Issue 7 foreword: Intuition

In Chelsea Harlan’s poem, “Future Brooches,” her speaker is drawn to a group of crouching people on a beach, studying something she can’t yet see. “I figured this was one of those moments I would never know the answer / unless I were to ask. [...] It felt like showing up to dress rehearse a pivotal scene in a play whose script I had practiced in the car / and poorly.” She approaches the group of beachgoers furtively, their curiosity sparking her own, propelling her toward them. The poem fulfills its own prophecy – later, we realize that the beachcombers are searching for agates, the chalcedony and quartz rock formations commonly found in the crevices of volcanic rocks. The poem establishes two timelines, one in the prophecy of its title, and a second that, which exists later, beyond the borders of the poem: “Agate! They said, their fingers like spiders. / Oh, I said, like I understood. And then one day I did.” This magnetism, the intuition that draws us toward and away from persons, places, and objects – the sublime – unites the thirty creators in Issue 7 of Guesthouse.

Brittany Borghi’s essay, “And If One Should Never Hear the Wave?” is a searing compilation of experiences surrounding parenthood and personhood. Beginning with her own journey to get an IUD implant – an endeavor I can personally attest to being nightmarish – Borghi presents a series of encounters with doctors, her partner, and her mother. Each adds another layer to her exploration of gender and body and her intuitive responses to the prospect of marriage, sex, and parenthood. In one of the essay’s several scenes that position Borghi on an exam table, a doctor is using a wire-thin “prodder” to look for a small component of her sympathetic nervous system that controls the fight-or-flight response. “What if there was a way to pin down this anger, these insecurities?” she reflects in an earlier scene. “To look at them with a scientist’s precision? To pull them apart with a probe? I get dreamy at the chance to pry open my frustrations.” So, too, is Borghi, in a broader, more intimate sense, chasing down that which informs her free will. “I want to find it, too,” she says, whether it’s something intuitive “or if it’s just generations of fear and mistakes” replaying themselves. 

Elias Hutchinson is similarly awed by the intuition of the body and its imperceptible forces, though he strikes a much different tone than Borghi does, in his poem, “An Itch That Isn’t There.” He writes, “The doctor says deep down there is a responsible wire, some or such circuitry fried as August grass, that causes me to lift my left leg and itch like a dog.” With a wryness verging on biting, Hutchinson’s poem is a little bit Metamorphosis and a little bit Sarah Jessica Parker in Broadway’s Sylvia. His transfiguration into a dog, although whimsical, suggests a darker transfiguration – perhaps an embracing or acceptance of something that lay dormant within him, something roiling beneath the surface. Hutchinson strikes the poem’s most serious, resonant chord with the line, “The doctor says I must become what my malfunctioning innards and brain coils think I am.” The matter-of-fact tone up against the strangeness of the scene, especially when the doctor leashes the speaker and leads him into her car, raises the uncomfortable sensation that our own circuitry may have been mysteriously fried. To quote the doctor, “Woof.” 

M.A. Cowgill’s poem, “I just like what we say,” also begins with an image of a doctor, the third piece in Issue 7 that reckons with the doctor’s office as a space that exists, somewhat, outside of space and time. “The doctor said that size never impresses a doctor. / We only care about rate of change. / I closed my hand around that. // [...] somethings about to change / in undramatic wafts of time.” It is a brief poem in three concise acts, but it conveys an uncanny feeling – the sensation when we are at our most lucid, our most premonitory, before a change occurs. The speaker intuits the future. It reminds me of the feeling I get in my inner ear when it’s going to rain – the undramatic shifts in pressure that warn us, like the scent of blood or the taste of metal, that we, or our surroundings, or our fates, are nearing a tipping point.

Katie Berta’s poem, one of two excerpts from collective: a novel in (mostly) prose poems published in Issue 7, also endures the trials of a body, or should I say, the trials of a partial body, one that has been segmented, dissolved, asked to endure the unendurable. “I am just an arm, leg, finger,  the  nail  on  a  finger,” her speaker says, “important,  yes,  but  certainly  amputatable.” But the poem is also a vow, or an ode, to autonomy, a reclaiming of what has been taken from her, done onto her. “I will not be absorbed any further,” her speaker proclaims, “will  not  sink  into  the  mire,  the  soup  of  bodies you’ve been cooking for me.” In this moment, she detaches from that which seeks to dissolve and generalize her. She trusts her own intuition, perhaps for the first time in a while. Whether it is an escape or simply a movement from one chapter into another is up for interpretation, but by the end of the poem, Berta’s speaker is more individualized and whole than she was when it started, not unlike the prose poem itself. 

