Issue #58

In Issue #58, the art and writing is haunting like the remnants of summer. They speak of memories, ghosts, of a distant past trapped in the world around us. Where there was once laughter, there was also pain. Families reunite, then splinter. When our lives are rapidly changing, how will we adapt? What do we lose and leave behind?

Julia Paul’s poetry portfolio tackles the grief that comes with the speaker’s loss of a beloved child to addiction. “What he couldn’t say: / That he’d been swallowed whole / and couldn’t see a way out.” Instead of just seeing a statistic, we are given a glimpse of life to a vibrant soul who was once cherished and confront a mother’s horror at what has happened.

In Shih-Li Kow’s Golden Boys, we are immediately thrust into complicated family and gender dynamics. A mother and her son are separated by an ocean, but when asked to leave everything behind, she falters. “I have not seen him in person for four years. I worry about accidents on the highway. The new roads might confuse him in the dark. I worry about how much he has changed and what his wife will think of me. I worry,” says our narrator, tethered to something in-between past, present, and future.

Devonia Street by Anna Oberg lingers in both memory and present day. Grappling with the history behind her great-grandfather’s suicide, she writes, “The taste lasts forever, stains my mouth.” Even the silence is haunting, the home in which one died is unable to stay still, life continuing in its special little way.

And it is this we are left asking: how do you remember something now considered lost?

Best to you all,

Rebecca & Ashley