April Flowers
I’ve been thinking a lot about the messiness of spring. How the new sunlight illuminates that which we’ve lost in the winter and concurrently gives us glimpses of the newness to come. Poetry holds this concept so nimbly, and it’s a wonderful confluence to be celebrating National Poetry Month this month. To celebrate, we’ll be hosting “Poem in Your Pocket Day” on our social media channels. If you’d like us to send you a fancy Does It Have Pockets logo sticker, all you’ll need to do is tag us with a photo of a poem in any old pocket, then DM us your mailing address. More on that later this month.
This month’s issue is a big one. We’re a month away from our first anniversary and this issue, our eleventh (!?), is absolutely brimming with brilliant work:
Poetry
Tom Barwell’s two poems from across the pond are pastoral and full of sound: “a chorus fruited by a far-off owl, so attuned to her note.” Two more poems from Jim Stewart zooms the lens out and out, where technology meets nature and wonders “if vectors still tell the story of our language.” “Admittedly Chaos ensued for some time” in three dizzyingly devastating pieces from David Sheskin. Mark J. Mitchell’s two poems are quiet, fully fledged stories in verse, and despite the hushed prose, “her bite’s quick and sharp.” Andrea Penner explores writing, our bodies, and all the shades of blue, “indigo, sung by midnight saxes, transposed sapphires.” elizabeth iannaci rounds out our poetry this month with two stunning pieces that dive into the ways “someone left a mark,” on the wet side of a whale or on our own human skin.
CNF & Artwork
We have two gorgeous nonfiction pieces this month. In “My Mother’s Furniture,” Julie R. Enszer writes a graceful inventory of her late mother’s house, weighing the things we take and those we leave behind, “I could have anything she owned but I wanted none of it.” Angela Townsend’s “Bones of the Shelter,” is a dynamic, first-person flurry of cats, ketones, and “a man called Laundry Tony is throwing towels overhead like terrycloth toddlers who yell, “do it again!”” J.I. Kleinberg’s Art & Hybrid entry is a beautiful, minimalist blend of collage and poetry, decontextualized fragments placed into conversation with one another.
Fiction
Our April fiction collection starts with Alyson’s Smith’s “Winter,” which delves into the Cabaret of an actor, their bodily contained dichotomy: “William Winter cries inside, Winta Wick drags him back to the stage.” David Galef’s “Two Streams” is a tiny, gorgeous flash full of the damp waterside and “feeling heavy or light but full of the stream that flowed through the day.” Kai Holmwood’s paean to Joan Didion, “Return to the Dam,” is a futuristic short, fantastically imagined where “the moment that should have been meaningful was peculiar in its ordinariness.” Cathy Ulrich surveys “the way you turn your head from side to side before you bend to pick up another broken thing,” the bereft sorrow of deflation in her micro “Something About a Balloon.” Bryan Vale’s “Rules for our Airbnb” reflates our hearts with a witty list full of portals to the unexpected, where we must remember “the entropy is no joke.” Finally, don’t miss Dana Hammer’s superlative “A Biting Clown,” where we join our ball-gagged protagonist in clown rehab and suffer through the “mandatory Clowning With Kindness Class, which is exactly what it sounds like.”
One last note: This month we mourn the loss of one of our canine assistants, Jessa, who lived a life full of love and friendship. Our team is sending her human, Jody, all the love and light we possibly can, even as we give thanks for having held Jessa in our midst. We hope you’ll hug your family, canine and otherwise, a bit tighter in her memory.
Until next month,
XO
