Issue 4 foreword: Mirage

A new year and a new decade are on the horizon. December is often a time for reflection on what’s ahead and what’s behind. But reflections can be deceptive. They can tempt us, bemuse us, and trap us within our own projections and assumptions. Throughout history and literature, mirages have informed our geographies and mythologies. Explorers report land masses where there are none; heroes of literature are snared in mousetraps of their own making, slashing their swords at ghosts and windmills; and we tremendous and doomed storytellers, plunge our hands into sand, thinking it water.

As I was reflecting on the theme for Issue 4 of Guesthouse, reading and re-reading the tremendous 20 works that comprise it, I found myself squinting into the offing, wondering if what I was seeing was real or a trick of the eye. Ben Peterson’s story, “Desert Caravan,” evokes Melville’s weirdest passages, language wisping around the wrought-iron scaffolding of his characters like never-tamed ivy. And then there’s the plot: a man leads a desert caravan astray, chasing a twinkling speck of light “pinched between the edges of the sky and the sand. Under the heat of the hot, hot sun, its bleary image quivers.” Peterson writes a deeply inward protagonist, describing his descent deeper and deeper into the desert landscape with masterful strokes of metaphor, humor, and heart.

The landscape is also unreliable in Kirstin Allio’s poem, “Watershed,” which takes the reader on a tour of a hurricane barrier post-storm. Piles of out-of-place and storm-torn objects make it an apocalyptic scene wherein the domestic has been scrambled with the wild and the familiar mixed into the obscene: “Sysco trucks / rattle loose gills / par avion panty / hose bushed / in a clothesline of leaves.” Allio’s densely packed language reeks and leaks with refuse and remains, the unnatural aftermath of a natural disaster that brings the inside world outside, crass, laid bare, and indelicate.

Where Allio’s language is linear and full to the gills, Alice B. Fogel’s two poems from her series titled “Nothing But”  evoke a veil-thin mirage, their words scattered dutifully across a white plane boxed in with thick, dark lines. The visual effect is an accomplishment, especially given the poem’s references to contemporary paintings,  but it is the poems’ shimmering and elusive half-narratives and musings that draw me nearer to them like a Venus fly trap: “it’s common sense / we insist / to believe / in a shared reality / that reiterative / imitable / systematic illusion of certainty that’s only the tip.”

A strong visual poetry is also at play in Kelsey Nuttall’s poems, “Three Haunted Erasures,” which she created by redacting text from Craigslist ads selling haunted dolls (seriously). “Play” is the operative word here, as these poems delight in their camp and spookiness. Like in Fogel’s poems, Nuttall uses form to trick her readers’ eye, revealing a sinister subtext beneath found texts. “You must be / a item / gorgeous / itself / like her story,” Nuttall writes, fulfilling her own prophecy; these erasures are gorgeous as art objects and in their epic narrative mystery.

Leah Kiureghian’s poem, “In the library let thinking,” a finalist for the 2018 Penny-Farthing Prize for Lyric Poetry, plays with fragmentation in a similar way. Kiureghian omits conventional punctuation and lets each line of the poem run into the next as if they are happening simultaneously. “I sat in the library let thinking / work past me,” she writes, forcing the reader’s eye to double back to parse out meaning. The poem replicates the experience of searching for a word or memory that is just out of reach — pawing at the door of an answer but finding it locked.

Like Fogel and Nuttall do, Geoffrey Babbitt uses strong concrete components in his hybrid essay, “William Blake’s Prophetic Epistemology,” one of three pieces in Issue 4 that takes on Blake as subject matter (he’s having a moment). As Babbitt oscillates between critical prose and original verse, he explores Blake’s metaphysics through a contemporary lens, particularly his ideas on perception. “If we look with our eyes, we are limited to Ulro — the Corporeal, Vegetative world,” Babbitt writes, exploring motifs from Blake’s poem, “Auguries of Innocence.” “By looking through our organs of sensory perception, however, we see the Eternal, the Infinite.” Babbitt’s essay is a reminder that it is up to the individual to decide if infinity is trustworthy.

