Issue 9 foreword: Fire and Flood

Ab intensity runs through issue 9 of Guesthouse. The poems, stories, essays, and artworks sizzle and flare. They leave scorched earth in their paths. Like gale-force winds and tidal waves, they erode the known world, revealing the elemental. They wash away assumptions and limitations to make room for growth and renewal. Like Martha Silano writes in her poem, “Once there was a zero:” “Words can make waves, bring in seaweed / and jellyfish, bring out lies. […] Sometimes words come to our rescue. / Sometimes not.” In these works, the truth washes up on the shore, in the aftermath. These works are often apocalyptic, but where there is destruction, there is also renewal. Nathan Austin’s poem, “to shelter you from the air,” perhaps describes best the collective thrust of Issue 9: “I’m trying to find the word for it. The kind of ‘out’ / that fires break, that power goes.” All 30 works in Issue 9 grasp at the indiscernible, the unsayable. All 30 works grapple with danger. The moment when, as Austin writes, “There [is] water, and the lack of water, and almost nothing left / to shelter you from the air.” I landed on not one theme for Issue 9, but two: fire and flood. That which burns, drowns, sutures, soothes. That which warms, douses. That which comes to our rescue and that which doesn’t.

In Meredith Clark’s essay, “excerpt from colluvium,” she writes to her younger self. “‘Child,’ I tell the girl on the rock, ‘you and I know, but there are thousands of us in the time in between who do not.’ / [...] It is more like a house fire, which I enter, and I cling to the walls, and I lead each one out by the hand.” In this essay, the writing process becomes one of self-salvation, as if Clark is leading her former selves out of a burning building, out of the past, as she put them onto the page. This is, in part, a metaphor for healing from trauma – leading the child self away from harm – but it also evokes the terror one can experience when writing about the past. I can imagine these former selves as the sculpted faces in Francesca Dalla Benetta’s Fuochi Sculpture, the artwork that graces the cover of Issue 8. As they burn, the faces don’t degrade in beauty but become more richly individual, more uniquely beautiful. Each figure represents a transition, like moon phases. I see what Benetta refers to in her artist statement: “an invitation to reevaluate the concept of beauty […], moving away from stereotypes.” She works mainly in sculpture because it is “an immediate, direct language, without abstraction or synthesis. The sculpture is inevitably honest, solid, hides nothing.” Benjamin Niespodziany's poem, “Curtains of Curdled Cake,” also compliments Fuochi Sculpture by embracing the beauty of change: “The flowers are rotten. They rot then blossom. They die then revive. They live.” This image gestures toward the cyclicality of the natural world, reminding us that flowers spring from death and destruction, out of the rot of their former selves. But there is also a warning in the poem, that the process of regeneration, of change, is a painful one: “Tack petals to the base of my gut. My knuckles. My lungs. A lunging of pain.”

As in colluvium, D.S. Maolalaí’s poem, “Desire Lines,” also tackles the writing process. The poem tells the story of its own creation: “one word tumbled / and led to another,” he writes, “like following / desire lines / through wild / unfallen woods. / [...] he went back / and revised things, / but the path burned.” Maolalaí describes writing as navigating an inhospitable landscape; when he doubles back to revise, he can’t trace his own footsteps. The poem itself meanders down the page like a desire line itself: “a path created as a consequence of erosion caused by human or animal foot traffic [...] usually [representing] the shortest or most easily navigated route between an origin and destination.” This is an apt metaphor for the poetic process, the shortcut from image to association we all must make in the grass as we work with language. Where fire serves as the vehicle for memory in “excerpt from colluvium,” water does the same in Benjamin Paloff’s prose poem, “Variations on a Theme (Amateur Astronomy 4).” He writes, “there have, indeed, been waves that held me under long enough to make me want, really want, to be alive. [...] It leaves a mark, like the barnacles my father filed his chest against when he tried to prove his manhood by swimming around the Steel Pier. [...] In a clinical sense, he really did drown, it just took eighty years.” This image of his father clinging to a piling has crystallized in the speaker as a desire to live. And, perhaps, to be the kind of man who doesn’t need to risk his life to “prove his manhood.” But even if the cycle of toxic masculinity is broken, his father’s desperation on that day in the sea ripples across time.

