From the Editor
Dear Reader,
Yes, dear fellow quirky mortal peering into this humbly offered selection of words and pictures we’ll call Issue XIII of Bracken—I am perhaps more than ever feeling grateful for the beauty of our quirks! I see the nervous blink of a dear friend’s eye and feel sure she’s worried about America too. I hear the old man shuffling by mumbling rhythmically to himself and I’m taken with this sweet bop. I look at people’s hats, their tilts and flops and flower colors, and thank the day-hidden stars for such brave oddities.
We are all, I’m happy to think, inescapably and adorably awkward—even those of us who secretly try not to be! Well, maybe those who fight to hide or banish or annihilate the quirks are the less lovely for it. But the kid with his shirt buttoned all the way up to the neck, as he stands straight with his shoulders back and a space-cadet serious smile on his face as he waits for the bus to school—his anti-goofball manner is touching too!
Those who assert that our weird, queer, ineffable particularities must be done away with make themselves grotesque. Still, I like to wonder about the freaked-out kids those rabid enforcers once were and still are underneath, terrified about not belonging. Can we find even the hired racist in his mask and Kevlar worthy of empathy on that hidden level?
The quirks in the poets and artists I love—the tingle available by the touch of strangeness in a poem, painting, photograph…I admit to feeling wafts of salvation in my encounters with these.
Please, dear distant friend with one sleeve past your wrist and the other up your arm; friend whose tongue can never quite make an R-sound, or who everyone thinks is white when you know you’re not, or who wakes from a dream in another gender…you, dear oddball, I hope you find in these words and pictures a bit of the company you seek! We’ve chosen, without even trying, work that is wonderfully riddled with quirks! I needn’t point instances out. Please, dive in, click on through, and you’ll see it—the flicker, the flash, the uncanny uniqueness in all space and time of an image, a word, a tiny twist in the dance that scintillates like the sun off a bent blade of grass.
Affectionately,
Jed Myers