Issue 6: Relief

I remember, as a very young child, sitting on the potty and thinking to myself: Relief is my favorite feeling. I thought, in the way that only a young child can, that by naming something as my favorite –– as I would a favorite ice cream or color or favorite cousin –– I could claim it for myself as my eternal (and nearly preordained by the forces that be) characteristic. I was proud of myself for this small originality. Relief, I thought, as I dried my hands on the Christmas towels my mom put in the downstairs bathroom every December, their little stitched-on jingle bells tinkling, is poetic. It occurred to me only later in life that this was, in large past, a response to the anxiety that loomed large and undiagnosed over my young life. And with the generations-old cycles of addiction in my family that informed it. I was seeking relief in ways I didn’t yet understand, as were the people I loved most. A story for another day.

I bring this up to emphasize that relief, the theme for Issue 6 of Guesthouse, has always evoked a longing in me, for better and for worse, and that as I was curating the thirty writers and artists to feature in this issue, I felt that pang of longing again and again. Relief is, of course, a feeling –– one that necessitates its own emoji –– but is also an experience, an event, a volta. Relief signifies change in fate or circumstance. In sculpture, it signifies absence: a partial image still attached to its source. And presence: something accentuated by contrast. Likewise, relief has been in the news: lawmakers have made ‘great progress’ on COVID relief bill;” “Stimulus checks aren't in the bipartisan relief proposal;” on and on and on. The thirty poets and writers in Issue 6 may not have answers to these problems, nor do they purport to bear any offering beyond language, constructed beautifully, in the right order. But I believe that language is a balm. An insufficient balm, perhaps, and yet, I hope it brings you some relief.

Conor Bracken’s poem, “Iguazu,” an ode to the beauty and terror of Argentina’s Iguazu Falls (Image 1, above), is a release in and of itself. Time freezes as the speaker, a tourist at the falls, recoils from the advances of someone intent on kissing him. All he hears, even over the sounds of his internal alarm bells, is the falls’ “gargantuan / gargle, the diabolical garbling. [. . .] the mouth bored / open by awe’s dull augur.” Where in another poem about a waterfall language might wash over us, Bracken’s pummels, “drums our hearing –— / humbled slug –— back / into its swirling shell of blood.” And for a moment, in this violent silence, we’re held only by water. Okwudili Nebeolisa’s poem, “Good Times,” also conjures a travel narrative, this time “an adventurous tour / of the Osogbo grove” (Image 2, below). A tour guide informs guests that if they’re quiet, they can hear the dead, and the speaker and his companion, skeptical but bemused, set out to listen. “The grove gargled water in her greedy mouth,” he writes, “and when we didn’t expect it, we heard them ––” Like in “Iguazu,” the fury of the rushing water has a potency that extends beyond the natural senses. We, as Nebeolisa’s readers, can’t hear what the dead murmur to his protagonists, but they are, nonetheless, relieved of their doubts.

Jonathan Andrew Pérez’s poem, “Extinction as An Urbanology Walking Tour,” is likewise a waterscape and likewise addresses the strange, often unsavory side of tourism. As a piece of historical poetry, it positions the reader on a hypothetical walking tour of waterfronts of Hoboken, New Jersey in the mid-twentieth century (Image 3, below), where we witness “Audited Haitian imports, in siloed counties, accounting of conflicting tradition. [. . .] the algaic loam in lustrous moon, a feverish bubble, Basking Sharks, nemertines, Oarfish,” and so on. But despite the vividness of Pérez’s language, which explodes with color, texture, sounds, and smells, the poem is critical of voyeurism. He maintains a critical distance between his readers and his subjects, which he accomplishes by using winding, unconventional syntax and sound that leads the reader down strange roads. It asserts: “This is not a tour.” David Dodd Lee’s poem, “California,” also guides the reader through a landscape. The speaker walks along the sprawling Pacific shoreline as if it is a sort of Eden: “It felt impermanent, / like the seagulls that were always drifting / in and out of the marine layer.” Rarely do I find a poem that relishes so profoundly its own exuberance, and when I do, I am nearly overcome with relief. Lee’s “California” is a place beyond the confines of life and death, of gain and loss. We’re free, there, to wander the white beaches, “the guillotines of love [. . .] nowhere / to be found.”

