Editor's Remarks

Joseph Gage CC



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          I come here sometimes to pray. What I mean is: I touch the ground and it feels warm. Well traveled. Because I swear there are times when being an editor feels like a type of wordless holy. We do it for different reasons. I started this work as a jagged stone, the waters moving over me have worked me into something I can hardly name. Its closest sound: gratitude. Words save our lives. Nothing else matters. My reason. This new issue has a lot of addiction and recovery in it. Was always the theme, but here it is, bubbling to the surface more than ever. And funny: how it's just what I needed, more than ever. 

Because ain't nothin' mine, I keep walking this line between learning and leaning in. Listening. What a song did for me once, laid out on the floor at sixteen: said: hold on to things you can't see, only feel. It was real. Music set it off, then came the poems and the no-home and all the years I went missing. When you could not name what had been taken from you, you lifted the pen and the pen lifted the pain just a little, just enough, that something broke through, carried you.

Look, there's a real limitation to all this. It won't undo what was done, the things that happened are real. The pain is real. We can burn ourselves out on hope. Who says we don't need a little darkness? Too much of anything can be deadly. Light and dark. Hope is somewhere in the middle. Whatever I thought I knew I am unknowing. It's called growing. We're all just a bunch of word farmers mixing our pain and past into the soil, hoping, praying, that what blooms leaves a little room for the unruly to sing its song. 

That what is wild and unruly belongs. You. Me. We belong. And looking back on all that - hope like an arrow to the heart - we say yes to all of it. Pain is pain. And so is love. And being here still despite where and what we come from is a goddamn miracle. Give yourself a little grace. You ain't done planting them rows just yet. Let the past have the past. Here we all are, right now, in this one imperfect moment, watching a thing come to life in the good light. 

Until we pass through these parts again, just be all that you needed for yourself back then. And each other. 

In service, love, and gratitude,
James Diaz
EIC - AHC​