Grab a popsicle and chill out for a spell with our 113th issue. Includes a Bob Dylan concert, an unusual teacup, beach fun, stone fruit, meat-sack meditation, a ouija board, and colorful monocular felines. So, you know, all the necessary ingredients for a rockin’ summer party.
Our one-hundred-and-ninth issue is something of an anomaly, as it contains much loss and destruction—of the environment, of others, of the self. Yet as the nettle’s sting is soothed by the jewelweed that grows alongside it, each piece holds some key ingredient that makes its burdens easier to bear: beauty, laughter, resilience.
There are so many things to worry about right now, and trying to keep up with what we need to do, to think, and to feel threatens to overwhelm us at every moment. We hope the words of James Donlon, Robert Garnham, K. Noel Moore, Nick Olson, Namit V. Shah, and Ali A. Ünal, as well as the art of Angelica Gonzalez, will provide an antidote to despair.
Welp, when lilacs last in the dooryard bloom’d, we weren’t trying to smell them through DIY-bandana face masks while maintaining twelve-foot-diameter personal space bubbles. This shit got hella real and then proceeded to fling itself into our collective fan.
The poems and stories here in our one-hundred-and-eighth issue brought some sparkle to our gloomy days, and we hope they’ll do the same for you. Take a leap with Sarah Sexton’s statuesque protagonist and sing the sheep electric with AR Dugan’s replicant. Ride a Sisyphean ouroboros with P.K. Read, look down on Leatherface with Anne Gresham, and explore the final frontier with Deborah P Kolodji before trying on a new (out)look with Chris Stanton. Don’t leave without admiring the organic fusion cover art of Ajay Kumar (Jordan) Singh.
Take care of yourself and your loved ones. Send us some of your words. We’ll be back with another issue in July, because the more things change, the more we stay the weird.