The metaphorical clashes with the physical world in Jake Bailey’s poem, “There Is a Dragon on My Lawn,” whose title introduces its primary conceit. “I don’t know / why the dragon is on my lawn. I’m not sure / all dragons have the same intentions, / which is crucial as far as dragons go.” The reader of contemporary poetry might pause here and wonder: What does the dragon stand in for? What does the dragon mean? But Bailey leaves that answer up to the reader’s imagination; he, after all, has a much more pressing issue to deal with, “It [the dragon] lies down like a beacon, / pours fire – not for the burn, but for after. / After, I make a sandwich and sit on the porch.” Like so many poems in Issue 7, this poem verges on a daydream, but his plainspoken diction gives it the decisiveness of a lived experience. Is it self-isolation-turned-delusion? An overextended metaphor? A manifestation of the speaker’s imagination or intuition? I love that the poem doesn’t humor us with a response. There is a dragon on his lawn, and there’s probably one on yours, too.

Conversely, rather than a mythic image becoming normalized, in Prince Bush’s poem, “From My Car,” an ordinary scene – having car trouble on a busy expressway – takes on the tenor of myth. He blends the reality of having car trouble on a busy expressway with a surreal scene of his own death. Well-meaning, misguided strangers offer his protagonist advice: “A woman / Suggested I get out // And push my car up / Despite the two-ton car / Flattening me, and another // Offered to manhandle my car / Despite the two-ton car / Castrating him.” Whereas the dragon in Bailey’s poem is really a dragon, the car here is more than a car. It’s the vehicle that won’t carry us, the burden we can’t set down, the weight that bears down on our intuition. It doesn’t run, and it can’t be run away from. The poem gains power in Bush’s decision to not specify the car’s allegorical content. It flattens, castrates, and cannot be denied. Car trouble also plays a role in Lauren Eller’s story, River Air, whose protagonist is scrambling to make it to a beloved’s funeral when her Uber breaks down. Instead of hailing a new ride, the woman stays with the Uber driver, Cam, who is deaf, while he waits for a repairperson, and the two develop a fleeting friendship: “Cam and I sit in the parking lot, waiting for the mechanic to show up. [...] I look down at my phone to see a text from my mom: Where are u?? Getting started. I lick my fingertips and type back. Got held up sorry. On my way. When I put my phone back in my pocket, I see Cam staring at me from the front seat. I feel my face heat up and take back the Chex Mix bag he’s handing me. Then he passes the notebook back, too, and I look at what he’s written: Why didn’t u call another ride?” Even though she knows she might regret not being there for the service, her grief compels her to stay. It’s a moving story about how intuition, when pulled through the sieve of grief, can propel us toward unusual coping mechanisms, such as sitting in relative silence with a relative stranger. In this story, that intuition helps the protagonist face what’s ahead.

Shane Kowalski also reconciles with death in his poem, “The Ecstasy of Three Cherries,” though he does so with a surrealist lyricism. “I want my coffin to be buried under a pastel casino...” he writes, trailing off on the tail of the ellipses that end each of his lines. What follows is a kind of hallucination, a dreamscape or mindtrip or daydream that follows no intuition except for its own. Like Jake Bailey does in his dragon poem, Kowalski follows his connotative images down the rabbit hole of intuition, never pausing to explain the literal world that may or may not be at stake. In his version of death, he is perpetually reaching out to the living: “Someone, whoever is listening out there, please bring me my Golden Egg... / If I crack it open, will a better version of me push out, ready to be driven to paradise in a limo full of peaches?” For a brief moment, the reader is compelled to follow Kowalski into his hallucinatory version of the afterlife. Brandon Sherry’s “Stopping at the Penult” veers even further into the territory of the elliptical. Like several of the pieces in Issue 7, this poem encounters and enacts the Sublime, the edge between terror and awe that characterizes our early exposure to domestic dissonance, sex, and death. “One time as a kid, I called 1-800-HOT-LIPS from a funeral home / A voice whispered I can’t wait to rub my hot wet lips all over your / I wondered, My what?” How’s that for an edge? To stop at the penult is to land on the next-to-the-last, not the last, syllable of a word – to pause at the threshold. Sherry resolves that tension in the final line via a numinous, intuited image.