Rajnesh Chakrapani’s speculative poem, “Brown People who Speak English,” which Andrea Lawlor selected as the runner-up in our 2019 Googie Goer Prize for Speculative Literature, also conjures a place beyond the usual boundaries of space and time: “a yurt where the distance of the horizon is between my legs.” Chakrapani guides readers across a chapbook-length prose poem, rendered in luscious, slippery syntax, across a half-imagined dystopian landscape –– and a romance set against that dangerous backdrop. “Conquering arrived because of the extreme temperature changes,” he writes, “most of the land unlivable as my remembrance of you is high-pitched, what was that novel you and I loved about acoustics that make people flinch?” As one sentence bleeds and drips into the next, Chakrapani’s streams of thought are both oasis and mirage in “a part of the desert that is a step beyond a mirror.” Beatriz Seelaender’s essay, “Looking for Kafka in Prague,” is yet another travelogue, though hers is distinctively propelled by humor. In fact, many pieces in Issue 6 have a humorous edge. Seelaender recounts a trip she took to Prague with a friend in hopes of experiencing the Kafka museum. They get there, but not before exploring a few unexpected crannies of the city including “Kafka House,” a lesser Kafka-themed attraction where they’re “welcomed by two statues whose shared moment of urination comprised a bizarre fountain. Through their stone urethras came the water, babbling calmly in a winter afternoon” (Image 4, below). Seelaender offers delights like these from beginning to end. When I first encountered this essay, I was awed by her wit, and every time I revisit it, I am as relieved as the two blue men who stand guard in the Kafka House courtyard.

Humor also propels Ariel Banayan’s poem, “The Art of Art Appreciation.” This poem reminds me that the best part of editing Guesthouse, even greater than the fame and fortune, is being surprised. Banayan’s poem should, by any reasonable standard, fail. “I farted / at the MET,” he writes, “while staring at / a marble statue / of a seated muse / turning pale / from my scent.” But as his speaker tours some of the world’s grandest landmarks –– the Louvre, the Sistine Chapel, etc. –– and farts in every one of them, I’m piqued by his irreverence in the face of “high art.” I laughed, which is rare these days. This poem reminds me that the human body is sublime in its ability to relieve itself -– and that art would be meaningless if we weren’t there to witness it.

The motif of water recurs so often in Issue 6 that I considered it as the theme, but each writer approaches it with such originality and distinction that no one stream defines them. For example, Reilly Cox’s poem, “Blue,” posits that God is a blue crab and that the canals near his childhood home are God's domain. God is local: “I dream of God swimming along the canal, / God’s fins turning in the brackish water. [. . .] As a child, I would try to catch God in a fishing net.” Many religious and spiritual traditions honor crabs as icons, deities, and spirits, and Cox adds to this tradition. Each stanza recalibrates their crab god from a different perspective, in the style that reminds me of Wallace Stevens’ “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.” But each stanza is rooted in a single occupation: to seek what holds water. Jordan Franklin’s poem, “Find the River,” also ushers readers closer to mythic waters. In the first stanza, a lyric telling of the speaker’s father, Franklin writes, “a river of silver roamed in my father’s mouth, dragged and sharpened over whetstone.” This river tracks through the following stanzas, too, also introducing the speaker’s mother –– “Brooklyn-girl, single-mothered, house full of uncles, aunts, and cousins who chased a whiff of the American Dream in war-ill Korea” –– until it arrives at the moment of the speaker’s birth. What follows is a baptism, real or imagined, through which the poem’s speaker emerges from her parents’ legacy, like “Jesus swaddled in a river’s mouth.”

