For issue 8, each editor selected their pieces based off of particular, meaningful themes. We’ve decided to publish these works as a folio in their specific genre so readers can feel how they interact and create a dialogue with each other. Get ready to read dangerously.

 

Poetry: Crash the Margins

Guest Editor: Kamden Hilliard

 

a formal– traditional– ghazal ends with an inclusion of the writer’s name; a callsign of sorts.

Jonathan Moore’s “ghazal for bitchboi,” ends– not in tradition or formality but– with a question of the

“summoner, summoning ground.”and it’s moments like this summoning, this willingness to wrestle with

form and praxis and identity that underpins these works. and oh are these works something: a revisioning

of A.I.’s memorable “practice” press conference, a speaker who expects “the worst of men,” a poem that

asks if you can “hear [it] now?!” and footnotes for the heart. Past these complicated relationships to data,

received form and the ever tricky identity politic, they reach for a decolonized emotion absent in ya

favorite all-white- lit-mag. these poems disrupt and heal and push themselves right through those margins.

I was encouraged by spaces like, the AAWW’s aptly named journal, The Margins, which seeks to

explore “an age when… We’re thinking about Asian American identity in a way totally different from

anyone else for a pan-racial, trans-cultural, truly world-spanning audience” (borrowed from The Margin’s

about us page). and while the Asian American space is a unique one, I figured I could extend this function

to POC and QTPOC work at large. How can brown folx recenter themselves and take up all the glorious

space we want? This issue seemed like a good start and thankfully the poets inside do a truly stunning

we [Jonathan Jacob Moore, Matthew L. Thompson, Isabel Quintero, Len Lawson, E Yeon Chang,

and Kamden Hilliard], the writers and editor of Crash the Margin do, indeed, crash the margin. we

disrupt. we fill and refill and fire each other up. we write in long lines and short lines and sometimes we

even slow down long enough to hear that

the blackest thing is dying empty

and being filled to the brim.

which does not exactly offer this as a safe space, but, perhaps, a safer space. a space in which we engage

the what Moore, again, calls “the work” or what NYU first year, E Yeon Chang, might describe as

…the weekend

I wore a black shirt and velvet leggings.

this issue is about the complicated, often terrifying, labor of living and loving the state of living. how we

may trap thru the flames of this slave state in order to forge something kind and maybe a little bit catty. I

am so happy to introduce these poems and hope that you, reader, may find something shocking.

something memorable. a reason to love and love breaking the margins.

 

gossip grrl

AKA Kamden Hilliard