I’ll take the hard road, I believe I’ll see you there—Bill Callahan
In the meantime, leaves blaze, fall, as they, like us, are forced to succumb to the relentless cycle to which we all bow.
October is the fading month—a yearly mien, subtle but constant reminder that the end, of one sort or another, is eventual, and comes to us all.
This year October came for me, slow as blackstrap molasses. It and I emerge from it bruised by the good fight of refute, stripped of the caul of negation—having lost so much, but knowing that those who burn brightest do not go gently.
The poems included in this issue have been companions during this reluctant process, David Watts’s “Piece of Bone,” has infused the marrow of my grief, a healing reminder that memory is the chaste, and the strongest bond. In her “Last Road.” Cheyenne Nimes provided sustenance in her lovesome list of lost objects “narcotic hair… [w]ind & dust on the radio…bridges & promenades”…and “[p]omegranate seeds….”
And Cyrus Armajani’s “Argentine ants,” reminded me, in their infinite
wisdom that,
“nothing stops…things from happening.”
I am grateful to the 13 writers who have generously populated
these ethereal internet pages with the chronicles of battle
against the beasts of loss, lust, lament, and life. Their words have been
a dear ossuary, in which I rested, and licked my wounds, until I was ready to return to the ring.
Jenine Guerriere, renegade-sister, kind friend to the forsaken
and forgotten, and mother of eight month old Sean, fought.
On September 13th, 2010 she took her fight on the road—
this issue of Full of Crow Poetry is dedicated to her.
J, I’ll see you on that road, this time “no cyclone of stones,
no thorns to remove from our hair,” just the nostalgia of
happiness when the hard road is traveled with a good friend.
MK
