Issue 10 Foreword

It has been a long time since a Guesthouse foreword enjoyed the contributions of two of its editors, but for Issue 10, deputy managing editor Harrison Cook and editor-in-chief Jane Huffman combined forces to bring you the praise and analysis collected here. Issue 10 shines brightly: thirty poets, fictionists, essayists, and artists share work that is, as we both agree, so layered and multidimensional that it eludes theme. Thus, this foreword is unique in both its authorship and its themelessness; instead of collecting all thirty creators under the same rhetorical umbrella, we have made space to recognize each contributor’s truly unique vision. As we celebrate Guesthouse’s fifth anniversary and tenth issue, we invite you to join us in this celebration.

Benjamin Bartu’s poem, “There But for the Grace of God Go I,” is an exercise in transformation. It begins in the observational realm, with quick, lyric fragments building to construct sleek images: “like how a piece of paper curls out from itself in flame. into air. the ash follows the coral where it wriggles.” The images are emotive and strange, and the fragmentation causes a quickening, rapid flights of connotation leading from one to the next. By the second section of the poem, Bartu repurposes much of the language from section one into something stranger: “in the mouth pore opening its largest pore its is approaching coral tip of the. the is itself coral. that turns its into really. mine is me.” A change has occurred across the field of the poem. The language has morphed, the lyric phrase veering into the territory of the surreal, the nearly unrecognizable. Formally, the second stanza of the poem creates a kind of mirror image of the first, but the image in the reflection is warped, as in a funhouse mirror or a reflection in turbulent waters. Transformation is also a theme in the poem. “I’m lying on the ground. the ground a part of me,” Bartu’s speaker writes. “i can point at it and say that. is mine. is me. is that really. the coral that turns into itself. [...] its largest pore is becoming a mouth. everything in the seizure is becoming.” As the poem moves kaleidoscopically from one image to the next, the reader witnesses change — becoming and unbecoming — in both form and content.

Liam Bell’s story, “The Piano Tuner,” is about a man rediscovering himself in the immediate wake of a separation with longtime partner Amira. Life takes a dramatic turn for protagonist Kenny as he encounters a series of strange threats to his life and livelihood in quick succession on the day Amira moves out. He realizes that this next chapter will present him with opportunities to evolve, to become more independent, to do for himself the “kind[s] of things Amira would have handled.” Despite having a tremendously bleak day, at the end of it, he returns to his love for playing piano, embracing chaos, his “fingers flying,” “a mixture of notes that were perfectly in tune and those that weren’t.” The story engages on a literal level as a bumbling everyman navigates a new chapter, but it also serves a metaphorical purpose. Having spent so long in a dependent position, differential to his partner and assuming a position in which he carried few household responsibilities, Kenny’s situation feels insurmountable to him. The obstacles that present themselves perhaps stand in for larger emotional and psychological hurdles a person in this position would need to overcome — a relearning and regrounding process that would enable their independence. The piano tuner serves as a kind of reaper, warning him of the consequences if he can’t rise to the occasion.

David Joez Villaverde’s three visual poems combine anatomical images, like those from a textbook, with shocks of color, texture, shape, and text. The images evoke a recognizable, scientific surety: trachea, pelvis, musculature. But the components that surround it, and particularly the text, evoke metaphysics and poesis: “Time is not something.” “The permanence of the soul.” “The soul is substance.” These are strange and unsettling phrases to read accompanying anatomically correct representations of the body, and a deeper analysis of the textual components make this contrast even more unsettling. For example, “elanguescence (remission),” whose title comes from the first snippet of text that Villaverde has placed at the top of the visual field, uses a word usually reserved for philosophy: ‘elanguescence,” meaning “a slow process of fading away into non-existence.” Pairing it with the word “remission.” which immediately connotes the realm of medical science, shines new light on the metaphysics of the former word. This collage is backdropped by a triangular pattern that suggests graphing paper, as well as torn snippets of what appears to be an image in pointillism. Rigidity bumps elbows with chaos, mathematics with spirituality. In addition to being visually striking, these collages challenge viewers to consider the relationships between body and mind, soul and structure.

grace (ge) gilbet’s four visual poems are excerpts from what they call a “hybrid poetry/nonfiction book, holly, about their grandmother who was murdered in 1976.” These poems collage together “excerpted newspapers, [the poet’s] family photos, scraps from [their] own journal, [and] torn scraps from Emily Dickinson’s collected poems.” Through these materials, a reader can begin to eke out a narrative, which has been washed over, distorted, and fragmented by past, present, and future and molded by personal and public gazes. Text speaks to image: newspaper cuttings that read “blood stains in the foyer / her body / face down / amid an array of / kitchen utensils” overlay a photograph of adult and child, a figure literally missing between them, cut out by scissors. The phrase, “it was the limit of my dream,” typed in a serif font, accompanies the handwritten phrases, “I don’t ask about that memory,” and “think I inherited,” scribbled horizontally amid swaths of amber red and yellow. The words “first,” “to,” “know” are pasted over the eyes in a photo of young children, accompanied by a newspaper blurb that reads, “The two boys ran into the house and found their mother on the kitchen floor.” gilbert has channeled family tragedy into a record that serves both as an artifact of their grandmother’s murder and its affect on generations, and a visual thesis on the nature of memory, storytelling, and trauma.

