by mainbrain@brainmillpress.com | Jan 30, 2019 | LGBTQIA+, NPM 2016, Poetry
Everybody needs a beloved. Some
look beyond and above. My baby died
in my arms like a Martian, his ribs
imploded into the oven of his chest.
Away he went, godlovvum. That was
10,000 years ago. My baby and I posed
nude amidst primitive trees. He pecked
my cheek and it caved. A feathered lizard
leapt into his arms, and it gored him. Today,
I have only his latex spacesuit. Today,
I think god how I loved once his body
as it materialized before me, spoke to me,
kissed me inquisitively. I loved wildly
when last he was here to allow me.
After coming twice, he vanished; have you
seen my ancient astronaut? He was here once;
he was the dunce in the high school play.
He was always watching crotches. From space,
he could see my heartbeat through the nape
of my neck, blow smooth my wavy hair.
I went back to where we met; he wasn’t there—
but the pond we strolled around still lay
like a victim under the cypress, goslings dotting
its all-consuming blackness like defenseless stars.
About Greg Allendorf
Greg Allendorf is originally from Cincinnati, OH. His poems have appeared in or are forthcoming from such journals as Smartish Pace, Subtropics, The Portland Review, Narrative Northeast, Gigantic Sequins, The Hawaii Review, and Memorious: A Journal of New Verse and Fiction. His chapbook, Fair Day in an Ancient Town, was recently selected by Kiki Petrosino for the Mineral Point Chapbook Series from Brain Mill Press. He holds graduate degrees from The University of Cincinnati and Purdue University. He currently lives in Columbia, MO, where he is a PhD candidate and Creative Writing Fellow at The University of Missouri-Columbia.
BMP Celebrates National Poetry Month 2016
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.
by mainbrain@brainmillpress.com | Jan 30, 2019 | NPM 2016, Poetry
April you break my bones.You sucker punch me right in the side of the head.If there was a mountain in my backyard I would find you therestaring down with a twisted mouth as you hurl lightning bolts, or bouldersthat you have hoisted above your head.
Instead, on my flat green acres, you lay low,Army crawling on your belly with a knife clutched in one hand,moving through the lilies that are just starting to bloom.You curl into the dark bottom of a watering canand wait for my wrist to appear above it, or build a nestin the chicken coop and swarm my face and armswhen I swing the door.
I’ve grown to know you.Fake beauty, pretender, liar.Thief.I’ve figured you out.When you spread your armsto cast a soft light and scent the night that surrounds boysstepping towards girls in gowns and wrist corsagesyou lick your lips at the thought of twisted metal andwheels that keep spinning long after the car has stopped moving.When you roll water down the river and spark light across the backsof silver fish, when you warm the rocks for long legs to spread out on,I know that you are waiting for footholds to give wayfor ankles and limbs to get tangled in underwater vines. For us to go under.
April you crush my skull.Outside my window the sky is as blueas the eyes of my dead son.A row of blooming cherry trees line the split rail fence.Night peepers sing to me.My baby still cries for me.The sun warms my face as I walk the long yardhands folded behind me,heart folded inside me.
April you gut meyou and all your awful beauty.
Elizabeth Berry lives on a small farm in Partlow, Virginia, with her husband and teenage daughter. Preferring the company of animals to people, she spends most of her free time with her four dogs, and colony of feral cats. She also frequently sits and brushes the hair of a tamed skunk named Jon Snow. She writes poems about loss and survival, and how often the two exist as ghosts in ordinary lives.
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.
by mainbrain@brainmillpress.com | Jan 30, 2019 | NPM 2016, Poetry
My phone promises me a gas station isthe bookstore I’m looking for. Twice.I consider a metaphor about refuelingor contents under pressure over timebut it would be a stretch. Truth is, I’m lost.
Truth is there are no maps for days like this.There is no destination. That’s a liewe feed to kids that’s worse than Santa.December sunlight like skim milk,I want to walk out into that thin bath.I want to hike six miles, maybe ten. I wantto punch someone. There’s no time.And a voice in my head—not the phone—tells me no, I’ve got this, I’m already onOakdale, just count the numbers down.
The store is in a strip mall. They sellmore merchandise than books.They do sell books. Not my books,but that book by a friend of a friendof mine on moss, on types of moss.
My friend said Mosses have a special place in my heart.It hadn’t occurred to me that a heart could havea still, green, pillowed space. I want to enterthat green, miniscule world of fronds and spores,ancient and breathing. I want to grow my own.
Sarah Sadie’s chapbook, Do-It-Yourself Paper Airplanes, was published by Five Oaks Press in 2015, and a full-length collection, We Are Traveling Through Dark at Tremendous Speeds, is due out from LitFest Press spring 2016. She teaches and works with poets one on one, and hosts occasional retreats for writers and other creative types.
Tumblr | Twitter
This poem first appeared on Tupelo Press’s website during December 2015, as part of Tupelo’s 30/30 poetry marathon fundraising project.
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.
by mainbrain@brainmillpress.com | Jan 30, 2019 | NPM 2016, Poetry
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.
–C. Kubasta, Contest Judge & Poetry Month Coordinator
Grave Robber Digs with a Pen
Imani Davis
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)
“Brunch Plans” by Tyler Gillespie
Longlist
“Extinction” by Robin Johnstone
“psychonausea” by Catherine Chen (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.
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