"This work is unlike any other, in its range of rich, conjuring imagery and its dexterity, its smart voice. Carroll-Hackett doesn’t spare us—but doesn’t save us—she draws a blueprint of power and class with her unflinching pivot: matter-of-fact and tender." —Jan Beatty
I asked for a dream before going to sleep last night, a dream that would help me to solve a problem, answer a question I had. In the ways in which I was raised, dreams were just one of multiple ways of learning, ways of knowing.
Unlike mainstream Western culture, which tends to limit ‘knowing’ to what is categorized as ‘rational,’ indigenous cultures across the globe recognize multiple sources of knowledge an individual or community possess and can access, including traditional wisdom, dreaming, land knowing, symbols and images, shared knowledge through connectivity, and story, among others.
from Citizen, VI [On the train the woman standing]
Claudia Rankine
On the train the woman standing makes you understand there are no seats available. And, in fact, there is one. Is the woman getting off at the next stop? No, she would rather stand all the way to Union Station.
The space next to the man is the pause in a conversation you are suddenly rushing to fill. You step quickly over the woman’s fear, a fear she shares. You let her have it.
The man doesn’t acknowledge you as you sit down because the man knows more about the unoccupied seat than you do. For him, you imagine, it is more like breath than wonder; he has had to think about it so much you wouldn’t call it thought.
When another passenger leaves his seat and the standing woman sits, you glance over at the man. He is gazing out the window into what looks like darkness.
You sit next to the man on the train, bus, in the plane, waiting room, anywhere he could be forsaken. You put your body there in proximity to, adjacent to, alongside, within.
You don’t speak unless you are spoken to and your body speaks to the space you fill and you keep trying to fill it except the space belongs to the body of the man next to you, not to you.
Where he goes the space follows him. If the man left his seat before Union Station you would simply be a person in a seat on the train. You would cease to struggle against the unoccupied seat when where why the space won’t lose its meaning.
You imagine if the man spoke to you he would say, it’s okay, I’m okay, you don’t need to sit here. You don’t need to sit and you sit and look past him into the darkness the train is moving through. A tunnel.
All the while the darkness allows you to look at him. Does he feel you looking at him? You suspect so. What does suspicion mean? What does suspicion do?
The soft gray-green of your cotton coat touches the sleeve of him. You are shoulder to shoulder though standing you could feel shadowed. You sit to repair whom who? You erase that thought. And it might be too late for that.
It might forever be too late or too early. The train moves too fast for your eyes to adjust to anything beyond the man, the window, the tiled tunnel, its slick darkness. Occasionally, a white light flickers by like a displaced sound.
From across the aisle tracks room harbor world a woman asks a man in the rows ahead if he would mind switching seats. She wishes to sit with her daughter or son. You hear but you don’t hear. You can’t see.
It’s then the man next to you turns to you. And as if from inside your own head you agree that if anyone asks you to move, you’ll tell them we are traveling as a family.
“The world breaks everyone, and afterward, some are strong at the broken places.” —Hemingway
Solitude—whether alone on the road in a car, train, motel room, or a forest trail, or even secluded and tucked away in your home, whether it’s a welcomed moment of peacefulness or a lonely state of despair—times of solitude shape us, recharge us, and break us down to our essence. Sometimes we choose to step away from the world. Sometimes the world breaks us and casts us aside. In those moments alone, if we make the choice to continue and create, true artists are born. We cross a border we cannot uncross and heal through our words, finding ourselves—and sometimes finding new selves in the process. As Hemingway said, sometimes we’re strong in those broken places, and sometimes we’re not. Sometimes that jagged broken part affects us forever afterward.
This fall issue we are interested in capturing both the positive, reaffirming pieces about solitude along with those that reveal pain, heartbreak, and introspection. We seek to investigate those breaking point moments, those halting discoveries, those empowered decisions that compel us to walk away from the world and to let the silt settle in the pool of water in our soul. Whether you enjoy locking yourself away or you had to in order to save yourself from hell, we want to hear how these moments lead to creative revelations and re-energized focus, or how they still haunt you to this day.
Submissions due 9/9/17. Issue live 10/31/17. Read guidelines for submissions at:
“Every particle in the physical universe takes its characteristics from the pitch and pattern and overtones of its particular frequencies, its singing.
Before we make music, music makes us.”~Joachim-Ernst Berendt
Make art about the song you recognize as yours, the song of the body.
The rains have stopped and and the hadrwoods have awakened, and the drive home from campus today was a wander through every shade of green. The Guardian Oak is full and bright, and the woods are thickening. I stood with giants, all of us reaching for the sky.
Michael Meyerhofer is a contemporary poet and fantasy author who believes those two genres genuinely can get along. To illustrate this, his debut fantasy novel, Wytchfire (Book I in the Dragonkin Trilogy), was published by Red Adept Publishing, and went on to win the Whirling Prize and a Readers Choice nomination from Big Al’s Books and Pals. The sequels, Knightswrath and Kingsteel, are out now. He is also the author of the forthcoming Godsfall Trilogy. Michael’s fourth poetry book, What To Do If You’re Buried Alive, was published by Split Lip Press. His third, Damnatio Memoriae (lit. “damned memory”), won the Brick Road Poetry Book Contest. His previous books are Leaving Iowa (winner of the Liam Rector First Book Award) and Blue Collar Eulogies (Steel Toe Books, finalist for the Grub Street Book Prize).
He has also published five poetry chapbooks: Pure Elysium (winner of the Palettes and Quills Chapbook Contest), The Clay-Shaper’s Husband (winner of the Codhill Press Chapbook Award), Real Courage (winner of the Terminus Magazine and Jeanne Duval Editions Poetry Chapbook Prize), The Right Madness of Beggars (winner of the Uccelli Press 3rd Annual Chapbook Competition), and Cardboard Urn (winner of the Copperdome Chapbook Contest).
Michael has won the Marjorie J. Wilson Best Poem Contest, the Laureate Prize for Poetry, the James Wright Poetry Award, and the Annie Finch Prize for Poetry. His work has appeared in Ploughshares, North American Review, Arts & Letters, River Styx, Quick Fiction, Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, and other journals.
He received his BA from the University of Iowa and his MFA from Southern Illinois University Carbondale. An avid weightlifter, medieval weapons collector, and unabashed history nerd, he currently lives, teaches, and inhabits various coffee shops around Fresno, CA.
“With a compassionate eye, and his trademark sense of humor that hooks readers from the very first page, Meyerhofer sends us back to our earliest memories, and shows us a world of heartbreak and wonder.” -Mary Biddinger, author of A Sunny Place with Adequate Water
“…Meyerhofer sings in a pure American tenor, his voice haunted by late night diners, small town heartbreak, and somehow, out there in the desolate vastness of the heartland, a flash of humor and a sweet glimmer of hope.” -George Bilgere, author of Imperial
“While never flinching from confronting the irredeemable damage we do to one another, these urgent and necessary poems remind us ‘that if we focus on what hurts, / face it wholly, it dissolves / like a light from a burnt-out bulb, / a curtain gone up in flames.” -Jon Tribble, author of Natural State
Michael Meyerhofer is a contemporary poet and fantasy author who believes those two genres genuinely can get along. To illustrate this, his debut fantasy novel, Wytchfire (Book I in the Dragonkin Trilogy), was published by Red Adept Publishing, and went on to win the Whirling Prize and a Readers Choice nomination from Big Al’s Books and Pals. The sequels, Knightswrath and Kingsteel, are out now. He is also the author of the forthcoming Godsfall Trilogy.
Mary Carroll-Hackett: Poetry and Prose 
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