Dear Ferocious Dreamer

Dear ferocious dreamer. Dear maven of song and surveyor of every flung star. Dear meandering romantic, audacious witness, dear listener with the whole of your covetous heart. Dear listener to the air’s brutal and gorgeous music, soft dancer to ballads not yet written or sung. Dear lost-ago sister, conjuring us behind shuttered eyes, dear mother of this shifting and cumbersome light, dear writer of moments and reader of lives, dear wide-aloud daydreamer, dear tenderly reckless, dear ceaseless pen, clacking keyboard and second throat—

Dear Harriet—

It is you who envisioned us, spilling like so many daybreaks through the door you opened, and here we are, so fevered and restless and so loudly alive, our days luminous and upended by the dauntless strut, the sleek dance of sound on a line, on a thousand lines, among us perhaps a million lines, lines that leave us breathless and grant us breath, lines that pull us down sun-splashed roads of jubilation and the crippling path of grief, lines like sting hard like homemade brown liquor and everything Buddy Guy done said, lines that unveil our whole histories and feed us in a way religion won’t, lines that break us apart and build us back crooked, build us back sideways, build us back heartbroke, lines that give us new names and introduce us to our shadows, 14 lines with stiff rhymes and a volta, lines flirting with dactyls and crammed with ampersands and shoveling golden, lines that say Hey you, you’re in love or Hey you, you need love or Hey haven’t you had enough love? These lines from Kimiko—“Imagine words with a dimension not unlike the light and dark regions of the moon. The back of planets. The craters. Words that orbit the body like a plea granted.”

Harriet, do you hear us?

Words like a plea granted. Lines like a need fulfilled. Poems like answers to what we cry out into the dark. All you did was open the door, and look—we’ve ripped it from its hinges. It is for poetry that we have gathered in this room of wild witness, here in syllable, in soul, in service. Here where we know there is no danger quite like a poet on the edge of a poem.

Cave Canem, we have warned. Beware the dog who snarls and sinks its keen canines deep into truth. Thanks to Toi and Cornelius, every poet knows there is world waiting for their work. Because of them, we are all here. No sound, no syllable, no line, no stanza, no poem—no voice—goes unheard.

Not ever intending to be unheard, Douglas Kearney rearranges and reveals and shoots us through with threads of electric, and gleefully disturbs us with lyric that jumps and rollicks and disturbs, refusing to adhere to the line.

Yes, here we are, Harriet, your modest pages sprung to life and out on the town. Here we are glittered up in razored suits and stillettos, breathing thinly beneath our Spanx and oh-so-carefully held breaths, here we are, a little itchy and giddy and smelling good and washed all over in limelight. But we know—and you know—that we are fooling no one.

We’d all rather be arced over our keyboards, scratching feverishly at our legal pads, sweating a line, counting a rhythm on our fingers, trying out a title, speaking new sounds into the air. We’d all rather be gobbling some horrendous snack of lard and sugar, because there’s no time for a real breakfast or a real lunch or a real dinner until this damn poem is done. Some time we forget to wash. But it is soooo worth it.

And thank you, Harriet. Not just for the magazine named for our passion, not just for opening that door and beckoning us inside. Thank you because we know that once we leave, after the awards have been given and the lights flicker dim, outside at the curb towering above the Ubers and taxis, there will be a snorting steed, stomping restlessly and glowing like pure pearl under the moon. His broad back will be more than enough room. And as the regular ol’ world watches, awed and undone, Pegasus will spread his wings over two or three city blocks. Buoyed by words, not by wind, those wings will lift us toward poetry—all those things we cannot see, but still believe in.