With idea, sound or gesture, the duende enjoys fighting the creator on the very rim of the well. Angel and muse escape with violin, meter and compass; the duende wounds. In the healing of that wound, which never closes, lie the strange, invented qualities of a man's work.

The idea of "duende" as the driving, passionate inspiration that moves poets to write originates from lectures of Federico Garcia Lorca [1], where he explains; "all that has black sounds has duende." It is with this dark passion that Arsenic Lobster Poetry Journal seeks to fill its pages.

           Editing the 2006 Arsenic Lobster Poetry Journal was like dancing all night—exhausting and gloriously brilliant! Ah, what a trove—these pages are the collected voices of wavering, deep song. In this eclectic collection we explore the fight with duende. The battle-cry trumpets a ceramic-blue-mad-scratching and concludes venus-glass-beautifully:

                                 come down, come down
                                 electric and violet salmon-green sky,
                                 open a copper pouring,
                                 angela and sylvia are crane-tooth-whispering,
                                 keeping forked secrets

                                 from the dog men.


           Whether one chooses to "peep through / the eyeholes carved in the goose" or is compelled to "shake apart / like those airplanes," one will feel the weight of the word herein, heavy as heartache. And what heartache could ring as truly as the lines:

                                 Willow astraddle
                                 you, I pump
                                 up your buried rain.

           Within this book, collected over my first full year as Lobster Editor, lives the energy of darkness—a place where cysts ripen into sobs, where precious stones, borne from the throat, float down a river of voice. Discover the way her mouth became a broken window; witness the killing of the sky with surgical rhythms; catch the mermaid who dreams of mirrors and finally, consider an invitation to savor each slowly diminishing limb.

           There is always the alternative: without the spirit or dark passion, without the "black sounds" found in poetry, perhaps we may choose to live a half life:

                                 half puppet show, half
                                 some hole in a dead tree

So, I invite you to begin a well-choreographed fight with the duende, starting with a turn of the page— where the sea lavender puff fire.

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Susan Yount
Editor, Arsenic Lobster Poetry Journal