Issue 8 foreword: Origin

Jon Davis' poem, “The Gift,” offers an introduction to the thirty works in Guesthouse Issue 8. “It begins back before memory,” Davis writes, “begins in stories told and heard, of gravelpit, hog farm, of hogs shifting in ramshackle enclosures, storm doors and logs and skids.” The poem is a genesis story; a creature is “carved from oblivion” and thrust onto Earth. “This part he was innocent of,” Davis writes, gesturing at the coincidence, or miracle, of life. “This part was done, not chosen.” This issue overflows with the bluntness and mystery of genesis. It examines birth and afterbirth, reminiscence and recognition, stories told across generations. With Guesthouse as their “ramshackle enclosure,” these poets, fictionists, essayists, and artists are the “great breathings” that whistle through the storm doors – the songs and whispers and shrieks and “bucketclangs.” These pieces thrum with the essential energies Lauren Camp names in her brief, luminous poem, “Challenge:” “the rhythm of the hub, track, / the anger, aftermath, admissions / [. . .] the grain mill, ritual, engine” with which “every day begins.” I chose “origin” as the theme of Issue 8 because each of these works is profoundly original. In a broad sense, each piece tells a kind of origin story. Whether it’s arrival, rebirth, or recognition, these works spring forth from distinct points of intellect, idea, association, and emotion. From anger, aftermath, engine, oblivion.

In “(Sister) (Sister),” a contrapuntal poem in which Danielle Badra responds directly to her late sister Rachal’s poetry, Badra communicates across realms: “i am worried for us / the hourglass is stagnant / is sideways / i can’t recall / our childhood / all on my own i can’t / remember when / we became sisters.” Danielle addresses the form in a Facebook post: “[Rachal] wrote the right-hand column as a birthday present to me for my 23rd birthday. The left side is my response.” The two poet’s voices begin to merge but stop short of incorporation. One poem originates from the next, but there is always distance, a narrow chasm, over which they can no longer reach each other. It is this space – in Davis’ “time before memory,” among Camp’s “soft muffle [. . .] “patched-over lichen” – from which Badra, and so many writers in this issue speak. Maxine Scates’ poem, “Vein,” also stirs the water between the living and the dead. While walking down a road in a familiar town, she startles at the fact that so much time has passed since a loved one’s departure. “I did say to Bill,” she writes, “that Johnny had been dead for twenty years, and we were both surprised because Johnny was fierce, / and his fierceness lingers though toward the end.” Time collapses in on itself in this poem, as it drifts in long, continuous sentences, into and out of the past, between the boundaries that demarcate the time before original grief and the time after. As with Badra’s poem, the reader is stunned by absence.

Lisa Fishman’s story, “The Elephant Box,” also examines how memory and time don’t run on parallel lines. Fishman’s protagonist, Amanda, pours over old letters from a loved one, recollecting moments from their relationship, and finds that the timeline is murky. “Elizabeth’s letters were dated [. . .] but that did not help it feel clear to Amanda when she had received them. She could not place them, or she couldn’t place herself in relation to when the letters appeared in her mailbox or post office box.” One letter contains an apology Amanda made to Elizabeth, but she can’t remember why or in what context. “It was strange to Amanda that whatever had occasioned the letter could disappear,” Fishman writes, “even as both the words and tone of Elizabeth’s greeting were instantly recognizable.” As in so many pieces in Issue 8, the past is fragmented: the apology is lucid and clear – tangible, in this story – but its origin has vanished. The story reckons with the relationship between what we can hold onto, and what we cannot.

