We are delighted to present this week’s selections from the Brain Mill Press 2016 Poetry Month Contest. We received many outstanding entries, from which these pieces by Jessica Jacobs, Olajide Timilehin Abiodun, and Catherine Chen stood out. We hope you’ll enjoy them...

About Julie Brooks Barbour Julie Brooks Barbour is the author of Haunted City (Aldrich Press, 2016) and Small Chimes (Aldrich Press, 2014), as well as three chapbooks, most recently Beautifully Whole (Hermeneutic Chaos Press, 2015). She is co-editor of Border Crossing...

We are delighted to present this week’s selections from the Brain Mill Press 2016 Poetry Month Contest. We received many outstanding entries, from which these pieces by Shabnam Piryaei, Courtney Leblanc, and Sharon Brooks stood out. We hope you’ll enjoy them as much...

We are delighted to present this week’s selections from the Brain Mill Press 2016 Poetry Month Contest. We received many outstanding entries, from which these pieces by Imani Davis, Lynn Marie Houston, and Jiordan Castle stood out. We hope you’ll enjoy them as much as...

Visionary           The American Museum of Visionary Art On the side of Key Highwaya tree is hung with brokenlight: diamonds, circles, squaresof glass on wire that glitterin the January wind.We stand before it. Who would want to see a hundredof ourselves refracted....

Wrappers You’re twelve and in love with the boy next dooronly you don’t quite know it yet.That tingle between your legsis something you fumble for while your sister sleeps,while you are awake and dreaming.You play married, practice that first boy kissagainst your...

Then Became         for Sylvain © Cynthia Hogue, 2014. Originally published in TAB: a journal of poetry and poetics (2014). Used with permission. About Cynthia Hogue Cynthia Hogue was born in 1951 in Rock Island, Illinois. She taught in the MFA program at the...

Constructing 'a Plausible Protagonist' Riding home double, atop the handlebars, a dangling legcatches spokes. Like the ticker-tape soundsof cards flapping, like the sudden violence done to childhood when you trust too much. After, I rememberhow we’d beg to skip church...

Stepmother en Filipinas, ca. 1948 I.Long before the clop-clopping of hoovesecho from the sun-baked road,and the calesa drops off its passengerand her groom, there will have beena thousand chores completed. The bride will arrive at her new homeand regally ascend to her...

About Wendy Vardaman Wendy Vardaman is the author of two collections of poetry, most recently, Reliquary of Debt (Lit Fest Press 2015). She has a PhD in English from the University of Pennsylvania, a BS in engineering from Cornell University, and recently returned to...

 About Nickole Brown Nickole Brown grew up in Louisville, Kentucky, and Deerfield Beach, Florida. Her books include Fanny Says, a collection of poems published by BOA Editions in 2015; her debut, Sister, a novel-in-poems published by Red Hen Press in 2007; and an...

Find yourself alone in someone else’s house, nine thousand feet above your actual life, days hemmed mostly in by national forest and the wind of your own thoughts. (He says he will die young. He says he is old. He says touch, turned take.) Here, there is nothing to do...

They didn’t tell me where the funeral was so I know it’s everywhere, spilling over edges with its overwhelming hunger while I brew tea the Russian way my mother taught me because strength necessitates dilution. There is always tea and there are always lemons;...

Alicia Rebecca Myers is a poet and essayist who holds an MFA from NYU, where she was a Goldwater Writing Fellow. Her work has appeared most recently in Best New Poets 2015; The Rumpus; Brain, Child Magazine; Gulf Coast; jubilat; The Carolina Quarterly; and Fairy Tale...