Note from the Editors
Dear everyone,
We write to you from an unseasonably blustery day in April. Plump flakes of snow fall from the sky, decorating the yellow tulips and dandelions that have already dared to bear their heads, and nearby footpaths are undisturbed save for a courageous squirrel or two bounding across. The landscape is not quite as picturesque as Jack Davis’ “Snow on the Hill,” but we feel its untimely beauty all the same.
Transition is alight outside our windows as it is among the artwork and writing of this issue’s pages. We begin in childhood with Iman Rahman’s poem “Roadkill Rabbit,” in which time obscures the accuracy of memory but not the fondness of youth, and Carter Furmanek’s collage “Homestead,” in which trees politely intrude into a forlorn domestic scene. Emily Forslof’s excerpt from The Seed of the Poppy, too, broaches the boundary between normalcy and the unfamiliar, only for Mark Khairallah’s “je ris” to then oust those conventions altogether, playing with spelling, homonyms, humor, and double entendrés. Next, we follow a lifetime in Alejandro Sosa Hernández’s “Resident Alien,” a sequence of city visitations in Will Kretz’s “City Poems,” before pausing to appreciate fleeting mundanities in Ely Silverman’s photographs “a puddle in sf” and “a tree in sf.”
In this issue, we invite you to suspend yourself in the passage of time, whether swift or meandering. Simply, we hope you linger and let these pieces linger with you.
Thank you for reading,
Dana and Helen