Brain Mill Press was honored to get these five wonderful “Love or Fear” submissions to our final event for Poetry Month. Please read the final entries by Elizabeth Berry, Pam Faste, GB Gordon, Dylan Loring, and Karen Wellsbury, and tomorrow, we’ll announce an overall winner from both the April 17th and this April 30th Brain Mill Press celebrates Poetry Month poetry posts.
Stars in the Sky
Elizabeth Berry
Maybe your cancer has come backand that is why it is so hard to sleep and when you do sleepyou wake up with a throat full of sand and you stumbleacross the worn wood floors to the kitchen for waterand gulp it down by the glassful trying not to look at the windowbecause the moon might look back and once you lock eyes with itit’s hard not to notice the blanket of stars that spreads out forever
and there’s just something about a blanket of starsspreading out foreverthat is destroying youmaking your heart literally ache in your bodyas you yearn for a boy’sfat hand in your handhis face a moon shining back in a picturethat you keep hidden in a drawerwith all of the other sharp knivessafe therefrom stars raining down from skiesfrom windshields exploding on impact.
You rub the scars.Stare out the window.
Moment Before
Pam Faste
It’s like thisthat moment before I speak,or write or post or sendor walk into a room, andthen again inthe moment just after, but also beforeas I waitawareness etched in acidthat sizzling, light-headed anticipation ofyour attention,my wrongnessreflected in your eyesin yoursilence drawn back to an ugly, rock strewn beachthe wave caught at the apex of its curvebefore the rising roar,before the scalding onrushof shame
you
G. B. Gordon
your face of cream and steeland laughter, like water and wholeand your old, blue Volvo
brick and slanting light
framingmuscled gracedancing, breathless, like a good gallop
a lady’s dirty nailsand sun marksat the corners of your eyes
a taut feelinglike guitar stringsfine-tuning the sensesno eternityjust now
Love Poem
Dylan Loring
I can’t set out to write a love poembecause when I doI end up runningcheese through the grater.
I can’t set out to write a love poembecause it makes me feellike I’m invoking broad generalizationsinstead of interpersonal revelations.
I want to write a love poemand have the person it’s intended forread it in silencethen hug me.
I want to write a love poemfor one personso that that one person knowsit is a true love poem.
Love is likefinding a good sushi restaurantin the African desertassuming you’re really into sushi.
Love is likean agoraphobe leaving his housejust this onceand just for her.
Poetry is likeprose vomiting a sculpturethat the person you loveproceeds to appreciate.
Poetry is likea smiling severed deer headon a platterbut with words.
Poetry is likea bunch of similesdesperately attemptingto convey feeling.
This is a love poem,this is not a Hallmark card,and you can’t buy one of thoseduring my love poem.
This is a love poem,we are a love poem,we are a seriesof love poems.
This is a love poem,it is cheesy,admit thatyou love it.
Dylan Loring is an MFA candidate at Minnesota State University, Mankato, where he studies Poetry and Screenwriting. In addition, he hosts KMSU 89.7’s Weekly Reader author interview program and serves as Poetry Editor for the Blue Earth Review.
Grace and Tommy
Karen Wellsbury
Pa brought a puppy home, wrappedIn his coat, at Christmas remember that? Laughterbubbles up, while hands on the tablegrasp and twine, searching for a truthwhere’s my Tommy, he’s late, he’llmiss tea. Grandad died Nan, Tommy’sgone. Watch for recognition, hazy eyedremembrance, Tommy died?he’s in his room, don’t lie, and whena trick of the light looks like a smilewe have tea, I make believeit’s alright. Hand slaps table, fragilebrittle china white, her rage like flash fireshe fixedmy fissured heart, custard pourer supremeGrace beloved of Tommy,cocooned in kitchen warmth, teasated – hold my hand, pleaseknow me. Tommy needs his teashe flattens her skirt like my heart, myfirst love, took me to school, Itake her to bed.