Steve Castro’s poem, “Feliz cumpleaños,” also brushes with the mythic. Across his three poems in Issue 6, he constructs speakers who accept as normal the odd, supernatural, and miraculous circumstances in which they find themselves. “I had also blessed the nearby town of Markin,” Castro’s speaker says in “Feliz cumpleaños,” “and apart from the one thousand frogs made out of pure gold that appeared in the city center a mere three hours after I blessed it, nothing good ever became of that saintly town.” The poem is conversational and funny –– Castro’s speaker is mortified by, or at least weary of, his own miracles. (And aren’t we all?) “Somehow, I was to blame,” he bemoans. The poem cuts through any notion of self-seriousness or pomp, and the result is awakening. (Another of Castro’s poems in Issue 6 offers a solution for when your camels spontaneously catch fire –– this is required reading.) Kirsten Ihn’s poem, “saying the names of pictures in the arcaded annals of the Jar,” also functions in an almost-private dialect of humor and magical realism. “hygienic in the room of my darkness,” she writes, “[. . .] on my belly i was like a snake / i love a good snake, i thought [. . .].” Like water into a vessel, Ihn’s speaker transmutates, filling one shape and then another. And water makes a literal appearance in this poem, too. She writes, “i thought about the various conditions of the water [. . .] that could be put into the mind with a spoon.” As charmed as I am by her macabre lyric and turns of phrase (I love a good snake, too), I’m also touched by the desolation in the poem. It seems to be born from loneliness –– perhaps pandemic-induced isolation (read: “hygienic”), perhaps not. The speaker has curled up inside their own syntax and intellect, and in that strange, half-lit place, they find something akin to comfort.

Both Rebecca Pyle’s story, “White as Clouds” and Trent Busch’s poem, “Joe” examine what –– and who –– outlives us once we are gone. Rebecca Pyle’s “White as Clouds” moves with the classical integrity and intellectualism of the old masters, but it is profoundly contemporary in its unflinching examination of class, race, and loss. At the onset, Pyle’s protagonist, James, is content with his conceit; entertaining friends in his late father’s fine row house in Bloomsbury (Image 5, above), he goes to great lengths to skirt mentioning the great tragedy that led to his early inheritance. Like in any good drama, the evening takes a strange turn when an uninvited guest shows up at the door. James stands in the threshold –– literally –– between his present and his past, throwing into relief the sharp contrasts and stark sameness extant between generations. Trent Busch’s “Joe,” portraitizes a man via three small scenes, composed mostly of dialogue, as he goes about his life. In one, Joe makes the following proclamation: “I quit, he said, / just quit. / Happen you find / enough air / left in the tires / of that old ‘81 Plymouth, / have her!” Connotative reasoning suggests to me that the “Joe” on whom the poem is based is a machinist –– or a machine enthusiast. Or at least the owner of a forty-year old vehicle he’d like to bequeath to the mortal world when his time comes. At the end of the scene, Joe gets his wish, but it’s Joe’s voice, beautifully recorded (or invented, or perhaps both) by Busch, that becomes a relic of his life.

Delia Pless’ poem, “Latin Isn’t Dead,” is also highly voiced, this time leveraging the first-person monologue to conjure her speaker and her family of origin: “My brother has twenty-seven staples in his head,” her speaker says, “if he ever shaved it, he’d look like a vase glued together in a museum. [...] That was the joke in our family: Ron, please don’t shave your head!” The relationship between the speaker and her brother, although it is only suggested, is undoubtedly fraught. But like it is in many families –– and so many pieces in Issue 6 of Guesthouse –– tension is masked by humor. Although the poem winds to a harrowing end, there is a certain boldness to how it gets there, the stream of consciousness of a speaker who accepts who she is and extends the same to others. Likewise, Philip Jacobsen’s story, “When I Get Back,” which Andrea Lawlor selected as the winner of our 2019 Googie Goer Prize for Speculative Literature, conjures a complicated sibling relationship. Set in a dystopian future where people are charged by the government to farm parcels of land –– where “W.A.S.P.s,” aka, “drone[s] for water aerospace piloting” buzz above the landscape –– siblings Billy and Helen return home from California to Nebraska. What is clear is that (a) something has happened in this version of the future: “stretches that were once dust and ash [. . .] now patched like a quilt of trees and crops (Image 6, above);” (b) their father is gone –– missing, perhaps; and (c) and their mother is dead. Both characters are traumatized by offstage days and years, but Billy and Helen must focus on the present. As they get to work tilling their own stretch of scorched earth, their plow digs up the past. 

Image 7 [video]: Tré Burt’s “Get it By Now Blues,” from the album Caught it from the Rye, 2020.