Ellen Boyette’s three poems in Issue 10 do what we think some of the best poems do: track a unique motion of mind. By experimenting with moments of artful near-incoherence — the kind in which the essential truth about something has room to rise to the surface — Boyette captures a thinking state, her speaker’s mind often leaping toward strange, surrealistic images: “sagely lugging IV drips toward loved ones sunning on a shore. love, I have so much more of with my namesake’s grave in periphery.” Her speaker uses diction to evoke the impression of a thing or entity rather than that thing or entity in its entirety — a memory (“a woman approaches who is not wan — [...] and the earth administers us our dosage”), an observation (“unfair that every car has a hood that never leaves it”), or a feeling (“raging through breath like yards of paper into anxious confetti.”) Motifs reappear — sickness, medical care, smallness, walls, faces, food — suggesting a narrative that is secondary to the syntax only on account of the latter being so strong. As they read these poems, which sprawl largely across the page and deal in an access of sparkling and dynamic syntax, a reader feels themselves nearly slip into Boyette’s world. These are wondering poems, poems that are curious about the outer limits of lyric language.

Francesca McDonnell Capossela’s poem, “Catullus VIII,” is a response and homage to the titular poem by the ancient author, which begins, “Wretched Catullus, stop being a fool, / and what you see has perished, consider perished.” The original poem is something of a breakup ballad, as Catullus convinces himself to move on from a former lover: “Now, now she is not willing,” he writes, “you, powerless, must not want.” Capossela’s poem strikes a similar key: “But your attachment is a noose. / Death to wanting. Burn my mind / clean. Raze it / clear.” These words ring with grief — a want to forget, to burn down the memory of what came before to spare the speaker from recollecting it. Where Catullus says, “You [...] must not want,” Capossela’s speaker says, “Death to wanting,” an arguably even more extreme sentiment. Detachment, perhaps, feels better than the truth, which is that the speaker has not found what they seek. Yet, the poem ends with a moment of clairvoyance: “It was me / I loved, / anyway,” Capossela’s speaker says, a realization that suggests that the “car chase of lust” could not fill a void, or a need, that runs much deeper. Readers of Catullus will recognize Capossela’s version of him, who directs his gaze — be it loving, lusting, pitying, or hating — inward as well as out. The poem also functions as a loose translation of the original that modernizes its language: “I followed girls,” Capossela’s speaker says, “paid good money / for the rush.” By producing a poem that is part-translation, part-homage, which functions with and without its original context, the poet creates a speaker who is both a version of Catullus and someone else entirely — perhaps a version of the poet herself.

In Jancie Creaney’s story, “Void and Volume in Quick Succession,” the protagonist is waking up the morning after a summer’s night party in a familiar province, perhaps a hometown or college town, populated by all of their “oldest friends.” As the protagonist ventures through a house party, they notice one old friend in particular, a man named Jer, a noticing act made vivid by Creaney’s blistering and confident prose: “The island in the kitchen cut [Jer] at the hip. His belt buckle looked pretty heavy, and his feet looked really flat, like he gravely needed insoles. I considered his carriage unattractive. If a man was a ski slope.” The party perhaps represents the “volume” at which Creaney hints in her title, a rose-colored evening of nostalgia and youthful fun. The protag and Jer fall asleep together in the grass, but when they wake up in the sober light of morning, they see the place a bit differently. “This is the long void — even then I knew,” the protagonist says, “[...] in the verdant divide between salt split roads and quaint porticos. And furthermore — god — what’s a town like this doing sticking in your mind forever?” Perhaps this “void” is a projection on the part of the protag, a representation of an emptiness or longing they feel inside. Perhaps it is meant to impart a theme about the nature of returning: to come back to a place you once loved is to see it in miniature. Either way, Creaney’s off-kilter humor and keen observations of the world destabilize readers long after they’ve left the story’s “meat-pink sky.”

