✧☾✧

​​​​

​

​

"I couldn’t / believe, completely, in its pain / until ..." writes Clara Collins in the poem "Prey." This new issue of our journal is, to me, constantly exploring that until and its myriad forms — tensions between what is laid out before us and what could be behind — or what could soften — the cruelty of the season. Like an idealization of someone vs. a more violent reality of who they are. Or a typified New York spring vs. the reality of its flowers, "frozen nubs hardened / dry in physical fear: a carnage of self-protection ("Frozen Magnolias").

​

The questioning in Morgan Liphart's "Georgia O’Keeffe spends six months of the year in New York" I think sets a great tone for considering how history and entropy influence creation: "Windows. Right angles. Entire worlds born / from black. .... / What reds and peaches did we miss / because she left her desert? / What screaming blues?"​

Rather than the celebration typical of spring, the poems that we have received lately do better to represent the current state of things, taking discerning, maybe even sober, long looks at their subjects and tracing the journeys of how they got here. ​How do we reconcile what is with what could have been? How do we land on the language that explains a demarcation of the self (as in the poem "gnash")? 

We also accepted many poems that are more concerned with why it is important to see than with images themselves. Consider how Karl Plank points out the impulse toward classification compared to artistic observation in "Viewfinder," wherein the bone and desert are again O'Keeffe-bright, and the world is "shaped by form." Or, notice how many flower buds proliferate yet are far from romantic symbols. 

​​​

Bethany Altschwager's works of art similarly represent interstitial layers of color and possibility, and constant change:​ "On the surface, the titles appear to be plausible cross streets in New York neighborhoods. In reality, the titles represent new, liminal spaces that do not exist in physical reality.... Preserving images of that which, by its nature, will be washed away, painted over, reconstructed, repaired, or torn down highlights the tension between holding on and letting go."​

​​​​​

​

Thank you for reading, and thank you to our great team.

​​

​

M

​

​​

​

​​

​​​​​​​​​​