Dorothy Chan’s Editor’s Note: A Triple Sonnet and Cheers to Wild Summer, Issue 2
Hey cuties, welcome to Honey’s Wild Summer,
because poetry and party are alliterative,
like perfume and pookie and pomegranate
and pleasure, and pencil us in right the hell
now, turn up the volume—pour a little honey
in your adult beverage, a Luxardo cherry
or candied walnut at the bottom soaked in whiskey,
and let’s vibrate through these words—les mots—
love letters and sexts and passages of time and space
and place, and where do I land in your dreams is
the question in this heat, and if you had the choice
between being gentle or being wild, what would
you take? I wonder. After all, how close to the
Truth do you want to get—to your core instinct,
moving away from the pretty into your nightmares
and confrontations, or writing is like swimming
into a deep, dark ocean, and you’re all alone,
even though you know you’ll get out knowing
a little bit more about yourself, and how bad
is it to be alone anyway if you’re near Truth.
Reader, we’re giving you wildness. Honeys,
we’re giving you fashion and getting lost and high
in the narratives, or choose your own adventure,
your own order, like it’s a brunch time special
filled with blueberry Belgian waffles and dollops
of cream and Eggs Florentine and Shakshouka
with a side of sausage, washing it down with
extra spicy Bloody Marys and bacon, and it’s time
to go on that adventure—hopscotch our way through
this curation of Animals and Valentines, because
who even believes in genre anyway, and give me
Sex and Kink and Spice and Everything Nice and
Erotic, and it’s like the freeze frame moment of
the big movie of passions and thrills and make me
laugh right now or it’s not a Happy Ending. We’re
serving Poetry and Comics and let’s play inside
graphic narrative maze, you hottie, and Essays
and Hybrid, and who believes in clear genre
anyway, it’s all feeling and trust and Interviews
and Reviews for a little conversation. Cheers to you
for joining our Hive this summer. I wish I could
pop a balloon right now—welcome to Issue 2.
About Dorothy Chan
Dorothy Chan (she/they) is the author of most recently, BABE (Diode Editions 2021), in addition to Revenge of the Asian Woman (Diode Editions, 2019), Attack of the Fifty-Foot Centerfold (Spork Press, 2018), and the chapbook Chinatown Sonnets (New Delta Review, 2017). They were a 2020 and 2014 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship finalist, a 2020 finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in Bisexual Poetry for Revenge of the Asian Woman, and a 2019 recipient of the Philip Freund Prize in Creative Writing from Cornell University. Their work has appeared in POETRY, The American Poetry Review, Academy of American Poets, and elsewhere. Chan is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire, Editor Emeritus of Hobart, Book Reviews Co-Editor of Pleiades, and Co-Founder and Editor in Chief of Honey Literary Inc., a 501(c)(3) literary arts organization. They were the 2021 Resident Artist for Toward One Wisconsin. Visit their website at dorothypoetry.com.