I5 Foreword: Inside/Out

The concept for a special issue of Guesthouse arose organically, in a Facebook Messenger conversation in May 2020. We noticed that our social network feeds were full of writers in conversation with one another about the role of poetry in the contemporary world. A world struggling to get out from under the novel coronavirus, COVID-19. A literary industry reckoning, at last, with the poisonous relationship among power, prestige, and gatekeeping. A country reckoning with its centuries-long and living legacy of police brutality and racial violence against Black people, catalyzed, in part, by the police murder of George Floyd. (While I have your ear, now is a good time to pause and donate to one of these urgent causes.)

Universally, we saw poets recalibrating our inner and outer lives, our bodies and environs, and our relationships with ourselves and others. Poets tasked with triangulating our writing practice with new responsibilities, shifting priorities, and revived anger. We were looking outward –– at each other, at nature, at systemic paradigms –– as refuge from their inner worlds, both literally and figuratively. And we were looking inward –– at mind, body, fear, and habit –– as refuge from the outer world, which is rife with new dangers. 

May rolled into June, and June into July, and as we curated this special edition issue from an expansive number of impressive and generous submissions, the question at the core of our editorial practices took on new depth, breadth, and complexity: What place does poetry have in this universe at  this very minute?

Issue 5 of Guesthouse offers myriad answers by way of our thirty-two exceptional contributors, each responding to the current moment with intuition and consciousness as well as a deep, intentional commitment to craft. Each poem provides one glimpse into a world amid a pandemic, but we’re so proud to present them in conjunction with one another. These poems each boast their own flowers, splayed and defiant and vibrant and dying in the mid-summer heat, but inside the earth, their roots are tangled.

There is deep anxiety, such as that which Christian Gullette reflects in his poem, “Insomnia,” one of two of his pieces published in Issue 5: “I wish I could wake my husband for sex / instead of scrolling on my phone, / Americans arguing online / if poetry helps or hurts.” Gullette brilliantly elicits the mood of quarantine, numbness shoved up against fear, all things holding the same charge (or lack thereof), from dog to breath to cum to TV to –– well, to poetry.  

There is also transformational irony, as in Rebecca Aronson’s poem, “Notice One Thing Every Day (FB advice on living through pandemic),” one of five of her poems in this issue: “I notice first / a swarm of bees. […] It menaces and sparks, shimmering from a distance.” The poem converts Facebook’s banal advice into a kind of noticing that is anything but sentimental. The “single bee,” the “rising hum,” “the whole risky world on show.” You want me to notice, Facebook? Check out this “holy dread.”

All of the poets in Issue 5 demonstrate a dedication to noticing deeply –– to engaging with self and world even as self and world change. And noticing takes on particular importance in the moment these poems embody, a moment in which each of us is recalibrating our relationship with home, family, and interiority. 

In his short poem, “Isolation,” one of his three pieces in Issue 5, Saddiq Dzukogi also discusses how we look to the media for guidance when we’re cut off from our routines and communities. “I heard on the news / to thank someone, today,” he writes. “I turned and turned / and saw only my shadow.” Dzukogi’s speaker is suspicious of this advice because he is alone in every direction. Who can he thank except for his faithful shadow? Where does gratitude go when it is unexpressed?

Jordan Meiller’s poem, “About the Obvious,” is similarly observational, but Meiller’s witness is internal; he tracks his own motion of mind. “I try not to get caught up in the surreality of it all,” he writes. The strangeness does not come through in images but via repeated words and phrases. “people / out and about” leads to the parenthetical “(but about nothing in particular),” a phrase that echoes through the remainder of the poem. The poem’s focus is on thinking, on the way the quiet, avoidant speaker talks to and of himself and experiences the strange social dynamics of the pandemic. He masks himself by being about nothing in particular, resulting in a tenderness, even an intimacy, between speaker and reader. What happens when the one who avoids human connection becomes the one who is avoided?

