KNEE BRACE PRESS

A place for stories about chronic illness, disability, mental health, and neurodivergence.

Poetry

Submit your poem to Knee Brace Press! We welcome new voices and veteran poets alike.

Guidelines

All submissions must relate to chronic illness, disability, mental health and/or neurodivergence in some way. What that means is pretty much up to you. If you think your piece covers any of these topics, send it out way!

Our poems

  • The photo is in black and white and depicts a white person with long, dark hair smiling to the right of the shot.

    Tipping Point

    What if I did not know my shadowed self was yet alive?

  • A white person with short, light brown hair and black, rectangular glasses smiles with their mouth closed. They wear a black T-shirt. The background is cream colored.

    Hostile Architecture

    In their first poem for Knee Brace Press, Taylor Kovach writes about self-hatred and passive ideation.

  • Pilate Grimm

    Waves

    You were a girl on Venus Held my hand through the hallway, then the exit of our School, then to the Venue with our dresses I said, “But I’m promised to a Man down on Earth,” Then I knew.

  • HPA axis dysfunction

    My rabbit heart is in your hands, warm and pulsing, living, skittish.

  • Emergent Self

    But like the sun, there is Something elevating About the depression Some perspective above.

  • A white woman with long, brown hair gazes at the camera. She is indoors and the background is blurred. She wears a blue jacket over a yellow sweater.

    The Language of Learning

    Most people assume that if you only know one language, that language was easy to learn. English and I still battle.

  • A woman with brown skin and long, brown hair gazes at the camera. She wears a pink shirt and a beaded black necklace.

    Misophonia

    It’s about mouth breathers, gum chewers, pen clickers, foot tappers

  • Melody Dover

    The Dance

    Years of tedious fighting with Pain I now tread the boundaries between

  • Vulture

    “Our love laid thick and bitter on my tongue/I choked it down as not to spit/I laughed so not to lunge.”

  • Last Call at the Cancer Café

    You said you weren’t an if but a when