pocket Sized Feminism,” she says that she hates keeping her feminism in her pocket and only bringing it out at women’s studies classes or slam poetry events. “I want people to like me more than I want to change the world,” she writes. That is how our society tries to mold us: Go with the flow, even if you see that things are hitting the fan. If you dodge it, it will go away.
We hesitate to voice our opinions on subjects that are important to us because the media has put this idea in our heads that we should be “cool” girls or girlfriends who don’t bother guys with our “silly” issues—like feminism—or else we will be a downer. Discussing why we need to close the pay gap or why we need to stop the push of rape culture is burdening men with opinions and conversations that make them uncomfortable—that’s what we learn, and it’s a deeply problematic idea.
In an interview about the Black Lives Matter movement, how feminism has shaped her, and the importance of owning herself, Johnetta Elzie (@nettaaaaaaaa on Twitter) says of negative responses to her work, “I don’t live a fairytale life. I don’t live a celebrity life. There are people out there that want me dead.” Here’s a young woman who is making the necessary moves to bring attention to issues such as police brutality and racism, and people want her dead? I thought it was supposed to be important for every citizento fight against injustice. Or is that only true when you’re white and male?
We hesitate to voice our opinions on subjects that are important to us because the media has put this idea in our heads that we should be “cool” girls or girlfriends who don’t bother guys with our “silly” issues—like feminism.
But women who exchange indoor for outdoor voices must expect a lot of resistance, especially in the Internet age.
When Harvard professor Danielle Allen wrote a piece called “The Moment of Truth: We Must Stop Trump,” she received racist, sexist, and even anti-Semitic tweets from Donald Trump supporters. “It was a prompt for the trolls,” she said. While this kind of reaction would cause some people to log off of Twitter altogether, it didn’t deter Allen. For her, it was a chance to show others the dangerously ethno-nationalist views his supporters share.
Women who exchange indoor for outdoor voices must expect a lot of resistance, especially in the Internet age.
When seventeen-year-old Amandla Stenberg posted her project, “Don’t Cash Crop on My Cornrows,” where she discussed the problems of cultural appropriation of black culture, comments about her being an “angry black girl,” “stupid,” and even “racist” went flying. Women of color who air their views on feminism, racism, and misogyny online are routinely bullied by those who would silence us.
In a world that preaches that it wants you to stand up for what you believe in, the fact that there are people who will harass you for doing so is perplexing. When I see the constant nonsense that women put up with online and in person for taking action in their beliefs, I feel exhausted for them. It can be mentally and emotionally draining trying to educate people and create a dialogue with them on important issues when they don’t want to make an effort. Being ignorant is much easier than being woke.
In an interview with Rookie Magazine, Rowan Blanchard talks about how she learned to stop apologizing for herself. “It has felt safer and less terrifying to silence myself to a degree … I have treated, specifically male feelings and ego, as superior and more fragile than my own.” I felt the same way growing up, and in some ways still do. I’ve had to learn how to stop myself from rethinking how I sound and how I act when I put someone in their place, especially when that person is a guy. If I don’t, I find myself pulling back and thinking that I sound kind of bitchy. I end up feeling bad, and I forget the reason why I told the other person off to begin with. There are times when I subconsciously try to keep my tone of voice low, even if I’m passionate about something, because I’m afraid of coming across as angry.
Women of color who air their views on feminism, racism, and misogyny online are routinely bullied by those who would silence us.
We’ve been taught to put our feelings on the back burner and to protect other people’s feelings, even when they are hurting us. We learn from this that what we have to say doesn’t matter—unless it benefits the majority. I’ve come to understand, though, that apologizing for how I feel doesn’t get me anywhere. If I genuinely hurt someone’s feelings, I’ll apologize. But if you’re intimidated by my opinion or presence, I’m not apologizing for it.
When you’re a woman of color, not only do you have to be conscious of possibly hurting a man’s feelings and ego, but you have to do the same with white people’s feelings. That’s why when we talk about the systemic effects of racism and sexism in our society, we are told to shut up and that we’re the reason racism still exists. Really? How can you say that we need to have an open and honest discussion about race, but when we bring it up, we’re the racists? It’s a move that favors those with power, who control the discussion by refusing to let it happen.
When I see women like Netta and Amandla on the covers of magazines, and young black women thanking them for being an inspiration, it makes me feel good. It reminds me that even when people try to stifle us with stereotypes like that of “Angry black woman,” call us derogatory names, and even threaten our wellbeing, we can’t let them win by keeping quiet.
Use your outdoor voice. Speak up. Get involved. Do what feels right to you. Why should we apologize for simply existing? We were brought into this world. The fact that we are here on this Earth is validation that we deserve our space.
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