In “Strata,” a poem by Laura Da’, the poet tells three family stories, each of them involving connections to horses and horseback riding. First, her parents ride horses to the mountainside “beside the Snoqualmie River” to “settle there”; then, her grandfather, “sometime between / Shawnee Reservation and Hanford Nuclear Reservation,” who trained quarter horses, “bred them when the owner was gone / and pocketed the stud fees”; and third, an uncle, who, “after the allotment act,” which he refused to sign, “was beaten so hard / he ran off in the gloaming, / bleeding a dark saddle pad / across the withers / of the fastest horse in the barn.” The horse, as a character, a constant, becomes one motif by which Da’ traces family histories that lead to her own life. By titling her poem “Strata,” she indicates that each generation, or “stratum,” forms a unique layer in a greater whole, such as in rock sediment formations. As a triptych, these three stories evoke intergenerational connection — the inherited narratives, traumas, and loves that bind she and her relatives together — and tell a greater story of violence against indigenous people in the United States. Likewise, Da’ positions her speaker as one in an ongoing lineage — one stratum in a continuously expanding line of generations. Readers that family stories have bearing on the present and the future as well as the past.

In Marc Frazier’s poem, “Black Box,” the speaker imagines potential breaking points: “I can always try Tahiti. If it comes to that. [...] I’ve always wanted to use the words cul-de-sac and cumulus together in a poem. I still can. If it comes to that. [...] When I took [my sister] places, people stared. I told myself I could kickbox them in the face. If it comes to that.” This refrain, which suggests a hypothetical point of no return, suggests the speaker is reckoning with extremes, moments in life when decisions must be made, actions must be taken, last resorts must be considered. Yet as the poem resolves, it reveals its tender underbelly: “In season,” Frazier writes, “I take pansies to my sister’s grave,” he writes. “I wait for someone to discover the black box that explains all this.” The death of the speaker’s sister becomes the nebulous of the poem, which, on second read, informs the poet’s earlier images and meditations: “If it comes to that” becomes a mantra for surviving grief. It is as if the speaker is making plans, attempting to absolve himself the pain of losing a loved one by allowing his imagination to wander down different timelines. Ultimately, he wishes for an answer, “the black box that explains all this.” A “black box,” the idiomatic term for a flight recorder device, functions as a closed-system method of analysis, a truth-decoder, a relic of a tragedy, often unsurfaced by surviving investigators, a record of what really happened. Yet Frazier shakes off this impulse: when it comes to grief, surety is a false horizon, and it can trick our bodies into forced conclusions. “Maybe it’s best not knowing. If it comes to that.”

Written “after” Mary Ruefle’s poem, “Merengue,” Geula Geurts’ poem, “Pills & Holes,” asks a series of evocative questions. Some are prosaic, such as, “Who does the dishes in your house: the father or the mother? / Do they first rinse off the leftovers & then wash? / Or do they use soap from the start?” These questions ring with the language of intake forms, personality tests, and psychoanalysis. Other questions are sinister, borrowing Ruefle’s signature bluntness: “Does the Devil enter through the cracks? / Or does he walk in through the door?” The cumulative effect is the suggestion that a shadow runs beneath all illusions of domesticity, that of the caretakers who must “mend the holes [...] keep it all together” even as internal and external forces threaten to tear it all down: “something burning in the kitchen,” “debt collector.” Signifiers of substance abuse and addiction also run through the poem. “Does the Devil have a pharmacist?” the speaker asks. “What does she prescribe? / Can it be taken with a glass of wine?” Perhaps in this domestic space, pills and alcohol have become a coping mechanism, though the form offers no certainty. Rather, the form, comprising a series of questions, signifies the precariousness and uncertainty of the positions of “mother” and “father,” social roles accompanied by myriad pressures. The poem’s questions are open-ended in their suggestiveness but simple in their execution: yes or no? Readers are asked to answer — and to deal with the consequences of doing so. 

Brett Hanley’s poem, “I Grow Old,” is a blunt confession about the realities of aging. “I pluck a chin hair on my 31st birthday,” Hanley’s speaker says, “a sign I’m as capable of growth as any / bear cub or fungi or Venus flytrap.” Though the poem muses on the connection between all living things, its focus is the speaker’s body as a singular, unique animal: “There are traces of me all over / this bathroom, a place for my DNA / to rest. / You could shine a blacklight / here and find me all over.” A reader might recoil at this observation at first until they remember nobody is immune to mortal realities. The speaker’s body demands banal management, but the poem’s final observation elevates this to a cosmic reality: even the “ancient Greek heroine, / Atalanta,” held her bloodied hunting weapon “like a pair of tweezers between her teeth.” The poem’s resolution mirrors its intention: to raise the image of “a chin hair” to the level of the ecstatic. Shannon Hardwick’s poem, “Round the Rowley Mile,” employs a subtle experiment in punctuation. As soon as one sentence ends, without pausing for an end stop, the next begins: “When I go, / I want to be full / of ecstasy / The point / is to empty the body / like a trough punched / clean by bullets God / says”. New sentences are marked only by their capitalized first letters. The effect is a speaker who can be read two ways: in a frenzy, her mind spinning multiple records at once, or in a meditation, where one thought kindly passes by its predecessor without judgment. As regularity falls away, a reader can sense, even before it is revealed in the poem, that her speaker is looking beyond the realm of the domestic for meaning, for a connection with the sublime beyond the “dress stained with milk” and the “peanut butter” of everyday life. Perhaps this requires detachment: “to empty the body” of what does not serve this higher purpose.

