This is my first post to the Mule, although I’ve been on a the staff for a while now—first as Poetry Co-Editor and then last year taking over as Poetry Editor. Working with Valerie MacEwan has been great fun. I’m learning so much about editing. But I still have a lot to learn. For example, as a poet, I know that image and music are vital to the poem. I know that line length and enjambment matter. I know that stanza breaks make or break a poem. I’ve been angry with editors who screwed up my poems. Been there, done that. But what I didn’t know what a royal pain in the donkey’s (oops, I mean mule’s dead) behind these conventions can be to HTML coders.

Valerie MacEwan has been editing and publishing the Mule for over ten years now. (See her blog entries.) The Mule is her baby. Some really fabulous poets have been published here over the years. And I am privileged to help her beef-up the poetry section, which I believe I have been doing. But what I didn’t know until just last week—as Val uploaded what has come to be known as the “Bad Karma Issue”—is that poetry is very tricky to upload. And that Val often has to hand-key each poem to get it right.

I should have known from my own blog, where WordPress uploads all poems double spaced. Let’s face it, poets, writers of code are seldom poets. They seldom think the way poets think. But I should have asked. So now I’m getting to experience a bit of the other side of this business. Publishing an on-line literary magazine is a two-sided task. Picking the right works (in my case, poems) is really only part of the job. Uploading the chosen works is the other—a job that Valerie has shouldered alone for many years.

So now for the great experiment, I’m breaking one of the Mule rules: We don’t publish our own work. But before I was Mule Poetry Editor, or even Co-Editor—way back in September 2002—I was Mule writer. And today I’m going to re-publish “Voices,” only without Val’s lovely picture. (You have to go to the Wayback Machine to find that.) This poem tells almost everything about me that there is to tell.

Voices

by Helen Losse

I want to eat ambrosia,
dine with the gods. Dance.

Seraphim at the gate, velvet-winged.
“A plea is not a call,” says the tallest angel.
“One should not taste of success too soon.”

“Yes. Wait’s a word to ride the wind,”
says another. “And who will know the
mind of God?”

A celestial chorus in a quick response.
And I, reaching upward, raise uplifted palms.
A spurt of boldness: Each—in its own way.

The voices fade, and things I reach for seem too far.
Then just as silence slices through morning,
heaven’s jagged edge cuts my finger to the bone.