Marion Brown, too, in her poem, “WANTED,” re-sees William Blake, characterizing him as she might a contemporary poet. Blake becomes “Fierce and self-employed,” a wanted man with a catlike punkiness who won’t apologize for “spying, for pouncing or dying.” The poem recalls age-old questions of the subjective value of art and the shifting position of the artist in the modern world. (Would Blake, in 2019, have applauded a $125,000 banana duct-taped to a wall?) Kate Murr strikes a similar note in her poem, “Gig Economy,” another runner-up for the 2018 Penny-Farthing Prize for Lyric Poetry. In this poem, the artist is again transfigured into a cat–this time a freelancer, “a freeprancing window washer” who “speaks bird. / Writes real estate blogs. Substitutes.” Like so many of us are, Murr’s artist-turned-cat is dependent on the hustle, scraping together an income any way she can.

In Nathan Blansett’s poem, “Haussman,” and Helen Marie Casey’s poem, “Josephine’s Roses,” the mirage of theatrics are at play. In the former, the narrator observes the artificiality and materiality of his workplace — that “every day at work the curators act as themselves.” The poem begins voyeuristically, with the narrator gazing outward at the performed identities of others, but by the end, the narrator sees himself as if from the outside. Casey’s poem, a finalist for the 2018 Penny-Farthing Prize for Lyric Poetry, paints a portrait of a woman who tries to construct her own reality: “Patient until she wasn't, Josephine cultivated roses [...], canopied boudoir irresistible, / storm clouds gathering there, / lonely island, a distant mirage.” In both poems, there is a comfort in artifice, but the truth has the final say. By the end of Casey’s concise but bursting poem, all bets are off; all assumptions are in pieces on the floor, seeping vase water; and the flowers are ruined.

Blake appears for a third time in Issue 4 in Daniel Schonning’s series of poems, “In Adam’s Room,” in which he reimagines notions of paradise and desire. “To say ‘wonder’ requires three distinct motions of the tongue,” he writes. Schonning’s Blake — much like his Adam and Eve — are tongueless, but in exchange, their desire is conceptualized in both mind and body, a fresh spin on often-deconstructed Biblical characters that is fitting for the modern age. Paradise is also a mirage in Amy Rubin’s story, “You Will Be Like Water,” in which a group of  indelible young people stray from comfortable homes and relationships to attempt to climb a frozen waterfall: “[Ethan] swung the curved, serrated edge of his ice axe like he was casting a fishing line, each blow sunk authoritatively into the mound. Amar noticed his over-exuberance; after the first swing, he had dangled in a bid for attention.” Their fall from grace is as real as it is symbolic — a tremendous shift in each of their lives from which they cannot return.

Phillip Crymble’s poem, “So Far Away,” which was selected by Diane Seuss as the winner of the 2018 Penny-Farthing Prize for Lyric Poetry, looks through the refracted mirror of nostalgia. Crymble remembers a former self, “teenaged third-shift / menial in stonewashed jeans and high-top leather Reeboks” who, for work, restocked a department store in the dead of night. He celebrates the freedom and recklessness of his youth — easy to do once you’ve survived it— but his language is so vivid and deeply lived that you can nearly smell the sweat and smoke in his hair as he careens from one stanza to the next.

Similar in tone is Erin Murphy’s micro-essay, “Something for Everything,” in which her narrator eavesdrops on two teenage boys getting lured into a pyramid scheme at a strip mall sushi restaurant. “‘Feel my hair,’ [the saleswoman] insists, raving about its thickness and sheen.” Although Murphy’s narrator knows the con, she, the mother of a teenager herself, half-admires their naivety, their unfettered sloppiness, their optimism. Within this defly made, uber-concise essay are folds and folds of connective tissue: between the self and the other, the past and the present, the subject and object, and capitalism and individualism.

Jose Hernandez Diaz’s two prose poems, which are part of a longer ongoing series, also contain domestic spaces and recognizable icons, but Diaz wields the tools of magical realism to transfigure the recognizable into something surprising, often many times within the same image. “The man in a Pink Floyd shirt jumped out of his rocking chair,” he writes, startling his reader with clashing connotations. Then, he ups the ante even further: “He bounced around the moon. It shook for an hour.” With their sparse, precise syntax and stratospheric imaginative leaps, these poems demonstrate what is possible in prose poetry and nowhere else: thunderous confluences of the ordinary and the extraordinary in both form and function.