Adam Houle’s poem, “Fall Church,” is deceptively simple, comprising only five lines that each contain five or six syllables: “The collapse is peerless. / Neat — once — as a pin. / The iron gates, stolen. / A vaulted door leans. / What new here begins?” The poem is haiku-ish, drawing on the form’s reputation for meditative observation and strong voltas between lines. Like the “fall church” that Houle’s speaker describes, the poem is a sort of collapsed form in and of itself. Traces of the haiku remain, but its doors are leaning, and its windows are spidered with webs. As such, the poem celebrates the beauty of imperfection in both form and function.

Early in Catherine Theis’s long poem, “The Beginning,” she writes, “These days I’m writing microscripts / where events seem closer at hand / an avenue of forgetfulness / brought me / here stitched in place” Perhaps this poem is a catalog of those “microscripts,” diary entries of the mind, each touching on myriad anxieties, observations, connections, pains, and allusions. “Traverse the corners / of my frightful damaged body,” the poem begins, “see beyond the plague /  of my treacherous imagination”. Indeed, motifs of “plague” and “body” recur throughout the poem, suggesting that this poem is a response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Theis’ speaker suggests that the writing process is a kind of balm, a secret chord that keeps them tethered: “There hadn’t been an answer / I liked hearing,” they say, “so I wrote one I preferred / and kept it secret.” The poet’s syntax is lucid, musical, and demanding: Indeed, for a dedicated reader, it demands more than one read-through: “My mouth a plum a bonne a bruh / a broken brother rent with parts sent / [...] string a little drink of knowingness / at my feet berries bark seeds peels / mescaline poured between concrete”. By omitting punctuation, Theis allows one turn of phrase to collide with the previous and next, creating artful run-on sentences that crescendo and fall again and again. Indeed, to read this poem is to challenge the idea of beginnings, as its title indicates, as well as endings. Likewise, the Greek mythological figure Cassandra, whose true and imminent prophecies went unbelieved, has a presence in the poem. “Cassandra as a spokesperson,” the speaker says, “ she narrates the weather / of a dust storm approaching / that way — the poet can come / and go as she pleases”. In “The Beginning,” Cassandra stands next to the poet as companion, consultant, and chorus; the wise fool, she is free to tell the truth because nobody will hear it. But the poet listens. In our pandemic age, when scientific truth is so often ignored, this resonates deeply.

Throughout Romana Iorga’s long poem, “Mea Culpa, Mea Culpa, Mea Maxima, Proxima Culpa,” a sense of danger persists: “The ground / begins at your feet, slips under,” she writes early in the poem. “The ground serves as punishment.” The speaker appears to see threat dancing at the edges of everything, a gaze she eventually turns onto herself: “My behavior / is that of a predator. [...] / Doubt what you see & get acquainted / with my claws. People often scurry away / when I talk while standing too close.” The poem’s title suggests this level of self-reflection, of “self-flagellation”: here is an account of the speaker’s “culpa,” her “mistakes” or “faults.” The poems veers across philosophies, confessions, and meditations on truth, on time, on madness: “I used to empty a chamber pot / for the queen [...] I wore pants / to church [...] / I played the violin in the metropolitan /orchestra.” There is something wildly refreshing in the depth and vastness of Iorga’s honesty. “Forgive me for sounding rash / & unthoughtful,” the speaker says, “it’s the emptiness / inside me that is spilling out.” Indeed, the poem spills its guts, eventually reaching a thematic climax. But it isn’t emptiness that sticks with a reader. Rather, it is abundance — the speaker’s galling, shameless largesse, her defiance, her turning of the knife: “See what I did there?” the speaker asks at the end of the poem. “I used my own / faults against you, buttered your toast / on neither side. Come clean, admit it: / I have won nothing, I have inherited it all, / my own & everyone else’s fear /of diminishment.” To “butter [a reader’s] toast on neither side:” that’s poetry.

