summer 2014

Three Poems   David Lazar
Two Poems   Ronda Broatch
Howling  David Ebenbach
Signals   John Nimmo
Hum In Me, Muse. No Words, Just Thousands of Arpeggios   Tina Kelley
The Uppermost Affliction    Sarah Sloat
Under the Lines  Melissa Gordon
Why Your Signature Is Illegible   M. Nasorri Pavone
First Night Alone  Donna Vorreyer
Always you will  Sara Kearns
Exotic Travel  Bernard Henrie
Farmington: August   Jeff Streeby   

Visuals by 
Thomas Gillaspy 

FROM THE ETHER

On “Curing the Blues”
       
I really enjoyed browsing through the photographs on the website of Thomas Gillaspy, the featured artist for this, our Summer 2014 issue. While it’s always difficult narrowing art choices for the journal, especially with so many terrific images to choose from, selecting the cover piece, “Cures the Blues,” seemed a no-brainer. It’s summertime. Doesn’t summer cure the blues? “Amen,” half of the country sighs this early June as the last of the winter ice in the Great Lakes melts. At last. What a prolonged winter it has been.

DMQ Review’s cover image traditionally tops our table of contents page as well. I think this is the first time we’ve had text as image for a cover, though some images have contained text. As I was reviewing this issue’s proofs, the table of contents set under Gillaspy’s photograph struck me as a kind of poem.

I’ve been counting on the implication that reading the DMQ Review “Cures the Blues,” and even more emphatically that poetry can and does. But there in the table of contents I discovered we’d created our own found poem. Think anaphora, the repetition of a word or phrase.

                    “Three Poems,” “Two Poems,” Cures the Blues
                    then try “Howling” Cures the Blues

One summertime way to cure the blues is to travel. Many of us travel throughout the year with business or family obligations. I’m talking about travel as part of vacation, either a means to a locale or the art of the journey itself, from an extended road trip to simply choosing a road not taken before. The idea of travel wends its way through the poetry in this issue. Can you find it?

                    “Signals”
                    “Under the Lines” Cures the Blues

Travel is one of the reason’s Gillaspy’s photographs, especially of road signs and billboards, fit the issue so well. Even if the poems don’t represent physical journeys, think of armchair travel when you read Tina Kelley’s imaginative piece; consider “the ongoing quest of deciphering who you are,” that M. Nasorri Pavone’s poem refers to; or, as in Sarah Sloat’s poem, find yourself “stumbling errant across the centuries,” to finally, finally reach your bed at the end of the day’s often long journey.

                    “First Night Alone”
                    “Exotic Travel” Cures the Blues!

Dear readers, thanks for reading with us. “Always you will” Cure the Blues for all of us here at DMQ Review. You, and our talented contributors, are why we pull this together.

As for “Farmington: August?” Let me know when we get there.
 

From the ether,

Sally Ashton
Editor-in-Chief