SQN - Sine Qua Non - Issue 1 - Journal - Page 20
Poetry Introduction
“ n case of emergency, break open the ribcage,” begins Oladosu Michael Emerald’s poem
“Manual for a Body in Transit.” Simultaneously a poem that tries to o昀昀er advice in the
face of urgent problems and also create space for history, memory, and feeling, Emerald’s poem,
the winner of our Inaugural Prize in Poetry, coalesces the disparate but ultimately interconnected
struggles, happinesses, and ideas of selfhood that the poems in this inaugural issue exhibit. The
SQN’s birth has been a journey to 昀椀nd structure and beauty, to build itself up from nothing but air,
and Emerald’s piece helps illuminate the questions at the heart of not only this issue’s beginning
but also the issues we face as people in a shared world: Where can we turn to 昀椀nd strength?
Where can we go to 昀椀nd peace? Whom do we become if who we were has been lost to time and
the shifting of space? Monumental in scope, to be sure, these questions aren’t without answer. If
we break open the ribcage, if we search within ourselves, Emerald’s poem suggests, we might
see “[t]he answers [we]’re still waiting to 昀椀nd.” What we 昀椀nd, ultimately, is that there is always
something within us that can help build us up despite whatever outside pressures or anxieties
weigh us down.
If Emerald’s piece sets the stage for this issue’s preoccupation with building or 昀椀nding the
self, then other poems complicate that journey through their attention to various images. Most
vividly, the body leaps from the pages in poems about gender identity and womanhood. Chris
Watkins’ “Now Sissy that Walk (A Creation Story)” shows us the reshaping of Adam into a
beautiful Eve bright with “long lashes,” “new breasts,” and a “comely silhouette,” who “walk[s]
/ without stumbling” in her godlike grandeur. Sarah Kohrs takes us in a di昀昀erent direction by
focusing on female anatomy, anxiety, and pleasure. While her speaker in “The Loneliest Part of
Being” indulges in self-pleasure under the cover of night, she is interrupted by worries about a
scar she needs examined on her breast and past criticisms from outsiders of her “sinfulness.” We
contain multitudes, these poems suggest, and we are beautiful for that.
In fact, from these multitudes we contain, we create not just brilliant selves but resilient ones,
too. After su昀昀ering through war, the speaker in Gospel Chinedu’s poem can 昀椀nally “hear the songs
/ echoing in [his] ear drum” as birdsong comes back into focus in the mornings. KM Kramer
shows us how the seemingly segmented self becomes, instead, a palimpsest that builds upon
one day’s woes with another’s whimsy to create a “bold” new self each day. Indeed, AE Abitz
furthers this strong self-making theme in her piece, “Ghazal,” which uses its formal repetitions to
show a speaker cobbling herself back together from “scarred forearms” into a “昀椀nal, melli昀氀uous
self.” Though trauma might mar the speakers in these poems, they use their lyrics as lenses to
show how struggle might wound us, but given enough time and care, we can come back from
that abyss. Exciting formal maneuvers in most of the poems in this inaugural issue transform the
often-times lifeless freeverse of contemporary lyric poems into prime examples of what beauty
comes from a melding of content and form. Jen Karetnick’s “We Are Each Other’s Harvest,” one
of our contest runners-up, is an ekocento pantoum created from the lines of Gwendolyn Brooks
poems and meditates on a painting of a mother and child by Carlos Antonio Rancaño. “If there is
milk, it must hold a hunger o昀昀,” echoes the poem across the stanzas as the line repeats,
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