Twila Newey’s poem, “In the Plum,” is minuscule in size, but it achieves, in its focus, a kind of largesse. In the minimalist tradition of the Red Wheelbarrow, Newey’s poem manages to capture a single, transient moment in so few words that the reader must not blink. She asks, “What do I call / these small / brown birds / tumbling past / whose flight / I mistook / for wind- / blown leaves?” Beneath the surface of this seemingly simple observation is a greater question: how do we construct a metaphor –– that which transcends the sum of its parts –– out of language? Evan Nicholl’s poem, “Solid Carpentry,” is also an experiment in brevity. It reads, in its entirety: “This gal makes big beds / over on Atoka Road. / She is very good. / The people who own her work / can sleep through thunder.” Whereas Newey’s poem asks a question, Nicholls’ answers, casting a small but permanent impression, as if in amber or copper, of a particular time, place, and person. In these insomniac days, there is immense relief in the idea of solid carpentry –– in deep sleep and rainy nights.

Two enormously different pieces in Issue 6 refer to specific musical works, the first of which is Darren C. Demaree’s poem, “Emily as a Tré Burt Song.” One in a colossal and ongoing series of “Emily As” poems, which Demaree has published widely, this poem portraitizes a beloved. It is a deeply unromantic love poem, which makes it all the more tender. “I drew a portrait of Emily / in water I was not holding,” he writes. “It seemed like enough for her. / It was not enough for her.” In rich language, the poem tracks the small domestic inadequacies that unfold between his speaker and Emily. Like Tré Burt does in his own lyrics, such as in “Get it By Now Blues,” (“It’s been a long time since I’ve had you near / Now you’re the bell in my pocket that chimes outta fear” [Image 7, video, above]), Demaree’s love poem is unsentimental but deeply sentient.

Image 8 [audio]: Johann Sebastian Bach’s “Count Kaiserling’s Variations,” a 1741 musical composition for harpsichord, performed here by Pieter-Jan Belder, 2017 (Spotify / [source])

Formally speaking, Charles Wyatt’s hybrid story, “Aria with 30 Variations,” is a diametric opposite to Demaree’s trim poem, but it, too, uses music as its springboard. As the piece reflects on each of Johann Sebastian Bach’s “Count Kaiserling’s Variations,” a 1741 musical composition for harpsichord (Image 8, audio, above), it wanders into the innermost depths of an enchanted forest, home to a brood of ghostly creatures. “Deep the mysterious forest falls, dark the forest darkens,” he writes in the section called “Variation 6 a 1 Clav. Cannone alla Seconda,” “like the maw of the Manticore, his three rows of teeth, his stingers soaked in poison.” Tasked with capturing the spirit of a composition in words, Wyatt draws on the supernatural. His invented universe is a balm.

History recurs in “Panels from a Courtly Spring” by Kelly Cressio-Moeller, a reimagining of Marie Antoinette’s often-misunderstood life and death. Cressio-Moeller doesn’t shy away from the decadence with which Antionette was known. In fact, the lushness of court life –– at least to the contemporary imagination –– makes for great poetry: “Cornflower satin, heels on parquetry —– she orders nests for her hair to keep skylarking near” (Image 9, right). But this portrait of Antoinette also voices her darker consciousness. Her life is played like a hand of cards, and although she is not exempt from sins of her own, she confesses to her mother that she is out of her depths and drowning in grief: “O Mother, cool Empress, is this what you imagined for your landlocked girl? No peace in the fortress, no rue-weighted bones?” Grief is also searingly present in Jordan Keller-Martinez’s poem, “Of the Blood,” which recounts the speaker’s experience of performing triage on a fellow soldier who is injured in a warzone. “I now / puncture the IV catheter through / his vein, into muscle / He, who recovered from heroin / not six months before enlisting.” The horrible irony of the poem is that the injured soldier, again, depends on a drug for survival, and the poem’s speaker must dole it out. In many ways, the situation is beyond redemption, and Keller-Martinez expresses this tension by containing a trauma experience in the lyric mode. The poem is simultaneously screaming and whispering, and I’m dazzled by it. I’m reminded of Edna St. Vincent Millay’s often-resurrected sonnet, “Time does not bring relief; you all have lied / Who told me time would ease me of my pain!” whose title also serves as its first two lines. Here, too, time is no match for cyclical violence, that which we impose onto one another and onto ourselves. And yet, the IV drip relieves the soldier’s mortal suffering. Pain and relief are no longer binary.

