This is what moves us: LETTER FROM THE EDITOR
BECCA RAE ROSE
I am writing this letter in fits and starts. I am pausing to warm my fingers against my neck, to redistribute the heat created by all the ways my body is at work even as I am still. I am telling you this because I don’t wish to hide the construction of these words. I don’t want to erase the mess and fuss and ache of writing by how I’ve arranged and rearranged and deleted and restarted it again and again to appear seamless, to seem static. You should know that this is work. And that work has many meanings, and I mean all of them: work as labor, work as movement, work as creation, work as kinetic, work as mechanic, work as fatigue. I mean that there is movement stitched into a letter, waiting for a tongue to propel it back into motion. I mean that we are so tired and yet we found it vital to do this weaving. I mean that we need some rest. I mean that there is a muscle in every word and also words in every muscle and that they are all doing the work of reaching. I mean that there is body here.
I should clarify: I am not using the body as a metaphor. I do not wish to use the body for anything. I am done with all that. My body has been used enough; a metaphor feels like another severance, of only valuing the body for how it might serve a purpose outside of itself, to be subservient to an imposed logic. Hasn’t the brain received enough airtime? Aren’t we here precisely because we are looking to the body for answers? So, I am not intellectualizing the body. I am asserting the body as the intelligence we seek.
Language can be both dangerous and illuminating. It seems no accident that we call a collection a body of work, or that a book has a spine. What happens if we call this not metaphor but lesson. What happens if I don’t write about muscle but instead muscle the writing.
I should clarify: I am not using the body as a metaphor. I do not wish to use the body for anything. I am done with all that. My body has been used enough; a metaphor feels like another severance, of only valuing the body for how it might serve a purpose outside of itself, to be subservient to an imposed logic. Hasn’t the brain received enough airtime? Aren’t we here precisely because we are looking to the body for answers? So, I am not intellectualizing the body. I am asserting the body as the intelligence we seek.
Language can be both dangerous and illuminating. It seems no accident that we call a collection a body of work, or that a book has a spine. What happens if we call this not metaphor but lesson. What happens if I don’t write about muscle but instead muscle the writing.
SKELETAL
The skeleton gets a reputation for being strong—what is a bone if not the hardest point in the body? Yet, it is the skeletal muscles that scaffold the bones, that connect the calcium of us into something sinewy, that turn disparate parts into the whole working arrangement of aliveness. Together, bone and muscle create the locomotor system—this is what moves us through space, what makes us less plant and more animal. The skeletal is just one in a triad of
muscle types in all vertebrates, along with smooth and cardiac. Each type of muscle has a different form and function—the skeletal are striated, bundled as they are in parallel fibrils, like strips of licorice in a pack.
Of the more than six hundred muscles in the human body, the skeletal are the only that are voluntary, meaning we can consciously control their movement. They are grouped in opposing pairs which must work together to tense and
release in unison, such as the biceps and triceps: one only works if the other complies, where tension is what is given and taken, this orchestration of work and rest. And while we do consciously control the muscles as a group, this coordination is automatic, the workings of the body more sophisticated than the conscious mind can handle.
It’s impossible not to reflect on this moment last March, the
release of our first
issue almost a year ago to
day. And it was a release, akin to emergence—our windows opening, the heat of another body nearby for the first time in a long while. It was a moment of exhale, of vaccines and a promise of the togetherness I longed for. But now? This is endless contraction, tensing with the grief of it all, unable to set anything down.
When we put out the call for submissions for our second issue last June, nine month
ago, I thought I was calling out into a time of release. Since then, a tightness has set in again. Since then, it has been exceedingly difficult to follow through with the making of this. But as we muscled through it anyways, I was reminded that that no matter what the work itself holds, a collection always creates a space for release, for rest, for loosening our grip on what wracks us by setting it down and sharing it through story.
Much like the
musculoskel-etal system, a literary arts magazine can provide the frame of a body within which we can gather and be warmed. The body knows it is necessary to pair each tension with release and to orchestrate a necessary rest. At a time when I feel either numb or in pieces, curating this collection of art and writing into one body doesn’t feel like simply attaching disparate pages under one seam—it feels like a healing. Like a mending of something torn.
SMOOTH
SMOOTH muscle IS made OF sheets, LAYERS of THEM. even IN a STILL image, THEIR slight WAVES denote THEIR motion; THEY contract NOT in PAIRS but AS undulation—A serpent’s CURVED movement. THESE muscles LINE our INNERMOST places: INTESTINE, uterus, BLOOD vessel. WE can’t CONTROL them WITH conscious THOUGHT—they JUST do AS they HAVE been MADE to DO, moving SUBSTANCE and SUSTENANCE and OUR bodies’ OWN productions AROUND us AND through US, miles AND miles OF travel RIGHT underneath OUR skin. THE delicate CIRCUITRY of ARTERIES, veins, AND capillaries ARE so INCOMPREHENSIBLY long THAT stretched OUT they COULD wrap AROUND the WAIST of THE world TWICE. can YOU fathom IT? two PLANETS’ worth OF this WEAVING, lined WITH smooth MUSCLE, doing ITS daily WORK, on AND on.
