EDITOR’S NOTES
Last year’s pandemic positioned humans so closely to Samuel Beckett’s How It Is that many are still submerged in the muck. Others have elbowed their way through the trenches, peering up, to glimpse the yellow crocus in the flower pot on the patio table: it dies and I see a crocus in a pot in an area in a basement a saffron the sun creeps up the wall a hand keeps it in the sun this yellow flower with a string I see the hand long image hours long the sun goes the pot goes down lights on the ground the hand goes the wall goes (21) Beckett’s prosody-poetry heals. Although, some realizations ensure that one matures: “this voice quaqua of us all never was only one voice my voice never any other” (87). My peering throughout this past year led to a discovery that my mom’s German ancestry was actually Luxembourgian. Coupled with my father’s Moravian folk, the descendants in my family are a colorful assortment of tulips. It reminds me of a little prose poem, “A Late Detail from the Depression,” by Gary Gildner about a husband and wife upon the discovery of a terrible burden and the little baby who couldn’t be consoled in the blazes of an autoshop’s burning fire: “One freezing day,” my mother began, “I’m looking around at all the cold—the apartment, the building, the whole world’s an iceberg—and guess what? I’m wrong. We’re on fire.” [...] 4
