Today, my front yard here in Richmond, Virginia, is buried in fallen leaves—maple, oak, magnolia, sweet gum.  Over the next few days, my wife and I will rake them into waist-high piles, bag them, and then place them at the curb for county pick-up and removal.  It’s autumn, of course, and time for that exhausting and exhilarating work.  No complaints, then.  We’ll enjoy the work, using muscles that too often remain dormant.  And we may even take the time to play in the leaves as if were children again.

It’s time also for the fall issue of diode, our third in this seventh year of publication.  In it, we have work from poets we’ve published previously, from poets we've admired and hoped would eventually submit work to us but hadn’t yet, and a couple we hadn’t heard of but whose work we were delighted to find among our submissions for this cycle.  Note also the work here in translation, from the original Arabic, Russian, and Spanish.  Think, please, of all that translation entails, at the level of word, phrase, and line, of meaning, of subtlety and nuance, of devotion to the original and to the poet’s work.

I myself am not a poet.  My role in the publication of diode is to take what our contributors have written and submitted, what Patty has then read oh so carefully, accepted for publication, and herself at times edited, and to put it on the page so that you, the reader, may experience it to the fullest, be moved and perhaps changed by it.  What I do, too, is work—not exhausting, but certainly exhilarating, as I read each of the products of the work of all our contributors, and from Patty.

I’m using the word “work” a lot, and speaking, of course, of both the act and the product.  As you read this issue of diode, keep in mind both, the ways in which both what we do and how we do it, the joy we bring to and take from it, both describe and define us.

Meanwhile, I’m heading outside.  Leaves, and work, await.

Jeff Lodge
Richmond, Virginia