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

Poetry Month Spotlight: Mauricio Kilwein Guevara

by | Apr 13, 2023 | NPM 2023, Poetry

Poetry Month Spotlight

Mauricio Kilwein Guevara

The White Top in the Basement

per Vittoria

This is what I remember: furiously pumping the wooden handle a dozen times, spinning the metal top in my grandparents’ basement until I made the universe, whir, release star-sparks. I can still recall the names of the newest constellations. Twist it Tight like a Fat Rat’s Tail. The Johnstown Flood. Watch-I’ll-Be-Hit-by-a-Car. Swallow of Fireflies. And my favorite, O, O, Camarón Tintantón.

My dervish threw sparks into space that were fairy green, match-strike yellow. Jinn were hiding in the threads of the azure sky.

Then always this before the aperture of a new day:

The asterism on the ceiling, close as untouchable, the shape of two arms folded, put me to sleep like music in a box:

تيتة

 

The Bridge

para Beatriz

His first surprise in this new America is unspoken:
Snow. It floats down out of the gray white up,
falling, touching his wings like puffs of chalk:
No more. More now. Falling cold slowly all
around him, like a million stars. He looks up
at his mother, who is changed.

……………………She is older in the snowlight,
smiling. Nieve. But her word comes only as a steam puff.
Language falling away, in the world becoming white.
The little beast is five years old. Everything
begins to shake and roar. Snow and beneath
his feet the world begins again. Ferrocarril,
she shouts out, like a horn or bell he cannot hear.

“The Bridge,” from Postmortem © 1994 by Maurice Kilwein Guevara, originally published by the University of Georgia Press, is reprinted by permission of Mauricio Kilwein Guevara.

 

Looking into My Mother’s Eyes, Waiting

 

with masks. ¿Can you tell,”
say the river emeralds,
“que estoy sonreindo?”

About Mauricio Kilwein Guevara

Mauricio Kilwein Guevara was born in Boyacá, Colombia, and raised in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He has published three collections of poetry and Autobiography of So-and -So, a volume of micro-fictions and prose poems. He has also published a book of literary translations in Madrid, Spain. His magical realist comedy, The Last Bridge/El último puente, received a fully staged reading Off-Broadway. He has taught fiction writing and poetry writing for many years in the graduate writing program at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee. In addition, he has been a visiting professor in Colombia, Cuba, Ecuador, and México. Excerpts from Kilwein Guevara’s soon-to-be completed novel, The Thieves of Guevara, have recently been published or are forthcoming in Washington Square Review, The Georgia Review, and Prairie Schooner. More at www.kilweinguevara.com.

National Poetry Month

Photo by Janet Jennerjohn

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.

Poetry Month Spotlight: Wendy Vardaman

by | Apr 5, 2023 | NPM 2023, Poetry, Reading

Poetry Month Spotlight

Wendy Vardaman

all my poems are old poems

 

all my poems are old poems, so during
the night I promise my trying-to-sleep & ruminating
self to write a sonnet this morning,
more or less to make the point that I still can.
even if I don’t choose to solidify experience
that way any more. they were snap shots, the poems I wrote.
a thousand or two. hundreds of sonnets.
notes on the children. marriage. rage. my aging

parents. to process my thoughts/
emotions/sensory overload. framed into hard
edged squares of story. I don’t know where this poem
is going. I never did. any more than we know
what’s next in life—the surprises, beautiful
and terrible. the constraints

 

meditation on impermanence

 

sometimes you’re zooming around scotland or barcelona. sometimes you’re home, looking out the window of your zoomroom while the rain falls, the ball of a clumsy left foot held by an office chair’s fork

sometimes you’re female. sometimes your feet stop working together

sometimes you’ve just had lunch with a friend at the Milwaukee Art Museum after falling for St. Dionysius. they summon you through vine & monstrance. you tell them you worry about the children, staggering toward adulthood. their story is your story

& then it isn’t

 

this is a story

 

one of us was echo
one narcissus

dear echo……..I miss

this is a story

both of us echo
neither narcissus

neither narcissus
nor echo
nor story neither

this a gap

…………this gap

………………….this

About Wendy Vardaman

Wendy Vardaman, wendyvardaman.com, works as a website manager and has published three collections of poems. In addition to poetry, her creative practice has focused on editing, prose writing, illustration, printmaking, book arts, and design. She served as poet laureate of Madison, Wisconsin, from 2012 to 2015 and volunteers as a designer, artist, and editor.

National Poetry Month
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.