In Caleb Braun’s poem, “Unclaimed Devotee, Confused, Cloistered since March, Rides his Bike All Day to the Same Place,” he, too, squits at the past. He struggles to recall details, as if a sheet has been thrown over familiar people, places, and things: “it’s 11 a.m. on the schoolyard lawn. [. . .] I pass faceless again as child / [. . .] Lord, there are times / when I somehow forget my own life / in this wind.” Memory is foggy one moment and vivid the next, and so, too, he recalls, is the present. During a global pandemic, the days begin to run together, beginning to repeat themselves. Braun’s speaker is alone with his own memory and finds there an unreliable narrator. “I’m asking forgiveness today,” Braun writes later in the poem. “This / and covering ground I’ve already covered.” The speakers in both of Aiden Heung’s poems in Issue 8 seem to experience a similar form of daily repetition. “Every day, I’m walking / on frozen grass toward the station,” Heung writes in “Allegory,” “feeling my warmth siphoned / away.” Then later: “I have to warp / my face into a smile today, // and board the train to a different story.” Heung’s speaker seems unhappy, resigned to this fate, to follow this bleak pattern until the end of his days. But despite its coldness and darkness, there is a glimmer of warmth in “Allegory.” Heung’s speaker finds some peace and respite in anonymity. “In the city of red dust,” the poem concludes, “I move / like light on water.”

Patrycja Humienik also divines unexpected comfort in her poem, “are you satisfied with your smallness?” Her speaker looks out at a storm brewing over a sea, a “furrowed brow / of clouds stacking into thunder.” In this chaos, she sees an escape hatch. “[I] could drive there if necessary,” she confesses,” seeing in the violence and vastness of nature as “a kind of lifeline / […] the lightning cracking blue / veins across the sky.” Humienik’s speaker feels the specific kind of “smallness” she refers to in her title, the kind that one feels when encountering the sublime. With this sense comes the oddly comforting recognition of human insignificance. “It is a relief to feel consumable,” she writes. If memory flickers like a candle in Braun’s and Heung’s poems, it glares like a floodlight in Abigail Minor’s work in Issue 8. In her poem, “Go Empty Your Pockets,” she catalogs a life in images, each rendered in specific detail, oscillating between the micro and macro: “let me keep / [. . .] the fat / pink marker and the insurance / policy on which I’ve written pinkly Fuck / encomiasts of sin,” and then later; “ the vision of myself / as a melancholy child / I was standing / at the door with my backpack seeing  / the yard as dirt.” Her litany – “Let me keep” – becomes both a tool of recollection and a demand – a reclamation, a grab, a plea, a beating back at the passage of time. Her speaker is desperate to retain the memories that make her whole – to keep them close to her chest even as they spill out.

Like Badra, Mary Dwyer also speaks to a loved one across a great distance in her poem, “Filius Iesu,” and like Minor, utilizes specific images to position her reader in time. “You left me, the snake plant, the clapboard cape,” Dwyer writes, her speaker addressing a brother, departed or otherwise out of the picture. “Your sagging pants, a dime bag out the door, your skin’s gray vapor thick in the wind’s wake.” These vivid details are impressions of an original grief, which, like in Scates’ poem, linger long after the wound is sealed. Dwyer’s poem is rendered in beautifully made rhyming pentameter, signifying, perhaps that this pain has been crystalized by time. Likewise, Micah Bateman’s poem, “Bridges,” an homage to Brigit Pegeen Kelly’s tremendous “Song,” illuminates distance between relatives, in this case, between sons and their fathers. “There’s a song in their hearts / [. . .] as their crowbars / Unbrace the bridge their fathers made. / Their fathers had made bridges / The boys don’t believe in.” As in Kelly’s poem, the act of work, the boys unmaking what their fathers built, is both actual and mythic, figurative and real. One generation retools what the former has given them, and the work bonds them, “gives them passage to the other’s house.” In unmaking one bridge, Bateman’s characters make another. They must do this work to survive.

