Continuing to write away from the war and the violence of humans and machines, constructing this issue meant to me that I would search for poems that glorified the sensual and psychic spaces of the heart. Don't get me wrong. These are ways away from the war and its devilish consequences. Deconstructions of psychic, social, and emotional spaces, love, lust, desire, loss, absence: these all play a part in the spring issue of Maverick. The will to write and establish a self beyond the boundaries of your tv set or computer: these things become again, in soft ways, in human ways--the phallic instinct and the vaginal throb are not really not set pieces in this issue, but rather vital planets that rise to meet the earth, continually meeting the earth, long after we're gone and this magazine is static. In the reality of cyberspace, the only thing that seems sure is the emotional content of our work for issue 6 & 7. For sure, the institutional, systematic, and tribal use of violence so prevalent in our world leads me to think that responding to the new world requires us to search our hearts and each other's hearts for the answers that may really lie side by side in the dark, among friends.

As artists, we must, in one sense, continue our responsibility to the darkness that has made itself so evident now: talking of the secret war, how it manifests itself not only in the media, but in our hearts and our designs. Be not too fooled, however, to think that at these times we should not write from the deepest, most obsessed spaces we each inhabit. In the most beautiful tradition, then, its my hope that this issue will respond deftly to the weak winter sun, the evil war, and the passage of St. Valentine's day into spring, into March.

Much like a jade tree sitting in a picture window, much like a favorite lover sitting on the bed with you, Maverick 6/7 provides an organic, multi-branched trans-dimensional poetry experience to follow with your fingers, to touch with your eyes.

In Solidarity,

El Jefe Del Norte