For this year’s National Poetry Month, Brain Mill Press & Voices wants to add to your #TBR pile, sing siren songs of unsung heroes, and signal boost living poets we should be reading more. By the end of the month, we hope you will have acquired 30+ new books of poetry and that they continue to multiply in the darkness of your library. Explore new voices & new forms — re-read some old favorites — play if you liked this poet, you’ll like . . . the old-fashioned way, algorithm-free — just poetry lovers talking to poetry lovers, as the Universe intended. Happy #NaPoMo2019 from Brain Mill.
“A Meme Reimagined,” “The Sound + The Fury,” and “B (If I Should Have a Son)”
We are delighted to present this week’s selections from the Brain Mill Press Poetry Month Contest. We received many outstanding entries, from which these pieces by Paramita Vadhahong stood out. We hope you’ll enjoy them as much as we did.
Poems by Paramita Vadhahong
A Meme Reimagined: Love between the Gaps
the sound + the fury = the unwritten sister
B (If I Should Have a Son)
About Paramita Vadhahong
Paramita Vadhahong is a Thai teenage poet and writer. She has lived in Thailand, Bahrain, and Dubai, and is currently settled in Houston. Her work mainly focuses on female strength, queerness, and the struggles and triumph of creativity. She is a contributing writer on Mindfray and has self-published a poetry chapbook (Raise the Black). Her writing can also be seen on Quora and Medium.
BMP Celebrates National Poetry Month 2018
Maybe you have lines living in you. Maybe you’ve been walking around like the speaker in Maggie Smith’s “Good Bones”: “This place could be beautiful, / right? You could make this place beautiful.” Maybe you’ve been inspired by Isobel O’Hare’s erasures, and have an urge to address some things. Maybe you’ve woken up in the spiked night, with a line swimming out of the deep. Maybe you have a story to tell. Or, maybe you memorized Jericho Brown’s “Colosseum” and have been repeating to yourself: “I cannot locate the origin / Of slaughter, but I know / How my own feels, that I live with it / And sometimes use it / To get the living done . . .”
These poetic efforts have touched me in the last few months, in that strange trigonometry of language, chance, and seeking, that we readers and writers do. Brown’s lines resonated with me, brought me low, and offered something – if not quite comfort, then a kind of recognition.
Brain Mill Press is so pleased to present our first set of poets participating in Brain Mill Press Celebrates Poetry Month 2015. This group of poets responded to the poem prompt WORK. We’re moved and honored to present these poets and their poems to you.
On Growing Up
Elizabeth Berry
On the day that my grandfather died my grandmother lit a cigarette looked down at the stricken faces of her children and said well, we still have this farm to take care of. My mother, then eight, looked out the window at the cows that crowded the fence, waiting for food, for release from the swollen udders, and beyond at the hay, tall in the fields, and at the tractors resting in the sheds, waiting for the long legs of morning to walk up and turn the key.
At eighteen, my mother, as lean and brown as a leather strap covered her face and veiled her reasons to follow my father a hundred miles from home.
Three kids in three years.
Mortgage
yard
car
pool
PTA
Low money, no money, grocery store clerk, pregnant daughter, baby crying all night, no lights, pay that bill but another’s coming.
And so it went for thirty years. Yet every month they would drive back over the mountain as visitors, and sit, drinking tea until the cows moaned and the others rose to go to work.
Occasionally, reluctant to unclasp ourselves from the circle of laughter and soft shadows that floated down from the familiar ceilings, we would follow them to the cool concrete floors, and clanging gates of the milking barn. My mother, face lit by the glow of the yellow interior lights, moved quickly to lead, to coax the herd into position and nodded with satisfaction when they lined up, and did their jobs.
Refracting
Audrey T. Carroll
Not the gentle crashing of ocean againstgrains of glass or the air againstphotosynthesizing branch
The crashing of steel against steel,wheel and rail complaining againstone another until one topples the othersends it careening
Time folds in on itself.
State to state or borough to borough?Concerns for type of steel bullet give way toconcerns for a mother traveling, perhapsby train that day
Rushing to an officethat no kindergarten teacher should have—Principal, maybe? Professor?Hers? Mine?
Time folds in on itself.
Longer I lookin the mirror, more I see herreflection staring back inthe way nose widens to smile,hand-me-down teacher’s clothes
Time folds in on itself.
Wake unsure what state I’m in.
