Preface.

Putrid, acidic ash bellows black like a regretful sigh out of the factories’ smokestacks. A body already rigored and swollen lies halfway behind a chinese restaurant’s dumpster with tattered rags polka-dotted with bullet holes. Oily tarmac like the slicked stroke of hair on the rich man’s head roars [with a cacophony of cars] under the summer’s pounding heat. A dusty printer in an ivy-wrapped warehouse spins endlessly, spewing the latest breaking news: “The End of the World!” 

That shadow across the cityscape, a falling evening on our stagnant days, envelopes us all. Salt seeps out of our bones and tears leak out of our wrinkled eyes as we put this grief to work. All the hurt from a world that strikes from all sides is leeched out with a pen’s pressure. Daily life, a circuit of cliff edges and pitfalls, drags behind it our mangled bodies, limp like a doll. We regain consciousness for a moment that we can record the struggle and give breath to the strife. Dead we may be, propped up at the editors’ desk, but our hands move across the page like a gentle wind: we remember the daylight that we could feel on our face, or the sweet scent of wildflowers caught dancing in the air, sights and sounds and memories safe from the shade’s reach. Or we remember the aches, the churning gravel yell from our fathers, the incensing monotony of retail labor, or the most miniscule slight by those we can’t remember why we hate. 

The price of life is the sting of reflection; but from it comes creation, whether by accident or with soul-intent in every word. Nothing is more necessary. Nothing more crucial than loosening the valve and releasing the pressure. Some psychologize it and demean it as escapism, others strip it of color and make an instrument of capital out of it. Many more, especially in our current era, simply never engage at all, whether by disinterest or inability. Tendrils of mundanity coil around our legs; daily life is a veil of thorns clasped around our eyes. Needing to sacrifice ourselves at the altar of productivity, we walk aimlessly towards the next nothingness, sold to us as salvation through the flashing lights of an advertisement. It is only once we 

This process, the unfurling of the layers and layers of coiling emotion and experience, is sacred to us, however. We step outward from ourselves and take a seat at the table, our eyes glassy cross and our heads emptying of perception. We stare blank at the screen or the paper and dream of the words and worlds waiting to appear. It’s not a grand mission or divine command. It’s primal, involuntary. Our arms tired from the world’s weight fall like stone onto the desk top, and our hands then move like automatons. At the end of the struggle, bruised and broken, we are left with just our thoughts, bloodletted and pumped through the pen, mixing with the ink, injected into the paper. This struggle is what facilitates beautiful creation: without it, we are colorless vessels of information. Suffering and joy, the sunlight and the ever encroaching shade, are the prime movers of experience – the very reason we can create to begin with, the conviction behind the shout. 

However, no one may hear a lone desperate yawp echoing through the canyon channels, the repeating cries for help, faint and intelligible. This nature we’re stranded stretches endlessly about us. Once we left the comfort of yet painful familiarity, we awoke in a desert, alone. So painfully, achingly, alone. How do we possibly reach the ears of others – if not for help than just to be heard? One straining voice only travels so far. So, here in this House, we gather our family, those whose cries and cheers echo to the stars and back. Those who are unafraid to scream, or just have a razor-edged whisper – as long as the words are uttered, that’s all that matters. Through our works here, we’ll tear ourselves apart and reform and reshape the pieces, that we may, after the battle is fought, exhale the bated breath we’ve been holding in deep all of our lives. Here in this journal is offered the platform on which all can hear and perhaps be moved themselves to awaken from their deathbed and join the choir. The world is covering her ears and shielding her eyes;