Editor’s Note
BY ZOE DORADO
POETRY EDITOR
I keep wanting to be good at anticipation. A week ago, I left California to attend my second cousin’s wedding in Indianapolis. I arrived with zero expectations, three hours of sleep, and a carry-on stuffed with my bright blue, slightly tighter, junior-year Prom dress—its glitter auspiciously still intact. At the reception (the party-phase of a wedding), there were a variety of speeches and toasts (appropriately loving), a multitude of aunties (faintly drunk), assorted roasted vegetables (locally catered), and, of course, lots and lots of dancing.
Now I love dancing—don’t get me wrong. However, there’s this thing that humans do (you might recall from some homecoming-in-your-high-school-gym adjacent memory) where The Chosen One is pushed into a circle of bodies and has no choice but to boogie it on down to Fergie. It can be utterly terrifying—this sudden, spontaneous visibility. This can be especially true when your Lola (eighty-six and going strong!) is watching you from the sidelines—swaying her hips as Fergie spits how she puts your boy on rock, rock. So, of course, on this particular dancefloor, I couldn’t help but feel a twinge of anxiety right before the inevitable moment dropped. I knew how to anticipate terror. I even knew, on some level, how that terror inside me could potentially transform into joy. What I couldn’t anticipate, what I couldn’t map out, was who exactly I’d become once I became seen like this—how my relationship with those surrounding me would shift once they saw me successfully (or disastrously) bust a move.
What, then, becomes possible in these moments of anticipation? Who do we see or fail to see when our desires—what we want—from people are shaped by our expectations of them? In the midst of uncertainty, how do we work to make each other possible? These are questions that Issue 51 allows us to enter. “I want nothing to change, then wait for my life to change,” Emily Jungmin Yoon writes in the Issue’s opening poem, “Grey Areas.” Here, within the first line, there is a rejection, then suddenly, a faint trusting of possibility—a doorway. Renee Morales’ prose poem, echoes something similar—every line syntactically phrased as a possibility: “Say she was a dancer. What if / baptism is a private practice making love in public what if you press / the shutter long enough will it eventually go automatic.”
What happens when our anticipation becomes automatic? What moves forward without stopping? In Juan Carlos Reyes’ fiction piece “Drown,” two teenagers generate desire out of anticipation, but are then confronted with the possibility of violence. Movement becomes stunted. A strange intimacy is revealed. Similarly, in Chloe Shannon Wong’s “Shooter Drill Abecedarian,” there is an anticipation of violence that is heartbreaking—not because the poem directly details the horrors of mass shootings in American schools, but because the poem anticipates the horrors and does the work of sustaining the possibility of living. Scott Frey’s poem “In the Circle 1” does similar work in confronting devastation: “Beside the ache near our lungs / is something like joy.”
“Is something like joy,” — like joy. How do we experience joy in the face of disaster? How, exactly, do we reach toward one another? Perhaps it is the act of world-building that moves us closer: “I had mentally designed a world where my mother was still alive, and we called each other every week,” writes Ademola Adefolami, in his creative nonfiction piece “Becoming an Immigrant.” Relationships blur but become possible in Rosie Hong’s fiction piece “Paper Son” (2024 Adroit Prize for Prose winner, selected by Kaveh Akbar): “Jiejie and Ma became my ayi, or what I would call aunties, or what I would call strangers.” Rick Barot describes in his interview with Hua Xi, that “making art for me now begins with the urge to understand myself in relation to the people around me, to the realities around me, and to the realities within me.”
What realities then are possible? Perhaps we can find them in the rabbit’s red eyes looking outward in Melanie Zhou’s poem “Old Friend” (2024 Adroit Prize for Poetry winner, selected by Ocean Vuong). Or maybe in the grandmother’s bodybuilding routine during a storm in Nicholl Paratore’s creative nonfiction piece “Hurricane Season.” Or, possibly, it lies within the moment described in Niall Williams’ novel, “Time of the Child,” where the doctor, sitting in the pews, gazes at the priest—hesitating, waiting for something to be revealed.
Sometimes I feel like the only real power I have is the power to minimize surprise. I often use anticipation as a tool to block out my own uncertainty about the world, about myself. But Issue 51 takes a different approach. The stories here create a body for our anticipation to live—fully— in our terror, our joy, and our wonder. Anticipation, in this way, can become messy—yes. But I’ll leave you with what Shze-Hui Tjoa says, in her conversation with S.J. Buckley: “The mess is the propulsive force. The mess creates momentum.”