Since we published our last issue, I have taken up running again. Talking about running is like talking about the minutiae of transferring between different subway lines (and nothing like talking about your dreams, which I wish everyone would do every day), but it has set me thinking more often about the odd work of moving my body from one place to another, and all the means by which I do it. 

When I lived in Indiana I would run or walk along the St. Joseph river, a place the poet Joyelle McSweeney has called “vexed and profound,” and imagine other walks I’d taken, try to hold both in the mind at once, or layer them over each other like a double-exposed photograph: walking along the Tiber in Rome; along the sea in Naples; from my childhood home to my best friend’s house the block over, past a hedge filled with bees and a dry culvert; from the apartment I shared with my first husband in New Hampshire, walking in the winter along a low stone wall to the laundromat; running along the Potomac. Can I make the rivers align? Or the landmarks converge? While we have been putting together this issue I’ve been running along the Hudson, which is startling in its size after living so long aside more reasonable banks. While I fall forward through the path in Riverside park my mind is also at the poison-ivy covered banks in South Bend, Indiana, the other place where ballast lives and is made. 

There’s surely some value in being present, but the pleasure of trying to be in the place you are while pulling in the memory of another place you’ve been does something to touch the weird wonder of living in a body that has been so very many places and only ever once at a time. 

Similarly, when we finish an issue I try to hold two or three or many of our poems in the mind at the same time, to see where they overlap and diverge, where the force of what’s made them necessitates a turn, a bend, a winding. Putting together our dialogues feature allows me to set two poets on a stroll and see what they make of it; our voices feature like seeing something new on a walk you’ve taken many times. Reading a poem is like walking alongside a river, or a hedge imagination makes into a hive, or a strange figure walking through a city you can’t quite recognize, moving the body down the path that has been laid out and offered and walked before. 

I hope as you read this issue you find yourself collecting and keeping the paths of the poems you’ve read before, testing them out in your mind against one another, thinking, how lovely, how strange. 

—   Sara Judy, for ballast