Contrastingly, Maria Dylan Himmelman’s poem, “What I Can Tell You about the Baby,” seeks to demythologize generational movement, complicating the narrative often told about the origin of life. “He [the baby] is not a metaphor for the creator, not thought / perfected or pearled in a spell, not holy equation,” Himmelman’s writes. “His sum equals less than you’d think.” Himmelman’s speaker offers her newborn son the gift of imperfection, of demythologization. I love this poem because it observes motherhood with irreverence, and in doing so, makes room for the real, which is far more interesting. There is also a demythologization present in Cate Marvin’s poem, “Against Daylilies.” She addresses the flowers directly: “To think I used to serve you up in the vase / I place at center of my table [. . .] But I’ve smoked so long I can no longer feel / the effect of your musk breath, and I can eat / the color orange in an egg.” Marvin’s speaker has experienced a change; no longer does she see the flower as an allegory for beauty, a bringer of “suns in nowhere zones.” That, she seems to remark, was a different self, a different life, a different innocence, an origin from which she has matriculated.

Likewise, Maya Jewell Zeller’s lyric essay, “Sestina for Foragers,” de-idealizes the natural world. She tells about her origins – growing up in a family that relied on eating what they could find: “salmonberries, red hucks [. . .] stolen jam from restaurant baskets, [. . .] pumpkins and zucchini wildly overgrowing in the gardens.” It was in graduate school, Zeller recalls, that she first heard the word foraging in this context. “We never called it foraging,” she writes. “Those of us who eat, by necessity, what’s wild and/or found—collage eating—just call it food.” The essay shifts between this exploration of access, privilege, and sustenance, and another – the poetic form of the sestina, which Zeller explains is “all about repurposing.” It takes a certain hunger to do it well. Poetic form is also central to Nathan McClain’s critical essay, “This Beautiful, Needful Thing: On the Poetics of Home in the African American Diaspora.” The essay juxtaposes Robert Hayden’s 1966 sonnet, “Frederick Douglass,” and Ross Gay’s 2015 poem, “A Small Needful Fact,” the latter of which, McClain writes, is shared online “after nearly every instance of a young Black life snuffed out by police.” He argues that the poems converse in both structure and content, suggesting that although Gay’s poem is not a sonnet proper, “it possesses the same rhetorical propulsion, [. . .] winding toward some resolution.” McClain also interprets the thematic resonance of the poems: “It isn’t difficult, as a Black poet, to read this poem [“Fredrick Douglass”] from our current cultural moment, within our own “long, tortuous” march toward the freedom by which Douglass and Hayden were so captured.” As such, in McClain’s able hands, both Hayden’s and Gay’s poems exist “in the past, present, and future at once.”

There is also new knowledge gleaned in Katharine Whitcomb’s poem, “Hotel Vienna.” The poem is driven by the refrain, “Now that no one loves me,” and this conditional, this circumstance, allows Whitcomb’s speaker to see the world anew. “[N]ow that no one loves me,” Whitcomb writes, “tiny angels / relinquish their architecture to circle my cheekbones / [. . .] now that no one loves me angels / unhook each precious painting / to set the trees inside them free.” It’s as if the loss of love in the speaker’s life has harkened heaven forth, has sent angels down from on high to usher her to freedom, blessing the very furniture, bringing every molecule of the world back to original life. Where Whitcomb’s poem evokes a coming of grace, Susan Rich’s poem, “First Knowledge,” conjures a coming of age. On a trip abroad, Rich’s speaker is confronted by the sharper edges and darker shadows of the world. In this unfamiliar, exciting environment, sex and violence swirls around her: “From my single bed / pushed against sash windows, I listened / to the world of urinating men, / heard hard-accented curse words as bar fights / broke out and couples pushed-up against our rooming house / stairs.” In her rented room, she is both apart from the action, the original sin, and at the center of it.

