Cucumbering a Sunbeam

by Emily Bowles

1.

For most people, Margaret Cavendish is a footnote[1] in literary history.
For most people, cucumbers are not fruit or flower because they are green.

2.

She terrified Woolf—raging voices, staged in volumes of a length only the
Uneditable Elite might afford to print, her “paper bodies,” she called them.

3.

Her husband’s body had produced more ephemeral works, and a treatise on
horseback riding, as well as two daughters, both older than the Duchess.

4.

I’ve been that woman, the same age as a man’s daughter by his first wife, and
like Mad Madge, I relish in cucumbers as much as others like cake.

5.

They wrote for their father, for their coterie closet drama, coveting ambition,
writing of cake when surely their servants had their hands in that batter.

6.

We do not pick our mothers, although we try to write and rewrite them. They
revered one, ridiculed the other, and each became one, hating what was other.

7.

Margaret was accustomed to that misogyny or would soon be. Her desires were limit-
less, cosmic, a cucumber overgrowing its plot, her novels overgrowing their plots.

8.

She had stood before the Royal Society, spoke out before that audience of satirzable
pseudo-scientific Men, Pepys’ pen ready to render her as the Object of their satire.

9.

Swift wrote not of Margaret but of the men who were “extracting sunbeams out of cucumbers.”
He made light of their science, mad enough, unstable in a stable with Gulliver, eating apples.

10.

There are no roses, no carnations that can survive a lack of light like this, and so I kill
the plants in my apartment, eat a cucumber, imagine that sunbeam—for, from her.

—————

[1] Seventeenth-century writer Margaret Cavendish was of ambiguous origins before her marriage to the slightly foppish William Cavendish, Duke of Newcastle, whose daughters from his previous marriage bettered their father as elegant writers of manuscript prose and poetry.  Margaret self-published wide-ranging books on philosophy, science, and more, while also writing seemingly impossible-to-perform plays, a utopian novel that explored many of her scientific theories, and a wild autobiography.

[Footnote to this footnote: like Woolf, I have feelings for her that inflect my version of her Story, as has had Every Historian Who Has Ever Pretended Objectivity, for Cavendish beginning perhaps with Pepys and somewhat later Ballard but extending indefinitely.]

Alice Walks Herself Back through the Adventure

by Margaret Rozga

Don’t believe your sister when she says you were asleep
and merely dreaming. Don’t hang around waiting
for the queen to take your head. Even if it grins,
don’t ask directions of a disappearing cat.
Don’t take tea at a table with many empty places.
If, tired and thirsty, you forget and seat yourself,
hold on through the whirlwind that follows.
Even if answers are riddles, ask your questions.

You can’t be everybody.

Ask deeper questions: how is it potions and biscuits
just happen to appear as needed? If there’s no one
to ask, don’t touch. Don’t forget the solution
to one problem may be the start of another.
Give yourself some credit. You found
better ways to manage keys and size.

Don’t follow rabbits on the run.
Don’t think books without pictures boring.
Don’t forget that green little girl you used to be.
Recognize the limit to backwards:

don’t try to be her again.

Looking through a box of photos

by Sebastian Santiago

I hold a picture of my mother,
the one where she’s splashing in
an inflatable pool in her front yard,
an unabashed smile on her face.

Strange to think she was once
only a girl.

I whisper,

Life will not be kind to you.

I want to lay in that pool with her,
and hold her like a dream.

I’m damaged goods mijo

she once said, as she drifted
off to sleep.

I press my lips to this picture.

From the other room,
I hear her laughing at
something on television.

What a time spent trying now

by Robin Long

What a time spent trying now

the pillars of past days—tip—
until I am crushed beneath

through parched lips, glittering dust
She comes

“bereft I was, of what I knew not,” She says,
of course

but hiding message in a music
is affliction in the night

We all know that it lives

We all know where to look

so we seek, we search
and the quiet conscience rests somewhere
just outside the reach
of narrowed arms, busted knuckles

I still have days I wake,
tuck my chin into my breastbone,
and seize patterned sheets
to stretch across eyelids
for hours

and only when the air sours of spent breath

and I clutch my throat with both my fists—

does the buried alive fight for me
on a morning I, myself, could not

————————————————————— 

Dickinson, Emily. “A loss of something ever felt I—”

Circa 1865. Unbound sheets. Sheet 48.

FR1072, J959

We are delighted to present this week’s selections from the Brain Mill Press Poetry Month Contest. We have received a lot of wonderful work via our submission portal, and these pieces by Samn Stockwell and Caleb Nichols stood out.

We hope you’ll enjoy these editors’ picks as much as we did.

Distance & Temerity

by Samn Stockwell

The sparrows were enamored
but sounded like a congregation of worried mothers.

Distance and Temerity flew
from Central Park to the bakery.
Like dark flakes, they fluttered to the ground
and ate crumbs of coffee cake and cinnamon buns.

Everyone emerged from the bakery
with white paper bags held out like lamps
and hot cups of coffee jiggling in the other hand.

Joggers zoomed by in black tights and headbands.
Fleet, said Distance.
Sweet as plums, agreed Temerity, inhaling.

After the joggers, the businesswomen, the businessmen
dragging brown briefcases
or swinging them like dull missiles.

Then, children going to school, the girls in pink and purple,
the boys in blue and red, with secrets like feathers.

The sidewalk was getting thin, a few shoppers and the homeless.

A snarl of chaff left as they leap?
Yes, remarked the other, they light and thunder.

Is there a sparrow waking at 2 a.m.,
knowing he’s alone? No.

Samn Stockwell has published in Agni, Ploughshares, and the New Yorker, among others. Her two books, Theater of Animals and Recital, won the National Poetry Series and the Editor’s Prize at Elixir, respectively. Recent poems are in Gargoyle & The Literary Review and are forthcoming in Plume and others.

Ken

by Caleb Nichols

Unsubscribe from everything, save hummingbird wings
and the waves of plague grass that salvage an afternoon.

Aim to create half as much as you maw, and
ken ye well a language not your own.

Face it once a day, the ebb tide, how even as it wanes
it pushes in, endlessly, until the moon unspools, unwinds.

Mute everyone, unfollow. Track daylight by the shadows on the wall.
Listen to the plague wind, savaging the afternoon, raising the dust.

Caleb Nichols is a writer and musician from California.  His poems have appeared in Unstamatic: A Micro Lit Mag, and his music has been featured on Paste and Out.  He records music along with his husband as one half of the indie pop duo Soft People, and tweets @seanickels.