Cetera #2 – The Body Keeps the Score
A digital issue gets built in a strange way. First it exists as a submission call. Then it becomes a flood of attachments, cover letters, half-remembered lines, notes in the margins, long email threads about sequencing, and the gradual realization that certain poems have started following you around. They show up while you’re making coffee. They sit with you on the train. They return in that hour of the night when the day’s language has worn thin and only the truest lines still feel awake.
The Body Keeps the Score is Cetera Magazine’s second digital poetry issue, and from the beginning we knew we wanted to make something more than a themed collection. We wanted an issue that felt assembled around pressure. The pressure the body absorbs, the pressure it resists, the pressure it stores long after the conscious mind has moved on to more flattering narratives. The title of course borrows from Bessel van der Kolk’s landmark book, which gave many readers a vocabulary for trauma’s afterlife in the nervous system. We took that phrase as a point of departure and widened it. In this issue, score means wound, tally, notation, script. A scar is a score. A flinch is a score. So is the learned choreography of hunger, vigilance, secrecy, desire, shame, pleasure, survival.
As we read, we found ourselves drawn to poems that understood the body as more than a subject. The strongest work treated the body as archive, target, inheritance, misread text, unreliable narrator, and evidence. Some poems came in whispers. Others were jagged. Some shape-shifted. After all, the body itself can interrupt a beautiful day with panic, memory, pain, appetite, recoil.
Because this is our second digital issue, we also thought carefully about movement. How one poem opens the next, how a reader travels from one register of embodiment to another. We wanted the issue to feel curated, but also alive. Made with intention, but still willing to surprise itself.
We’re deeply grateful to the poets who trusted us with this work. And to the readers: thank you for entering this temporary world with us. These poems leave marks. That felt like reason enough to gather them here.
The issue is now available to download below:
The Poets
Cyrus Chan, Janae Mancheski, Jaden Gootjes, E. L. McKee, Louhi Pohjola, Christa Fairbrother, Lori Litchman, Christine Light, Lana Hechtman Ayers, Andrea Giedinghagen, Jordan Prochnow, Lisa Delan.
The Editors
Jon Negroni. Natalia Emmons.
