Blue

Was it April? I’d moved into that drab place
up Maple and you—remember this?—
came over with wine, with oysters, even,
snagged from the fish market past the canal.
Can you see it? I can:

We’ve spread our feast on the bare boards,
not a stick of furniture in there, no table
for any of it. Spring fingers of sunlight
go probing, lengthening, stippling
until all the tall windows blank out blue.

Remember how our bodies reached
and touched and tasted—arms, hands,
lips, how our limbs entangled
on the hardwood stretch of floor, how
our murmurs, then cries gave us back
their muted echoes from the high dusty
moldings of the ceiling and drifted down?

How the moments became one moment,
how they made one place where we
stepped out of time.

                           Too much later, how
blue time rushed in and mauled us,
holding us in its cruel jaw. Drove into us
the cruel blue of its tooth.

This poem was featured in Volume 2, Issue 2. Click here to explore other pieces from this issue.

Dakota Russell

Renee

This piece, Renee, is a simplistic characterization of my own cat. It is a portrait of her within a forced perspective composition where the subject confronts the viewer. It is entirely painted out of gouache atop a 6x6 inch panel. During its creation, I felt lost as an artist and was struggling to understand the definition of my own art. This piece was the first painting I had created in years that was for my own enjoyment other than for my work and schooling. The use of color and further distortion of the room surrounding the subject was a key part of my experimental thought process.

Using my own cat as my subject evolved into a symbol representing a new spark and process of creating art. This simple piece not only helped me out of years of struggle within my practice, but opened up an entirely new world of art to me. With this, I can use my personal experience of making art exciting again by inspiring others to create as much as possible and reminding those how they define their creative process. 

This piece was featured in Volume 2, Issue 2. Click here to explore other pieces from this issue.

Letter from the Editor

In a recent debate on social media, many wondered if anyone reads little magazines. It started when someone posted befuddlement about a certain kind of nonstory story. You know the one, a perfectly crafted end table of a thing that serves to hold fine language, passable plot, and believable characters but offers very little else. These stories, she claimed, make up most of what’s published in our contemporary magazines. It’s not that I don’t enjoy reading these stories, the poster explained, it’s just that they don’t do anything, don’t make me feel anything, and they certainly don’t stick in my memory.

Others helpfully explained to our original poster that this kind of story is the fault of MFA programs, of careerist “portfolio building,” and of literary magazines like this one where, someone said, everyone has the best intentions, but no one really cares about literature. Clearly, the commentators agreed, no one actually reads this stuff, and, if they do, they’re dummies for wasting their one precious life. Call me a dummy, I guess.

To some degree, it’s true. This is the kind of attitude and literary culture that could only take hold after the MFA boom and the internet revolution, when we have more writers, readers, and little magazines than ever before. And, certainly, it can take real effort to find a memorable oasis in the sea of submissions—novice scribbling, well-crafted apprentice work, and the continued output of excellent writers who’ve not yet found mainstream success enough to focus on novels or screenplays or webisodes or whatever else the literati deem deserving of celebration this news cycle.

But to condemn this entire enterprise, as many glib commentators did, because it doesn’t produce enough remarkable content is to both misunderstand the purpose of the endeavor and to expose one’s ignorance of the many gems that have always sparkled in the little magazines.

Small presses, independent publishers, and little magazines like The Headlight Review are (and always have been) the substrate of literary culture. Like the rich loam from which the forest blooms, the little magazines offer what most beginning and even experienced writers will find nowhere else: sympathy, attention, effort, resources, and support. But more importantly, they offer an otherwise unknown freedom from the tyranny of conglomerate taste and the pressure of the profit motive. It is in the little magazines where writers and readers can explore the boundaries of literary form and explode the confines of oppressive community standards; where new authors can refine their style and locate their audience; where the undervalued work of the short story, the translation, and indeed the poem can thrive while the posters scroll by.

As to the quality of the literature published in these venues, I offer this, our most recent issue. With outstanding fiction, excellent poems, vivid new translations, and compelling visual art, this issue represents the culmination of a year spent reading, thinking, editing, and publishing by care undertaken by our exemplary guest editors, Melanie Sumner (fiction) and Gregory Emilio (poetry), and staff, especially Brittany Files, our managing editor, and Antwan Bowen. Thanks this month are also due to our Chapbook Prize judge Valerie Smith, who selected the pieces excerpted in this issue as finalists as well as our winner, Gail Griffin for her chapbook Peripheral Vision. Finally, we owe many plaudits to Zarek Lacsamana who completely redesigned and rebuilt the website over the summer of 2024.

