Dear Reader,

The issues we put together, at least in my mind, consist not only of the pieces we publish, but of all the pieces we read. Patterns and preoccupations emerge among them, and whether or not it is especially evident in what you read here, this season has been preoccupied with destruction. Death. Apocalypse.

I often find myself driven by James Baldwin’s assertion that “A society must assume that it is stable, but the artist must know, and [they] must let us know, that there is nothing stable under heaven.” Destruction is not fodder for writing because we want to revel in it, or because we covet the macabre. At least for me, it has always been a confrontation with what we sacrifice for the illusion of stability. We often sacrifice the truth, don’t we? We sacrifice everyone and everything that falls outside the boundaries of that construction of stability. For those of us already positioned outside of it, or those with some limbs in and some out, the cost is clearer. The cost is personal and omnipresent. And so to confront instability is to hold a mirror to life itself, and in so doing, to project light.

In these pages you will find characters in crisis, contemplation, and quiet resignation. You will find them walking on “the weight of [a] bad / knee alone under the discolored / clouds resembling leaking noses” (Bickenbach). You’ll find them “...scraping every crevice of the mind and body for something left to give and finding nothing but viscous dirt under [their] fingernails” (Wilson-Cruz). There will be “Layers and layers of cars idling, honking, hollering, vomiting, shitting, crying out, and worst of all revving, revving, revving” (Sirotic). You’ll find “...a box of narcan / arrived one week too late…” (Westgate).

So, yes, there is trouble in these pages. But come on in anyway, because it’s beautiful in here. As contributor Alba Sarria writes in “An Exercise in Happiness”:

                 There are bursts of bats at the birthing of night, when red and pinks smear

                  like celestial parting fluids.

May you read this and see ripples of light coloring whatever spillage has stained the horizon and peeled you away from the story you wanted.

With gratitude to my wonderful coeditors,

to our readers, our contributors,

and to everyone who has submitted work to us,

Elizabeth Higgins