Jaime M. Zuckerman’s essay, “Sterna Paradisaea,” also involves drowning, though the victim is mercifully rescued at the last minute: “The drowning girl hung onto my shoulders, like you would if you were riding on the back of a bird, and pushed my head under. I grabbed her arm and tugged her forward in heaving pulls. Exhausted, she felt like a weight, pulling me under. The salt water choked me, and my lungs burned.” Although the essay circles primarily around the Arctic tern, a seabird with a unique presence in the environment, Zuckerman weaves in several poignant memories, including this treacherous scene at the beach, blurring the line between the natural and human worlds. In this scene, the ocean almost wins.

Like “Variations on a Theme,” Darius Atefat-Peckham’s poem, “Derakt-e Fazel, Tree of Grace,” is an adult child’s homage to their father. Both poems present fathers who are imperfect. “If God sat beside my Papa in his chair,” he writes, “my Papa / would confuse his pronouns, laugh / to himself, explain how in Persian / there is only one word, one / sound, for this.” In so few words, the speaker lovingly portrays his father as someone who has had a complex life, not untouched by grief, but who is still open to new knowledge: “How after / fifty years in two languages, a daughter / come and gone, it becomes harder and easier / to learn.” The expanse between two generations is bridged by empathy.

Several other pieces in Issue 9 address the complexities of relationships. In Onyedikachi Chinedu’s poem, “Weren’t We Fools From the Revolving Ball of Greens,” the speaker addresses a close friend, maybe a partner, or lover, who had an experience with a “gentleman” they find untrustworthy, someone “who had nothing but sex / to desex [their] soul.” “What did he ask over a dish of boiled noodles / and scrambled eggs with diced carrots and / green bells?” the speaker asks, suspicious of their intentions. The lush specificity of language engages all the senses, even as the speaker moves on. “How much did he say without / warning? Did they reckon with their insincerity?” Although the speaker is chastising them for staying with the man despite there being so many red flags, they do so lovingly, perhaps looking back on their fallibility: “weren't we fools / from the revolving ball of greens, / and not gorgeous?” Gabe Montesanti's graphic essay, “The Tattooed Man,” tells the story of a brief relationship between two strangers who attend the same therapy group. The speaker, who is dealing with mania, learns that a man in the group who “hears voices” has always wanted to try painting. “The notion surprised me,” the speaker, who is an artist herself, says. “I couldn’t imagine this man painting.” Throughout the therapy sessions, they share a few conversations and vending machine Ho-hos, but the relationship has a lasting impact. “We regarded each other with a kind of tenderness I’d never experienced before,” she says. The speaker imagines that the man’s “inner voices” are “like sleeping bats,” an image so serene and tender that it might never leave me.

As in Paloff’s poem and Zuckerman’s essay, the magnificent power and danger of nature is on display in “A Lighthouse Keeper Considers her Solitude.” Gabriella Fee depicts a speaker, the titular “lighthouse keeper,” whose body begins to take on the qualities of waves and wind: “I rest and break / with no beam cast over me,” they write. “It isn’t that the body lies, just that it moves / in its own cross-current away from the truth.” It is not sadness or loneliness that drives the lighthouse keeper to look so deeply inward, to see the inconsistencies in their own soul, but solitude. In this poem, solitude offers the speaker a wildness, a ferocity. A self-knowing. Delicious and delirious. And flawed. The body becomes a force of nature. The confluence of body and nature are also at play in Sarah Stickney’s poem, “Stockings.” She writes of a private self, hidden from view: “Under my clothes / hides the animal, soft / as a milkweed seed that floats off / to grow another solitary plant.” There is a hint of dissociation in this poem, a protective separation between body and mind. The “animal” that “floats off / to grow another solitary plant” represents a creative impulse, something the speaker can use and cherish, privately, below the surface. There is a cleavage of body from mind in Martha Silano’s aforementioned poem, “Once there was a zero:” The heart / is like a heifer,” Silano writes, “large and adoring, assumed to be stupid / but actually wise, while the mind mingles / between two metal plates  / and a militant vice.” Both poets make distinction between two selves: the “animal,” “the heifer,” “large and adoring,” “soft as a milkweed seed,” against the “vice” of its consciousness.

