The voices in Issue One echoed paths and regions reaching to the crystal and brass and worn knobs of urgent whispers, howls, silken words of and within what we share, now. The doors that enter and exit us between paper walls are reached through these knobs that are at once like holes.

 

Where Issue One enters and spins within the liminal spaces of language, Issue Two builds story after story in the voices multiplied in self both after, within, and dismembered of the self. These stories of selves develop into depths of identities, the cosmos, and imaginings that bridge fantasy with the complexities of this speculative day, this day in which we build our ways of going directly against.

 

Issue Two is a space for getting lost with our next selves, where we are “lying / over the pile / of holes” (Ron Estrada), where each hole is “the way you were me, a house” (Amie Zimmerman).

 

Without the gestures of a body that makes by its mouth, the foci of words set here in pulpmouth fill the holes with the glimmer and feel of “a self of replication” (Andrea Rexilius) happening in our “boneless dream dreamless dream” (Moonseok Choi). From piece to piece, “We must forever / be parting from ourselves in order to create an other” (Denise Jarrott). Inside the depths there is a daytime lack of light where “The moon has thinned to white wire but hooks nothing in the darkness.” (Joanna Ruocco), and here emerges a body from the text weaving through this world of. She’s holding the blade of light to hook to language and “She has a body with no organs, it’s all aesthetics, she only wants.” (Ella Longpre). And “[w]e see her struggling to understand and to be understood.” (Sara Sheiner). She is “a periodically sociable recluse / she was actively writing poetry” (Shannon Tharp). She is the joining of the pieces through a bond like water: “Water was and is most of the world…Water replaces other water. Water has a floor separate from and deeper than our own.” (Cathryn Rose).

 

With water she transforms to the maker and she writes her “letter to plush letter to dark” (Kimberly Ann Southwick) in a voice that demands “Don’t make me cascade from marvelous / peaks to an uncomfortable end” (Kay Gabriel), that confidently warns “I’m not going to heaven / to see you” (Akusua Akoto), that is a letter of pictures and “These pictures are safe.” (Callum Angus). It was fine, it was fine, it was fine. The line she writes here extends to the next--

 

She is learning “how to smile on by watching actors on television, not knowing how to turn up the corners--just baring my teeth” (Jean Yoon) until that smile becomes “brief, briefer, sudden like a tear, shortened / into a single sound” (David Mucklow). In the sound of the cut of teeth “if you could / dissolve / that would / be best / a smell of / thunderstorms” (Evan Gray). But she “said lightning // Heard motions / Heard things that weren’t words at all.” (Amy Lawless).

 

On the ink covered paper walls, “Everything used to be full of smaller versions. Now it’s a big racket” (Nora Miller) and the surrounding words are “the bodies begin[ning] to / rupture   fuse” (Jessica Baer). She could “lift the naked world as if it were an apple” (Danny Schonning), but she “made a band of angels & a freeway too & / demons on white horses // swords of fire falling—“ (Aby Kaupang) where “The woodpeckers drum the dead trees.” (Babak Lakghomi), the drum of birds the thunder of her home in a hole.

 

It is with our own sigh of “pleasure and thanksgiving” (Joanna Ruocco) that Issue Two is here. General submissions will open on November 1st and close on December 31st. As always, we look forward to reading you.

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With Gratitude and Care,

pulpmouth