Several of the writers in Issue 7 intuitively take on (or take to) the natural world as a conduit for self-reflection. Liam O’Brien’s poem, “I Lived in the Woods,” opens with a quartet of lines, including the title, that extend our investigation of language, which reflects reality’s uncertainty. “I Lived in the Woods,” his title proclaims, and the poem begins: “I thought I lived in the woods. / I thought of the woods / but was afraid most of the time...” This progression from concrete reality to conceptual reality to emotional reality leads us brilliantly into the domain of the imagination and the landscape of lost love. The end of love, it turns out, also marks “the end of a self” – the death of a kind of romantic intuition tied to a thou. The world takes on the “sere gray” hue of the forsaken, and the woods, once lush, are transformed into a desolate ravine “where no one who loved me stood.”

Sneha Subramanian Kanta’s poem, “en cours,” is a masterclass in linguistic play, density, and texture. The poem presents a litany of words and concepts, many of which derive from the natural world (e.g., “shell,” “mercy,” “wolf”), and gives them new, ever-deepening definitions that draw on all five senses. “Shell, or memoir collection of ocean sounds by the mantle tissue. / Mercy, or animal veiled into animal among the scent of pine trees. / [...] Wolf, or malleable howl in the strata of a forest.” The poem’s relationship between nature and language is one of inextricable intimacy; language becomes a conduit for nature, the means by which we can understand, in whatever small capacity nature can be understood, the intricacy and largesse of the world. The poem is downright lucious, excessive even, as it spills from one meticulously crafted image to the next, and the result is a landscape of textures, scents, sounds, and ideas – a new dictionary of landscape-as-archetype. 

The same can be said for Regan Good’s poem, “Garrons in the Pale Paddock,” which operates in Good’s distinctively pastoral, even Romantic, tradition that gazes lovingly at the natural world and its innate divinity. Giddily, almost, Good presents us with her subject: “A pony festooned in marram grass driven down / the sea cliff droveway.” This single line, as with all lines in all of Good’s poems, showcases her attention to echoes of strange words – the archaic, the seldom-used. She invites us into her diorama, where the light is rose-colored, and horses smell not at all like horses: “Let’s braid its mane into one-hundred plaits, / then twist them into glossy chestnut buds.” But the poem dwells in more than the peaceful, pastoral beauty of grazing ponies. It gets weird: “Several ponies on the cliff, / several suns wrapped in living ponymeat.” In movements like these, which color the poem like shots of ink into water, Good’s pastoral mode splits from the scenes and allows inside something darker, more self-aware and modern, something anarchistic.

Many pieces in Issue 7 take on familial knots, moments of conflict and tension between relatives, friends, and loved ones, and no poem serves as a better primer on this topic than Lynne Thompson’s “Consanguinity.” “Family alters   hook of fire   hair turn   spilling mountains,” it reads, each clause or turn or phrase freed from the clippings of punctuation and separated by large, eye-caching caesura, “their connection alters   meanders   like memory   downward”. She continues, “Family alters clues outsiders overlook /  then          family alters Mother Night with questions.” The repetition of the words “family” and “alters” – among other motifs in the poem that circle back on themselves – gives the poem its torque. The concept of “family” becomes less and less familiar as the poem moves from start to finish; it is profoundly altered from phrase to phrase, cheese-grated, psychoanalyzed, saved, left for dead, and saved again. In Marcus Ong Kah Ho’s story, “Baby,” a young boy navigates a troubled household, an abusive father, and a new stepmom, who arrives on the scene after his mother – “real Ma” to Billy – departs to begin a new life with a new family: “New Ma was about the same age as real Ma but had a heavier face, shinier hair, longer eyelashes, and redder, plumper lips,” Billy says. “Truth was, new Ma wasn’t that great. She was from a part of China where the cold could kill, where the smog exhausted you. She was indestructible, in other words.” New Ma brings a new set of challenges into Billy’s life, including abusive tendencies of her own. But Ong Kah Ho’s telling of Billy’s story is deeply complicated – nothing is one-dimensional about his relationship with his Pa, with new Ma, or even with the new half-sister she introduces to the household. Despite his wounds and sorrows, he reaches out, as if by intuition, for love and connection from the adults in his life even as they withhold it.

