I was a methodical child. When we learned subtraction in grade school and the teacher told me that those zeroes magically turned into tens for the purposes of subtracting 77 from 100, I didn’t believe her. I was so frustrated at being told to just trust her and do it that I came home crying. My mother had to explain it to me, how it all made sense, how no numbers, in fact, went unaccounted for.

And when she was teaching me how to drive, I asked her how many times you turned the wheel for a right turn, and then how many times you should turn it back. I really did. I wanted order and rules. I was not a drive-by-feel kind of kid. To her credit, she didn’t laugh.

When I took my college placement exams, I did better in math and science than in English. I sat in that testing room and debated the answers for English—really, was this the major theme for the reading selection, or was the larger (and largely implied) argument what really mattered? And why didn’t any of the answers correspond to what I really thought, anyway?

I ended up majoring in English. I became a poet. Now when I talk to my students about poetry, I remind them that it isn’t math, that in poetry sometimes 2 + 2 = minestrone, or butterfly, or orange. (I might have stolen that. Teachers, as well as poets, steal.) They always laugh. But how else to explain to them that usually short enjambed lines make you read a poem faster, but sometimes it’s actually slower?

At the allergist’s office the other day, the nurse made chit-chat with me while she stabbed me with three separate needles. On finding out that I teach poetry, she said, “Oh, I never got poetry.” I smiled. I told her that if she were in my class, I’d help her. And then I told her that I never really “got” art. It was a moment of solidarity, and she smiled.

In this issue of Sweet, alongside our amazing poems and essays we offer a few more images—some graphic memoir, some poetry-art collaborations. I exaggerated when I said I didn’t get art—I love it, it pushes and pulls me like seaweed in the tide, like words do. But it’s a little more mysterious to me than words, as I haven’t dedicated 20-plus years to its study. I like the mystery, though. A bureaucrat by nature, perhaps, I continue to seek out what can’t be translated into formulas and rules. I gravitate towards what I almost-understand, what I can almost-know. The writers and visual artists in this issue are reaching after, reaching toward, things that are essentially both mysterious and important, and I’m thrilled to be along for the ride.