Audrey T. Carroll is an MFA candidate with the Arkansas Writer’s Program. She graduated with a BA in Creative Writing from Susquehanna University. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Fiction International, Hermeneutic Chaos, Foliate Oak, Writing Maps’ A3 Review, The Cynic Online Magazine, and others.
Dedication Is Gold
Megan Ryan
I’ve started in schoolTaking detailed notesThat covered every pageStudying for hoursPreparing for tests.
I was an overachieverGetting A’s and B’sWas a valedictorian in 8thThen saludictorian in 12th.
College was the challengeTaking on monstrous coursesThat tested my skillsTo see if I had what it takes.
I tumbled and fell,But I didn’t give inKept climbing to the topTo reach the peak of successAs the sun shined upon me.
Five years passedGot my degreeNow I needed a jobEasier said than done.
Kept searching high and lowBeen applying everywherePracticing and improvingFor upcoming interviews.
Though nothing has come alongBeen about three years nowYet I’m not giving upI’m sure the time will comeWhen my dream job appearsFor this hard-working achiever.
Code of Iron
Kim Solem
Men of ironClimb the skySome will fallA long way to dieNo single one of themHas ever screamed or criedIn agony and horrorOn their deadly diveBecause Iron WorkersLive and die by this code‘When you’re falling’‘Meet your death bold’
Once Upon a Holiday Moon
Kim Solem
The Monday after HalloweenI laid down the law to my employees“You’d better be here on the jobOn both Thanksgiving and Christmas Eve”
And if you don’t like what I have to sayLook for someplace else that paysCause here in the good old USAIt’s your boss’s way, or the highway”
Much to my surprise no one protestedNot one dared even chirpExcept for old Mable,Who slowly turned roundBent over,And lifted up her skirt
Pulling down her bloomersAll the way to her anklesShe looked over her shoulderThen said with a smirk,“You can kiss my old bare assCause this girl won’t be a slaveFor some asshole of a jerk”
I was shocked to say the leastAnd before I could show Mabel the doorAll my other employeesTurned round, then bent overAnd let their pants hit the floor
Now I ask you my fellow AmericansWhat sort of countryAllows folks to moon their boss?Let alone even dareTry to back talk?
No wonder we send jobs to ChinaAnd some to CameroonNo one there would try to moonA rich and powerful tycoon
My tale of woe gets worseAfter filling out all those pink slipsWhen I left my office, what did I find?All my employees picketingIn long strike line
And you know who was leading it?That damn old MableHolding a hickory stick“Oh Shit!”
So heed my warningMy fellow entrepreneursBefore telling folks to dance to your tuneThere just might be oneEmployee like old MableWho’s not afraidTo show you the moon
Author’s Note: Forgive me but within every pretentious poet, there is a thirteen year old, dying to get out.
More Women on the Board
Karen Wellsbury
Not enough women on the board,mainly made of men.How they will be lured,not enough women on the board?Is this sexism to be cured,to break the male dominated hoard.Not enough, women on the boardmainly maid of men?
For this year’s National Poetry Month, Brain Mill Press & Voices wants to add to your #TBR pile, sing siren songs of unsung heroes, and signal boost living poets we should be reading more. By the end of the month, we hope you will have acquired 30+ new books of poetry and that they continue to multiply in the darkness of your library. Explore new voices & new forms — re-read some old favorites — play if you liked this poet, you’ll like . . . the old-fashioned way, algorithm-free — just poetry lovers talking to poetry lovers, as the Universe intended. Happy #NaPoMo2019 from Brain Mill.
The Matador Review, an online literature and art quarterly, launched in January 2016 and is physically based in Chicago, Illinois. Their purpose is “to promote ‘alternative work’ from both art and literature,” and they regularly publish poetry, fiction, flash, nonfiction, and art features. In seeking work from both emerging and established artists, publishing interviews, and continuing to promote the work of their contributors through the Matador blog, The Matador Review seeks to be a “cultural conservationist for the alternative world.”
Perusing the The Matador Review, its literature and imagery, is a sensory pleasure – there are the voices and bodies we inhabit. Sutures are evident, as are scars.