Steve Kronen’s poem, “Goneril and Regan: A Defense,” offers a kind of epilogue to King Lear, giving sisters Goneril and Regan, Lear’seldest two daughters, a chance to have a last word with the audience. In the poem, they claim their actions, which range from petty to downright villainous throughout the play, are a product of how they were raised by a tyrannical, power-hungry father. “He never, never, never, / never, never spoiled the child / by sparing his word,” they say, as if in chorus. They explain they were afraid of their father, and they recognize he instilled in them selfishness and greed: “and we,” the women recall, “chilled / to our hearts, goose-fleshed with shivers / beside him on his windy bluff / (That, too, pointing to the water, / is mine) learned from our father / what constitutes enough.” They also claim to have loved their father at one point — to have shown him care and tenderness, which they recall with near astonishment, given all that has gone down across the five acts of their drama: “We loved him once, and this is still the marvel: / how we washed and returned to the shelf / the sheets that touched the withered penis.” The reader can choose to believe them, or they can chalk it up to more falsehood, a last-ditch plea for dignity. In her essay, “Daughters of Chaos: An examination of the women in King Lear and Ran,” scholar Cathy Cupitt likewise points to how Goneril and Regan are products of their family and social cultures: “Is it really so surprising that people who seem to have had little power in either the domestic or political spheres should behave inappropriately when power is given to them?”

Jane Lunin Perel’s poem, “Deceitful Sea,” is an unflinching portrait of the ocean, its largesse, its danger, and the changeability of its tides: “Hiding behind Your thin-lipped / waves / when / You’re low. / Then, You recede and Swell Your Manic Careening Beasts, / Slamming the shore, [...] We call This Your / High.” There is nothing serene about Perel’s seascape, nothing sentimental. The poem, like the ocean itself, “[its] Sea Wall Foaming at the Mouth,” is brutal, its descriptions audacious and unbeautified. Likewise, the poem is presented visually in a splay of sentence fragments that form the shape of a jagged wave crashing across the page. Like the ocean is a god or goddess who must be flattered, Perel reveres it with choice capitalization throughout: Your, You, Swell, Your, Manic, Mouth. This, along with artful line breaks, also offers the poem an aural resonance that mimics the many sounds of the ocean: “Your thin-lipped / waves / when / You’re low,” with its three line breaks and swaths of white space, offers up a sudden quiet to it against the loud percussion of the single line, “Swell Your Manic Careening Beasts.” Beyond a meditation on the sea (there’s no meditation going on here) the poem also deals in personification: the sea is a person who experiences psychological extremes, a frightening person who lashes out in arbitrary, involuntary bursts. Whether it is a self-analog or a study of a loved one, this person works on their own terms; “You have no Control,” the speaker says, “except to repeat Your Cycles, Your / High Crimes, / Your Hysterics.”

In Pam Matz’s poem, “So Much Hadn’t Happened Yet,” the speaker recalls their first academic office, “a tiny adjunct to a former vault. She brings with her “an obsession for arranging words,” which suggests the speaker is, indeed, a poet, as well as the “the revolutionary, iconic, unsentimental, tender / Cunningham photograph — Magnolia Blossom,” which she displays on her wall. The photograph, a close-up, black-and-white shot of the titular flower in which the viewer is enveloped inside an arrangement of petals, becomes a symbol for her passion — for the art of looking closely and writing about it. It is, after all, why she is there in her vault-sized office to begin with. The photograph also comes to stand in for her position as a young hire in a department; a colleague notes the photograph might be too suggestive to have on view in her workplace, but the speaker says the suggestiveness is the point, though not in the way the supervisor meant. “To see the flower /so intently you’d have to go close,” she remarks. To write poetry is to suggest, to gesture at something beyond the pale of everyday, to make connections between unlike things, to create something uncomfortable, like delicate, transparent carpels curling out of the erect stamen of a magnolia flower, framed by open petals. The poem marks the first of what might be a series of small rebellions — those that are necessary to make it as an artist in academia — indeed, “so much hadn’t happened yet” at the moment of this interaction. But the speaker knows, already, that one thing is for sure: to write poetry is “to go close.”

