Dearest dam dwellers,
Welcome back to our charmingly dilapidated internet vacation home oasis. What the fuck is up? How are you? Bad question okay sorry…I can hear the harrowing choir of I’m fines from here darlings…you’re probably stewing some saucy rage or trying to suppress it cuz you think it’s unattractive or self-destructive or whatever. Well you’ve come to the right watering hole my weary travelers. Take off your toxic positivity petticoats and step into your livid leotards to dance in the fiery pits of peeves with us.
This issue is a steamy homage to the spectrum of anger. This issue is a microhaven for people that are sick and tired of brushing their fury under the rug because the public makes them feel like negatively emoting is ugly and aversive. There are no rugs in this issue, just hot-headed hardwood floors to sink your wicked beaver teeth into.
In one of my poetry workshops years ago, my dear colleague said I love this piece but I feel like you only write bitter poems and I’d love to see a scrap of joy. That shit still echoes in my head. I thrive through confronting my resentment in my creative process and when
I leave the page. Writing through hot tears and seething has a healing cathartic quality to it. Often the pissed poem doesn’t end up possessing a volta, shift in thinking, or resolution but I oddly do. If I were to force myself to write a happy poem it would be inauthentic and like trying to squeeze out a fake smile phantom shit. So this is for all of ya’ll that unapologetically write from your overflowing well of vexation. Embrace that sexy wrath. Let it fuel you to build a better corner of your community or stand up for yourself or realize that the shitbird person that made you feel this devastated is probably not worth your love and energy.
Throughout reading submissions for this issue I kept being reminded of the idea that anger and love are inextricably intertwined… *like obviously you stupid bitch* Yeah yeah yeah it seems so obvious right, but their connection is discounted when anger is demonized as weakness or lack of control. It’s hard to see it connected to the most sought after feeling of love. And yeah, sometimes anger is paired with harmful impulsive actions and distasteful language— but at the nucleus of anger is often an overwhelming blinding love that’s tailspinning in the seemingly infinite sky of absence and dread of accepting an end to something you feel like you can’t live without. It’s like the iceberg effect: anger is that little icecube ham-boning on the surface with shaking fists and sputtering, but the girthy jabba the hutt underbelly is chock-full of lost love, vulnerability, emotional risk, shame, abandonment, not-good-enough scaries, all the Brené Brown trigger words.
Or maybe love embedded in anger is like a beaver lodge behind the dam. Yeah I’m fucking going there. *Cue David Attenborough voice* The dam of anger is the forefront of human emotion, built to be a fortress of protection and self-preservation; it reduces runoff aka keeps the land of yourself intact, and conceals your brimming reservoir of self-perceived weakness and shame. Most assume that beavers live in their dam, but they actually live in a tiny snug love lodge behind the dam. That’s where they eat and sleep and fuck and fiercely pillow talk; where they’re vulnerable and let their guard hairs down.
The gorgeous enraged works of this issue echo this crucial idea: Let yourself be mad; you cared about this person or event or thing or feeling so much and now it’s gone or not the same. Don’t be ashamed of your anger. It flows from your aquifer of love and fuels the flora and fauna of newfound understandings. Readers, wade in all this anger and realize that you aren’t alone, you’re proudly harnessing an integral part of the ecosystem of emotion.
All my beaver love,
Haley
Beaver Magazine 