Throughout Issue 5, poets bring forward urgent conversations about identity, access, and privilege. Several explore queerness in poems that embody the productive tension between being “in” –– quarantined –– and “out,” in language that projects a fierce and defiant declamation of selfhood. In “Queer Time,” one of her two poems in Issue 5, Sanam Sheriff posits that the circumstances of the pandemic that so many of us experience as “unprecedented” –– isolation, fear, shame, misinformation –– are the everyday realities of queer people of color. “I wear a mask on my mask. This / has never been the difficult part,” Sheriff writes, evoking the violence that is regularly imposed on bodies like hers. “My people, well- / versed in the omission of truth as a survival of it.” Meanwhile, the poem’s interior is unmasked and deeply embodied –– leg hairs “sway their headless wicks,” “as a flag sways […] as a fag sways, outside the bar, three blows from beaten clean / of breath.” The speaker’s queer body holds and resists it all. 

Aaron Smith also invokes his queerness in “A Lonely Heart is a Ruthless Heart,” one of his two poems that appear in Issue 5. The pandemic moment has amplified existing grief and past trauma, which manifest in a poetics that is simultaneously gentle and furious: “Dad said don’t trust men / whose mouths smell like jockstrap still / he watches Anderson Cooper who I DM’d / when mom died.” Smith’s enjambed sentences are unencumbered by punctuation –– unencumbered by manners, by tiptoeing, and they cascade into one another with the torque of a storm front. It is as if he has cut through the unsaid to get to the said –– that which is closest to the nerve: “grief is a deep pond you swim in dad / hurts my feelings but I still think he’s funny.”

Unsurprisingly, many poets in Issue 5 explore the domestic sphere, and although these poems range in scope and circumstance, they share a common acknowledgement that staying home can be as or more unsafe than going out. Sheltering takes on diverse and shifting manifestations, sometimes within single poems, lines, and phrases. This is perhaps most explicit in Traci Brimhall and Brynn Saito’s collaborative poem, “Shelter Ghazal,” –– one of a collection of their collaborations in this issue –– which utilizes repetition to hit a discordant note. The word “shelter” is repeated again and again –– a chorus that parrots the 2020 news cycle. But as in Smith’s and Sheriff’s poems, Brimhall and Saito posit that the body is, first and foremost, what’s at stake: “Like the snail but not the slug, not the opossum but the armadillo / or the turtle’s famous comforts, sometimes the body is a shelter.”

Especially for those of us who have complicated, often fearsome relationships with our bodies, the shelter of flesh and bone isn’t a given. Elizabeth Schmuhl’s poem, “Dancing to ‘Denise’* in the Middle of the Pandemic,” one of a pair of her poems in Issue 5, positions the reader at that moment of crisis –– the crux between the physical and metaphysical threat of death. “My body a circle of stomping as if all the rain came down on me while the sun was shining,” she writes, allowing her thoughts to bleed like wet mascara. “I could keep going my body is not finished.” It is as if she cannot testify quickly enough –– as if she must slip her testimony through the doorway as the door swings shut. Within Schmuhl’s urgency is insistence: on living; on utterance; on rage against the virus, the man, the machine, the dying of the light, etc.

Gail Wronsky also sets her poetry to music: this time Dizzy Gillespie’s “A Night in Tunisia.” In her poem, “Why you aren’t going to die,” one of a pair of hers featured in Issue 5, her speaker looks forward to a time after COVID-19: “when I’m no longer wearing a / mask that has your face / drawn on it.” The “you” here is nonspecific. Lover? Aspect of self? The boundary is nebulous. In fact, the speaker addresses a drawing of a person rather than a person, a drawing on a protective mask that the speaker wears. There is very little space between I and thou here. The “Why” of the title is answered in the poem’s final move –– the comparison between the blue of the loved one’s eyes to “the blue underwings of / a spotted mouth from the family / Noctuidae,” a word that leads the speaker, sonically, to “Night in Tunisia,” “our favorite / Dizzy Gillespie tune.” You aren’t going to die. I’m not going to die. Because –– moths, music, language, music. An identification that is something like love.

David Kutz-Marks’ poem, “The Ragtag Flare Group,” also incorporates music, though it trades the narrative approach of Wronsky and Schmuhl for something far more speculative. It is, perhaps, the most fantastical poem in Issue 5. “A song that weighs 100 pounds on Earth would weigh just 20 on the moon,” he begins. And we’re off to the races, careening through outer space and earthen tunnels and the past and the present and back again. Song is what’s at stake amid the global pandemic, and in Kutz-Marks’ hands, it stands in for the human spirit. “Song survives the virus but is changed by the face of the virus,” he writes, “such that it wears / the virus face.” But what can lyric do against a rising death count? 

