There is something sharp at the edge of memory. Perhaps we call it forgetfulness, perhaps pain. As I sat and read through our final collection, these are the words I jotted down on my tiny square notepad. This unlikely group of poems found its company in the wit, candor, and quirk of the ordinary. But this collection is also double edged, unafraid to explore the devastation that exists in our exaltation of life. I admire the artists whose observations made them, and am honored to play a small part in making these poems more visible to the world.
Abigail Michelini, Poetry Editor
Watching this collection of poetry swell and build over the last few months and now our readers get to enjoy the works we've fallen in love with. As we continued to read and choose poems, these pieces have reverberated in me. I have found myself turning back to our submissions in my daily life, sitting at the desk in my dorm at night, on a park bench scrolling through my phone, at the kitchen counter in my parent's house on Easter. I think the poems we chose share a mastery of drawing sublime from the everyday. In "Lithosphere" by James Davidson nature forges a connection between queerness, spirituality, and the natural world, exemplified in lines like, "our tectonic plates pressing,/ crumbling at our jagged edges,/ forming our own Pangea." The poem resonated with my own associations to nature as a queer person, conjuring memories of writing in a marble notebook by the creek that runs behind my elementary school and feeling a sense of wholeness there. The line "I believe in God,/ when it snows" from "On the Third Day" by Paige Szmodis is a line that I think echoes outside of the work to the themes being explored throughout these poems; the sacredness of everyday moments. The works also evoke a direction visceral connection to our bodies. Mary Leonard writes "At MOMA, Rothko's rectangle bleeds,/ dancing like a free spirit," in "Staining the Canvas" as she parallels the bleeding of the painting and with her own relationships throughout her life to periods and bleeding, exemplifying these works ability to draw profound, yet seamless linkages.
Robin Gow, Poetry Intern
