For Mental Health Awareness Month, we’ve curated this playlist of poems recently published in Shō Poetry Journal, featuring Emily Adams-Aucoin, Catherine Broadwall, Crystal Cox, Olivia Jacobson, Sophie Johnson, Mallory Rodenberg, Alyssandra Tobin, and Tiezst “Tie” Taylor. Also check out previously featured related work from Ari B. Cofer and Erica Dawson.
Table of Contents[Hide][Show]
- “Applause” by Tiezst “Tie” Taylor
- “Melencolia I” by Emily Adams-Aucoin
- “Pine Needles” by Crystal Cox
- “Love Poem with a Splinter in its Paw” by Catherine Broadwall
- “We Stick Out In the Suburbs” by Olivia Jacobson
- “Egg on My Face” by Alyssandra Tobin
- “Of Course I Tried” by Sophie Johnson
- “Meditation on Static” by Mallory Rodenberg
“Applause” by Tiezst “Tie” Taylor
My psychiatrist has hired a small live-in studio audience to support me in my activities of daily living. They applaud when I take my morning Sertraline and Vyvanse with a highly caffeinated tea. They applaud when I moisturize my body with shea butter and complete my 7-step skincare regimen. They even applaud when I take out the trash and recycling on Wednesday evenings.
About this Poem: This poem is a whimsical approach to the burdens of daily life with serious mental illness and holds space for the various ways in which we may view failure or success with our activities of daily living.
“Applause” appeared in Shō No. 8
Tiezst “Tie” Taylor is a Disabled Black femme who is non-binary trans. They are a 2026 Best New Poets nominee, 2025 Pushcart Nominee and radical educator, artist-activist, poet, and storyteller, and the self-proclaimed “Queen of the Duplex Form.” They have earned degrees in education (B.A. in the individualized major of Teaching for Social Justice, New York University & M.S.Ed in Elementary Education, University of Pennsylvania), and are a proponent of disability justice and abolitionist frameworks. Their work explores their experiences in surviving: Disability and severe mental illness; intergenerational trauma and poverty; and intersecting forms of oppression. They use their art and research to educate, heal, nurture, radicalize, and catalyze change for all marginalized peoples. Tie’s work appears or is upcoming in Lucky Jefferson, Midway Journal, Shō Poetry Journal, Torch Literary Magazine, and ANMLY. Follow Tiezst on Instagram @tiezst.
“Melencolia I” by Emily Adams-Aucoin
They were melancholy-textured hours. Our old dog was skin and bone,
officially resigned. I had golden keys which unlocked nothing.
It wasn’t night, but there was a kind of persistent half-sleeping;
my mind pushed against the bars of itself in a perfunctory way.
About this Poem: This poem is ekphrastic, and inspired by Albrecht Dürer’s copper engraving Melencolia I” (1514). I fell in love with the piece during one of the worst depressive episodes of my life. I related to the angel with her head in her hands, surrounded by tools of measurement but unable to locate, measure, or solve her own condition. I started writing poetry as a means to locate myself within the world, to keep me accountable for being here. Kind of like a fail safe, or a parachute. I wrote this poem because I needed a very specific tool.
“Melencolia I” appeared in Shō No. 7
This is the first poem in the micro-chapbook It Adheres to Many Things, which won Harbor Review’s 2025 Editor’s Prize. You can read Emily’s micro-chapbook here.
What follows in Emily Adams-Aucoin’s “It Adheres to Many Things,” are a series of poems holy or broken . . . Adams-Aucoin guides us into her personal journey through lenses alternatively saintly and monstrous.
. . . Adams-Aucoin gives us this holy or broken (or both) world in its own tongue, a world illuminated and staring back at those who dare to look.
—Gregory Stapp, 2025
Emily Adams-Aucoin is a writer whose poetry has been published in Electric Literature, Frontier Poetry, TriQuarterly, Sixth Finch, North American Review, Colorado Review and elsewhere. She is the author of the micro-chapbook It Adheres to Many Things which won Harbor Review’s 2025 Editor’s Prize.
“Pine Needles” by Crystal Cox
The pine needles cling to my hands, to my back.
Out west, there’s rarely grass without their cacophony.
I’ve got a new lover, and we’re lying in a pile together,
listening to laughter on the wind while, elsewhere, children
are dying, keep dying.
“Pine Needles” appeared in Shō No. 7
Crystal Cox was born and raised in mid-Missouri. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Idaho. Her work has appeared in Midwest Review, Sonora Review, Phoebe, The Shore, and elsewhere. With seven years of literary editing experience, she currently co-edits Outskirts Literary Journal.
“Love Poem with a Splinter in its Paw” by Catherine Broadwall
They say even if a campfire is doused in water,
beneath the cool ashes, an ember can still blaze,
can still ignite a sneaky flame. I suppose
I am something like that these days.
About this Poem: This poem takes up the ambivalence I felt for a while about the place where I live. When my husband and I moved in, it presented several challenges. At the most extreme, the entire front of the building was replaced except for a very thin layer of dry wall (in winter). Several units, including ours, sustained damage to the dry wall during construction, and we took the repair job as an opportunity to paint the wall a beautiful shade of lavender. After that, things got easier in the building all around, and I began to like our home more. The poem, at its heart, is about allowing room for lots of conflicting feelings while still seeking–and, perhaps, choosing–love.
