Mayari Literature, Volume 2 Issue 2: CYCLE
Our literary magazine’s second quarterly edition, Year Two. Breaking out of patterns. Coming full circle and finding home.
A Letter from Our Guest Editor Karen Pierce Gonzalez
Oh wonderous seekers,
To everything in life there is a phase, a spin, a twist, a lunge forward, a step back, and sometimes a dosido before the dance starts all over again. Or maybe not. What if the sequence of motion endlessly repeats itself like the looping chorus of a song in only some situations? In others, the turns we generally ascribe to ‘cycle’, the theme of this collection, do not repeat themselves. Instead, they glide right off the ledger lines of memory never to be seen again.
We know the count of seasons – spring, summer, autumn, winter – is linear. Sequentially, one after another, they offer comfort with reassurance. Yes, they will return. But we want more. We desire to leave behind ‘the drudgery of this wash-and-spin’, to witness how brook ‘pebbles of words’ dissolve downstream.
The poems in this well-crafted journal suggest that even when things do ‘come and go’; they do not always ‘stay the same’. In some cases new forms emerge, ‘born of sunlight and silver water’ and from love’s ‘perfect compost’, heralding mysteries that can never be fully regulated or contained.
Still we gasp, just as the poets here do, when our understandings of rhythm, natural and mechanical, become true north needles on our individual compasses, guiding us to trek across timeless regions within our hearts where we can ‘cycle back around’ to retrieve what we have left behind.
But, alas, as delicious as such moments of rendering are, they are not always smooth and easy. Jarring, unpredictable, contrary to public opinion, counterclockwise gyrations might actually better ‘remove stains’. It is in the shadows on our personal roads that we feel the’ brush of a wind on our skin’ that dries us, the ‘length of days’ growing short.
We squeeze every last drop we can out of Now from the succor of ‘samsara’ even though it promises ‘repeated births and deaths’. But that’s not enough.
With rapture and imagination, we wander among and wonder about the unknowable measures of our being alive. It is enough to just ask how winter’s ‘howling discontent’ causes madwomen or mad men to smile, to trust the ‘ghost’ who returns each autumn, to touch with our very own hands the physical and etheric layers of this world; our home.
In ‘peace or revolution’ we are marked by the ‘scars of healed remorse’ just as deeply as we are by the ‘change of new fortune’. We leave these precious breadcrumbs behind for ‘future generations’ of poets, readers and loved ones to find.
May they also explore to discover their own cycles.
Blessings,
Karen Pierce Gonzalez Coyote in the Basket of My Ribs
Table of Contents
Meher Pestonji Wave Cycles
Kushal Poddar The Drowning Monk
Beth Hartley To begin again
Martin Parker Cycle of Life
Laura Grevel The Dance
Robert Fleming Press Release: Maytag launches Wash Day
Henry L. Jones Rooted Above and Below
Mona Zamfirescu The Work
Julian Matthews Washing Machine
CPMaze Pacifier
Amy Hoskins December, Dialectics, and Physics
Doc Janning Distant Rumour
Neil Daswani Sorrow Has Its Seasons
Jennifer (Soy Avocado) Leong Cycle On in a Cyclone
R. Bremner Cycling
Dee Allen. MIRIELLE
Marianne Tefft Mettle
Jacob R. Moses Monsoon
Meher Pestonji Nature’s Gift
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