It’s a special honor to publish Eric Sandy’s essay, "Out in the Land Where the Mushrooms Grow," which is the first piece of longform journalism ever featured in Guesthouse. Like Wyatt, Sandy ventures into the wilderness, recalling his foray into mushroom foraging with a local group of mushroom enthusiasts (Image 10, above). “We’re fanned out across the loping landscape,” he writes, “hunched sharply and poised with pocketknife and magnifying glass to chart the caps and stems of fantastical mushroom species.” As he combs through the Appalachian landscape, he seeks relief from the burdens of the modern world. “I wanted to look elsewhere,” he says. “I wanted to look at something scrutable.” Where Wyatt and Sandy succeed in breadth, Forrest Roth’s essay, “Robert Mapplethorpe,” succeeds in a third dimension: litany. As a portrait of and elegy to the controversial twentieth-century photographer, it casts a wide net: “An accumulation of thumbnail pictures by Robert Mapplethorpe. An archival tour of Robert Mapplethorpe ephemera. A senate hearing transcript regarding the obscenity of Robert Mapplethorpe.” As Roth’s piece journeys deeper into obsession, he surveys the topography of Mapplethorpe’s life –– a glossary, a crash course –– casting into relief the vulnerable, often-erotic images that comprise his oeuvre (Image 11, below).

Liana Sakelliou’s poem, “Still Life with No Background,” translated in Issue 6 by Don Schofield, is also an ekphrastic work, this time wrapped in a childhood memory. “Mrs. Katina Pappa took us to the Zappeion, / to the First Panhellenic Art Exhibition,” Sakelliou writes, “so we could see the Apotheosis of Athanasios Diakos, / a painting almost four-meters tall and just as wide [. . .]” (Image 12, left). By positioning her young self against the oversized oil painting, Sakelliou portrays a singular but familiar experience: encountering the depth of history through art, and vice versa. Schofield generously delivers this poem to English readers. “— 6 million drachs for a framed piece of canvas?” his translation reads, calling into question the age-old dilemma of valuation. Why does one “framed piece of canvas” hold more value than another? Sakelliou’s young protagonist encounters these questions in a flash –– a kind of departure, or relief, from innocence to experience.

Ginny Threefoot’s poem, “the broken creature we adore as whole,” responds to a few lines from Emily Dickinson poem that read, “We behold her –– glorified –– / Comforts –– search –– like this –– / Till the broken creatures –– / We adored –– for whole ––” And like in the Dickinson, Threefoot’s poem worships the anti-ideal –– that which is questioning, fragmented –– including her own life: “My A’self,” Threefoot begins, beginning the litany that propels each of the poem’s movements, “diving into visible / asking for evidence / dividing into pairs.” “Movements'' describes Threefoot’s poem well, as it is kinetic, built on actions, changes, sounds, and systems. “I laugh I slip I pluck / I rip vow shake pronounce.” I imagine the creative act –– metaphase, anaphase, and telophase –– cells multiplying, partial but holy.

It’s a coincidence that four of the fiction pieces included in Issue 6 have to do with missing mothers. Like Jocobsen and Pyle do in their stories, Emily Mernin’s story, “Lake Talk,” and Sarah E. Ruhlen’s story, “The Ailments of Thomas Pepys,” take on the relationships between mothers and their children –– especially as those children turn into adults themselves. Emily Mernin’s story, “Lake Talk,” captures glimpses of the slow disintegration of an elderly mother, Jane, through the eyes of her daughter, Q. The past and present sweep through significant rooms and landscapes in the family’s life, creating a sometimes dizzying, overlapping portrait of multiple generations inhabiting the same spaces. “The playground next to the burning tree was still dangerous. Orange metal and chains strung from end to end,” Mernin writes, describing an unusual fire that Jane and Q encounter on a walk through a park (Image 13, video, below). Then: she transitions into the past: “As a child, Q had exchanged something there, once, maybe sand. Little Q hoped for expertise there.” Next, Mernin fast-forwards us back to the former moment, completing the loop: “Then, years later, her hobbling mom wandered through it, old, leaning on it all, disappearing into the dusk. Q wished for her to sit.”