The WORK in THIS issue IS alive, IS at WORK: it FEEDS us, IT bloods US, it UNDULATES with GRIEF and release. YOU’LL find MUSCLES of THE mind AND the GUT and THE heart AND the TONGUE. you’ll FIND memories STORED in BLOOD, in THE spine, IN the WATER that THE body PUSHES through US. The STORIES tense LIKE thrush TONGUING the reeds, AND release LIKE rootradicals. TENSE like A toe CURLING around A paintbrush AND release AS fire thAT blooms LIKE blood BRUISES. tense LIKE hands CHOPPING parsley OR making BAGELS from SCRATCH, like PERSIAN menders WHO pull INGREDIENTS from DIRT and RELEASE it LIKE sapphires IN our FINGERS. tense LIKE shifting TOPOGRAPHY and PERSISTING afflictions, RELEASE like CUMULONIMBUS, or LIKE a PIGEON drops A letter FROM the SKY. tense LIKE fingers WORKING hair INTO a BRAID and RELEASE like THE last LIGHT extinguished FROM a BUILDING. tense LIKE hunger AND algorithm. RELEASE like THE mouth DOES repetition, ASKING over AND over: “WHY do YOU despair?” TENSE like A fever THROWS itself THROUGH the BODY and RELEASE like A flood IS a RIVER expressing ITS memories. TENSE like THE body TENSES in DESIRE, reaching FOR citrus. RELEASE like LANGUAGE breaks APART for ITS music. FEEL it, ALL of IT, every WAVE of TENSION that MOVES through THESE pages AND through TO you AND let IT move, LET it BREAK, let IT release HERE, with US.
The WORK in THIS issue IS alive, IS at WORK: it FEEDS us, IT bloods US, it UNDULATES with GRIEF and release. YOU’LL find MUSCLES of THE mind AND the GUT and THE heart AND the TONGUE. you’ll FIND memories STORED in BLOOD, in THE spine, IN the WATER that THE body PUSHES through US. The STORIES tense LIKE thrush TONGUING the reeds, AND release LIKE rootradicals. TENSE like A toe CURLING around A paintbrush AND release AS fire thAT blooms LIKE blood BRUISES. tense LIKE hands CHOPPING parsley OR making BAGELS from SCRATCH, like PERSIAN menders WHO pull INGREDIENTS from DIRT and RELEASE it LIKE sapphires IN our FINGERS. tense LIKE shifting TOPOGRAPHY and PERSISTING afflictions, RELEASE like CUMULONIMBUS, or LIKE a PIGEON drops A letter FROM the SKY. tense LIKE fingers WORKING hair INTO a BRAID and RELEASE like THE last LIGHT extinguished FROM a BUILDING. tense LIKE hunger AND algorithm. RELEASE like THE mouth DOES repetition, ASKING over AND over: “WHY do YOU despair?” TENSE like A fever THROWS itself THROUGH the BODY and RELEASE like A flood IS a RIVER expressing ITS memories. TENSE like THE body TENSES in DESIRE, reaching FOR citrus. RELEASE like LANGUAGE breaks APART for ITS music. FEEL it, ALL of IT, every WAVE of TENSION that MOVES through THESE pages AND through TO you AND let IT move, LET it BREAK, let IT release HERE, with US.
CARDIAC
The muscle of the heart; or, the muscle that is the heart. What does it mean that the heart, a muscled organ in your chest the size of a fist, has a category of muscle tissue all its own? This, too, is involuntary. A pump system, flooding the arteries with freshly oxygenated blood, a
its work 60 to 100
muscle that does
mind. This, the
us alive.
"Muscle Memory"
reject any
would have us
body is valued in
brain takes
there must be an
as the axis on
then let it be this
workhorse, this
locomotive, that
muscle that does
mind. This, the
us alive.
"Muscle Memory"
reject any
would have us
body is valued in
brain takes
there must be an
as the axis on
then let it be this
workhorse, this
locomotive, that
muscle that does
times a minute, a
not answer to the
muscle that keeps
The very term
is intended here to
hierarchy that
believe that our
parts and that the
precedence. But if
organ celebrated
which we spin
chambered
red, thick-walled
times a minute, a
not answer to the
muscle that keeps
The very term
is intended here to
hierarchy that
believe that our
parts and that the
precedence. But if
organ celebrated
which we spin
chambered
red, thick-walled
What is a literary arts magazine without a reader? You are no bystander: you are the most essential part of this body of work, the body at work. Remember: this is not a metaphor. You bring the heat that sets these stories in motion and powers the muscle of a story to do its work: to warm, to lift, to ease. Remember: this is not a metaphor. Place your cold fingers on the skin above your heart. Feel this site of perpetual motion. Rest, here, in this collection. This muscled mechanism that always knows how to warm you. Be still and notice what it is to be moved. Remember: this is not a metaphor.
washes us with new breath over and over and over again without us even having to ask. Sometimes even in our lowest moments when we ask it to stop and faithfully, fluidly, the heart doesn’t listen.