SQN - Sine Qua Non - Issue 1 - Journal - Page 21
contemplating the burden of motherhood amidst exterior pressures and “ghosts that come
/ […] / in the limping afternoon.” What the poem builds through its incredibly dexterous
management of found language is brightness enshrining this mother and child and creating “this
We,” who are the “Alwayswonderful of this world.” What Chandler Garcia shows us in “13
Greeds” is another example of how one can build the self from di昀昀erent pieces carried inside,
but what makes this poem unique is how all the other lines are built from the letters of the poem’s
昀椀nal line. I won’t spoil that surprise in this essay, but su昀케ce to say, Garcia’s speaker will entrance
you and then “grind you up.”
In addition to these two stand-out formal experiments, other poets include metatextual
references to how writing poems approximates the act of living from one day to the next. D.C.
Leach’s speaker hacks away at the stump of a tree for days and amasses a number of onlookers,
some who think he’s out of his mind, and others who tell him he could use a chainsaw instead of
his singular axe. But ease like that isn’t what the speaker really wants. No, instead, he likens his
chopping to the rhythms of writing poetry, how each swing and the hole he’ll dig to carve out the
roots of the stump later all come together as memories, or lines, that 昀椀t into his life.
But perhaps the most important messages I see in the bulk of these poems are the importance
of holding on to hope and believing in the existence of love even if the world is falling down
around us. Michelle Alexander writes an epistolary poem in the voice of Suzanne Césaire to
Aimé Césaire and talks about how despite the stress of struggling against power, the two of them
have built a beautiful life together. Andrea Figueroa-Irizarry writes that love can also be quiet, as
simple as touching hands while looking up at the stars wondering how there’s so much nothing
up there that’s made all the everything down on Earth possible. And if that “everything on Earth”
becomes too chaotic, the 昀椀nal poem in this inaugural issue, CJ Brady’s “It’s Not the End of the
World (Even As You Know It): An Apocalypse Mixtape,” reminds us that while the bad may be
in the cards right now, the wheel will always spin around again to good; no fate is 昀椀nal, so point
your face forward.
Reader, reading these poems has been tough, but what we’ve put together here excites
me, moves me, and shakes my bones. I hope you are touched in these same ways when you
experience these pieces, and when you reach those 昀椀nal words, I hope, to use Onyekachi Iloh’s
phrase, the experience has been like witnessing the growth of “a naked tree of joy.”
Matthew W. Baker
Managing Editor, Poetry
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