I’m honored to report that the spirit and future of literary magazine publishing is alive and well here at The Headlight Review, and I know after reading this issue you’ll feel compelled to agree. Thanks for reading, writing, and submitting.

This piece was featured in Volume 2, Issue 2. Click here to explore other pieces from this issue.

Flu

Deep in winter, always Madame
Sosostris, hands paler than first light,

every reflective widow’s
blighted eye I pass as a ghost

might. The days hiding
underneath each wood plank, rats

gnawing through the piers,
beams, blind glass holding it all

together. The corridors,
waiting for the solstice to bear

spring tidings, promise that
warm winds will erase the stares—

back behind every mirror. Learning
to never ask about my future,

just as I have learned to love
with my mouth closed and words

unshuttered, love like prongs lending
another block of wood to a feeble fire.

When the snow softly beats the earth,
the woman who is known to be the wisest

in Europe whispers I love like the snow.
I pretend that she is not there

so that I may pretend that
I do not love at all.

This poem was featured in Volume 2, Issue 2. Click here to explore other pieces from this issue.

Growing Mythology, or, To Turn a Frog into Something That Isn’t a Frog

Tuck islands in the lyric. Offer a watery spelling of light.
The disruption of stars in the blue-black oil

unearths a verb from its worm palace. Sing.
The green algae ribbons were just released on parole,

now the banks are becoming sentient. Whoa,
they’re really holding this place together.

Between two mirrors, a face becomes
prepositional. Under Hydra’s nose

it’s hard not to imagine animals
outside physical law.

Every inexactly green blink
brings you closer to amphibious

and you can’t stop believing
Robert Lowell died in a bog.

It was only the idea of a bog,
in the same way a question like

Need I move mountains to hear the sea?
puts us on our backs.

The cicadas are mythicizing everything
with their remarkable racket.

I so want to join, to chirp the orphic end—

In their language, the frog is the face of our moon.
Light sways, a little drunk.       An ancient body blooms.

This poem was featured in Volume 2, Issue 2. Click here to explore other pieces from this issue.

Two Poems from “What the Hollow Held”

We’re proud to feature these two poems from Rebekah Wolman’s chapbook “What the Hollow Held,” which was selected by Valerie Smith as a finalist in The Headlight Review’s Chapbook Contest in the Spring of 2024.

Late Father as Lost Wax-Casting

People said "Sorry for your loss," suggesting
gone forever, suggesting never come back,
never get found, as in empty, as in without,
                                but it was something more
like transformation, the Dad-shaped space
inside my forlorn mind full first of shock
and fear for what he'd feel if he could feel,
                        alone and somewhere unfamiliar.

Then slowly what the hollow held, the chill
and numbness, began to melt; slowly
the cavity refilled. There he was again
in the place where he belonged—alloy
of his finest traits, rough spots filed. Still
himself but so quiet, so easy to be with.

The Two Cultures, with bursitis and arthritis of the knee

Literary intellectuals at one pole—at the other scientists. . .Between the two a gulf of mutual incomprehension.
— C.P. Snow, The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution

Massaging my swollen knee to coax the built-up fluid
against the tendency of gravity and towards the beating pump,
I think about my father—his knee, smashed on a lacrosse field
in 1941 and what may have finally killed him if decades of aspirin,
even buffered, can kill a person. We're joined now, closer
than we were when he was living, by these joints not engineered
for wear or weather like expansion joints in dams and other structures
of his life's work.
                                But the high bridge over the gulf between us
remains unfinished, the span from his end reaching farther,
closer to a meeting point, than the span from mine. He read
George Eliot and Boswell's Life of Johnson, was better versed
in literature than I in how things worked. You live in a fantasy world,
he told me. His was the world of pumped storage hydropower plants.
In mine those reservoirs and turbines become a version of a heart.

The Painter

You sat with brushes in hand and the light flowing above and below,
the prayer like paper, the light illumined our sacred trees.
Somehow, we forgot our raucous and joyous past loves
when I asked you to listen for the screen door's slam
and the call to supper as I brought you the evening meal.

And then there was that folio of your recent sketches:
so many similar dark faces filled with joy.

I gazed at the rich, brown texture of a watercolor on the page,
a man’s tortured face, his beard, his tough bronzed skin.
You said it was a portrait of your brother,
who died overseas during a rain of fire in Viet Nam.

And you put down your brushes to confess
we were going to start life all over again
without waging the private wars that keep us together.

You painted your dead brother’s face
against a background of blue.

This story was featured in Volume 2, Issue 2. Click here to explore other pieces from this issue.