“Love Poem with a Splinter in its Paw” appeared in Shō No. 5
This poem appears in Aftermath (May 2026, Dancing Girl Press).
“Aftermath reckons with the idea of transformation: How do you reclaim your voice when rendered speechless? Where do you walk when the earth caves in? What lights your way? With ethereal precision, this collection of poetry traverses the abrupt end of a marriage, the stories and patterns we inherit from our origins, and the rebuilding of a self. Broadwall’s words encourage readers to compose their own futures — dwelling not on the wound but what is possible in its wake. Its kaleidoscopic narrative invokes women from mythology, fairy tales, and theater to remind us of the infinite ways to hurt, heal, and transmute.”
Catherine Broadwall is the author of Aftermath (Girl Noise Press, 2026), Water Spell (Cornerstone Press, 2025), Fulgurite (Cornerstone Press, 2023), Shelter in Place (Spuyten Duyvil, 2019), and other collections. Her writing has appeared in Bellingham Review, Colorado Review, Mid-American Review, and other journals. She is the winner of the 2023 Paula Svonkin Creative Arts Award and the 2020 COG Poetry Award, as well as a finalist for the poetry categories of the 2021 Mississippi Review Prize and 2021 Pinch Literary Awards. Her website is www.catherinebroadwall.com.
“We Stick Out In the Suburbs” by Olivia Jacobson
My father’s rollback that’s parked in the street
has pissed off the neighbors
again. My father calls Mrs. Brown
a plastic bitch from his chair in the den
(what we call the living room).
About this Poem: When I wrote this poem I was thinking of Grant Woods’ painting American Gothic— I was thinking of what it meant to be warped. Off. A bit slant. It’s said that Woods’ initial interest in painting the farmhouse was the unusual gothic-style window centered in the painting behind the farmer and his daughter. Woods thought it an opportunity to critique the farmhouse for pretending to be bigger and better than it was. I know what it’s like to pretend. Us writers do it all the time. When I sat down to write this poem, the biographic had its way of seeping in, of course. The speaker’s age and concerns are like the early symptoms I experienced before I knew I had OCD. This poem initiated the hard work of dissecting memories that’ve helped me discover more about the distorted nature of myself and my work. It’s difficult to put yourself on display, but I always find myself better on the other side of the poem. Or I’m at least taken with that possibility.
“We Stick Out in the Suburbs” appeared in Shō No. 7
Olivia Jacobson is an MFA candidate in poetry at Syracuse University. She is the editor-in-chief of Salt Hill Journal. Her chapbook, On Junkyards, won the Etchings Press Book Prize for Poetry (October 2025). Winner of the Charles Simic Poetry Prize (2025), her work appears or is forthcoming in Hole in the Head, The Florida Review, Moon City Review, and Outskirts Literary. Her work has also received support from The Rockefeller Brothers Fund and The Hudson Valley Writer’s Center.
“Egg on My Face” by Alyssandra Tobin
I need to investigate myself like a bad cop who lost his gun.
Figure out why my brain revs itself into ice sweats,
into puking up dinner and sunset too.
About this Poem: This poem came about when my Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder was particularly out-of-hand, and had me constantly spiraling over the existence of life after death. Don’t we all want to believe there’s something else, something After, both for ourselves and for our loved ones? My brain gets stuck on the not-knowing, and this poem was an attempt to document that distress.
“Egg on My Face” appeared in Shō No. 6
Alyssandra Tobin is the author of the chapbook, Put Eyes on Me Not Like a Curse, published by Quarterly West in 2022. Her poetry appears in Poet Lore, New Ohio Review, Poetry Northwest, Grist, The Boiler, Fugue, The Pinch, and elsewhere. She lives in a “census-designated place” in Montana.
“Of Course I Tried” by Sophie Johnson
made an altar of pomegranates & seroquel thrice daily swallowed
poked and prodded in search of the witches’ mark
wrote sonnets limericks villanelles haikus
bought a ball gown and a therapist and every book about tarot
Sophie Johnson is a poet who once lived in Seattle with her kitten where she completed an MFA program. Her work appears occasionally.
“Of Course I Tried” appeared in Shō No. 4
“Meditation on Static” by Mallory Rodenberg
Months after my brother died, I dreamed
he drove a red Chevy across the night sky,
his holy chariot an S-10.
“Meditation on Static” appeared in Shō No. 7
Mallory Rodenberg’s poems have recently appeared in The Missouri Review, Shō Poetry Journal, and The Swannanoa Review. She was a 2025 artist-in-residence for the Robert Lee Blaffer Foundation, and the recipient of the 2023 Levis Prize in poetry from Friends of Writers. She lives in Southern Indiana.
RELATED WORK: MENTAL HEALTH AWARENESS MONTH
Two Poems by Ari B. Cofer
“Depression/Uterus” and “After the Hysterectomy” from Shō No. 6
One Poem by Erica Dawson:
“Portrait of the artist as sonnet for Dickinson’s line A wounded deer—leaps highest—” from Shō No. 6