Your grief for what you’ve lost lifts a mirror up to where you’re bravely working.
Expecting the worst, you look, and instead, here’s the joyful face you’ve been wanting to see.
Your hand opens and closes and opens and closes. If it were always a fist or always stretched open, you would be paralyzed.
Your deepest presence is in every small contracting and expanding, the two as beautifully balanced and coordinated
as birdwings.
Hole In The Head is one year old and what a year it’s been!
Each of our four issues cast a wide net. We were rewarded with just what we’d hoped for: brilliant poetry and imagery from new artists and those more established. It has been our hope from the outset to be a venue hosting fresh talent, good poets who may have struggled to find a home for their work, regardless of how long they’d been at the craft. At the same time, we figured that as Hole In The Head became known as a locus for good work, poets, photographers, painters and other more established artists would also bless our Submittable door. And they have!
Perhaps the most rewarding part of all: Our strong design, coupled with great work and our digital presence, has attracted a world-wide audience, offering authors and artists new and old a truly international opportunity to get their work out. As of 11/10/20, our site has been viewed 10,879 times and 7,145 of those are unique visits from 89 different countries – from Algeria to Vietnam.
And all of this comes to you free of charge.
But excellence comes at a cost. Establishing and maintaining the website and domain, submission site, marketing and advertising, memberships…we covered these and other expenses with the generous assistance of readers and a modest submission fee in our first year. None of these expense go away in the second year – damn it!
And we have more plans for our second year and each one comes with a price tag. Most importantly, we will become a 501c3 non-profit, which will allow us to apply for grant support. We also look forward to the day when we can pay contributors for their work and establish prizes/contests for poetry and visual arts. We will sponsor and produce readings and other in-person or virtual events.
This is just to say, we need your help. If you like what we’ve done in our first year, please consider heading to our PayPal page and giving whatever you can. paypal.me/holeintheheadreview
We’re really excited about our second year! Thanks for your support!
The time will come
when, with elation
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror
and each will smile at the other’s welcome,
and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you
all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,
the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.
Most mornings I get away, slip out
the door before light, set forth on the dim gray
road, letting my feet find a cadence
that softly carries me on. Nobody
is up-all alone my journey begins.
Some days it’s escape: the city is burning
behind me, cars have stalled in their tracks,
and everybody is fleeing like me but some other direction.
My stride is for life, a far place.
Other days it is hunting: maybe some game will cross
my path and my stride will follow for hours, matching
all turns. My breathing has caught the right beat
for endurance; familiar trancelike scenes glide by.
And sometimes it’s a dream of motion, streetlights coming near,
passing, shadows that lean before me, lengthened
then fading, and a sound from a tree: a soul, or an owl.
These journeys are quiet. They mark my days with adventure
too precious for anyone else to share, little gems
of darkness, the world going by, and my breath, and the road.
These are the only genuine ideas; the ideas of the shipwrecked. All the rest is rhetoric, posturing, farce. – Jose’ Ortega y Gasset
from Volume 1 Number 4 of Hole In The Head Review, http://www.holeintheheadreview.com
God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength. Consider your own call, brothers and sisters; not many of you were wise by human standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth. But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; God chose what is low and despised in the world, things that are not, to reduce to nothing the things that are. (1 Cor 1:25-28)
Edge of Atlantic 