by Steve Granzyk

The poems in this issue include several of the common human conditions that test our emotional resilience, our ability to achieve the peace that acceptance brings. These poets write smartly and sensitively in acknowledging that our suffering can lie beyond  the powers of medical science, a result of the debt due our innate mortality. They also show us we have the power not only to accept our own pain but, through our empathy and compassion, to give acceptance as a special gift to others.

I have placed Lucia Owen’s three poems first because they strike like a lightning bolt across a night sky, establishing how difficult finding peace is when grieving the loss of a long time spouse or partner. The speaker of  “The Grief Resource Kit”  has a  keen sense that at present there is no checklist or workbook that can give her consolation. Great loss will be deeply felt and must be endured before healing can begin. Owen’s speaker recognizes she is completely absorbed by a mourning that feels like the “life-sucking vacuum of your gone-ness.” The pain of her loss leaves her out of control, like a wild “mustang” with “No home barn lit in the dark, just running and running.”  In “Memory’s Mirror” she sees herself naked, not just without clothes but stripped of her identity as a connected partner—“what we said and did, and how we loved. / But the past is just that. Now nothing  /  to wear, no idea what to put on.”

The imaginable unimaginable is seen as a nightmarish dream world in Lorraine Jeffery’s “Cables and Carabiners” where, bereft of all family members, the speaker is “conscious no address will deliver / a loved one.” She herself swings  “above the abyss, / knowing / there is no safety net.”  Vincent Casaregola’s “Dust” begins as a rumination on how cleaning a kitchen connects him to his mother, gone “decades ago,” but ultimately reveals the speaker’s unflinching grasp of the reality that all eventually must cope with: We “know our clenched hands and / ragged fingers are, themselves, the dust we fear.”

Many of the issue’s poems, however, affirm the possibility of the healing power of acceptance—-provided by others (Miriam Bassuk’s  “O.L.D.”) and by our own ability to persevere under the various ills that plague us, (Judith Waller Carroll’s “The Human Body is 60% Water,” and Erin Jamieson’s “Ducks”). In the lush, sensory imagery of the paradoxical, “As I Go Blind I See,” Mary Alice Dixon bravely finds pleasure in sounds and smells, and the taste of an orange, while suffering the deterioration and eventual loss of sight caused by macular degeneration: “then with open mouth / and closed eyes / I love blindly fresh / citrus zest blessing / my tongue / I become wholly / the fruit I see barely / by the skin / of my old soft teeth / .

Finally, several poets portray the challenge of caring for family members sick or dying. Yet poems by Laurie Rosen, Tabor Flickinger, Diane Funston, and Dave Malone show the enduring quality of the compassion we provide for others in their most dire needs. Without the ability to accept and acknowledge the suffering of the people we love, we would be much less than what we become in such heartbreaking circumstances.  Lastly, be sure to read Angela Law’s “Recipe for Madness,” where the speaker affirms the right to choose to live in accord with her own choices about sexuality without being judged or questioned.

As we wrap up our 14th issue of the past six years, I am filled with emotion. I now find I have reached an age where difficulty accepting my own health challenges, and witnessing those of family and friends, have become my daily reality. At the same time, I am buoyed up by the great privilege it has been to read the work of so many of you, and whether or not we have included your writing during this time, please know you are appreciated. Your writing–but even more, your bravery while sharing intimately your health crises– is accepted humbly– and with heartfelt sympathy and admiration.

–Steve Granzyk, Poetry Editor

Steve Granzyk is the poetry editor of Please See Me.