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I love surprising poems that make me consider the mechanics of America. When phrases, banalities, or experiences that tend to fade into the TV-commercial background of life are hit with some new oneiric light. “The well qualified enjoy zero percent interest. / Cars loom in metallic wrap on long stone driveways” (Adam Houle). Or the “trip to Miami, / cheap sunburns, soft white robes, / room service french fries / and tiny bottles of Tabasco” (Marina Hope Wilson). It’s often through a strange lens of the casual object or the commodified, counted body that I think more deeply about my personhood. These poems make me aware of the cognitive dissonance in daily routines; of change coming too slow and too slight, and without a way to bring back the dead.

This autumn issue is, for me, something of a hall of mirrors, as the strong perspectives of each speaker glare and shine between my own overlays in so many refractions. The persona lurches and threatens rebellion in several poems. For example: “I am the woman in the box. / I hear a staircase to an old season. / …. hornets crack the glass, / fascinated by their own mirages” (Holaday Mason). And in Ryan Clark’s “homophonic translation of anti-abortion legislation,” in which the speaker says, “It is my own / voluntary self and not some mad rifle-laden other / rotting the day into night-filled alleyways / shivering from a vote of sudden loss.” 

We stay in Texas with Leia Bradley’s poem with cicadas. “It’s a good a place as any to lose your goddamn mind—eat the muscadine, / drink the moonshine, see how far you can spit the watermelon seeds— / let’s forget how much time we’ve tasted / ….. I know life / isn’t just winging as fast as you can until death.” And John Popielaski’s first poem mentions another place I have lived, where I too “fell so many times it was a miracle / I’m not in fragments far from home.”

In this issue of mettle and finality, it's in the “First-Generation American Elegy” that we find feasting, reckless desire, boxes of imperfect memories, and a breathless listing of all that we want more of when it's gone. I hope that you give yourself what you need this season, meeting neither surfeit nor loss. I hope you can gather the harvest while you stand at the cusp of letting it go. 

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Thank you for reading.

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M

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