Ron Slate’s poem, “He Decided to Go to Kuzguncuk,” is a softer intergenerational narrative, but it also suggests the iterations of trauma passed down from parents to children. His speaker recalls how his grandfather vowed to return to Istanbul, where he was raised. But this homecoming is dappled with the wounds he endured during the second world war. “It was 1967, the Armenians were gone, the Greeks were gone, and the Jews. Then he began to weep – in his youth, when a funeral procession rolled down Icadiye Street, people came out of their houses to pay respects, no matter their messiah.” Slate’s piece enacts the crucial work of storytelling – to remember, to return, and to bear witness through time. 

Another origin story is Noah Stetzer’s poem, “Allegheny, Monongahela, Ohio, a rustbelt pastoral that portratizes its eponymous town in the American Midwest: “the fire lights / reflect at night from a black ribbon / you cross over by bridge to get any / where around here;” his speaker reflects, “it’s the bridges you come / to respect, it’s the tunnels – ways over, / ways through.” Allegheny is depicted here in silhouette, as if by a spectator looking down from an overlook. But Stetzer also gestures toward his relationship to the city by positioning himself with the “we” that belong there. It is the “we” of the working class, filtered through a lyric sieve.

Something else entirely gets passed down in Stephanie Jean’s poem, “Oversight”: “dearest, i wanted / to thank you / for the picture. / don’t panic. i know / how frightful kindness is. / in my culture, / overtures are hereditary.” In a few short lines, the shortest in Issue 7 and one of the shortest poems Guesthouse has ever published, Jean depicts the world of a relationship with the deftness of a three-act play. An exchange has occurred offstage; a gift has been given, and the speaker has returned to the scene of the interaction to say thank you. But tension blooms – not conflict but an intercultural exchange – when the speaker’s overture of thanks shocks, even frightens, the other party. This tiny poem illuminates how meaningful interactions happen on microscopic scales and that these small convergences of thought and feeling can be lasting, especially when they are cast in the amber mold of poetry. 

Addie Tsai’s poem, “In Baba’s House, a Pair of Rainboots the Color of Lemons Is Desire,” also functions in the realm of memory and family of origin. “When Baba said no, I hid underneath the bed, another sign that I was free,” her speaker recalls. “That image was an anomaly.” I assume that we all have early memories of reckoning with authority – whether that comes in the form of a “no,” like it does in this poem, or in other, darker, inexplicable manifestations. But Tsai’s poem complicates that child’s experience; a child hiding under the bed is a response to anger and frustration, but this child encounters a kind of freedom, their “skin is a magnolia, defiant...” The scene is an archetype of desire – oh, those yellow rainboots! – up against the adult lie that denies desire. Their fight-or-flight responses are conflated, and, as they experience both autonomy and authority, they reach the formative moment of insisting on their own truth, come hell or high water.

A segment of pieces in Issue 7 are deeply philosophical, propelled by personal idiom and the shape and movement of ideas. Sarah Gridley’s poem, “I thought a mirror,” suggests a cleavage of personhood, something she examines, as have a long tradition of poets, by looking in the mirror. “[I] never thought the mirror / was ever more than half of something captive somewhere else,” Gridley writes. “And I know I would have thought / less of the mirror / if not for this.” In this poem, the mirror contains a parallel universe that keeps “half of something captive,” suggesting that the lived reality of her own world is similarly halved. I am reminded of other explorations of this kind of doubling, such as in the recent film Us, where each person on earth denotes a duplicate being who lives in an underground version. Or the early Twilight Zone episode “Mirror Image,” where a woman runs into herself – an exact twin – in a train station and is driven off the tracks of her own life by her doppelgänger. It’s a classic speculative exploration – and a most successful one, as it immediately calls into question what “wholeness” means – and Gridley’s poem adds a new, syntactically captivating voice to the conversation.

