From the Editor

"I was never kinder to the old man than during the whole week before I killed him," ... boasts the unnamed narrator of Edgar Allan Poe's 'The Tell-Tale Heart'.

For seven nights, he opens the old man's door to shine a sliver of light onto his "evil eye" — watching, unblinking, through the darkness. After the murder, the body secreted beneath the floorboards, the narrator slips slowly into madness and guilt — until, unable to bear it, he breaks: "Tear up the planks! Here, here! — It is the beating of his hideous heart!"

The body, as it is said, keeps the score — and no organ so terribly as the heart. Throughout gothic literature, hearts have been used to elicit disgust and revulsion. Yet behind their fleshy exteriors lie guilt, desire, and grief, all waiting to be exposed.

The poems in this collection examine the collateral damage that living takes on the heart, and the violence of opening the body in order to mend it. But mending carries its own violence. Across nearly every poem, the body is something that is opened, inspected, burned, cracked apart, or consumed — whether it be by lovers, by doctors, by desire, or paradoxically, by the poets themselves. In some cases, the body is not just opened but destroyed entirely: “the body aflame, stretching and writhing. "

It is perhaps no coincidence that the majority of our poets are queer people, writing at a time when their bodies are increasingly under assault. We, as readers, are commanded to bear witness to these desecrations of the body.

Brooke Soulsby's poem is structured around watching - whether that be from the eyes of doctors, or from the narrator themselves: "I will feel — pulling — hurting / eyes — watching — eyes — lingering / I will catch — my reflection" . Isabella Nicole's deer is only vivid when it is caught in the headlights - after which it is “cracked open like a pomegranate". And Hebe Kearney’s central figure watches their partner as they in turn watch the Creature: "I discovered you observed it during the night. / I watched you watch it, transfixed… "

In some poems, the idea of the body extends beyond the individual and bleeds into the soil of places where violence has already soaked through. Paris Whitehead's poem specifically grounds bodily violence to a specific place — Taranaki, a location of deep historical trauma through the violence of European colonialism. The impact of violence on the earth as whenua (as both land and placenta) is clearly felt by all those who walk along its face - the image of skyscrapers is hammered "into the skin of my island / so blood beads in the alleys". Rebecca Hawkes seems to find entrapment in a different key — not the operating table but in the open field, where beauty and bracing wildness curdle into something that sticks and won’t let go. “You move forward to wipe them clear / but find the horse’s hair transformed into black tar that holds you fast,” and with that, Godiva is dragged into the river.

The body, once opened, does not close again so easily. Dark secrets of the heart are rarely hidden for long. Eventually, the floorboards will be removed, the skin peeled back — and what is found beneath will not stay quiet. As Freya Turnbull fittingly declares:

“cut me open first. then we'll see what I write."