Muriel Nelson’s poem, “Pandemic Sequester,” offers a soundtrack to the COVID-19 pandemic. “Here’s a recording by one man alone / who laid down each voice part — bass, tenor, / and yes, alto and soprano too — with no / super-spreader choir to sing of charity, belonging, / and the lovely word amor.” She is referring, we believe, to a 2017 YouTube video in which singer Beau Autin created and performed an astonishing arrangement of Duruflé’s “Ubi Caritas,” a popular communion song in Western church traditions, in which he sings all the parts, digitally overlaying the audio into a final product. Autin calls it a “one-man choir multitrack,” which is a serviceable metaphor for pandemic life if there ever was one. Nelson touches on the emotional resonance of singing a “communion song” with oneself — relatable, over the past few years — and on the mystique of bringing a choral piece whose texts dates back to 796 CE to the internet age. Autin sings along, in communion with only himself, and yet, in his arrangement, “you can hear Rostropovich, Bach, Duruflé, that singer, / and now, joining them all, the voice of longing.” The audience, perhaps, comprises that latter voice. Autin’s video has been viewed nearly 25,000 times.

In each of the nine lyric vignettes in Alison C. Powell’s essay, “I Go Up, I Come Down,” each of which is titled after a triangle formation (i.e., “pyramid,” “nose,” “steeple”), the author tells a story in which she moves up or moves down: literally, psychically, spiritually, artistically. A mountain hiking trip in Switzerland. Taking an elevator to “a tunnel below the River Thames.” “Flunking Geometry 2 for the second time.” An attempted novel in which she used the “Freytag’s pyramid” story structure: “Start low. Ascend. Reach a climax. Descend.” With each new entry into this codex, Powell explores what makes a journey — for readers, the writer, and their narrative subjects. In this way, the traditional narrative structures fail: in life, there is no easy beginning, middle, and end. With its experimental presentation in nine parts and smattering of concrete textual elements (e.g., font size, alignment, capitalization) that draw a reader’s eye both from left to right but also up and down, the essay’s form beautifully exemplifies its content. “And my point appears to be that life boils down to climbing — or boils up to collapsing,” Powell writes in the final vignette. “Nothing to hang onto, and it is all about hanging on.” The essay demonstrates that the geometry of progress is not as sharp as its mathematical counterpart, that as long as there is a try, then there is a step, be it up or down.

The first movement of Anuel Rodriguez’s dynamic poem, “Thief,” begins in simultaneity: “My mother comes out of her room with her wheel walker / at the same moment a polar bear appears on the living room TV,” his speaker says. “I adjust my ski mask and watch as it swims in the ocean / beneath pieces of melting glaciers,” he says. In four lines, Rodriguez establishes that the stakes of this poem are high: the polar bear is in a precarious situation, as is, perhaps, the speaker’s mother. In the poem’s second movement, the speaker reveals his own precariousness, which mirror’s the vulnerability of the former: “RA is known to cut / years off of someone’s life,” he says, “So, I’m on bank-robber time now.” RA, what we assume is rheumatoid arthritis, becomes the titular “thief,” threatening the speaker with suffering. The speaker, too, considers himself a “thief,” metaphorically speaking, as he feels as if he is living on stolen time. The fourth and fifth movements of the poem venture into the surreal, evoking a kind of mourning on a vast temporal scale: “Like my mother, / if you ripped my body to pieces, you’d discover that my shadow / is missing.” Rodriguez’s speaker has inherited something from their mother — a “missing shadow” they cannot get back, perhaps a metaphor for generational trauma or dissonance between child and parent. “​​My mother says she wants me to take a picture of the doves / outside, which I’ve never seen,” the speaker says. Literally, this demonstrates lapsed communication between the speaker and her mother. But figuratively, it does more work: the poem pushes us to ask, What is already gone? What can we get back? What do we take for granted?

Delilah Silberman’s poem, “Martha,” begins with two seemingly unconnected thoughts: “Martha Plimpton on TV again! / What a beautiful day / for my friends to catch fire.” As the poem concludes, returning to its namesake, Martha Plimpton, and to tragedy — fire, flood — it follows an anti-logic that recalls the stylings of the antipoetry movement. In antipoetry, writes scholar Edith Grossman, “the ordinary artifacts of modern urban life [...] become the hostile furniture of quotidian existence that stands in the way of the protagonistst.” The poem’s cognitive leaps from the quotidian to the tragic, from Plimpton in “her silver dress and sexy / man on her arm” to the disturbing, intrusive thought of loved ones burning alive, offers a snapshot of how an anxious mind sometimes operates. Martha Plimpton is also a known abortion rights advocate and activist, which lends a political undertone to the poem for those who are aware of her work. In the poem, she exerts a certain sexual agency in her “silver dress,” which leads the speaker to muse on her own bodily autonomy: “Don’t look! / It’s me alone in this cool body.” Perhaps, also, this is a remark on modern celebrity, of being in the public’s constant gaze. This interpretation sheds a different light on the danger at the beginning of the poem, especially in light of recent political decisions that have stripped people of their rights to seek abortions in much of the U.S. “Run, friends,” the speaker says. “You’re on fire.” Although the politics of this poem run coolly below its surface, Plimpton’s presence adds a dimension to the poem for those who want to find it.