The self also burns brightly in Joe Milazzo’s sequence of poems, “from Leap Day:” “walking pocketing / nickels and quarters / of body heat,” he writes, “i smell / the smoke of many / fires / maybe / all the fires.” Where Fee’s speaker’s body “crests” and “breaks” like angry water, and Stickney’s “hides […] floats off,” Milazzo’s burns and smokes, emitting heat and smoke. I hear the echo of an eco-poetry in Leap Day: a warming earth, dotted with fires. The heated body traversing and inextricably bound to a heated planet. Indeed, several poems in Issue 9 express the bounty of nature, and others its degradation. In Zoe Ryder White’s poem, “Ditch, August 1,” the speaker describes looking up at the meteor-speckled night: “Last night, behind cloud cover, the Aquariids raked relentlessly across what we call atmosphere.” In this scene, even the morning glories tilt their heads to the sky, “dilate their sweet little glory holes.” There is nothing separating heaven and earth: “Quell vs. ignite. You know the conundrum.” White’s series of poems all address an offstage “thou,” but in the epistolary tradition, they are far more about the writer than the recipient: “What can I tell you?” she asks them. “You who change into another you and then into another, across the page, and then back into you again. The same thing happens to me, to I!”

Flower Conroy’s poem, “Notes on Aesthetics,” also indulges in the sweetness of the world, especially that which her speaker finds in the writing process. “What we think is language is language,” she posits, “the way photosynthesis is an exchange between aura & rebus.” Poetry, here, becomes an organic process. Conroy nods to the great fifteenth-century Dutch/Netherlandish painter Hieronymus Bosch, who is most famous for his nightmarish depictions of hell. “When it comes to instant / gratification & Boschian delights,” she writes, “I try for as long as possible / (& not one nanosecond longer) to stave off ecstasy — then, / I eat the whale, bite by bite.” Here, Conroy argues that poems can be big, hungry, shameless. They can up space, can take what they want. Where Conroy draws from Bosch, Jane Zwart leans on Austrian Expressionist painter, Egon Schiele, in her aptly named poem, “The Cult of Egon Schiele.” “In my wallet’s built-in booklet / of plastic sleeves,” she writes, “I carried / a wallet-sized Egon Schiele.” Zwart’s speaker desires to exist in the world of the painting, to climb into its frame: “knowing so little of the body / and its bones did not stop me / wanting to descend his ribs, / to use his clavicles as climbing / holds.” Like Conroy devouring Bosch’s whale, Zwart seeks refuge and pleasure in Schiele’s bold, honest, and often overtly sexual portraiture. It is a private, “wallet-sized” kind of escapism.

Varun Ravindran also reaches into the past in their poem, “The New Astronomy,” which glimpses the horrors of a particular historical moment. In the early 1600s, a local magistrate of Leonberg, Germany accused more than two dozen women of witchcraft. Katharina Kepler, mother of astronomer Johannes Kepler, was among them. The poem recalls her ordeal as she was persecuted by local officials, who tried to intimidate her into submission by showing her torture instruments and describing how they would use them on her. “A quiet fire, a stony fire, a thistle caught ember,” Ravindran’s Kepler recalls. “When I was asked to confess / Again and again the fire was behind me. / [...] I was shut in oak. / I smelt my insides. / I was shown each glittering tooth of my executioner all the possibilities of my body.” This is perhaps the most graphic piece in Issue 9, but its violence serves a greater message of resilience. With the help of her son, Kepler refuses to admit to the crime and eventually wins her freedom.

