Choose Your Reader…
If you are struggling to figure out which one of us to submit to, use this page to get an idea of our tastes. These are non exhaustive lists of things we typically like, but feel free to surprise us! Trust your gut! Full send!
(Our masthead is below as well!)
What do we both like?
-Groovy, snappy, sound work, and musical language
-Inventive/experimental forms that support and enhance the content
-Surprising/unexpected language, imagery, juxtapositions, disjunctive leaps, and ideas. Stuff that makes Taylor go “O_o” and Martheaus go “wooooo that’s good shit”
-Mom trauma (:
-Subs from BIPOC and LGBTQ+ writers. Subs from women, Palestinians, educators, and those with disabilities. Subs from anyone who has historically been marginalized due to their varying identities. Welcome, welcome, welcome.
What neither of us like?
-Hard, obvious end rhyming unless you’re Kendrick Lamar. (Kendrick, you can rhyme as much as you want.)
-Racism, homophobia, transphobia, sexism, ageism, ableism ETC ETC ETC
(Seriously, we will just ignore your sub)
-Obfuscation with sesquipedalian vernacular (we’re not impressed by four dollar words that don’t add to meaning…but if they add meaning… ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ )
-Arbitrarily name dropping literary or historical references (like after poems, ekphrastic, re-used lines, or other things that feel stale and pretentious) without connecting it to the personal stakes of the speaker.
-We both have short attention spans, poems longer than two pages rarely (if ever) get accepted.
Keep scrolling for more specifics!
What is Taylor into?:
-More likely to appreciate religious iconography. “god/God” stuff. (Religious trauma for everybody!)
-ECOPOETICS BOISSSSSSSSS
-Poems about all the things we inherit from our varying cultures, poems about what we carry and what we set down
-Any poem that has the words “your body” or “the body” in it
-If your poem has the word “basketball” in it (or really any sport) it legally belongs to me (jokes…but send them here fr)
-Not a huge pop culture girly. I don’t get the reference and that makes me sad
-TURN NOUNS INTO VERBS!!!
-We both like surrealism, but I like it more and I’ll feel butt hurt if you send them to anyone else
***Bonus points for: dinosaur poems***
What is Bleah into?
-Place poems: take me somewhere so specific, so gritty and full of detail that I want to re-read your poem to return over and over again. Specifically into rural, southern, midwestern, and other “other’d” places.
-Idiosyncrasies… I want to hear your voice, your twang or your idioms, your weird turns of phrase and personal use of syntax. I don’t want a polished poem that sounds like everyone else in your MFA workshop… I want a poem that I could link back to you even if your name weren’t attached, even if it were read by a stranger I’d say “Imposter! That’s so-en-so.”
-Indulgent sensory detail: whether it's erotic, platonic yearning, childhood nostalgia, a table spread of food, or a soundscape I want those concrete and tactile details that make the ecosystem of your poem feel lush, vibrant, and pulsing. Alive!
-Your risk taking! Send me the thing that made you feel buzzing and frantic while you wrote it, show me the decisions you don’t usually make but couldn’t help, I want to see all of your messy and experimental risks on the page. If there’s something that’s not quite right for us this time, at least you took a risk and that’s very brave! I will gladly take your pop culture poems, especially if they’re millennial/tumblr/niche little references to Anne of Green Gables or the Secret Garden or Polly Pockets and other things children born between 1993-1998 were really into.
If this doesn’t help, go read the poems we’ve already selected to see what our inclinations are like.
we are closed for subs until June 1st 2026
Meet the Brawlers
(Co-Founders and EIC’s)
Martheaus Perkins
he/him
Martheaus Perkins was born to a single mother in Center, Texas and a first-generation college graduate. He is the author of The Grace of Black Mothers (Trio House Press 2025). His poems and essays have been featured in Obsidian: Literature & Art, ballast, the museum of americana, The Worcester Review, PRISM international, Harpy Hybrid Review, West Trade Review, 805 Lit + Art, Longleaf Review, Genre: Urban Arts, and SoFloPoJo. The name “Martheaus” is a collection of each Black woman who helped raise him: “Mar-” for his grandmother’s nickname, “-Thea-” for his mother’s name, and “-us” for his big aunties.
Mar helped co-found BRAWL and then in 2026 stepped away from reading and into an ADMIN role
Bleah Patterson
coming soon
Taylor Franson-Thiel
she/her
Taylor is a poet from Utah now based in Fairfax, Virginia. She is the author of “Bone Valley Hymnal” (ELJ Editions 2025). She is a developmental and editorial coordinator for Poetry Daily, the Assistant Poetry Editor for phoebe and the EIC of BRAWL. She can be found @TaylorFranson on Twitter, @taylorfthiel on Instagram, @taylorfthiel.bsky.social on BlueSky, and at taylorfranson-thiel.com
Former BRAWL Readers (R.I.P)
What is Martheaus into?
-Enjoys humorous poetry (everything from dark humor to the most absurd of squirrels)
-More likely to buy into speakers who are goofy (immature? quirky? odd? difficult to pin down?)
-Taylor likes to claim she likes experimental forms, but she wouldn’t know an experiment if it blew up in her face (jokes love u Tay-Tay), but seriously send your visual messes, hermit crabs, and lil freaks here!
-Loves poems that “poke the bear” (you can decide whatever bear I’m talking about)
-Send all your nature crap to Taylor
*** Bonus points for: Obscure nerdy/pop-culture allusions (might be an automatic acceptance if you reference Avatar the Last Airbender)***
Surprise! Congrats on making it this far! This is just one of the Easter Eggs we’ve included on our site. Feel free to guess which avatar belongs to which EIC in your cover letter…
Meet our logo!
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Butterscotch The Skeleton and Chester The T-Rex.
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Meet our logo! • Butterscotch The Skeleton and Chester The T-Rex. •