For this National Poetry Month, we invite you to explore The Matador Reviewand discover it for yourself: the Spring issue is available now.
torrin a. greathouse is a genderqueer trans womxn & cripple-punk from Southern California. She is the Editor-in-Chief of Black Napkin Press. She is a Best of Net, Best New Poets, & Pushcart Prize nominee, and the author of one chapbook,Therǝ is a Case That I Ɐm (Damaged Goods Press, 2017). When they are not writing, their hobbies include pursuing a bachelor’s degree, awkwardly drinking coffee at parties, & trying to find some goddamn size 13 heels. torrin was recently given a shoutoutby Kaveh Akbar in The Paris Review‘s Poetry Rx column, and readers can read much more of their work at https://tagreathousepoetry.wixsite.com/home.
BMP Celebrates National Poetry Month 2018
Maybe you have lines living in you. Maybe you’ve been walking around like the speaker in Maggie Smith’s “Good Bones”: “This place could be beautiful, / right? You could make this place beautiful.” Maybe you’ve been inspired by Isobel O’Hare’s erasures, and have an urge to address some things. Maybe you’ve woken up in the spiked night, with a line swimming out of the deep. Maybe you have a story to tell. Or, maybe you memorized Jericho Brown’s “Colosseum” and have been repeating to yourself: “I cannot locate the origin / Of slaughter, but I know / How my own feels, that I live with it / And sometimes use it / To get the living done . . .”
These poetic efforts have touched me in the last few months, in that strange trigonometry of language, chance, and seeking, that we readers and writers do. Brown’s lines resonated with me, brought me low, and offered something – if not quite comfort, then a kind of recognition.
We are excited to share poetry by Rita Feinstein and Sarah McCartt-Jackson, whose chapbooks have been selected by editor Kiki Petrosino for inclusion in the Mineral Point Poetry Series this fall. Rita Feinstein’s Life on Dodge will be available October 16, and Sarah McCartt-Jackson’s Calf Canyonreleases November 13.
Poems by Rita Feinstein
from Life on Dodge
When you left, there was a sound like the scraping of a dagger being unsheathed from my heart, and in the left-behind hollow, a red bat came to roost. Good, I thought, because bats go where moths go and moths go where the light is, which means there’s still something like a streetlamp in me, however dusty and guttering. But where its corona bleeds to black, you can still hear it—the sleek shriek of steel against bone, the infinite echo of you pulling away.
You have gone, and so can I. I can go to a red planet with no name, no coordinates. There is no wind here, no dust, nowhere to stake a flag. No rotation, no view. No ocean under the crust and no ice at the poles. There is no gravity, no atmosphere, and no one to name its craters. There is not a robot to help repair the spaceship I don’t have. There are no giant worms in the sand. There is no sand. There is nothing here but not enough of it.
This planet is my home now— might as well name it. I name it Dodge, in the hope that someday I will get the hell out of it. Or that it will get out of me. It lodges deeply in my hips, constricting its fist. It’s a hard, round ache in my breasts. I can taste it on the back of my tongue, sour like beef blood. The last time I hurt this much, we were too poor even for a bath plug, so you filled a plastic bag with sand and let the drain suck it into place. It was the best you could do. The iron-orange water held, but so did the pain.
About Rita Feinstein
Rita Feinstein is a DC-based writer and teacher. Her work has appeared in Grist, Willow Springs, and Sugar House, among other publications, and has been nominated for Best of the Net and Best New Poets. She received her MFA from Oregon State University.
It begins with drink. Our eyes drink color and reflect it back to our brains, which drink shape. Shape drinks shade, leafshadows scrambling on their stems like starlings stuck to wire. Wire drinks voices, spliced threads chopped apart and ribosomed back together in a winding ladder propped against our earlobes. Our earbones drink the wet sounds of leaves unfolding newborn fists, the desperate sound of fish gills in a boat bucket. Our hands drink the wormblood and hook. Our foreheads drink sweat, our forearms hair and knuckle. Our ankles the mosquito tongue, dry of our neighbor’s blood. Boatplanks drink scales and shoe soles and cigarette ash and oceanfog and the heat of sunlogged turtles, which drink the cloverstem milk, which drinks the roothairs, which drink the cavelight, which drinks the batwing, drinks the limestone, drinks the fossilbone slipped between a molten stone harvest. The inner core drinks iron-tasting pennies, nickel. Not enough liquid in the world to fill its iron core. And this is how in drought I learn a rogue billet does not raise a doe’s eye, how a doe does not lift from drinking.