Another fantastical approach to the current moment is Maya Jewell’s poem, “How You Put Me On My Back in the Thistles: A(field) Ekphrasonnet,” one of two poems of hers in the issue. In zigzagging lines that sprawl across the page, she asks, “Why am I a butter-headed flower / among the rabbits / I said why am I a butter head / among the rabid.” The speaker is adamant, needing answers, but unable to express the question. There is an almost artful slurring of speech at work here. “Butter-headed” transforms into “butter head” and “rabbits” turn into “rabid,” and the poem’s grounding becomes more and more shaky. Ultimately, Jewell writes from the brink of collapse; her language can barely hold itself together, it shifts and stumbles despite itself. But the instability of the language makes it a brilliant modality for troubled times; I am shifting and stumbling despite myself, too, on a daily basis.

Salman Khoshroo’s “Wool on Foam” series also delights in instability. I first encountered Khoshroo’s work while browsing through some of my favorite art blogs, just passing the time. I was stopped in my tracks by his work and sought to feature him as the cover artist for Issue 5 even before I discovered he created “Wool on Foam” as a response to COVID-19. The faces he depicts in colorful roving are indisputably human, but they are distorted, more like a relief of a shape than a shape itself. “These portraits are delicate and vulnerable and resonate with my own precarious situation,” Khoshroo writes. He is also interested in “re-interpreting the masculine condition” by juxtaposing his content –– “male portraits” –– with his medium –– “habitually perceived feminine material.” I’m haunted by these images in the way that I am by the work artist Hélène Delmaire did for the French film, Portrait of a Lady on Fire (Céline Sciamma, 2019); the subject is both present and elusive, ravishing and ravaged.

Dreaming and waking take on reversed roles in Issue 5, particularly in Deborah Gang’s poem, “When You Are Glad the Dog Throws Up and Wakes You.” Her speaker has a nightmare in which figures from the past and present –– exes, relatives, friends –– make critical errors and ruin her day, dredging up old resentments. (If you haven’t yet had this particular version of a COVID nightmare, I envy you.) “It turned out / that B, who was suddenly with me and who was a boy again, / had called his dad for help,” Gang writes. “B’s phone worked, though he hadn’t / thought to mention it.” There is a centuries-old tradition of hellscape poems –– waking nightmares, living hells –– but Gang’s is decidedly comedic. She laughs at the absurdity of herself, confessing that of all the nightmare’s horrors, she was most disturbed by the superficial: “the worst part was how good E looked.”

Karen Kovacik, in her translation of Krystyna Dąbrowska’s 2013 poem, “In the Cabin,” paints a dreamscape that speaks prophetically to the current moment: “I dream we’re on a ship / gripped by a deadly epidemic. / We zigzag over the sea, no port will accept us.” In ten short lines the poem manages to evoke a love that renounces officialdom and death. I was thrilled to include a translation in Issue 5, especially one with such a dimensional scope; it was written nearly a decade ago in another language, but through Kovacik’s translation, it arrives to English-language readers in 2020 piping hot. “By now, the captain and the whole crew are sick,” Dąbrowska writes. “But you and I are still well. / […] no one and nothing can touch us — only us.” In quarantine, the couple is alone together –– like the first or last people on Earth or paired animals on the ark. But from the vantage of 2020, their dark paradise is even darker, and when the membrane breaks, they have farther to fall.

Gail Martin takes an opposite approach in her poem, “Late Night Desert Walk, March 2020,” crafting a slanted dreamscape out of her local environs. “I can’t even figure out how to spend a slow afternoon, walk a rough gully between should and want… […] The Catalinas severe in this odd light.” This poem exemplifies the troubling decadence of boredom –– the privilege of being able to stay home when others cannot. But the poem also muddles the familiar into a strange and disoriented landscape: the natural world hasn’t changed, but Martin’s speaker has. In crisis, a “slow afternoon” can unroll like a death sentence. Walking can feel like shambling. And listlessness is no longer listless but alive and hairy as “agave, saguaro, brittlebush.”