Elizabeth Langemak’s poem, “Some Questions I Had Later and Still Have,” likewise evokes a transition from innocence to experience. The setting is a Johnny Cash concert at a country fair in Plymouth, Wisconsin. “What / my dad showed me that night,” Langemak writes, “was Johnny’s / dust-covered bus. [. . .] It’s full of black shirts, / he said, later.” This early exposure to the adult world – this peek behind the curtain – prompts the “questions” Langemak references in the title. “In Plymouth, Wisconsin,” she wonders, “was everyone a bus / of black / shirts,” omitting the question mark with a thump. It’s both a question and a realization, one that ostensibly prompts a new understanding of herself and the people from whom she comes. Maria Isabelle Carlos’ poem, “Inheritance,” is one of the pieces in Issue 8 that most directly speaks to the theme of “origin.” It explores the tangible and intangible things that are passed down via family and culture. The poem begins with an epigraph that reveals the horror of a “living exhibit” at the 1904 St Louis World’s Fair, where crowds came to spectate “Filipinos from at least ten different ethnic groups.” Carlos’ poem uses the “abecedarian” form to list what her speaker has inherited, including both emblems of her family story and the racism Filipino Americans have endured : “Ancestral blood. Anxious tics in my right eye. Anthem I never learned. Broad forehead. Callused hands, or a preference for work that grows them. Colonial rapist blood. Dual tongues. Dueling tongues. Dogtown. Errata. Fried fish slickening a paper towel.”

Self-knowledge and identity are also themes in Michael Wasson’s poems in Issue 8. In “Edit: ________ Removal Policy,” he asks, “If I destroy / my- / self to- / day, does / that make / me A / -merican / enough?” In these short, broken strokes of language, Wasson evokes the past and present annihilation of Native people and the weight his speaker carries because of it. Indeed, all three poems emerge from the threat of erasure: “the entire hillside / blossoms our valley / alive, to crush us,” he writes in “Poem on Behalf.” And later in “A Verb for Being Left in the Light, in the Fire, or What Remains After Everything,” there’s “a dream where my father’s skull opens / into a spray of larkspur.” But Wasson’s poems are not void of hope; his speaker’s gaze remains fixed on the “opened eye / of tomorrow.” Inheritance is also at the center of Michael Martone’s suite of micro-fictions, especially in the story titled, “A Deep Fat Fried Breaded Pork Tenderloin from John's Awful Awful (Awful Good, Awful Big).” “It takes a while to tenderize the meat,” his speaker says. “We use the peen end of a ball-peen hammer, a hammer I inherited from my grandfather who was a coppersmith, [. . .] before it is inserted in the sleeve of the breading, the flour of which I grind myself with a marble mortar and pestle I inherited from my other grandfather.” These tools become points of origin for his characters. As in both Bateman’s and Carlos’ poems, work, and the dignity of work, is passed down, down, through the concrete rituals and objects of labor, from one generation to the next.

Two pieces in Issue 8 paint nuanced portraits of characters, the first being Ayomide Bayowa’s poem, “Fallen Walls, Mere Floating Portions,” an intimate and lucid portrayal of the speaker’s grandfather. “My grandpa’s neckbeard is ostrich-scarce,” Bayowa writes. “His bruise— / red as a plagued pool, fresh from an out-bathroom fall.” Bayowa writes unflinchingly about the pains of aging, ranging from the inconvenient to the traumatic, but he does so with a loving touch. “He can’t pick two words at a time, not even his favorite fruits,” he writes, “(lemon & Lebanon).” This man represents both Bayowa’s speaker’s origin and his future, for he will someday “start creasing into linens of goatee wrinkles” himself. Joanne Mosuela’s poem, “Paul McDonald,” is also a vivid portrait of a man. It imagines the origins of the “Old McDonald” nursery rhyme and its namesake farmer, here called Paul, who is drawn to a career in architecture because he is beguiled by the idyllic beauty of barns. It sounds like a gimmick, but Mosuela transforms this conceit into a touching inquiry into the human spirit. In school, Paul studies “the loft / of eaves, the cantilevered beams, the trajectory of ceiling to an eternal blue beyond,” but his career takes him to a city, as careers often do. From his “high rise,” he can see “so much / as one old mortar wall from his open window.” He has lost sight of his origins. “Oh, to go back to the roots / of a remote past,” he mourns.