Wildfire
We watched the fires spread.
Neighbors set up their lawn chairs
to watch their neighbors’ houses burn.
Which is how I caught a bottle
to the face when I threw a cigarette
butt out the window. And how
the bottle shattered and fractured
the windshield after my jaw and how later
he didn’t remember (or said he didn’t)
how the windshield cracked,
and I told him,
and he said that wasn’t true.
And so it wasn’t true.
Creston
I did not see the moonwashed lake behind our trailer or the yellow finch in the avocado tree. I did not see the fire, the smoke of which we watched from the mustard thistle lawn. I did not see the coyotes eating the dead cattle or the California mouse while it was still alive. I did not see old Ted (all thirty-three and married) wreck on Shell Creek Road with a nineteen-year-old passenger in lip gloss and cutoffs, when it was not just ten days before he took me to a baby’s grave on our way back from buying a pack of cigarettes, and me seventeen. The freeze on the vineyard edges. The lizard drinking from the wild pig bleed. The shotgun slug through the throat of a barn owl, hanging by a wing from its owl house.
I saw what happens when girls—who are not supposed to—witness their babies’ faces. I saw the helicopters circling like released seeds, their gondola buckets of water dangling. I saw the cattle troughs dry as the Camatta creekbed and cow bodies bulked in the live oak shade. I saw a peregrine falcon tearing the mouse bones, beak to skull, hunger coagulated in its nares. A flatbed truck with whiskey and paper cups, an empty graveyard with a moon big as a belly. Reservoirs turned to sulfur. Pig hooves charred in the barbecue pit. A fifty-three-year-old owl perched in the left ventricle of my heart.
BMP Celebrates National Poetry Month 2018
Maybe you have lines living in you. Maybe you’ve been walking around like the speaker in Maggie Smith’s “Good Bones”: “This place could be beautiful, / right? You could make this place beautiful.” Maybe you’ve been inspired by Isobel O’Hare’s erasures, and have an urge to address some things. Maybe you’ve woken up in the spiked night, with a line swimming out of the deep. Maybe you have a story to tell. Or, maybe you memorized Jericho Brown’s “Colosseum” and have been repeating to yourself: “I cannot locate the origin / Of slaughter, but I know / How my own feels, that I live with it / And sometimes use it / To get the living done . . .”
These poetic efforts have touched me in the last few months, in that strange trigonometry of language, chance, and seeking, that we readers and writers do. Brown’s lines resonated with me, brought me low, and offered something – if not quite comfort, then a kind of recognition.
We are excited to share poetry by Wren Hanks and Tracy Mishkin, whose chapbooks have been selected by editor Kiki Petrosino for inclusion in the Mineral Point Poetry Series this fall. Wren Hanks’s The Rise of Genderqueerwill be available August 14, and Tracy Mishkin’s This Is Still Lifereleases September 18.