Matthew Moore’s poem, “A Ritmo de Brano,” functions on a similar plane, this time examining the notion of personhood through the lens of an offstage thou. “Wet cry, / You chafe like beauty,” he writes. And then, the poem enters a new mode: “Like a pillow an inquiry burns / Blue sigh beyond solecism.” And the poem ticks rapidly in the direction of the connotative mind. The poem, too, for those who are well read in psychoanalysis, references the work of Sigmund Freud. During the editing process for Issue 7, Moore generously offered his own commentary on the poem’s logic, which I couldn’t help but include here for its clarity and sophistication: “The last four lines of the poem [i.e., ‘Down roads I see / To wait for you a fell branch in / The hand in removal, / The hand in removal removed.’] are a deep allusion to the notes on Freud’s case study of his patient Ernst Lanzer, ‘The Rat Man,’ and the psychoanalytic problem of ‘undoing.’” Yet even for readers who don’t pick up these threads, the poem has a certain quality of undoing – of reaching for an extra stair that isn’t there.

Amie Zimmerman’s poem, “Silent Room,” evokes, to me, the writing of Gaston Bachelard, who posited, at a very basic level, that architecture – the rooms and cells and tubs that hold us – engender emotional reactions. So do the component parts of everyday life in Zimmerman’s piece: “Inherently at cross-purposes, a beam of light cannot excuse / the grain of wood – see, it’s math of the heart at its fattiest, / why the two together are so satisfying.” The poem is, at first, an aesthetic observation – a curiosity piqued and satisfied, a mathematical solution solved – but the intellectual realm is soon intruded upon by the emotional. “The next person who mentions holding space is getting / a punch to the throat,” Zimmerman writes, pulling the light-dappled tablecloth out from under the poem, revealing a chilling confession, a laid-bare bit of intuition that cuts through the light, the wood: “I put off living since I was born.”  

Alan Baer’s poem, “Specificity,” captures the uncanniness of storytelling – those stranger-than-fiction details and coincidences that befall us like strange birds. Baer begins by telling the story of when his brother was hit by a car on his bicycle while he was “carrying puddings / to a friend’s dinner party, holding the bag / with two fingers of his right hand.” Then the fourth wall breaks, and Baer’s third-person narrator interrupts himself to analyze the telling. “The puddings are what people refer to / as something you couldn’t make up.” He continues, “Inside each moment, a universe / of possible futures collapses / down to just one. / Actual details (like puddings) retain traces / of this collapse, of all the things / that didn’t happen / as well as the exact things that did.” The poem transforms from a narrative to a metanarrative that examines the storytelling process, and it does so without pretension or the veneer of wisdom – and without dropping the storyline itself. I love this poem for its sharpness and its softness. Sean Stewart’s story, “If Every Chute Opens,” also bends the expectations of storytelling. In slim, lyric paragraphs, he introduces a group of paratroopers, outlining their individual fears, habits, and rituals before and during a routine jump in a style that reminds me of Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried. Each trooper has their own singular experience, breaking up the perceived monolith of servicemembers: “Private Davis blows and pops fuchsia bubbles. Blows and pops. Blows and pops.  Private Saul studies the laces of his boots. He keeps his eyes there. He tries not to look at the laces of the boots next to his. He tries not to look at the laces of the boots of Private Anders. Private Bend whispers to the little badger puppet snug on his finger. His finger bobs up and down as the knit sock of black yarn replies.” I won’t give away the primary conceit of the story’s form, which casts the piece in strange light in its final moments.

Anna Zumbahlen’s poem, “Fall Issue,” evokes a scene near and dear to me: compiling an issue of a magazine. It reminds me of a montage in a film: the swift stapling of papers, the sharp keying of edits, the scurrying back and forth from the screen to the printer. “I inserted periods and dashes. Contextualized incomplete verb phrases. // Italicized.” Zumbahlen’s scene also spills beyond the edges of the task at hand, focusing on sensory details in close, compact phrases riddled with double entendre that cast the editor as one of the very mechanisms of creation, machine-like and sublime. (Though perhaps I’m biased.) “[I] Enlarged a hole in the heel of my sock and ground enough beans to make two cups,” she writes. Verbs are this poem’s domain: bought, repotted, unscrewed, contextualized, italicized. Is the editorial work an allegory of building a life, or vice versa? I’ll let you know when I figure it out.

