EDITOR'S NOTE

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Nearly 4,000 years ago, humans created the oldest concrete depiction (that’s yet been found) of astronomical phenomena: this pretty Sky Disc, with gold inlays that trace the sun at solstice, helping people track seasons and harvest times. During the European Bronze Age, the heliacal rising of the Pleiades fell about halfway between the autumn equinox and winter solstice, later marked by Samhain, precursor to Halloween. For many ancient Europeans, the brightening Pleiades were associated with mourning and remembrance of the dead.

As evening darkens earlier and the nights grow longer, our skies too become clearer and steadier. Autumn is a good time for stargazing in your local dark sky park – some redress for the fact that light pollution has hidden the Milky Way for a third of humanity and 80% of Americans.

Though it was not an intentional part of the selection process, this issue certainly turned out to be stelliferous. The stars feel active in many of these works – some events (like in “The Long Drive Home”) can only happen at night; some conversations are held with the stars themselves. In Mark’s art, heavenly bodies whirl around skyscrapers that sway wildly like blades of grass, voiding our notion of buildings as protective symbols of authority. As he says, “there is trauma in these structures, impacted by the world within and about.”  

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In “Exploding Fish Museum,” our institutional markers of hegemony similarly become unstable—even absurd—when overtaken by the ocean. I appreciate the reconceptualizing of freedom as indifferent wildness when the water, maybe feminine in this context, dissolves our petty distinctions:

 The curator elucidates that this was before

               Democratic institutions took hold     Of the ocean

                                             Unless it was the other way around,

                                                                           The legislative body     Flooded with salt

                                                                                          And glorious freedom

(Alicia Kwok)

The first poem of the issue. "Among Billionaires," introduces, for me, a throughline of apeirophilia that colors later lines like “it’s the British Columbia before / Christ I come back to” (Ian Doumit). In this issue, the reader is often invited to peer into perpetuity from the vantage point of a single body. The unfathomable years, the innumerable cells, the scale of catastrophe, or the number of dollars a billionaire is “worth” – “the number is impossible / but that’s what we share” (Richard Cole). 

In “Long Lake,” the stars evoke our closest symbol (this poem, “The Long Drive Home,” and “nobody is born to this” are also great explorations of secrecy, culpability, class, and race in the U.S.):

You stare at the water,

catch a glimpse

of stars. You want

to believe there is

still a chance.

….

You know the lake

was named after

a Klan member,

so it’s easy. Go on,

tell America who

took your precious

babies, your beloved

sons. Describe him.

She’ll believe you—

across the nation.”

(Thea Matthews)

Elsewhere, in “November,” a hiker rising above a smoke-filled valley sees that

Each star is clearer, 

but still an abstraction, a loosely assembled glow

like unfinished needlework. 

 You can trace the lines

into great distances, to where they fray

to nothing. A battle was fought here,

so long ago now the weapons are luminous dust.

(Nicholas Pagano)

Elusive liminality is in subtlety. For example, the impersonal space of a hospital shown from an insider perspective, where one small marker of time, like initials etched into an ancient wall, or a worn-out name badge, becomes everything: 

Outside, winter hardens the parking lot.

Coffee moves through the halls in paper cups,

steam rising from each private life.

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In rooms where bodies stop cooperating,

I say difficult things plainly.

This will hurt.
No, not tonight.
You cannot drive.
He may not wake up.

Some faces turn once toward the doorway.

(Veronica Tucker)

Practicality, groundedness, fortitude, and accountability of the speaker—and precise attention to image by the writer—also herald meaningful contemplation and proximate colloquy with death: 

I don’t need ceremony.
This place is its own
gesture toward civility—
a fancy tablecloth

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of other people’s
graves, whole villages
submerged
and spun to silk.

(Melissa Shepherd)

I find these acknowledgments of smallness, and recognitions of consecration and its processes somehow very comforting. It makes me wonder if, now that humans have created something higher than us in the food chain, we can celebrate being mortal with renewed gratitude. Note this bittersweet description of autumn: 

the last wave

of the goldenrod and jewelweed

blooming, fall impending

like a sentence, and the length

of sunlit days not what they used to be.

You change a life by adding

weight in one way or another

to its lightness

(John Popielaski)

Explore also the varying tones used to discuss death, and consider why the speaker must so often first pass through the trial of a winter night to meet the dead, as happens in several poems: “For the airplane bulleted me through blizzard into the belly / Of the funeral parlor (Jackie White); “The sea behind me, black and busy. ….. / I wanted proof that the dead were not done making themselves known” (Sushanth Shyamsundar); and “Arrival in a snowstorm, …. / Around blind corners, the scything current / Sharpening the ice” (D. Eric Parkison). 

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Several poems turn inward to explore interpersonal relationships, measuring physical and emotional distances. Christopher Shipman captures the impermanence of blurring surroundings:

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All of us stuck beside windows
watching shadows shark by,
trying for as long as possible to love
every single one of them.

Ken Holland balances tenderness and mortality, grounding the elegiac in physical, even musical, detail: 

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to my grandfather, a slight
man with a billow of silvery
hair the color of chimes,
head canted to the silvered
knell of his own death

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The theme continues in “Sandalwood Haunting” by Sushanth Shyamsundar, which beautifully evokes the domestic and spiritual traces a loved one leaves behind:

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a ghost does not need to appear.
Sometimes it only has to make the air
remember how a prayer was shaped.

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Rather than imagining grief as a dramatic haunting, it dwells in atmosphere and ritual. What endures is how the absence continues to shape a room, a story, and a consciousness.

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While some poems imagine a distant future (“Wisconsin is an ocean / with a thriving coral reef” (Snežana Žabić)), others turn present-day ecological loss tangible and heartbreaking. The sharpness of the last image of “Red Dust” by Aardhra Chandran matches a reader’s anger at the intrusion and extraction: 

Now concrete occupies the valley.

I carry a fistful of humic loam

from the last ground we stood on.

When I open my hand,

three sharp pitons remain.

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Under all these stars, storms, hauntings, elegies, and crossings, there is also a quiet insistence on connection, and feeling. I will now imagine us all “sharing a cigarette lit by the stars” (Aspen Everett). 

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Thanks for reading!

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This issue was guest-edited by Nathan McDowell. Thank you, Nathan, for helping to approve and arrange the poetry, fiction, and art below. Your strong creative judgment and thoughtful approach to critiquing were crucial to shaping the issue, and I am grateful for your time and the fun collaboration.

— Marina

Editor-in-Chief

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