THE ANNUAL $5000 ONLY POEMS PRIZE for…
POET OF THE YEAR
Brionne Janae is a poet living in Brooklyn with their two dogs. They’ve published three books of poetry, Because You Were Mine (2023), Blessed are the Peacemakers (2021) which won the 2020 Cave Canem Northwestern University Press Poetry Prize, and After Jubilee (2017). Off the page they go by Breezy.
if you asked Jesus to describe devotion
he would paint this exact scene
his legs fading to black his mouth
open to receive whatever his king offered
I see my poems as an attempt to collapse the distance between the spiritual and sexual. I think when you’re doing it right both sex and spirituality are deeply erotic, because they’re both about connection.