Editor's Remarks

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​     We are left wanting, in this life, most of what we never got early on. When we were young and tender we were not met with tenderness. We adopted strategies to cope, to stay afloat. What language does a rage-storm speak? Who knows the length of the thaw? And when it comes alive in us, such roar, who will know its source, who will receive it tender? The lucky of us find a few ears along the way that know the sound. Whatever grace is, its saving is ordinary, every day, unfamiliar to most of us, until... Well, it can take a long time until.

    But it does happen. Ask me how I know this. Because when I look at all the stories of blooming up in a thunderstorm that threatens to pull us out by the roots, and seeing how we survive by bending like the reed the long night through, reflected here poem by poem, story by story, by those who know what I mean when I say that none of this was easy or guaranteed, I know. The fact that here we are, gathered together for a moment, in time, in time, because for so long we were out of it, the flow and the feel of it, but here is us, timely and belonging. 

    How to become familiar with the good things? There it is. That's the destination. Because for some of us the good was not the relational genre that shaped our families. We were brought into uncertainty and it made homes inside of us that it's taken us years to learn how to foreclose on. Grace is just mercy brought to bear by those who know what it's like to have been born out of time and who have found ways back into it.

    If ever you feared it might all have been for nothing, here is a little bit of proof that maybe it was not. The world is broken. We are broken. And yet. And yet. Something else too. My friends, receive it tender when it knocks. The one in pain, lost and ambling. Be the ear that knows the sound. Be the root still in the ground. Pass it around. 


James Diaz
Founding Editor
Anti-Heroin Chic