Several pieces in Issue 9 speak explicitly to the current moment. “It was the year of the sixteen bomb / threats,” Robin Myers begins in her poem, “Early Lessons in Care,” “the year I wouldn’t eat unless I was / alone, which meant  / late at night, cold chicken greasing the heel / of my fist.” Desperation and fear shadows this poem, as it does over so many pieces in Issue 9. Although she makes no exact reference to the year, any in our current millennium fit the bill. But Myers provides a bit of relief, too — in quiet, un-photogenic moments of tending to oneself. Care, the poem suggests, sometimes means “vanilla / ice cream in a shot / glass,” eaten in the middle of the night.  Leslie Contreras Schwartz’s poem, “Nights,” also observes solitude that rings true to the contemporary world. Although it is the shortest poem in Issue 9, only a few lines long, it is lasting. “The curtains stripped from the rod,” she begins. “Just the night-things, the window / and self left to deal. / I suspect this is done, alone.” I relate deeply to the curtain-stripped rod. I suspect others will, too, especially at a time when so many of us have been isolated from the people, places, and things we love. A time when we have been “left to deal” with life’s crises, to tend to our “night-things,” more or less “alone.”

Of all the pieces in Issue 9, perhaps Alessandra Lynch’s poem, “Grebe,” most directly addresses the COVID-19 pandemic, using an image that has come to represent both the loss and reclamation of life: the respirator mask. “The respirator takes on a life of its own / The respirator takes a life of its own / The respirator takes a life / [...] Petals, small investigators of breath / doubling over — / in a gust —.” Lynch’s respirator is godlike. It giveth, it taketh away. The poem asks us, what do we worship in a pandemic era? What do we fear, and what do we revere? The poem looks to the natural world. To the titular grebe, to “three black-capped chickadees [that…] live in a village of breath.” Nathanial Calhoun’s poem, “shy canopy,” also addresses the COVID-19 pandemic, although less explicitly. “What was all that shuffling away from recovery? / it’s-fine-no-worries or don’t-look-at-us-now?” he asks. “After the first moment of forgetting / we unroll the whole carpet of moving along.” These lines speak to my own frustrations about the “return to normalcy” campaigns that are pushing a message that COVID-19 is behind us, and that our old version of “normal” is worth returning to. They speak to the capitalistic impulse to prioritize productivity over people, and the fantastically short-term memory that guides so many western systems.

In Andrew Nickerson’s short story, “FOMO,” the protagonist is a professional content moderator tasked with protecting internet users from seeing violent and illegal photos, videos, and posts. After hours of looking at “humanity's hidden face” from his cubicle, he becomes jaded, paranoid, and distrustful of strangers, even in innocuous situations: “From all he witnessed and judged, the other bus passengers seemed at once so innocent that his heart ached — and so capable of the grimmest imaginings.” It is a character study of a man grappling with concepts of morality and connectedness in a world where technology fosters so much exploitation. Where strangers are brought together by circumstance in an essay like “The Tattooed Man,” here they are kept forever apart. A modern anxiety also characterizes Emily Moline’s poem, “Theology of Moods:” “a frog can’t choose —,” she writes, “it’s always semi-porous / and Superfunded by whoever’s green / god got kickbacks / three rainy seasons ago.” The frog stands in for the human being, whose image, data, and memories are routed through invisible networks and sold to the highest bidder. The individual is caught in this frenzy, “caught / mid-metamorph,” one of millions data points who has no agency over how they are used and abused by systems of power. It is a rather depressing critique, but Moline’s lyric delivery leave the reader resisting outright cynicism. In “Heroic Couplet,” Dana Levin also addresses a contemporary anxiety, drawing a quivering line between the Beat poets and today’s world. “Thinking about Corso and Ginsberg,” she writes, “being chased out of a meeting […] because Corso read, ‘O Bomb I love you / I want to kiss your clank eat your boom / […] I want to put a lollipop / in thy furcal mouth.’” In 2022, these lines are as perverse, provocative, sexual, violent, and beautiful as they were in Corso’s lifetime. Their lasting relevance makes Levin’s speaker cynical but wise. “Why fear Bomb?” she writes, emulating Corso’s ironic turn of the knife. “It’s just another kind of Death, which will come for us all.”

