Eighteen years is a long time to do anything, let alone publish a poetry journal. When we started diode, we made a few promises to ourselves and our writers: We would respond to every submission in thirty days or less. We would never charge a submission fee. And we would make diode a space for poetry that sings, haunts, unsettles, and electrifies. A space where voices in their many textures, histories, and urgencies could find a readership.
Eighteen years later, we have kept those promises, and it feels important now more than ever to mark this milestone.
Editing a journal for nearly two decades is a particular kind of devotion. It is a labor of love, yes, but also an act of persistence and faith. The work of curation often comes at the expense of one’s writing. Still, this trade, words for words, solitude for community, is one that editors make willingly and joyfully because editing is also writing in another way. The reward of helping a poem find its audience, knowing it has reached those who need it, who feel its current in their bones, is the reward that sustains.
The world in which diode began is not the world we find ourselves in now. What is the role of poetry when everything is burning? When so much of the world is unmade by genocide, by colonialism, by environmental catastrophe, by deepening and vicious inequalities? Maybe poetry is not about resolution. Perhaps it is not about fixing or mending. Maybe it is simply about presence, bearing witness, making space for grief, rage, hope, and joy to exist side by side. Audre Lorde reminds us that “poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action.” This is the work of poetry, to articulate what is otherwise left unsaid, to bring into focus the injustices and the joys, the rage and the tenderness, that shape our existence. Poetry is both the question and the answer, exposing wounds and offering balms. It gives us a way to grieve, resist, become. Perhaps the most powerful thing poets and poetry can do now is not look away.
Looking back on eighteen years of diode, I am grateful to the poets who entrusted us with their work and the readers who return to these pages. Thank you. A million times. Thank you. As we step into our next chapter, we remain committed to the principle that has shaped us from the beginning: the unwavering belief that poetry is absolutely and utterly necessary.
Diode Poetry Journal's Issue 18.1 continues the tradition of showcasing innovative and compelling poetry. This issue exemplifies the journal's commitment to amplifying diverse voices that challenge and inspire. The selection of poets and their works highlights the depth and range of contemporary poetry, offering readers fresh perspectives and profound insights. Issue 18.1 is a testament to the enduring power of poetry in today's world.
As we mark the milestone of Issue 18.1, we reflect on our first issue, a time capsule of our beginning. Here is diode 1.1
All the poems in diode 1.1 are powerful, each charged with urgency, lyricism, and depth. But two in particular call to me for their ability to inhabit both the intimate and the expansive, rendering loss, desire, and survival in profoundly personal and universally resonant ways. These poems unfold like maps of revelation and transformation, where every line hums with an electricity that has not faded with time.
ALLISON TITUS & ROB SCHLEGEL
“Orphanage keeper, handmade, suitcase bearing part of the sea”
Orphanage keeper, handmade, suitcase bearing part of the sea,
in which mirror are you least reflected; whose boots
have you tossed away? Take this shovel
to the far shore, and forge a campsite
in the darkened harbor, low tide
restless with fog, and the horse you borrowed
might steal the black fruit from your bags
as you bend to warm your hands over the fire.
Can’t blame him. Poor guest
to your desolate margin. When night arranges
its small breathing distance,
what is left on the bones
you boil to broth. Posy:
a fistful of salt. You’ve left
the animal to carry its own damp sleep
from the kindling and still she catches fire,
but no one is there to say
spectre come; no one is there to put the fire out.
This haunting, evocative poem is layered with loss, survival, and the weight of absence. It moves through a dreamlike, almost mythic landscape, a shore, a fog-laden harbor, the presence of a horse, fire, and the spectral quiet of a world that feels abandoned or untethered. The orphanage keeper seems to be both a traveler and a ghost, tending to a desolate space, making sustenance from bones and salt, a meal that speaks of scarcity and endurance.
This poem creates an entire universe with just a few striking images. It is rich with allegory about exile, displacement, and the quiet persistence of survival in a world that offers little refuge. The language is precise yet mysterious, allowing the reader to enter and feel the damp air, the restless tide, and the quiet hunger of humans and beasts. It lingers, unfolding new meanings with every read, like a memory surfacing from the depths of the sea.
CHRIS ABANI
There Are No Names for Red
Based on paintings by Percival Everett
I
The way desire is a body eroding
into a pile of salt marked by a crown of birds:
and black. This fall is not rain, grain too subtle
for that dissolution. A constellation wrapped
in a stitch spreading like sand charting
thread across time a tender weave
and hope. This is resurrection.
II
And the sky is red
And the moon
And light is this rain.
This is all the terror we can bear:
the moment between flame
and where shadow begins
but only so much as can be cupped
in a child’s palm
and yet to say: the loved one
has slipped to ghost.
III
What attempts survival here has no words
but hunger. A white backcloth that devours
the blackening. Then red cut in lines thick
as paste and obscuring the once figurative.
This desire wears cerements of yellow and sun.
And at the edge of this world, a box of wood
and canvas; light and light and light.
IV
Everything here can so easily turn to mud
and the recalcitrance of dead leaves and bugs.
There is hair here too. Not so much brown and animal
as rough; I speak now of sorrow, of weight
beyond measure. There is a drowned woman
in the dark swirl. This paint, buoyant and light, eddies.
V
Whatever guilt drives this brush is nocturnal and heavy
with the smell of the cramped darkness under the stairs.
But night will not be blamed. What good are words
when the green light over the ocean is all we need?
VI
What passes for night here has more to do with the place
where the body is flayed open to sorrow and wonder.
The boy on the bridge drops a feather into a lost river.
A rusting lawn dreams of grass rude and fescue.
A match held down to tobacco still burns with an upward flame.
There is no truth here.
Dutifully the mist comes down the mountain. What else can I tell you?
“ There Are No Names for Red, “ is a stunning meditation on desire, loss, survival, and the shifting nature of perception. Deeply entwined with Percival Everett’s paintings, it stands powerfully as its layered, painterly exploration of language and meaning, moving like a series of brushstrokes. Each section adds texture and depth, creating an emotional crescendo that resists resolution.
The poem evokes something primal and unspeakable. It acknowledges the limits of articulation while insisting on expression through juxtaposing light and shadow, matter and meaning. Its final question—What more can I tell you?—leaves the reader suspended, as if gazing at an elusive canvas. It is a masterful exploration of the charged space between presence and absence.
Thank you again, dear reader. Your love for poetry, your engagement with the voices we publish, and your presence in the diode community mean everything. Each poem we share is a spark, a pulse, a way of reaching across time and space. You, as readers, complete that connection. Your support, careful attention, and time keep diode alive.
Thank you for your reflection on what poetry can offer in a crisis like the one we're living. As I try to write my way through this time, I need words like these. I'm not sure how I ended up on your list--maybe I sent you a poem that didn't work for you--but I am grateful.
Susanna Lang
Poetry publishing is one thing (which I'm grateful for) but publishing commentary on world situations is something else. For example, you write about colonization of Palestine by Zionists (read Jews). But Jewish people lived in Israel for millennia. Moses, Joshua, and scores of others including Jesus lived in the Holy Land/Palestine/Israel thousands of years ago. In 1948, after the Holocaust, the United Nations created Israel as a modern nation, though Israel existed long before, as the Bible describes. You write that you want Intifada. Really? so the blood of thousands of Israelis and Palestinations will be on your hands? Think and study before you proclaim.