Issue #65

With Issue #65 coming out just in time for Winter Solstice, which is somehow already around the corner tomorrow, we’re humbled and excited to put forth an issue that encapsulates a mindscape which can best be described as hiding in plain sight as birds overlook the frost and snow that covers us, pockets of time unfurling. Issue #65 contains a series of works that expose internal and external wounds and conditions, demonstrating on a global scale what lies underneath the frost.

We found Marcy Rae Henry’s poetry portfolio quite appealing with lines like “we are abstract in the dark / a mosaic of yellow tiles floating out like bees / almost a dead cow in water,” and “god has left us alone on the island / doing impressions of humans / having a bad day.” The emerging voice here is unique and intoxicating, reminding us that there’s so much more to life than what meets the eye or that which exists within the confines of what we thought we knew to be true.

“Field,” our featured fiction selection by Isa Lorenzo, is a beautiful and timely story told through the eyes of a child. Based off of a true event in which fifty-eight people were killed in a field due to politics, a ten-year-old child in the Philippines is forced to confront the brutal reality of governmental policy and corruption. A timely piece, it tells us, “ How did you get over a massacre? You didn’t. You never would.”

“Solution Phase” by Libby Horton is a captivating creative nonfiction piece that merges one human’s experience with recovering their mental health with clinical descriptions of the chemistry of mental illness. Horton drops the reader into the narrative with the second person “you,” allowing us an intimate, fleeting look into a life colored with illness, chemistry, and everyday encounters. Even when things seem simple on the outside, “Serotonin seems simple and accessible. C10H12N2O. Surely there is more to my story than the 25 atoms in this molecule.”

We wish you peace and happiness as winter approaches.

Best,
Rebecca & Ashley