These poems speak to Laurinda Lind’s prose poem, “Later On,” which also transfigures the human form into a record of desire. Two lovers are caught up in the fever pitch of love, so much so that they leave their earthy notions all together: “Seeing themselves in mirrors / would shake them, since not feeling their feet and having mile-long legs made them sure their / heads should have evolved too, which wasn’t the case. “I see Diaz’s and Lind’s protagonists as floating in opposite directions  around the same nebula; the former is swept up in a tornado of circumstance and strangeness that he accepts and rationalizes, whereas the latter opt in, choosing fantasy over reality.

Jane Medved also takes a hard look backwards in her poem, “The Book of Job,” but her narrator mourns what has come and gone with the resigned bravado of someone standing among the ruins of a once-grand estate. In one long, prosey run-on segmented by commas that can barely contain her, Medved’s narrator considers those she has lost: “... what’s the point when half of them have left, moved back to America for snow days and Costco, although I think my mother’s friend Ceilia might be dead, I used to invite her over, but those days are gone …” Medved cuts through the rosy mirage of nostalgia without hesitating, portraitizing a new life — perhaps better, perhaps worse — carved from an old one.

Also bending the continuum of genre is Coco Picard, whose graphic essay, “A Meditation on Light and Land,” the first graphic essay Guesthouse has featured, pairs confidant, minimalistic drawings with found and original text: “... my first sensation was one of intense light covering my whole field of vision [...] and recreated, I in turn create.” The precise identity of the essay’s narrator is shrouded until the end, when Picard provides bibliographical notes, but those familiar with iconic images of the 1945 Trinity nuclear test explosion will recognize it. Over the course of seconds, the nuclear device is born into the world with a half-consciousness that Picard voices in lyrics worthy of the test’s codename, allegedly a reference to John Donne’s line, “Batter my heart, three person’d God.” Indeed, Picard’s Trinity is many-personed; as it blinks into consciousness, we are all complicit in its making and unmaking.

Perhaps more than any other piece in Issue 4, Muriel Nelson’s poem, “Trompe L'Oeil,” (translated from French to mean “trick of the eye,” or “optical illusion”) exemplifies the issue’s theme. I owe Nelson my gratitude for inspiring a deep dive into mirage phenomenon, an investigation that would shortly thereafter morph into this essay. An ekphrastic poem in homage to Pere Borrell del Caso’s 1874 painting, “Escaping Criticism,” which is rendered in a way that makes it look as if a young boy is crawling out of the painting’s frame, “Trompe L'Oeil” has the three-dimensional effect of its source material. Nelson questions the authority of her own gaze, squinting into her verses as if trying to see them for the first time. “Your eyes, I say to myself, can’t be trusted, / you know,” she writes. “Staring at screens, they’ve turned burn / to bum, darn to dam, stern to stem [...].” By doing so, she paints a line between del Caso’s investigation of forced perception, a technique in art and architecture, and the ways in which first impressions can prove fickle.

Artist Cinta Videl, whose painting “Home” adorns the cover of Issue 4, is a sophisticated, vividly rendered portrayal of the lopsidedness, loneliness, claustrophobia, and beauty of domestic life. I was first struck by Videl’s work because I found familiarity in it. Her smooth, finely detailed images remind me of the work of Cris Ware, whose Building Stories, a book the size of a board game box, I hauled around a college campus for a semester. Likewise, Videl’s narrative gaze evokes a favorite childhood picture book, Bamboozled, by David Legge. It’s the story of a girl who spends the day in a relative’s topsy-turvy house where the sofa has human hands, coffee is served from a watering can, and cake is cut with a coping saw. But Videl’s artwork is uniquely hers, and it is as sweet as it is irreverent. “Home” portrays a dollhouse of sorts, complete with characters, lampshades, and a tiny footed bathtub. But look again: there are strange, angular shadows; staircases lead to nowhere; chairs and tables hang from the ceiling; people dangle their feet from floating precipices; and house plant tendrils defy gravity. 

It is this invitation to look again that every piece in Issue 4 evokes in me. I hope that you carry these works with you into 2020 and look more closely, more carefully, and more critically at the world around you because of it.

Wishing you a happy new year.

Jane Huffman, Editor-in-chief

*Guesthouse does not own this media and we perform due diligence to cite original creators.