musical golden shovels

a fellow poet and friend of mine once told me that when he sits down to write, sonnets are often where he ends up: the form is so familiar to him that it becomes the fallback vehicle for his expression; it’s so ingrained that it holds whatever he brings to it.

golden shovels are like that for me.

i came to writing through music and music through writing. i have degrees in both, which maybe sounds like indecision, but it’s always felt like the same impulse at different frequencies. and lyrics have shaped my own writing in ways i’m still tracing. a line from a song surfaces in the middle of a poem like something remembered. a bridge becomes a volta. a chorus becomes a refrain. some songs hit so hard they become the feeling itself. so marrying the two for a first issue felt not just right, but necessary.

the submissions i received were both familiar and surprising. what’s here isn’t one kind of golden shovel. some are faithful to the form, with the source lyric threading through, each end word carrying its original weight. others push against it: mixing lyrics with album titles and song titles, even moving between sources mid-poem. others yet break the structure on purpose, the deviation itself becoming the meaning. and the final piece is something else entirely — meta in the truest sense, written about music and rooted in the text that gave the form its name.

what surprised me, editing this, was how much the poems were in conversation — not just with their source material, but with each other, to the point where putting this together felt like making a playlist. sure, it’s not a mix i would have normally made on my own, but when i look at all of them together, i can’t help but think that i’m glad these poems found each other.

— natalye childress, editor-in-chief

april 2026