Amy Poague presents a portrait of a place in her poem, “Time Gone Missing,” where her speaker is stranded on a faraway shore. “I have been here on the beach / for two months now, lost and sick.” This landscape is a state of mind, a time lapse, a dreamscape, a loneliness, a sleep paralysis from which the speaker can’t wake. Perhaps it is a paradise of one, or a form of purgatory. The poem makes a swerve at the end, revealing a prophecy that “someday, we will all swim like we were / never born float with pool noodles in the World Wide Web.” Suddenly, the poem becomes a treatise on technology – the isolation and sickness that comes with life spent online. Jasmine An’s poems in Issue 8, which are reader-adaptable hyper-texts (the first that Guesthouse has ever published, with thanks to the author for her CSS prowess), also originate from the pandemic moment, particularly “We Recognize.” Using found text from “a national COVID-19 survey” and other nonfiction sources, the poem explores the racial inequities that have been exposed and exacerbated by the Coronavirus. She writes of “a laggy orientation / to others’ reality” that has prompted mass ignorance to how people of color – particularly people who perform 
“indispensable labor” – have been disproportionately harmed by the pandemic and our social, cultural, and governmental responses to it. As the reader interacts with the text, the sourced and original text fades into and out of view, a praxis of literal disappearance.

Jeff Pearson also explores profound isolation in his poem “State Hospital South.” The speaker describes living with “schizo- / effective disorder,” which he describes as a “sling [. . .] holding [his] head together.” “In the wetland,” Pearson writes, “as the quiet hospital / campus above lapses into activity hour, / I build a handcuff out of snake grass.” He recalls his first stay at the hospital, “timeless / grafted into a location outside of the days,” and another, when he “swore to take more than fifteen tabs / of ibuprofen.” Against these tumultuous memories, the current moment of the poem is lonely, still, and peaceful. Pearson’s speaker lies in wetland looking into the night as “the leftover glow in the dark / stars lose charge,” “the sticky stubble of snake grass filter[ing] / through [his] shirt.” This poem, and many other works in Issue 8, speak to the sculpture work of Hans Op de Beeck, the featured cover artist. His featured piece, a 2019 sculpture titled, “My bed a raft, the room the sea, and then I laughed some gloom in me,” portrays a sleeping woman, her bed afloat in a serene pond. It seems to portray the woman’s dream of floating through a faraway ecosystem. “Sleeping and dreaming are conditions that frequently recur in the artist’s work,” a statement from the artist’s studio reads, “but rather than supporting their presence with psychoanalytic readings, they encourage the audience to submit to their own dreams through the imagination.” Indeed, the sculpture is transportive; you can almost hear the trilling of soft water and the thrum of mosquitos swirling the water lilies. As in Pearson’s poem, the subject is surrounded by a dynamic natural world. But as the title suggests, there is darkness present, too; the abject stillness of the sculpture and its symbolism (e.g., sleeping pills, butterflies, “emblems of mortality and transience”) and its grayscale palette evoke entrapment, as if this sleeper won’t ever wake. Perhaps like in Poague’s poem, Op de Beeck’s subject is returning to the primordial, floating back to the origin of life.

The  mystery of dreams runs throughout several pieces in Issue 8, as in Jillian Crocetta’s essay, “Salamander Literature.” The essay hinges on the author’s obsession with the number six, with which she has a personal, spiritual connection. “I knew that the whisper in my head was six, personified,” she writes. She traces this association across many fields of inquiry, personal memories, and dreams. In her dreaming reality, Crocetta’s speaker embodies a different self, one that is perhaps closer to a divine power or authority, closer to what “six” embodies or represents. “I knew that dreams were curious things. / I knew that dreams could be celestial, as could the number six, as could the regenerative salamander. / I knew that I was a different me in my dreams, and that I would wake up wanting to touch her hand and feel for corporeality.” As in Op de Beeak’s sculpture, dreams offer portals to self-analysis and self-knowing—and to a shadow world obscured by day. The dream self is sister to the real self, both strange and recognizable, appearing and disappearing in the same instant. Stephen Ira’s poem, “The Cake Dream,” also traces the movement of a dreaming consciousness, this time across many dreams, or perhaps one dream, fragmented or repeated across iterations. “Once, in the dream, it was you, but with reversed tattoos. The address of your old house on the right hand instead of the left.” Then: “I dreamed someone finally noticed that I kept my middle name.” And later: “I always tell people this one. [. . .] During dinner, I had something in my bag that I wanted to show Alfred Hitchcock.” Each dream reveals another facet of the speaker’s experience, joys, anxieties, and relationship to the person or people to whom they’re recalling their dreams. Ira resists direct interpretation, instead allowing the generative power of the dream world to encompass multiple realities, futures, bodies.

