We are in the thick of a thick stack of proofs for our upcoming summer issue—335 pages thick, to be precise. Yep, it’s our second long forms issue, and we aim to have it at the printer by mid-May. In other words, time is as short as the issue is long, and it doesn’t help that we keep lingering on arresting passage after passage, such as these lines from Brandon Amico’s “Book of Distances”:
Chapter eleven is ash, twelve wheezes out
of the book and accordions down the stairs,
thirteen is a map of my eyelid. The box
in the map’s corner shows one inch
to equal one year or one heartbreak,
whichever comes first.
Or these from Steve De Jarnatt’s “Harmony Arm”:
Ma let him in on some oddball Gunderson history. In the nineteenth century, half the clan had briefly given themselves over to an offshoot of the Charles Fourier Phalanx and run off to Utopia, Ohio. This collectivist movement believed that if humans could live together in peach for sixteen generations, a new appendage would evolve, a human tail called a Harmony Arm. It would be as powerful as an alligator’s, but supple as a cat’s. A sort of prehensile hand flexing at the tip—a huge thumb and two fingerish knobs with the retractable talons of an eagle. This reenvisioned noble ape in touch with his true nature would flourish, wielding the tail-arm as a labor aid, weapon, and even a source of sensual pleasure.
Look for more snippets in the weeks to come, and for a sneak peak at the cover, click here.
