In this issue, a decidedly non-scientific investigation of mental disorder, we probe the life’s blood of poetry, the unbidden facility of suspending a logical and orderly belief system.  The nature of temporary psychological derailments takes a vast array of insidious forms: running the gamut from a small case of April IRS insanity, to an all out bipolar breakdown while encompassing, say, a manic mouth in the woman on the bus sitting next to you, weepy melancholia, alcohol induced rage, the ninety-nine sheep of insomnia, contagious arachnophobia, pernicious panic attacks, inappropriate guilt, or simply the uncomplicated worry that someone will stuff you in a barrel of broken glass and roll you down a hill.  In this issue we explore the minute differences in the shades of mental darkness, the changing face of the monster who lives in the swimming pool drain, the varying pitches of the voices that scream about how inadequate, ugly, and worthless you are, the changing velocities of vertigo, the geography of sleep walking, seismographic measurements of the waves of inflated self-esteem alternating with troughs of no self-esteem whatsoever, a chronicle of the sudden need to convince anybody stopping at the Arco Fast Gas and Mini Mart to lend you enough money to go to Mexico so that you can get married when you don’t even have a romantic interest.  Whatever the flavor of mental unrest, the obsessive compulsive writing of lines of uneven length across the page herein might help the psychological ship of state right itself in dangerous waters. In answer to other forums that debate the role of the poem at the end of the millenium and whether it can survive the Internet Age, I answer: rant on.

 --Jana Harris