Four walls are built, sheetrocked, painted.  We enter, stand in the middle, echo. The couch is moved in, table, chairs, a rug, a lamp, and boxes of palm-sized trinkets to be placed on the mantle, kitchen counter, window sills...we no longer echo when we speak.  We place ourselves in our homes, all of ourselves, from the quirky frayed edges of leftover youth, to the hopeful stance of new beginnings. We wander from room to room, surrounding ourselves with buffers of symbols, and in this way face daily life dead on, looking it straight in the eye. Who would think such weight rested in the placement of a ceramic salt shaker on a kitchen counter, a candle on a table, red shoes on the floor, tangled flowers in a garden, on the snapshots and newspaper clippings hung across the fridge door.

Welcome to what has just been built. Sometimes, if we're lucky, strings of words help sharpen the view through the lens of our own histories, informed by what we know, what we think we know, and what we still have to learn. The poems on this site traverse vast territories in content and scope, but in the end, in one way or another, they're about the moments that couldn't be left behind. So we linger, and inhabit the lines and stanzas for a while, glimpse something familiar, some thread of story, some kind of home, word, room.

   --Kirsten Rian Poetry Editor