Editor’s Note
“You lived & died in one long summer.”
So begins Emily Skaja’s poem “Future Fig” about a miscarriage and all that happens over the few brief months of summer. This summer, I am missing the extraordinary poet and my friend Martha Silano. Marty had a summer attitude—sunny, expansive, playful, warm—that she brought to everything, including writing through her ALS illness. I think of the famous Mary Oliver lines from her poem “The Summer Day”: “Tell me, what is it you plan to do/with your one wild and precious life?” Marty lived hers with zest, impact and joy. We are honored to share two poems that will appear in her collection Terminal Surreal, forthcoming in September.
As I read again through the stunning work in this fifty-fourth issue of The Adroit Journal, the possibility and pathos of summertime pulse off the page. No better than Diane Seuss who asks
“May I take the murdered world in?/Sing of it again?”in her poem, “An Aria” after inviting the reader to walk barefoot as one does in summer into her mind, a neighborhood where we are invited to dwell for a spell.
In another neighborhood, on another summer’s day, Gabrielle Calvocoressi’s poem, “Forgiveness Cistern I am Trying” reckons with cruelty and forgiveness. “I am trying to remember/it’s a time of forgiveness./I am trying to remember/my body has never been/my home. I wave and water/the garden. I offer the flowers/from the bed. The mint, rosemary,/sure take a few tomatoes,/take whatever you can hold?”
I am transported by the work in this issue—as if on summer holiday—to climb Mount Ventoux in France with Lucy Schiller as she explores Petrarch, the writing life and searches for truth on and off the page in her wry essay “High Resolution (Notes on Blurriness).” To board the Howrah-Mumbai Mail train in the story “If You Weren’t Such a Good Boy, You’d Remember” by Sudha Balagopal. Or get lost in the small towns in Uruguay in Travis Price’s translation of Mercedes Estramil’s story “Ismael Cortinas.” And Swati Sudarsan’s conversation with Patrycja Humienik about her debut collection “We Contain Landscapes” explores place, journeys and longing.
In summer, the days linger into the nights. In his coming-of-age short story “Lucky” about two fourteen-year-old boys and the summer night that changes their lives, Douglas W. Milliken describes the events of a party: “This must’ve been sometime in July because the daylight went on forever. Everybody milled laughing and blathering on the wraparound deck with their drinks and their cigarettes, soaking up the last light of the day until there wasn’t any day left to soak.”
Sundays in summer are especially languid, a sensation that is beautifully described in Eilene Glenn Moore’s translation of Nathalie Schmid’s “Sunday in East London” about the day following a terrorist attack: “everywhere peonies the most delicate colors”.
That’s the thing about summer. Even when there is fear and loss, of which there is much these days, there is delight, consider the end of Martha Silano’s “Can’t Complain”: “I hope every other minute/is a sparkler that never burns out.”
Because it is summer, and I’m off to a baseball game—to drink beer, eat a hot dog and, with a fellow writer, cheer on our beloved Mariners—I’m leaving you dear reader with a few lines from Jo Bear’s poem “Archive of Absence” about the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League: “We admitted to ourselves & then/to each other the clutching/shape of want—moved it from/a yoke at our shoulders/to a span of pine slung low & warm/in our hands.”
Enjoy these end-of-summer days and the literary picnic we have prepared for you!
Heidi Seaborn
Executive Editor