We thought they were safely drowned

[sovay]

The afternoon's mail brought my contributor's copy of Not One of Us #72, containing my poem "The Voice of the Cards." It's the poem I wrote on my phone with Autolycus sleeping on me; it owes a conceptual debt to the opera from which it takes its title, Peter Maxwell Davies' The Lighthouse (1979). The rest of this small, strong, autumnally unstable issue showcases identity in the poems and stories of Sarah McGill, Jennifer Crow, Steve Toase, and David C. Kopaska-Merkel, among others. I love the black-and-white covers by John and Flo Stanton: the memento mori dissolving, the creeping passports.

I understand the rationale behind screening pop-culture references out of a public contest, but I am still disappointed that the Steamship Authority has categorically refused to name either of its newest ferries to Martha's Vineyard and Nantucket The Bigger Boat.