M.P. Stout’s poem, “Family Drama,” greets the reader with sweeping images, magnesium-bright: “Slip of liquid on a smooth path. / A bolete blooms itself through brusque leaves. / Everywhere, the mycelia are thrumming.” Quick like pouring water, connected like fungi in the undergrowth, nature is jeweled within the stanzas, and as the poem goes on, the natural world intersects with an urban landscape: “A train up north opens doors, ingests kids. / Later, they pass my window on rumbling wheels. / I would like more safety in the pane glass.” The title suggests a portrait of social conflict that seems all but absent in this dream of a poem. But in juxtaposing dissimilar thoughts and things — nature and cities, safety and danger, wildness and domesticity — Stout creates an extended metaphor for disunity. “The touch of a wasp in all related things,” she writes — and perhaps among all related people, too. The potential to hurt and be hurt. In Leah Umansky’s poem, “Even if the Body,” the speaker acknowledges that the body, which she calls “a vein of time,” does constant unconscious work, “so much right now to keep us,” to sustain us. The speaker is advised to “put [their] hands on [their] body each day and just feel it, focus on it” as a means of “regarding [it] by way of touch.” Bodily autonomy, physical and metaphysical, she admits, is sometimes hard to fully grasp, to fully remember: “Even if the body / is ours, hourly out of our reach. It belongs to us.” In the poem’s final section, the last of five thematically connected prose stanzas, Umansky turns her attention to poetry writing and its intersection with embodiment: “Being a poet is a way of having two lives. It feels like there are two, the before and the after, both pressing their faces against the glass, both trying to outlive the other.” Beneath this duality between “before” and “after” exists another that drives so much of art-making: that between the conscious and unconscious selves.

In Lindsey Webb’s short-short story, “It Bathes Itself,” a mother is charged with the herculean task of ringing in her daughter for supper. The child “bikes around the cul-de-sac with a piece of toast held between her teeth like a platform for something to land on.” She rolls her eyes at her mother’s insistence, and the reader senses that this is not the first time. This is one of the many “long private arguments[s] with death” in which the mother engages: “plum jam is so sticky it’s almost magnetic”; “sprinklers” that threaten to spray “poop water” into her daughter’s open mouth; shoving wet food into a “complaining,” “hungry” garbage disposal “with her naked hands.” These are the small grotesqueries of parenthood, of domestic work — those that are seldom seen or acknowledged as labor, even by those who engage in them by habit. On the contrary, Webb relishes in these observational details of a mother multitasking, elevating them to plot points in her microfiction: each chore seems to connote something far beyond its surface. In this way, the content seems to beget the form. Beneath the mother’s seemingly small actions are tenderness, frustration, love, boredom, thrill, anticipation, and worry. The result is a portrait of motherhood painted in devouring dimension. 

Allison Benis White’s poem, “Women in the Garden,” is a response to Claude Monet’s 1866 painting of the same title. White’s speaker explains the painting is said to have been a revelation for the painter: “Heinrich [a popular Monet scholar] writes, ‘It may be that Women in the Garden revealed Monet’s subject to him / for the first time: light.’” But in her poem, White focuses her gaze, instead, on the literal subject of the painting: “the women in the garden,” and one in particular — “[she] in the white dress / who is running away. Arms outstretched, / as if to flee, or greet someone unseen, left of frame.” White attempts to “see through the painting,” imagining the lives of these women in pastel dresses who perch “unnaturally” in the foliage. She also imagines their deaths; in examining their stillness, their strangeness, their “loneliness,” she senses tragedy. “The women are dead but can be spoken to,” White’s speaker muses. “What ended you? What ended you?” By humanizing the “subjects” of “Women in the Garden,” the poem offers a “feminist retelling” of the painting, though it is not a happy one: it suggests the cultural restrictions imparted by gender roles nineteenth century, many of which still resonate today, and the “secondary” role women played in many great male artist’s working lives. (The poem perhaps nods, too, at the untimely deaths of both of Monet’s wives.) Likewise, the speaker sees her own grief in these women’s vague faces. “How they [the women in the painting] all / died,” they say suddenly to someone else, “and I don’t have anywhere to see you.” The word “you” takes on many nuances in the poem, but lines like this one suggest the speaker is grieving a loss of her own, the death or departure of someone beloved, “unseen, left of frame.”