G.C. Waldrep’s suite of poems, “from Plague Nights,” is also fixated on slanted quietude –– time spent alone in the “gully between should and want” that Martin offers us. In these edge-thin poems, each time-stamped with a number designating how many nights into the pandemic he is at the time of writing, Waldrep uses fragmentation to capture his anxious mind. “The doctors / await, expectant,” he writes in “Fragment 567. “They have / stories they are / waiting to / tell, about us, / to other doctors.” Every plague night is restless, if not sleepless. As the poems veer from speculation to confession to theological discourse (“The proper instrument / for weighing souls / is, of course, flame”), Waldrep maintains a surgeon’s steady hand. And then it quivers. 

Fragmentation is a common thread throughout Issue 5, with several poets using it in varying degrees to emblemize an anxious world inundated with contradicting forces and voices. Lisa Olstein’s poem, “Windfall,” is a visually striking enactment of both fracture and wholeness. The poem’s sentences have the effect of having been through the paper shredder, each bi- and tri-syllabic fragment separated by asymmetric strokes of white space: “moving / a class / online is / not like / writing a love / letter.” But Olstein’s fragmentation is characterized, too, by completeness; her fragments mesh into complete sentences and fully realized figurative language. I love the tension Olstein establishes between the poem’s form and function. It teaches the reader how to encounter it, how to tape the shredded bits back together to see the whole picture: “moving / a class / online is / not like / writing a love / letter / but that’s / the best / analogy / I’ve heard / in terms / of / it helps / a / little”.

Pascalle Burton’s poem, “L Vibrating Lyrics,” also utilizes fragmentation to suggest a larger wholeness, this time harnessing the negative capability of found poetry. As it unfolds fragment by fragment (extracting adjective–noun pairings from its source text, Thomas Piketty’s Capital) it makes compact and disorientating statements on the modern moment: “genuine realities / critical scrutiny / trivial indifference / hairsplitting audit.” Like oddities in a viewfinder machine, each vignette glimpses a strange interpretation of Piketty’s themes of social inequality. Burton also has an art piece in Issue 5 thatI would be remiss not to discuss: “Every Day, Fingertips,” in which a “keyboard performance” maps a typist’s finger strokes as they copy the poem, “Shape of Clouds,” by Sawako Nakayasu. It is invisibilia made concrete, and it speaks to a pandemic moment when physical touch is newly dangerous.

Language is also an entryway in Clare Oleson’s poem, “hypochondriasis is making mortality a hobby,” which captures the frenetic movement of a mind that sees death around every corner. We’re living in a hypochondriac moment, and for those whose anxiety predated COVID-19, one’s own body can be a minefield of fear, denial, bargaining. “New / deities: the good lamp, a yolk / pressed into a sun under thumb unbreaking, / a finger of butter on the cast-iron,” Oleson observes. Objects in her environment become omens, prophecies of doom, “things to look to, to ask, / does the melting scream of fat / know where the death is?” There is a sense of compulsiveness, of magical thinking –– as if the speaker believes she can stave off demise by spinning her “lazy susan of gods,” –– “[the] laundry, […] ventilators […] people from [her] hometown demanding / release from their porches / husbands / unflooded lungs.”

In Tommy Archuleta’s series, “Sustos,” (Spanish for “fear, shock”), the speaker also appeals to higher powers to reconcile with fear: “You leaving the orchard / gate open / to welcome / the first frost / the surest way to offend / the god of ruin.” Archuleta’s “god of ruin” looms over each “Susto” in the series, turning rocks, offering omens, and threatening annihilation: “All those faces in / the floor / All those / little black rocks I keep finding / in my bed,” he writes. Like a sudden chill from a “drafty / nailedshut window.” What these omens amount to remains unsaid, but this silence is the poem’s sharpest weapon. One “Susto” even leaves us with a blank and endless “Now what” –– no punctuation, no answer. “Now what” indeed –– “Now what” like the song on the wind in the valley of death.

One of Justin Danzy’s two poems, “Tuesday. The first of the vicennium. I read a book about dismemberment,” is death-infused as well. It careens between fear and wonder, the literal birth of a friend’s daughter “named after a Celtic god,” a friend the speaker adores, and an apocalyptic external and internal landscape. The trees’ “black bones” hang above a late snow, and a group of birds he calls a “depravity” rather than a flock engages in “their programmed act / of becoming.” The poem teeters between a kind of cynical hope and bold depravity; it is spring, there is birth, the birds have been programmed to return –– and there is a pandemic. Black Americans are dying at the hands (and beneath the knees) of the police. The poem ends by foretelling that fear will dismember us, as will love. It will “break you until you believe it to be a God. Or a goad. Or a golem of black and wicked wings.” Danzy has the guts to not rescue us from it.