 Image 13: “Tree on Fire” (user: WildChild Studios / Vimeo [source])

In Sarah E. Ruhlen’s story, “The Ailments of Thomas Pepys,” Alice, mother of three and on-again/off-again Stop-N-Gas employee, develops an obsession with Thomas Pepys, the brother of the diarist Samiel Pepys, the eccentric seventeenth-century Parliamentarian. She encounters Thomas once in a school library book and is struck by the fact that he has a disability, though she can’t remember which. This lapse haunts her all her life (as do other figments from the past that you’ll have to read to believe). To the chagrin of her relatives and friends, Alice’s mind wanders to Thomas, as if he is a lost part of her, such as in the following scene. Nancy is Alice’s boss at the Stop-N-Gas, where the scene takes place: “Alice, blinking at Nancy, said dreamily, ‘Was it dyslexia?’ To which Nancy screamed, ‘You don’t have to read to heat up a doughnut, you moron! I want three-dozen glazed out here within the next half hour, or your ass is in the can for good, do you hear me?’”

Both of the erasure poetry folios in Issue 6 of Guesthouse –– Jennifer Sperry Steinorth’s excerpt from “Her Read,” and Sarah J. Sloat’s “Sleepless Nights” series –– reinterpret the genre. Steinorth’s erasures are maximalist; she adds as much material to her source text as she omits including paint, ink, white out, and embroidery thread. She also imposes novel systems of order and storytelling to her source text, as is evidenced in her poem, “Some Flights, : a triptych :a contrapuntal,” which must be encountered in its full form and on its own merit to be believed. “Her Read” is an expert pairing of image and text wherein neither medium is elevated over the other. As an art book, it is evocative from front to back, but it is also demonstrates a delicate balance between the old and the new. On the other side of the same coin, Sarah J. Sloan’s “Sleepless Nights” series are minimalist; although she, too, adds new material to the source page –– this time, imagery –– her strokes of erasure are clean and contained, allowing the remnant slivers of text to stand out from the voice, unequivocally. “A touch of melodrama,” the poem, “Sleepless Nights #57” reads, “separated the / aquarium from the / darkness” (Image 14, left). Likewise, Sloan’s stark field delivers its own touch of melodrama, shining a bright spotlight on the carved-out poem. Both of these erasure works are reliefs, in an artistic sense: from the Latin verb relevo, meaning “to raise,” a “relief” is a “sculptural technique where the sculpted elements remain attached to a solid background of the same material. To create a sculpture in relief is to give the impression that the sculpted material has been raised above the background plane” (source: M-W dictionary). The erasure rises from the source text, but it never breaks from its foundation.

Finally, there’s our cover feature, the remarkable lighting installation, “You See a Sheep,” by artist Yuko Nishikawa. Her sculptures, which she says are informed by piku piku –– “a Japanese onomatopoeia that describes involuntary movements caused by unexpected contact” –– are both organic and fantastical, comforting and strange. The lamps that comprise “You See a Sheep” are oblong, melon- and gourd-shaped vessels painted in warm, pastel colors and donned with irregular holes from which bulbs cast a soft glow. Hung at odd intervals between floor and ceiling, they create an immersive experience that I long to see in person. They remind me of lotus pods; insect hives; bubbling pancake batter; pockmarks; pomegranates; spaceships, Shel Silverstein illustrations; and of course; un-sheared, fluffy sheep. (Those who suffer from “trypophobia,” the fear of irregular patterns or clusters of small holes or bumps, be warned –– these lamps are holey and bumpy.) But it is this beautiful tension between the known and the alien that delights me and makes me look again, closer this time, and then closer still at Nishikawa’s artistry. I desperately want one one of her pieces in my living room so that I can be newly relieved of reality every time I look up. “You See a Sheep,” like all of the works in Issue 6, reminds me that darkness is temporary for those who remember to tun on the lights. Relief is coming, my friends. For now, I hope this issue of Guesthouse tides you over and tucks you in.

Jane Huffman
Editor-in-Chief

2020