Poems by Wren Hanks
from The Rise of Genderqueer
It’s her mouth on my cock in a unisex bar stall / my hand squeezing his cock under the greasy table / it’s my girlfriend on the marble countertop / while I’m breaking a wooden spoon / against her ass / Daddy, it’s me in a car / at 16 / convincing a Catholic boy / to put his hands on my breasts / it’s that you think / I’m a dyke / when you see my shaved head / like definitions / will protect anyone / from me / Daddy, I’m coming / for your daughters / I’m coming for your sons / coming for the dog whistle genders / in between / perhaps I am / the dog whistle / in between / Daddy Pence / don’t wait up
Dear Daddy Pence, meet me at Olive Garden
We’ll compare notes on nuptial bliss / on nights staring at Seven of Nine’s tits / while our wives drink reasonable / thimbles of wine / on ironing shirts / (tomatoes off the vine, Daddy, / and garlic bread too) / on spitting our Crest into those sinks / rimmed / with cat hair / I’ll take your hand / and ask you how long it’s been / really / since one look / at a man’s / brought your pulse up / I know the answer, already, Daddy / It’s the camera-ready red / this soldier’s aiming for
Daddy Pence, when you kiss your wife is it like
stars and stripes / your tongue an eagle’s wing / no wait a talon / do you make her mute, daddy / the way you wanna make me / a silent statistic / de-transitioned with those / chewable / bubblegums hips / Daddy, were you ever / the beauty / on someone’s bed / have you ever been / a fucking object
About Wren Hanks
Wren Hanks is the author of Prophet Fever (Hyacinth Girl Press) and Ghost Skin (Porkbelly Press). A 2016 Lambda Emerging Writers Fellow, his recent work appears in Best New Poets 2016, Foglifter, Jellyfish Magazine, The Wanderer, and elsewhere. He is an associate editor for Sundress Publications and co-edited Curious Specimens, an anthology of the strange and uncanny. His third chapbook, gar child, is forthcoming from Tree Light Books. He lives in Brooklyn, and you can find him on twitter @suitofscales.
Poems by Tracy Mishkin
from This Is Still Life
The Deadweight Machine
As if a tectonic shift has dumped a mountain on his chest, my husband slumps in the easy chair. Five weeks until the homeowners insurance drops us, stacks of useful junk around the yard. The deadweight machine measures how you hold up against tension and compression.
When he begins to snore like Rip Van Winkle, I imagine an organic grocer’s typo has created a display of orgasmic blueberries. I eat them all without paying. A man in a green apron restocks the shelves with tender hands.
Before the war, people weighed beginning again in a new language against the coming storm. Every time I think of leaving, he catches a death rattle in my car, stops the house from flooding, sweet-talks a raccoon out the kitchen door.
This is Still Life
The house has a fresh coat of pain. Screwdriver and utility knife abandoned on the bed. Drawers choked with plastic forks. Receipts, seeds, and batteries. Needles, carpet tacks, an open blade. Red string streaming from cabinets—the battle flag of a man who throws nothing away.
I should have split when I first saw his apartment, crammed with power tools and old TVs. Barely space to sleep. But we weren’t sleeping, we were burning. Falling. More room in my heart for crazy than I knew.
My mother knows I’d rather get wet than wait. She warns me not to fight to reach the items on the highest shelf. Lightning isn’t fair, she says. Arugula doesn’t make it healthy. When you need a Phillips, all you find are flatheads. She calls my house memento mori: orchids, bonsai, sun-bleached boards.
Stumbling Through
After the yellow tape and the dark blood, after the wallet with our family photos is released, after three days of paid bereavement pass and the jar goes round at work for casket funds, after I dream of identifying the body, after the cops come back to question us again, after praise for the Lord and the embalmer’s skill, after whispers of revenge and today we do not mourn, then the first breath without a sob.
About Tracy Mishkin
Tracy Mishkin is a call center veteran with a PhD and a graduate of the MFA program in Creative Writing at Butler University. She is the author of two previous chapbooks, I Almost Didn’t Make It to McDonald’s (Finishing Line Press, 2014) and The Night I Quit Flossing (Five Oaks Press, 2016). She been nominated twice for a Pushcart — both times by Parody — and published in Raleigh Review and Rat’s Ass Review.
BMP Celebrates National Poetry Month 2018
Maybe you have lines living in you. Maybe you’ve been walking around like the speaker in Maggie Smith’s “Good Bones”: “This place could be beautiful, / right? You could make this place beautiful.” Maybe you’ve been inspired by Isobel O’Hare’s erasures, and have an urge to address some things. Maybe you’ve woken up in the spiked night, with a line swimming out of the deep. Maybe you have a story to tell. Or, maybe you memorized Jericho Brown’s “Colosseum” and have been repeating to yourself: “I cannot locate the origin / Of slaughter, but I know / How my own feels, that I live with it / And sometimes use it / To get the living done . . .”
These poetic efforts have touched me in the last few months, in that strange trigonometry of language, chance, and seeking, that we readers and writers do. Brown’s lines resonated with me, brought me low, and offered something – if not quite comfort, then a kind of recognition.
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