Issue 26, containing: An Ode to Sappho, Commonplaces, &c.

——————————

SOME EDITORIAL NOTES

At the time of writing this note, it was May, it was 77 degrees outside, there was a breeze, and I smelled budding lilac. It was so… much, in such a huge and beautiful way. 

My heart felt so full, so unendingly expanding. It was strange to want to cry because of just…  Spring.

Now, though, it is June. And I have some thoughts about June this year.

——————————

AN ODE TO SAPPHO

I  am not a poet. There are better people to gather themes and syllables into perfect posies of rhyme and meter, the majority more talented than me in multiple respects.

But it is June. And in June the ghosts get noisy.

I don’t know if they’d invented June yet when Sappho found herself at dinner opposite a girl so beautiful she couldn’t breathe. But if there was no June, then there was no careful corporate voice reassuring Sappho that it supported her, her poetry, the beautiful way she loved beautiful people, and all at such a volume that it blocked out every other conversation in the room.

Since there was no June yet, though, Sappho had no idea that it was something she was fortunate enough to miss. And thank the gods and goddesses for that because there was a girl a dimeter across the way who was smiling down at her food and using one finger to push a piece of fruit aside in favor of another and Sappho was panicking quietly into her water-mixed wine because it was the stupidest thing, how much she wanted to see that smile turn upward and that fingertip brought close enough to taste.

Sappho didn’t know the girl’s name, which is fine, it doesn’t really matter in the grand scheme of things. Sappho didn’t know a lot of things. She lived in a world where there was no June, and so she didn’t know what it meant to live in a world where June is just one short month of platitudes surrounded by days and days and endless days of voices. We June people have entire sciences devoted to their cataloguing, and we can tell you what one distant sound means compared to this much closer one, how which words howled correlate to this and that statistic, where in the chest a scream must start to differentiate the victim from the violent, the dead of one sort from the dead of another.

(That’s a lie, I’m sorry; I shouldn’t lie. We don’t know the difference. But June sometimes makes you think you might someday, and that’s the cruelest part of June, I think. That, and also how quiet the voices get, quiet but never absent, as if they’re finally dying down and we can all sleep or, better yet, stare at beautiful girls across our dinner tables without worrying about who will see us do so.)

I was talking about the dead, though.

The thing about living in repeating Junes is that the noise is everywhere, and our ghosts can only whisper. Sappho had significantly more silence but she also had no need of spirits warning her to remember that love like hers was dangerous. Here, though, in our June, the voices — companies and churches and the man down the way and the woman on the television and the friend you thought you knew and the Ganymede parroting hate as if it’s wisdom — they pause for a moment to pretend that they were never noisy. And it’s in that pause the spirits speak, the martyrs of desire. They’re only whispers, but there are centuries of them — and they make a chorus of the dead to remind us of the lessons we wish we’d never had to learn.

Or maybe not us. Maybe just me. I turned forty this year, and I was reminded today that I am living when so many of my queer forebears died from sins the same or less than mine. And I hear their ghosts today, this month, as Pride is celebrated and the dead are forgotten and I find myself opening my mouth to say, over and over, “Remember them. Remember us. There was no dance, no holy place from which we were absent, and from which we once were driven.”

Maybe Sappho is one of the whisperers still present. Maybe there was a June for her after all. But I hope not. I hope she walks in some Elysian daydream, where once at a dinner party a beautiful girl looked up and up and smiled wide, and Sappho spilled her wine like an idiot and the girl laughed, delighted, and kissed the stains out later in the blessed silence of a sweeter past.

——————————

COMMONPLACES

From  Torrin A. Greathouse’s “Weeds”, in Wound from the Mouth of a Wound:

Even in the harshest season,
we survive. We bloom forever
where we are told we don’t belong.

******

From Wendell Berry’s “A Meeting,” in A Part:

In a dream I meet
my dead friend. He has,
I know, gone long and far,
and yet he is the same
for the dead are changeless.
They grow no older.
It is I who have changed,
grown strange to what I was.
Yet I, the changed one,
ask: “How have you been?”
He grins and looks at me.
“I been eating peaches
off some mighty fine trees.”

******

From Sappho:

I tell you
someone will remember us
in the future.

——————————

ANNOUNCEMENTS

If you would like to write a letter to be produced/answered in the magazine, please email me at minor.hours.magazine@gmail.com with the subject line:

Letter to the Magazine: [subject of letter as you would like to see it printed]

If you wish the letter to be anonymous or under a nom de plume, please state so in the body of the email; similarly, if you’d rather not be printed at all, please also state so in the body of the email. It will otherwise be assumed that mail sent to that address is intended for print.

Alternately, commenting on this post will get you a similar result, with much less fuss.

******

-Until next week, be safe.