Well, what to say about this past year? Our issue was late thanks to a number of COVID-related delays, and whenever you are reading this, there might still be copies stuck in USPS purgatory... However, fortunately, that sense of forever stretching beyond our little horizons is captured perfectly in our cover art (by Erica Baum), so you can look forward to being assuaged. The poems inside the issue perhaps also speak to our moment, though in different and unpredicable ways. Maurice Manning attempts to capture the past; Lauren Slaughter faces mourning head-on; and Ed Falco wonders fitfully about Narcissus. And maybe Narcissus can be a mascot of sorts for this weird moment of ours--how so many of us have stared at our own faces on Zoom and felt paralyzed, perhaps not by self-regard, but by somethign still inevitably bounded by the self. Hopefully the poems and interviews in this year's issue of HSPR well help break you out of whatever trance you might be in.
Contributors
Alexandra Beers Sean Cho A. Peter Cooley Robert Cording Todd Davis Edison Dupree Ed Falco Jessica Greenbaum Oscar Hahn Alamgir Hashmi Noor Hindi Haile Leithauser Angie Macri Maurice Manning Edward Mayes
Jennifer Moxley Cheswayo Mphanza Supritha Rahn GJ Racz George Scarbrough Maxine Scates Derek Sheffield Lauren Goodwin Slaughter StatHaikuBot Suzanne Swanson Roberto Tejada Robel Yemiro Jon Kelly Yenser Jane Zwart
Clytemnestra Facing the Judge
You take from a woman what she is or once was or could have been and leave her to shiver on the echoing stair so you can return to your game. The ways she can ruin a party are numerous.
My body knows what it had and lost. As the master came closer—conqueror, harlot on his arm— I felt my twin more keenly. I lurched, then licked my lips on hearing his healthy approach. I know how to sweep up. but I will not live as two anymore Grief, unnegleted, can be nurtured into something new.
Alleluia by George Scarbrough
How hard they try. How hard the star tries to impregnate a lamb. How hard the lamb tries to birth a shepherd. How hard the shepherd tries to beget a wise man. How hard the wise man tries to accommodate a star sweating over a dry barn. And the star, how hard the star tries to enflame the straw, what an impasse it foments in brilliant foxfire. And the foxfire, what a speckling on the blood-dredged floor, what rubies instilling a king’s fool-gold. And the gold, what a hurry it makes with the runners coursing the sandhills of far countries. And the sandhills, what shifting and hiding and dismissing, more equivocating in flight than residence. And I, alone on a bare eminence, what a besieged constellator I look and am. But the subscripted star, dragging itself into such winds, how avoidlessly it enters the question, suborning without even trying.
The Passionate Astronaut to Her Love by Hailey Leithauser
The pull of this world is grounding weight, a laborous freightage that lugs and daggles low, so let us, my pet, unburden ourselves of its pounds and its ballast and go beyond where our breasts can lift as the shy, silken tits of nymphs. Let us go, let us offer our souls to a lenient welkin where our hair fans and furls to Botticellian curls, and buttocks, swagged and slumped, rise like new warm golden loaves. Oh, let us hustle to gather together our suits and helmets, our sweet powdery ice cream, our packets of Tang and climb to where our calves and thighs contort once more to infinity loops, arms loose to parabolas, and there in the ivory night I shall be light as a white ostrich feather and you, spry as a blue Hindu god and the dark between stars will be the dark of a rapturous Grand Cru that opens and swirls slow to our lips with none but the biddable draw of our breaths.
