There’s No Time Like No Time

In the story that serves as the namesake for this publication, former Black Warrior Review editor Zach Doss writes, “The Village with All of the Boyfriends is where all of your boyfriends wind up eventually. You built this Village for them and they can’t leave and neither can you.” Like his contributions to the Black Warrior Review community, the space that Zach describes here is inherently timeless—occupied at all times by past, present, and future. Defined by strict confines, yet growing beyond capacity.

With this description in mind, it’s only fitting that the newest addition to the Village is this: Temporal Boyfriend. An issue which, like its namesake, is overflowing with life and variation.

When we first proposed our call for submissions for the ninth edition of Boyfriend Village, we solicited writing that redefined histories. Temporal Boyfriend craved literature that blurred the boundaries between genre and form, art representative not only of mixed perspectives, but wholly incongruent timelines. We sought stories that unstuck us from time, verse that melted clocks from the walls, and narratives that unspooled memory before our very eyes. Simply put, we asked our contributors what made their watches tick.

In this issue, we present you with fifteen curated pieces of literature that question the very nature of our universe—pieces which defy convenient interpretation, interrogating faith and physics in pursuit of unanswerable questions about the nature of life and death, being and becoming.

Here you will find archival fiction camouflaged as a Wikipedia entry, poetry in the forms of MacBook desktop, domestic dreamscape, and even a telegram from the confines of a wormhole. Our writers  uncover with undue empathy the strange histories of a 4,000-year-old unintentional mummy, a vintage UFO abduction, and Disney’s animatronic Abe Lincoln. These pieces explore the concept of our past selves, analyzing the nature of personal growth and repetition by referencing media such as The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and the 1991 Indian romantasy, Njan Gandharvan. Through scattered, grief-filled memories, they investigate the complicated contrast between deaths both violent and peaceful, yearning desperately for closure or comfort or whatever comes next.

Rounding out this issue, and imbued in its every nook and cranny, is the fabulous art of Ana Prundaru, whose digital collages aptly visualize our vision for non-linear timelessness: messy, disordered, yet hauntingly beautiful. Chaos in the most complimentary of ways.

It is our sincere belief that the newest Boyfriend in this Village is a timeless one. We hope you will agree. So, buckle up, and let Temporal Boyfriend take you for a ride. As we asked our contributors many months ago when this edition was little more than a hopeful premonition: prepare to be sped up, slowed down, and turned inside-out and upside-down. All we ask is that you consent to leave your assumptions of reality firmly in the dust. ⏱︎ 

With all the time in the world,

Michael Hughes Wesner
Editor, Boyfriend Village