eDitor’s note

When we selected “Watershed” as the theme of Issue 37, we had no idea how prescient our choice would prove to be. Our editor in chief, Lori Soderlind, who relaunched this journal in 2018 and raised it to new heights, announced shortly after we named this issue that she had accepted a new post. This the first issue to be produced without Lori’s leadership, expertise, style, and drive. If we ever took her gifts for granted while Lori was in the chair, then we have had a tough year to reflect on what she brought to this journal, how much she did, and just how well she did it.

Donna Miele, our managing editor from 2020-2022 and member of our editorial board, had previously indicated her intention to step back from her managing role due to health issues, though on hearing Lori’s news characteristically offered to come straight back as an advisor. As Donna’s interim replacement, I cannot overstate my gratitude for the calm wisdom with which she has guided me through so many crises of confidence, and editing practice and style over the past year.

This is, therefore, a watershed issue in every sense, created by the editorial team Lori and Donna built. I am indebted to every member of that team for bearing with it, and with me, and for all they have brought to their work; I am in awe of their knowledge and skills, their patience, and above all their dedication to this publication.

Watershed has, of course, many meanings, both literal and figurative. That breadth excited us, and was a large part of what made it our pick. Our submitters responded with the same enthusiasm, latching onto the theme to send us myriad interpretations and applications in their poetry, prose, stories, and images. Lori could never have adequately prepared me for the agony of being able to print only the smallest sample of the wonderfully inventive and creative submissions we received. Watersheds even seemed to rise in un-themed submissions; perhaps this was a late-night editorial obsession with categorization creeping in—but then what piece of writing or visual art worth its salt does not present, at some level, a turning point, a defining moment, a divide, or a confluence?

Themes of confluence are taken up by the poet Margaret Gibson in the interview she graciously gave us, and which we are enormously proud to present here. Margaret talks about the streams of her spiritual and everyday lives converging in her writing, describing metaphor as a device to gather “what’s been separated…into a whole,” and observing that “Poets, more so than other language users, learn how to use language, song, and silence in a way that unites body and mind, presence and absence, word and image.” Confluence then extends to Margaret’s work as Connecticut’s State Poet Laureate, confronting thinking “in terms of separation and division” that separates humans from Nature and divides us by race and class. “So much damage flows from that erroneous way of thinking,” Margaret notes as she outlines her initiatives to gather a diverse poetic community to combat divisive thinking and emphasize the inseparability of environmental and social justice.

Thank you for supporting this journal and its contributors, and for being the reason we pushed through to get it out.

Alastair Murdoch, interim editor May 2022

Dulcet tones at the Dinner Party anD later

I’m pleased to see this sky, like being at a dinner party when a handsome stranger gets seated beside me, the conversation feels natural and maybe I’m a little bit in love. I’m glad when the dinner party ends since I’m getting a headache, Champaign does that to me, so

I say goodbye to my hosts and dining companion, chauffer night standing by my car, angry that I haven’t given him a raise, but I get in hoping he’s sober—he might make it to morning, blue sky tapping on my window, which I open— a hornet cloud gets in and stings me.

Kenneth Pobo

sKiP at the cemetery

Each spring he drives out to Ste. Genevieve Memorial Cemetery, his parents’ graves. Hours, crimson moons behind chipped stones.

Kenneth Pobo messing uP

I’m messing up this new sonnet. It’s fine during the octave, dies in the sestet. I mean to be writing about love, mine and my husband’s. The wheels come off. Childhood barges in—its hand slippery and wet. Too many rules to obey, a dark should interrupting my play, wrecking my sleep. Now I lay me down to drown in the deep waters of fear. Classmates knew I was queer before I did. Their words surrounded me, hounded me, every hiding place on fire.

You had it even worse than I did, dear, losing your hair at thirteen—family cackled out jokes. Laughter choked like barbed wire.