Note from the Editors
We write to you on a 48-degree day in early November, two days after an 80-degree day in early November. The trees hang onto the very last of their dry leaves, the sun sets as the school day ends, yet I am still sweating walking to class. I take my sweaters out of my winter duffel under the bed and then put them back. The outside can’t decide when to finally drop into cold; I can’t decide which coat to put on in the morning.
We anticipate the eerie cold with unsettled hearts, minds waiting for the other shoe to drop. We feel the world off-kilter, and it seems like you all feel it, too; we opened our submissions and it all came pouring in: the birds, the empty & dark highways, the people lost, the animals stuck, the bug infestations, the roadkill, the time loops, the religious angst, and the skeletons. And we welcome them with open arms.
Get lost down the endless, endless freeway in Emma Kerkman’s “Truck Dog” to land before the peeping skeleton in Maia Macek’s “Midnight”—or rust away like everything else in Jae Thomes’ “In God We (t)Rust.” Even among the rot and decay that rule over these pages, there’s the respite of Kate Carman’s transportive “West Gilgo” and nostalgia of Ally Feisel’s “How to Build a Time Machine,” among other works that evoke times, places, and seasons past. But even while you reminisce, don’t forget that the birds still follow you, always over your shoulder—from Kerkman’s “Killdeer Church” to Thomes’ “I Invited the Crow for a Cup of Tea.”
Each and every piece in this issue tethered themselves to one another and tangled into something inseparable and harmonic like the branches in Becca Perry’s “Texture.” The art that follows is vulnerable and loud, blunt and daring, as epitomized in Abigail Moone’s “Meditation in a State of Urgency and Hope”: “I want to shock you. Memorize me, world.”
We recommend you peruse these pages with a mug of hot tea—if it’s cold enough for that.
—Eva Glassman ‘23 & Lucy Seward ‘24