The cicadas are coming back this year. I’ve found them buried in the dirt in my garden as I dig holes for flowers,
their shells soft, their eyes buggy and brown. They always seem stunned to be unearthed. I try to put each one back in the little hole it’s carved out of my yard even though I know I’ll probably be sick of them when they crawl out of their hibernation en masse. It’s weird to think I’ve been walking over them for a few years as they slowly grew and slept. One thing I like about gardening is finding little secrets like that—finding a cicada or an old toy, sometimes a flower bulb I can’t identify. My yard isn’t the easiest to dig through because parts of it are full—I mean jam-packed—of old driveway pebbles and all of it is full of clay at some depth. We’ve worked it into a charming little place, though, like you’d expect to find outside a cottage: nice, beautiful grass surrounded by crazy flowering plants of all heights.
A lot of the things I love about gardening I love about poetry, too: finding something new and fascinating when I dig down, watching a flower or a line bloom a new way each time I look; the controlled chaos; the nourishment (we’re growing veggies and fruits this year); the way it’s been growing and continues to grow whether or not I’m looking.
I love a poem that opens up more and more every time I read it, like a flower does hourly, daily, even yearly, and Pamela Yenser’s poems do that for me. Pamela’s poetry shows, through vivid imagery and fantastic use of sound, how our everyday lives are haunted from many directions, including nature, crashes, our own bodies, possibly even the supernatural.
Fatima Mansour has given us two powerful, punching poems this month. The narratives, punctuation, and pacing of the poems let us in to see what it’s like to be analyzed and cursed for who and where you come from. Fatima’s poems are brave, and they made me squirm a little, and I’ve realized I understand more about the human experience from reading them.
Christian Ward’s poetry is beautiful and quiet, calmly introducing one image and one sound at a time. I can feel the frequency of these poems grow as they open like windows, or flowers, or eyes and ears.
Associate Editor Nicelle Davis brings us three great poets with interviews this month. Nicelle writes:
Charlotte Innes, Gillian Culff, and Anna Lowe Weber straddle that precarious line between metaphor and magical realism. They each, in their own fashion, allow readers to witness the metamorphism of a volcanic emotional concept into a rock solid representation. These women write such organic lines that it is nearly impossible to see how the mechanics of the poems are working to give the reader the empathy needed to experience their words. These are poems that truly root us in beauty and the mystery therein. Please enjoy as I have enjoyed the work of these powerful women.
Watch out for the cicadas, and enjoy the garden.