Dana Roeser’s three poems in Issue 8 cover a tremendous amount of ground, but like in Crocetta’s essay, what grounds each of them is self-awareness. Roeser laughs at and with herself. There is distance between her and her subjects, which she fills with observations, images, and one-liners. In the poem “Samara,” after “planting tomatoes / and basil and tarragon in the dark / under the whirling maple seeds” in her garden, her speaker postulates about sex and infidelity – a jaded, stony, immensely vulnerable monologue that spills erratically down the page. This is a leap that only Roeser could make. “What do men want?” she asks in the very next breath. “It has to do with the urge / to shove their * junk * into the / dark mystery.” There is a dose of bitterness in the poem – one that she fully acknowledges (“a fecund soil,” she calls it). Her wit barely obscures that which is buried there. Where Roeser’s poem is vast and encompassing, several poems in Issue 8 seem to spring from a singular word, image, or obsession.

Elise Bickford’s poem, “On Words That Do Things, People Who Don’t,” opens with a rhetorical question: “1. What do I tell people when I tell people what I do?” The poem continues as a list, one item leading connotatively into the next. Bickford’s speaker answers the poem’s original inquiry: “2. ‘I’m concerned with a question…’ 3. But being concerned is not doing.” What follows is an ever-deepening analysis of what writers do: “7. Often, I sit. Hours at a time. Doing just that. / 8. Sitting.” The poem spans multiple interpretations and conclusions: “doing” becomes “sitting” becomes “cultivating” becomes “watching,” becomes “doing by accident,” and so on. Eran Eads’ poem, “Vibrates” also expands outward from a single idea, like a ripple in water extends from its origin. Vibration first appears in the poem as something very specific – a dieting technique of which Eads seems skeptical. (“The theory involves something vibrating, […] wine-avoidance / strategies and do-not-order-those-burgers / methods”). But the poem quickly evolves beyond this original image; in the modern world, it seems to argue, everything vibrates all the time. “Vibrating / says the clothes are done. Vibrating says / a friend has called. Vibrating asks, why / are you still drinking cheap wine?” Like many of the pieces in Issue 8, “Vibrates” is a feat of connotative imagination. By the end, the very Earth is vibrating beneath our feet.

I struggled to end this foreword, perhaps because all 30 of these pieces move with tremendous, ongoing energy. I feel propelled forward by their stories and songs, which tell not of ends but of beginnings and middles, upsets and restarts, histories made and re-made. And so instead, I’ll let Ethel Rackin have the last word, whose triptych of modified ghazals beautifully and strangely embody the issue’s theme of “origin.” They re-imagine the “ghazal,” a traditional Arabic poetic form, first recorded in the seventh century, that requires several formal elements. Rackin chooses to emphasize a single traditional parameter — that the poet name themselves. As such, these poems honor the form’s ancient origin to an extent, but they stand on their own, irreverent. “Tomorrow is gone—,” she writes in “Red Ghazal,” which could stand in as a thesis statement for Issue 8 at large. “Raise the red lantern / blue heron nights / faded red sun / end the errands / the distractions / [. . .] / your last day’s come / Ethel Rackin.” I extend the same call to you, reader, as you enter to Issue 8.

Jane Huffman, editor-in-chief

With thanks to Diane Seuss