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We are so excited to share this new issue of our journal with you! 

The poets below write wildlife, witchcraft, feast, liquor and wine, dance, smoke, music, golden afternoon light, and—most especially—labor into their lines. Though the paint sometimes spills over, many have discovered a new way to move through collation and throng, manipulating their image. Most return to one crucial but quiet center, to a clean bone, to a deep, inherent, ancient knowledge. Like: “the break beneath my ribs / for what we were before: a land / without lines, a known threat" (Rose Marie Torres).

Or, another example:

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What we call instinct now

retold as knowledge of how to survive

cold. What did your body tell me?

What did I tell my own children?
Here we are in this season of
departures, of decisions
to stay or go, this door or that.

……

What if I told you everything you needed to be

was there somewhere once, etched like a code into your bones?

(Mary Kovaleski Byrnes)

Autumn is “the vineyard’s last broth of grape” (Ranjani Neriya), the “discord & growth, chrysalis & broken bone” (Lynn Thayer). It is fragrant and irrepressible decay: “the taste of cigarette smoke, phosphorus, wildfire in the air” (Deirdre Collins) and a “return to the whole, to the land, to the glove” (Heather Bourbeau). It is even a vivid passage through the rain and jazz of the city — a “celebration of failure” (Ken Holland).  

We have so many potential interpretations of new knowledge that can come out of experiences like aging and menopause (Candice Kelsey), examining illness and identity through ekphrasis (Grace Lynn), and loss.​ I am in awe of the gentle freedom that many of these poems remember, search for, and find:

A ripe plum tumbles

shy and speechless from its tree.  

……

the changing same 

of the seasons in a garden 

filled with what does not belong to me

……

the autumn rain 

battering the lantana, shaking the last petals 

from the geranium — so enraptured was I

by my unfurling life.

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(Laura Ann Reed)

As the days shorten and the air gets colder, I hope poetry continues to expand how we receive this season of transition. Thank you for reading!​

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M

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