"I'll just tell you what I remember because memory is as close as I've gotten to building my own time machine."
— Samantha Hunt (The Invention of Everything Else)
"con-trails" by jennifer l. tomaloff
Writing a poem is like transcending space and time, especially if it's based on something true. And they're all sort of true. I turn old lovers in to sea monsters and haunted European forests. It feels like rewriting history the way it happened in some parallel universe. I should have known from the beginning things were going to go wrong. There's an unexplored sense that is always active, like power lines hovering above you that you fail to notice. It hums to you all the possibilities that are existing at every moment, and just because you choose one outcome, it doesn't mean the others stop existing. They are running the course of your veins, and sometimes when you sit down to write, remembering the beginning of some love story, your hand picks up a pen and tells a slight variation of that story, but it never means it's not true.
Claudia
February 2011
note: jennifer l. tomaloff's photograph is the inspiration for ed makowski's poem featured in this issue.