Madeline Gilmore’s poem, “Crouching Spider,” one of a series of her ekphrastic poems in Issue 7, uses one of my favorite sculptural investigations on the planet, Louise Bourgeois’ “Crouching Spider,” as its subject matter. She captures not only the sensory experience of encountering a work of art in its own right but also the experience of standing in its presence – the gallery or promenade or cranny that is graced by the installation of a fine artwork and is thus made artful at a molecular level. “What pleased me more / than the drive or the sunlight / glittering like a nude / in a museum,” she writes, “was the giant spider / in the attic room, the brick walls barely / enclosing legs as long as my body.” Bourgeois was so much an artist of intuition, and here, Gilmore aligns herself with the intuitive via that crucial hinge: “And I, too...” This is where spider, sculpture, creator, and speaker meet in a lonely, iconoclastic, cold, and powerful artistry.

We’re honored to reprint a series of photographs by Toby Coulson, featuring the fashion design work of Oumou Sy, as the art feature and cover of Issue 7. Coulson originally created these photographs for a feature in Document Journal, “All hail Oumou Sy, Senegal’s ‘Queen of Couture,’” that was accompanied by an interview with the designer. On her decision to begin designing and sewing clothes, Sy said, “I was born in Podor, a haven of peace on the river in the northernmost point of Senegal that borders Mauritania. Women in my tribe have only one purpose: to get married, be pretty, and stay silent. When my dad died, I felt all his force come into me. At the age of [5] I was no longer a child, at the age of 9 I refused an arranged marriage, at the age of 13 my mother bought me my first sewing machine, and I started using recuperated fabrics. I wanted to be independent; if you are a woman, financially self-sufficient, and you can provide for your parents, people would not bother you, and you would be respected.” Coulson captures the power and emotion of Sy’s designs in his striking photographs. Each look is styled and photographed in a way that makes the model appear both larger than life and fully embedded in their surroundings. Each photograph is a celebration of the incredible artistry, vibrancy, and originality of Sy’s creations; of the people wearing them; and of Senegalese culture. 

Issue 7 also includes two pieces that aren’t traditional centos but are cento-ish. Rachel Neve-Midbar’s, “The Fruit of Darkness in Anne Carson’s Decreation,” is a collaged essay comprising quotes from the title piece; original writing; and bits from other novels, poems, and theoretical works, from the Bible to the notebooks of Simone Weil. Neve-Midbar’s original contributions are deeply compelling, building connective bridges and tunnels between the component parts: “What is fecund in darkness?” she writes. “Night creatures called nocturnals, the navigated night-sounds of bats. Nightshades ripening at midnight. Mushrooms and lichen and night-blooming jasmine.” The essay is experimental but approachable, with each thread building to an ending that is climactic both in narrative and in feeling – we’ve learned something about Decreation, both the origin text and the idea itself.

Similarly, Paul Bisagni’s cento, “All the Possible Forms Do Not Occur,” collages quotes from Gildersleeve’s Latin Grammar (1903) and Greek Grammar (1920), utilizing variation in text color or intensity to indicate when “contiguous phrases come from different sections of the same book.” The resulting poem is lyric, dense, and dizzying, and it can’t be adequately represented here in its partial and decolorized form: “At times, too, the disturbing influence is the insertion of a violent displacement of words, the positive being the thing dreaded: the eyes of quails, Dame Nature with a pitchfork (usually graceful and free from obscurity), (having a) snake-hand (born elsewhere).” The poem calls to attention the strange vernacular we use when learning new languages – and, in this case, when learning “dead” languages – and threads a string between three eras: the ancient world, the turn of the twentieth century, and now. Last but not least is Zachary Ludington’s poem, “Palimpsest.” To explain it is to risk diminishing its delightfulness. Let me give you, reader, an assignment, a kind of treasure hunt as we come to the end of this preface: Play with the definition of palimpsest: “a manuscript or piece of writing material on which the original writing has been effaced to make room for later writing but of which traces remain.” (Think, too, of how the aforementioned centos do and don’t fall under this umbrella.) Do a little research on the name “Orbaneja.” Revel in the poem’s music, its rhymes, its shine: “This is a rooster. Grab your marbles. / Cast pearls before the swine.” Let’s go for the “low-shelf wine” and intuit it for once in our goddamned lives.

Jane Huffman and Diane Seuss

With thanks to Chad Cripe and Harrison Cook