The moment I saw Judith Einstman's painting "Inside the Lucky Pup Playhouse" on the gallery wall, I wanted it for our Summer cover.  It was the bemused delight on the face of the puppeteer.  It was her veiled eye and suppressed smile, as she admires the freshly painted, finished Punch, or imagines the next play she might create with him.  It was the contrasting awakened eye and the grin of the puppet before her.  Behind her, the ones she crafted first have grown even more expressive.  The constable prepares to blow the whistle on their mutual admiration.  Judy sulks, wanting to take her turn with one of them---which?  I love the fact that all of the faces are kindred to the puppeteer's face.  I love the seamless, umbilical join of maker and made, sleeve to sleeve, so that she might be the puppet and Punch the one who moves her.  

I confess this has become one of my favorite images for you, who love poetry.  To make a poem is to put on the other---person or object or experience---to enter it as the puppet maker slides in her own arm, first infusing it with her own life, then discovering in it a new, independent life.  A writer recently told me, "My poem was supposed to be about the history of the Sioux in South Dakota, but the narrator ran away with it . . . I don't know where he came from, but he fascinates me."  In control but not in control, the poet tries out the possibilities of the other, surrenders to it, and becomes the richer.  

The same thing can happen to the reader.  In this issue you get to try on the lives of Robert Faguet's jazz trumpeter, William Jolliff's convict, even Heidi Czerwiec Blitch's Lazarus rising from the dead.  You can slip on other ears to hear cicadas with P.J. Taylor or a marching band with Aleen C. Fisher.  In our Crossover feature, Susie Frazier Mueller supplies different eyes with which to see bamboo and driftwood.  Some of the poems, after you slide them off, might live behind your back like Einstman's puppets, available extra selves.  

I imagine you on a beach blanket, a porch swing, or a steamy subway, carrying this issue along for recreation.  The poem comes on our vacation or IS our vacation.  But what can be more crucial for our own time, for the constant demands of democracy, than this putting ourselves into the other, this practice of empathy?

In my hometown, migrant apple pickers used to ride to the orchards every summer in old, broken school buses.  For a few weeks they simmered in shacks and then went on their way.  Winchester calls itself the "Apple Capital," and for many years our economy depended on these "invisible" workers.  But in the last couple of years the migrants are choosing to settle down.  This moment has played itself over and over in American history---each time with a new language, a new ethos, a new wave of desperate strengths and dreams.  Already arms are reaching out, those with the imagination, the ability to receive the other, that will eventually let "us" unite with "them" and be re-created as a community.

I do believe that poetry plays a part in preparing for such a venture.  In this sense every poem is political.

The winner of our 2004 poetry contest, S.K. Carew, enters into the life and dreams of a migrant onion picker, in a poem that manages to be both hard and soft.  Our contest judge, who gave generously of his time and insight, was Robert Siegel.  (You can enjoy three of his own poems on page 4-5.)  He writes about the winning poem, "Bride of Dream Man": "There were a number of good poems, but I chose this one because of its powerful, lyrical realism.  The poem deftly and economically presents the whole scene, the hardship and beauty of it, and fuses these two qualities in fresh and memorable images and metaphors - especially in its striking concluding stanzas."

My hope is that you will find the puppeteer's pleasure in this issue.  That after you taste some of these poems, you might find, as in Joanne Esser's "Picking Blackberries," "Your hands will be purple for more than a day. . . . Your shirt will be indelibly stained, a permanent reminder."