Humanist Editor Seeking Consenting Self-Flagellating Author
A prose poem
Title modeled after Humanist Vampire Seeking Consenting Suicidal Person
The book on my nightstand tells campfire stories of how states make the peoples legible, drawing maps without the corners you call home, burning down the underbrush to calculate timber yield and defining a lot of homestead, a city block, a unit, a sliding scale of authoritarianism imposing, encroaching, gentrifying. Cause ain’t ain’t a word, but it’s easy to hate them English teachers diagramming sentences like building gallows and assembly line factories, mass production cookie cutters cuttin’ off all your adverbs and leavin’ the stumps to bleed. And I know I’m a prescriptivist with too many rules, but the problem with anarchy is somebody’s got to proofread the manifesto. And please, oh please let it be a human even if you hate us while we’re doing it—I swear the red on my hands is just ink.
As a breed we’ve got all the worst jobs of angels and vampires, none of the charms. Just fangs ready to open veins and a thousand eyes set to judgment, a thousand wings set to flood the sky like a portent of death or rejection. But I’m begging on the other side of the threshold that you need us because what’s the state of the museums if you fire all the curators? If you let the spellcheck come in, let GPT write your soul, mathematically optimizing the pounds of flesh Willy Shakes wouldn’t have written about if he’d let a bot whip up the draft and do a grammar sweep. It’s a brave new world of new media: no editors, no legal, no copy, no checkers, no critics, just a value pack of megaphones ordered online.
So how can I convince you I’m an artist too? Cut my pencils to sharp ends in the libraries of Austen and Montaigne, DeLillo and Didion. Garner’s English on the shelf and half of Chicago under my tongue, I’ve killed enough of my darlings and myself enough times over in late nights on a page filled thick as forests wondering how to make it all fit, walking authors around my desk like paper dolls, praying I don’t rip ’em as I join hands, making garlands of word letter word, the rhythm, the diction, connection, collection, making it whole, making it one thing. God, if I could just say Let there be light. No power of creator, I’m out on the corner, another herald with a thing to sell I can’t call mine.
But I still care about the commas, and I may not have a voice but I can tell a tense, conjugations of how to be falling down my pages. It’s a mess, an archeologist in a kaleidoscope, but I’ll make your maps as detailed as I can. I’m no auteur, no author. Just another editor seeking a consenting self-flagellating author, and I’ll try not to make it hurt too bad.
All to say, the Fall 2025 issue of The Branches Journal is in production! (And its editor in chief has many thoughts about the editorial process amid the age of new media, anti-intellectualism, and the war on culture and the arts!) Join our email list to hear when the launch event will be held and how to get your hands on a print copy.
This piece was featured last month at the reading series Poetry at Sunnyside Arts in Queens, New York.