In one of her two poems in Issue 5, “Grace Who Moves Over the Face of the Water,” Rosebud Ben-Oni examines the stories we absorb and the stories we tell ourselves –– the wounds and balms of autobiography and memory. She recalls the story of how “generations / of fishermen threw crabs bearing a samurai / grimace back into the sea […] perplexing our ideas / of what is legend & what is delicacy.” She winds through the poem with fluidity and, yes, grace, contemplating what was given and what has been lost and what and who goes missing. The poem is many-chaptered, allowing Ben-Oni to explore her own “pre-COVID legends” of selfhood, friendship, and family, “long before such long days / of sirens & six feet & longing.” Here, “long” and” long” and “longing” toll like the dead bell in Plath’s “Death & Co.” But it is perplexity that drives her to a thesis: that “wholeness / might be an imaginary feeling,” that some slice of ourselves may have been missing all along.

Aaron Coleman calibrates himself in relation to a greater mythic archetype in his poem, “Late in the feature film.” Although Coleman’s speaker is sheltering in place –– “soaked / in my byzantine clutter of personal effects, their faint scent / of a life before this one,” he recognizes himself in the “young american hero” in an action flick. Or at least in the hero’s final meal –– lunch at “a midday highway diner booth” where he sits “across from an oracular child / who dips a finger into a loopy maze.” It is in this moment of quiet tenderness that Coleman contemplates the poem’s major dramatic questions: What does it mean to be a man? “How did I get here? Did I choose this for me?” And he offers a suggestion that drips with Hollywood magic: “The answer matters less than the wonder.”

All the poets in Issue 5 reckon with themselves and with the kind of “selfhood,” or solitude, that a shelter-in-place order demands. Solitude can offer productive reflection, even when the mirror is torqued. Amy Thatcher’s poem, “Our Lady of Sorrows,” is an ode and an elegy to an absent mother, perhaps dead, perhaps gone. But Thatcher’s poem is, maybe even more so, an ode and an elegy to her own survival in the face of trauma. “I take my face to the mirror / and see how well-rested / my regret has become,” she writes, “How like a girl it is.” The poem calibrates the relationship between a child and her future self –– the young woman she was and the woman she is now. There is also a reckoning with religiosity: “Sympathy for the Devil, she said, / is artful artlessness. / That was her kind of compliment.” Thatcher’s poem defies that, too –– it is art.

Anthony DiPietro also conjures a child self in his poem, “Cul-de-Sac.” He transports the reader to his childhood home in the suburbs –– “Another quarantine, my early teen / prisoner-of-war years. […] Friendless years of days of books / and trivial lists and Lego houses.” From this vantage point, DiPietro grapples with the importance of time spent alone, even when that time is thrust upon you. At odds with his parents and adolescent body, the teenager in DiPietro’s poem takes every opportunity to get outdoors. “At night, I’d climb / from my window onto the little roof / and look in four directions.” He found ownership over his own experience in those moments of solitude: “The night belonged to me,” he reflects, “and extended / to the boundary of my hearing, […] and the field / of my senses.” The outside world has taken on a new meaning for many of us this year, but DiPietro asks us to experience what we can via the field of our senses.

A smattering of poems in Issue 5 confront the realities of a strained health-care system in a plague year –– the bleak inequities and deficiencies within that system. Shawn R. Jones’ poem, “Hypoglycemia during the COVID-19 Crisis,” lays bare the dual vulnerabilities that many Black Americans are facing right now. For one, the virus is disproportionately affecting communities of color because of systemic racism. From Emma Grey Ellis, Wired: “Structural inequalities have kept black Americans significantly poorer than their white counterparts, and economic disparity creates health disparities, especially during a pandemic.” For another, the health-care system in the US is disproportionally underserving Black patients: “Black patients tend to get poorer care and have worse health outcomes than white patients with the exact same illnesses, so it’s little wonder that some struggle to put much stock in medical advice now” (source).