Jim Whiteside’s poem, “You Asked,” comprises two parts, each titled by their settings: “The Stradivarius Sound Bank” and “Mission Dolores.” Each is a study in vulnerability, sensitivity, and temporality, and each, in its own way, is distinctively sensual. In section one, “a musician stands / [...] playing a dying instrument — recording / glittering scales and arpeggios before/ the wood becomes too fragile, unplayable, / and the violin goes silent.” The musician is archiving something ephemeral, something nearly lost. Although the music is saved, the violin must be retired, laid “in a glass box [...] / the strings gradually / loosening.” As such, the poem has the air of an elegy: a goodbye to what was once alive and vibrant. Section two also captures something precious, though it occurs on a much smaller scale, in the speaker’s personal life: a quiet picnic on a “yellow quilted blanket [...] spread out to hold a dish of almonds /pastries with fresh fruit from the good bakery.” In this pastoral scene, “everything / shimmers: the city, ocean beyond, / glitter on the cheek of some old hippie.” As soon as it is experienced, this moment passes, but it becomes a memory as sweet as old violin music.

Evan Williams’ poem, “John, the World’s Foremost Expert on Nuclear Strategy,” reads like a contemporary fable about complicity, responsibility, and violence. John, the speaker’s apartment neighbor, is a nuclear strategist who “pontificates [...] on the virtues of second strike capacity, on revenge and retaliation.” By the nature of his work and knowledge, John is villainous, but Williams’ speaker also reminds us that he is a human being. One night, listening to the goings on from the other side of the apartment wall, he wonders what he might cook for dinner: “likely brisket, something meaty, something hot.” One might see William’s gesture to humanize John as one of empathy, but it also makes the narrative more horrifying. The speaker must reconcile the fact that John is both his neighbor — an otherwise normal man who cooks and sleeps like he does — and also a complicit actor in a system of unimaginable violence. By making John an “expert on nuclear strategy,” to boot, rather than an engineer, politician, or other stakeholder, Williams also seems to be making a statement on his cognitive dissonance — his safe, academic distance from the harm that his expertise and consultation might cause: “[John] pontificates,” his speaker explains, “for that is what foremost experts do when they speak.”

Connor White’s short story, “The Rest,” has many of the field marks of a work of magical realism: following a horrific train accident, Tommy has suffered the loss of his head, and his partner, Lorrie, must take care of her loved one who is still, somehow, alive by all medical definitions. “No one knew how a train collision could have shucked off his face and skull and most of his brain,” White’s narrator explains, “only to leave that wobbly little stub of his brain stem intact, dangling from the torn stump of his neck.” The story is Kafkaesque in its irony (“The nurses set a tiny pillow under it. A pillow at the top of her enormous, headless man.”) and in its contemplative imagination regarding the human condition. At the core of this horrific tale are larger questions about what it means to be alive: the relative morality of medically extending the life of a suffering person with a fatal diagnosis — someone who can no longer speak for themselves — and how to have faith in systems of medicine and religion in the face of a bad prognosis. “The Rest” also offers an extended metaphor: a reader could interpret Tommy’s situation as a stand-in for a real-life mental or physical health crisis that, to Lorrie, in the immediate aftermath of the accident, feels insurmountable. In either reading, as the story reaches its dramatic conclusion, readers will puzzle over Tommy’s and Lorrie’s fates.

“Connexa Chamaemilla” by Ondrej Zunka, the cover image for Guesthouse Issue 10, is part of the artist’s collection titled “The Fleur,” which he describes as “an art collection of twenty-one unique surreal species.” In the statement on his website, he says he hopes the series “inspire[s] us to look for guidance in the infinitely beautiful and intelligent natural world.” From this catalog of fabulous images, any of which could make a great cover image for Guesthouse’s tenth issue, editors were drawn to “Connexa Chamaemilla” because it evokes a sense of connectedness, a theme which, if we had to pick one, might unite all thirty creators in the issue. In the image, the centers of two separate flowers join in a half-infinity loop, connecting into a whole organism. A gradient sky bends the viewer to the bridge of the warm-hued pistils, where our eyes bounce back and forth, following that ruffled arch. From the viewer’s perspective, we are under the form, protected. Shade from the undercast moves our eye downward to the lit bases, where we are finally greeted with the strange, the welcoming, the familiar: both flowers connected, yet independent from the natural order. “[Camomile blossoms are] only found in pairs,” Zunka explains, “[so] the prominent bridge of disc florets that connects the two independently-rooted flowers functions as a communication channel that transmits nutrients, energy and good vibes.” We hope this image extends our gratitude to all our readers who encounter it on our homepage, that it offers a doorway into everything you will encounter in the pages of Issue 10. Welcome. Sit down in our strange garden. Smell the blooming camomile. Smell it again.

Harrison Cook and Jane Huffman

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Issue acknowledgements: Chad Cripe, editor and proofreader; Amara Toure, graphic designer for digital broadside project

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