Blue Mesa Review Issue 44

Foreward Dear Reader, Reading through the Blue Mesa Review archive, I’m always surprised and intrigued by how the pieces that appear in each issue seem to be in conversation with each other. We don’t solicit submissions according to any specific theme, but sometimes my mind groups the pieces in such a way. This year, as I read through the pieces selected by our judges, Zeyn Joukhadar, Natalie Scenters-Zapico, and Kim Barnes, I detected a distinct and overarching sense of longing.

In “Farewell Address to the Last Mango in the Pacific Northwest,” Ari Laurel invents a hopeful future America, in which our elected officials not only recognize their responsibility to their own citizens but as participants in an international stewardship-based economics. Inevitably, however, this means going without certain luxuries, such as mangoes. In this piece, Laurel urged me to long for that future world while, remarkably, renewing my appreciation for the things I am able to enjoy.

Kelly Neal also employs an essay form in “Scorched Earth,” a satire of corporate greed complete with office shenanigans and archived blog rants. Perhaps what I longed for most while reading this piece was the kitschiness of the early-aughts internet which is, unfortunately for some, still preserved in all its former glory. It’s the most lighthearted piece in this issue, even though it does tackle late stage capitalism at its ugliest.

Joanna Ng’s “Poem in Which a Gold Rush Bride Writes to Her Husband” is a mournful exploration of loss and longing in a foreign land. Ng ambitiously explores the historical facts of Chinese immigrant labor during the California Gold Rush through the lens of an argonaut’s widow, waiting for his bones to be returned.

In “How to Kill a Goat and Other Monsters,” Saúl Hernández’s speaker describes the violence he has come to mistake for love while longing for beauty. The piece follows the thread of an exboyfriend’s violence creating parallels with the speaker’s grandfather. “Theres a war in his hands / the way there was a war in Abuelo’s hands,” Hernández writes.

In “Stars from a Burning House,” Rowan Lucas tackles similar subject matter. Throughout the piece, Lucas attempts to use the stars as an escape from a violent and broken home. Ultimately, however, the speaker longs for a home and, perhaps, something as stable and enduring as the myths constellations are born from.

Suzanne Martin’s “Buckshot” anticipates a violence or, at least, a breaking that we, as readers, are unsure will ever materialize (perhaps because we’ve been in the speaker’s shoes and know that our anxieties are often greater than the sum of their parts). Instead, we are presented with a stack of small uncertainties or anxieties on which the narrator has built their relationship with a mysterious and, at times, emotionally unavailable man. It’s clear that she longs for F but what she longs for more is, perhaps, an assurance that cannot be given.

And yes, perhaps the assurance we crave can never be given to us, though it can be represented 8 | Issue 44