Jones’ poem unfolds at this confluence. She introduces us to a man who is terribly ill: “He is Black. / Too afraid / to go to the hospital. / Too afraid / to be denied / a ventilator. / Too afraid / to suffocate alone.” Without the recourse of medical care to fall back on, a loved one steps in to “play nurse […]  “Googles symptoms. / Takes his vitals / with her own hands.” The poem is as insistent as it is tender as it is grief-stricken –– each “Too afraid,” like a hammer swinging at a nail. Jones’ urgency is utterly deserved; for many families across the country, this is reality. People are sacrificing at great lengths to care for those America leaves behind. The compression of form gives heft to every word. Potatoes. Body. Doll. Black. Tuskegee. Chocolate. Palm.

Sherry Stuart-Berman’s poem, “Holder,” approaches the health-care system with a different closeness –– and a different distance. The poem’s speaker is married to a health-care worker who serves the front lines of the pandemic. “[I] remember my husband in scrubs, his mask / & plastic shield,” Stuart-Berman writes. “In all these years, I’ve never said to him: Don’t. Don’t tell me.” Although the couple has endured the risks and traumas of the husband’s profession for years, the COVID-19 pandemic spurred change in their dynamic. This time, when the husband brings his work home with him –– life-saving work –– he endangers the lives of his family. Stuart-Berman is herself a medical professional, and her speaker’s fear in the face of COVID-19 speaks volumes about the nature of the situation: no amount of experience could have prepared them for this. The specificity of the nine peony buds at the poem’s ending becomes the only lifeline in the vicinity.

Cecelia Hagen’s poem, “Potential,” approaches the health-care system from yet another purview. Her speaker is visiting a nineteen-year-old loved one at a residential treatment center. “She stands barefoot / on the sidewalk, lavender toenails,” the speaker observes. “She acts mean, but I know she feels / unworthy of life.” Later, “at the start of the quarantine,” the poem’s speaker reaches to hand-wash the sweater she was wearing one day five months ago, pre-pandemic, when visiting the same young woman in the psych ward. Through the scent of the sweater, she accesses the “sour desperation [she] felt” that day. She has lived the blunt realities of a broken health-care system before the pandemic. Her act of thinking back leads her to the poem’s final rhetorical sentence, a warning: “We have no idea what is coming.”

José Olivarez’s poem “EAT THE RICH” is a loving portrait of the speaker’s young adulthood in a rust-belt community trying to survive gentrification and corporatization: “out in Calumet City, there weren’t any billionaires,” he writes –– a phrase that is repeated at the beginning of each of the poem’s stanzas –– “so we drove to the steel mill that laid off our dads, / but when we got inside, everyone looked just like our dads.” Olivarez imparts a deeply personal political message without an ounce of didacticism. His speaker offers glimpses into the lives of family and friends, using food and laughter as sensory touchstones: “from the pig feet (tasty in stews, / my dad would say) to the pig ears (fry them up, / my dad would say).” It would be far too easy to say these individuals are wealthy in other ways when wealth disparity is very much at stake in this poem. But in Calumet City, there’s a certain value in “knowing the wealth of pig grease.”

All thirty-two of these artists have captured the pandemic moment with attention to the inner and outer worlds. They stand in the doorway between out and in, between coming and going, and they reach in both directions at once. Dana Levin captures this in her series of poems, “Shut-in Suite:” “Closed doesn’t close until you say the d. / Don’t shut the door, d,” Levin says, speaking both to the reader and to herself. With her hand on the metaphorical doorknob, Levin’s speaker is caught between open and closed, between shutting herself in and shutting others out –– equally terrible modalities, equally significant sacrifices. “But the d / does it, / quietly […] its lift / of good riddance / at the end ––”. 

Good riddance, indeed. May we be rid of COVID-19 swiftly. May we wrap our wounds, mourn our dead, and tend to our sick. May we have the strength to reform the systems that made the pandemic disproportionately devastating in communities of color. May we invest in our words, thoughts, and feelings and those of others. With Issue 5 of Guesthouse, we’re proud to present a collection of poems that conjure these prophecies, honor these hopes, and make these demands for healing, inside and out.

Jane Huffman, editor-in-chief

Many thanks to Diane Seuss for her guidance and contributions and to Chad Cripe, our expert proofreader.

*Guesthouse does not own the visual media featured on this page, and we perform due diligence to cite original creators. Please email guesthouselit@gmail.com if you have questions or concerns.