Technically it’s fall here in Colorado as I write this introduction, but on this late September afternoon, 84 degrees and rather toasty in CR’s attic-floor office in Tiley House, it still feels like summer, and the semester still feels new and full of promise. But it will be mid-November when this issue is printed and in readers’ hands, and many of us are particularly on edge about what lies ahead for our country, for our world, in these next couple of months. So perhaps it’s not surprising that the stories and essays here are freighted with anxiety. In Margot Livesey’s “The Letter Writer,” a young man is hamstrung by his fear that his girlfriend, immigrating to Australia, will not return the affection he can barely articulate. A teenage girl, in Anne-E. Wood’s “Losing It,” panics when she and her younger sister are separated on the train they’re taking to visit a distant relative. In Sammy Stevens’s “A Porch for Ursula,” a man contends with a slew of simultaneous anxieties—parenting a small child, owning a house with extensive and invisible problems, juggling health crises and money woes—bringing his marriage nearly to the breaking point. Struggling with her father’s recent death and a desire to fit in, a young girl, in Nathan Blum’s “Big White Tent,” faces some hard truths after friends desert her during a frightening encounter. Emily Wortman-Wunder, in her essay “Geography of Forgetting,” explores the relationship between landscape loss and dementia, and the solastalgia brought on by the increasing urbanization of Colorado’s Front Range. Examining the intertwined anxieties of poverty and pain in “Redneck Folk Medicine,” Nina King Sannes writes about her experience as a first-generation college student trying to access health care. Sara Heise Graybeal recounts, in “Only the Mother,” a year in her son’s early life when he was frequently sick and the constant fear she endured as a new and single mother.
These are not stories and essays in which fear and anxiety are neatly conquered. But they are works that show us how we survive our fears. As Graybeal writes, “I have come to make my home beside that fear.” And perhaps home is enough.
Welcome to the fall/winter issue.
—Stephanie G’Schwind, Editor-in-Chief
This issue opens with Victoria Chang’s poem “Untitled, 1992” and the question “What are we to do with this knowledge?” I often find myself falling down the rabbit hole of this-ness. You, dear reader, know your own this-ness—one of intimacy, that-which-heavies-or-holds you, the stuff that gets stuck in your molars, making you tongue and tongue and tongue. I’m tonguing these pages. A consumption of their this-ness.
Chang’s words dare me to dig deeper into myself, into these poems, and into the very essence of our humanity. I find myself contemplating this-ness and knowledge in these pages—pages rife with drought, absence, mercy, nostalgia, the less glamorous parts of us, the strange places of tenderness, I Love Lucy reruns, grief, ingestion, [ ], and so, too, death. From L M Brimmer’s “[I’ve forgotten what it means to forget]” to No‘u Revilla’s “Stop lifting dead bodies to your ear / expecting the sound of ocean—,” these poetic worlds break open expectations to reach for rawer, more cerebral, more daring versions of our humanity. Revilla meditates on how walking becomes an act “to ward off death,” and “If empire marks us, we mark the way back.” Let us mark! Resistance roils here, reminding us that we, too, can imprint. I tongue and tongue the story in each of these poems. One such moment exposes the genius in Thea Matthews’s slipperiness of the I-voice in the duality of action: “I leave molars intact I am wedged in between,” where the I-voice leaves the molars intact, while simultaneously being situated within the molars. To act upon. To be acted upon.
And of course it’s fall. The transitory precipice where we shed and shed to become ready for the boney winter, the willingness of spring. The cyclic nature of our human natures feels ripe in these poems. Ripeness—the last swell of chlorophyll breaking down in the leaves before the leaping. As Chang urges, “Because the absolute value of / death must be beauty,” I, too, believe our this-ness builds toward a fallible absoluteness—one where the beauty of life in the creases, gaps, and hard-to-look-at places gathers in us so brightly that not even death may forget us.
Perhaps all this this-ness is not just about the consumption but the act of being consumed. I am not the tongue or the molars but the piece of corn—agitating before swallowing. I turn to another one of Matthews’s lines to describe my relationship to this issue: “I ignite.”
—Felicia Zamora, Poetry Editor
Featured in this issue:
Tommy Archuleta, Katie Berta, Nathan Blum, L. M. Brimmer, Victoria Chang, Sara Heise Graybeal, E. Hughes, Kim Hyesoon, Margot Livesey, Antonio López, Thea Matthews, Sara Lupita Olivares, Miguel Martin Perez, Catherine Esposito Prescott, Ayesha Raees, Noʻu Revilla, Monica Rico, Nyds L. Rivera, Nina King Sannes, Sammy Stevens, J C Talamantez, Anne-E. Wood, Emily Wortman-Wunder