An apocalyptic vision of the world also runs through Jose Hernandez Diaz’s prose poem, “The Ice Cream Sandwich at the End of the World:” “A man in an MF Doom shirt woke up in the middle of the night and wrote a poem. The poem was about a dragon who had polluted the city with his flames. The dragon was trying to destroy the city: a modern metropolis.” In many of Diaz’s iconic prose poems, the protagonist brushes against the surreal, the silly, and the sublime. In this piece, the poet wields the power to create worlds, and, of course, dragons to destroy them. This poem reflects an ethos of anxiety, and perhaps suggests that poetry, the act of creating, is the salve, even though that, too, has consequences. Diaz’s poem compliments another in the issue that uses blunt, straightforward language to describe terrible events, achieving a productive and unsettling contrast. In “Creation Myth with Blatant Copyright Infringement,” Anthony Sutton’s evokes Jason from the Friday the 13th films as well as the language of the Book of Genesis. (Both references comprise the “blatant copyright infringement” that Sutton references in the title.) “In the beginning, Jason slashed every one of us,” Sutton begins. “We took his skin and made the Earth.” But the poem soon pivots, and Jason victims usurp the spotlight: “We took his mask and made the moon. / We took his machete and made all of you.” What begins as an entertaining homage to a horror classic becomes a creation myth. A new world springs from the old world’s terrors.

Jenny Browne’s poem, “Ampersand Tattoo,” is also a profoundly anxious poem, though where Diaz’s is deceptively simple, Browne’s is frenzied. Each line begins with an ampersand, and the reader tumbles from thought to thought, image to image, as if running through a house of mirrors: “& in the likely event of a water landing / & the sea rolled her eyes […] & before or after the door opens / & when the boom box on the passing bike blasts Bach / & two people discuss how deep to dig / & the new trees outside Sonic seem happy.” Each line functions as a doorway — an entry point, the first line of a new, hypothetical poem or story — and the cumulative impact is a deluge of lyric expression. This is an apt description of Samantha Bares’ prose poem, “Dog Days:” “In the open I wouldn't dream of refusing you harbor. Quicksilver plotting the shapes not for long. Shrewd a storm, scout direction leading movement — in my waters not hurricane not typhoon. Ague.” In terms of its diction, this poem has the most unconventional in Issue 9. Grammar is bent and twisted, resulting in a private idiom that obscures and obfuscates as much as it tells. But the poem doesn’t eschew sense. It is a direct address, the speaker offering refuge to someone who needs it. Like in so many poems in Issue 9, there is a storm raging. “Promise me rains dews melts recuses. […]. You, spent debris, adrift the tribute.” The language is a “hurricane, [a] typhoon” in and of itself.

None of the 30 pieces in Issue 9 shy from looking in the face of destruction. In some pieces, anxiety looms large and explicit, where in others, it simmers. In some works, apocalypse is in full bloom, reflecting the high stakes of current events around the world: war, displacement, hatred, pandemic. In others, the world hangs in a delicate balance, teetering on the edge between crisis and calm. In others, still, the writer is wrestling with redemption — a fickle, often faraway, hopeful thing. I’m proud to present a collection of works that so fluently wrestle with these competing truths. Pieces that look hard at the world, its endings, and its beginning. I want to let C. Russell Price have the last word. These lines from their poem, “Désirée Says, ‘There Were Crisis Actors at the Crucifixion of Jesus Christ,’” need little introduction: “You can always tell a lot about someone / by how they roll and how they want the end / to happen. Fire and ice are so passé.”

Jane Huffman