EDITOR'S NOTE

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I’ve had the pleasure of guest editing Issue 14 at the invitation of editor-in-chief Marina Kraiskaya. Summer is the season of decadence, the year’s point of no return, and its pitch rises annually as each successive year becomes the hottest on record. In this issue poets contend with, and through, intensity; a menu of ways to “loosen / the litigations / of magpies” (Eartha Davis). Their language seeks to organize the season’s crescendo.

Some historic pains are fine and severe enough to cut through the noise and the fruiting. “Each sharp flap against mason-work / resounds as musket shot, the hyphen / after 1625, a black trail into the present / the bullet that did its excising well” (Matthew Henry) holds 400 years of violence in deft, sure metaphor. 

Other pieces bridge historic and intimate generational pains. “It’s the Midwest. Bad place / for the blessed, forge / to get out of, son / made to come back (Benjamin Evans). They step up to assume a mantle. “It is a signal, an orientation, a dark-winged summons” (Romy Ruukel). And anticipate its passing to the next:

I struck the match. The sulfur flare bit the dark.

My son’s face in the portrait, glass spider-webbed

by the wind, opened its mouth.

To scream? To swallow the flame? No, he was smiling.

I had been here before …

 … inside the fist of what’s coming. I had not yet set him down 

(Phillip Shabazz)

I hope that as you read, you will consider not only what these pieces do but how they form their doing. As in Eartha Davis’ “agus beatha ath-eagrachadh,” the poet measures the breath, marking inhale as a function of exhale, lines as functions of line breaks. As in Allen Means’ “lachrymatory,” the two-column structure invites alternate readings. Linear narrative fragments into a chorus which destabilizes the positions of victim and assailant, past and present, in the expanse of “the sea / the sea.”

In George Tidmore’s “Short stay under the shade of a heavenly Southern live oak,” the clamor for escape — from spiritual, cultural, and physical heat — may be an unstudied need for expression. 

I watch them (dancing like oaks) & call them

them. Like I’m not looking for shade, too. They return like evening

because they are evening like everything. The trees, on their flaming

spree, tell me watch out for the red bugs, I go on building God, burning

God, burgundy God, child of —

The voice accumulating in the back of the throat, into song, is cut off. Is the speaker overwhelmed by the intensity of “building?” Or have they found the route to shade? The refrain is: “You ain’t shit, devil! / … You! Ain’t! Shit!” Meaning lives not in the intricacy of the gospel singers’ verse but in the acts of its expression. To “raise / their blazed hands,” “fall hysterically like blue,” “laugh & laugh.”

“A recurrent artery loops away from its origin, blood running upstream” (Ann Chinnis). If to live is to depart from one’s origins, to return to origins is to approach death. Chinnis’ poem, dealing in medical technology and memory, ends: “I restack my losses into your voxels—a pine cabinet, white dinner plates edged in gold. Dragging the mouse quickly to blur your tumor, I rest the cursor on the date of your birth.” The units of a lost shared life, china and cabinetry. Rest and viable meaning, for “the cursor” and, perhaps, for the surviving, occurs at the funerary mark of the birth date, while the prose form assumes the image of a square “voxel” or of a gravestone. 

Kathleen Hellen’s slight poem, “on 1,200 pounds, going 45 mph,” which tears past, is the incidence moment of departure and arrival, tenacious “wisp of a woman with whip.” No need of a prayer or calculation, “how? he asks, in this business of thoroughbreds. / … (horses horses running in his head).” The poem leaves the behavior of business, the preoccupation with figuring, in a juvenile, impotent dust, “only hinting in how she flicks her wrist.” 

Thank you to Marina, my co-readers, and all of the poets.

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Isabel Rudner

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