Dear Reader,
I am feeling overwhelmed. At the grandest scale. Every news alert on my phone suggests a new infringement on my rights. Things have gotten so grim that, just before the launching of this issue, we collectively decided to redact my name given my immigrant status. I am so frustrated. With the way that genocide is hedged and euphemized in corporate media. With the emails sent from institutional strongholds that are meant to keep me docile, even as so-called leaders (elected, appointed, I can’t keep track) capitulate in the face of this particularly loathsome hegemon. I am frustrated with myself, my own feelings of helplessness, even as I have a mostly comfortable existence in the face of this global suffering, this sadness, this despair. If you too feel this way, we offer Issue 20 as ample, shimmering evidence of our shared humanity.
The powerful, incisive stories, essays, and poems in this issue insist that we wake up. They say, come on now, enough of that. Or, as Kamelya Omayma Youssef’s poem "Karaoke 2024" puts it, “don’t write death on what / is screaming Life.” If you too feel overwhelmed, there is work here that will ground you. These pieces will reconnect you to your community, your shared humanity, your love. There is too much on the line. Ayling Dominguez’s “Ars Poetica as Sacrificial Offering” demands your attention, your focus “Eat my heart, I dare you.” Well, alright then.
Turn towards voices demanding that they be heard. « Je suis venu ici pour dire ma vérité, » says Lou, the survivor of a Nigerian bus attack in Chisom Anarah’s “The Language of Truth and Guilt.” As Lou and Anarah’s narrator negotiate, our inherited colonial languages themselves are fraught—nonetheless, this tool we have can be used to blur and obfuscate truth. And yet, the pieces in this issue invite us to work beyond language, beyond its enclosures. Jo Bears’ poem “Classification of Terms” exposes lexicographical gaps, the limits of taxonomy. Instead: “Praise the archive of the body, how the sun dips / pools of amber behind my eyes & how / I remember what I cannot yet understand.”
Let us find playfulness at the limits of language. Shaan Sachdev’s “Bro as Urinal: 24 Vignettes of the Masculine Vocative” chews and spits up our cultural received understanding of “bro culture,” tongue-kissing it to us, baby bird style. Is that too much? I’m inspired by Sachdev, whose work is at home in the grime of a urinal as it is in an alternate world without bro, where, instead of “the ontological sham sword fight to the sweaty, sniggering end,” the bathroom urinals become a place where “our three men, shoulder to shoulder, fall upon each other, an accidental orgy.” Not so in Charlie Hart's “Joyride,” where an all-too-familiar Florida sees gators and transphobes multiply and grow more menacing in equal measure. As narrator Julius’ herpetophobia (fear of reptiles, not herpes!) tracks alongside the growing threat of state-sanctioned bodily harm, there is fear but there is human connection too. In a handshake between two men (bros?), in a bumper sticker so absurd you can only laugh: “Live, Laugh, Love. And if that doesn’t work, Load, Aim, Fire.”
And while Issue 20 skewers masculinity, femininity too is up for intimate exploration. Girlhood, like “bro,” is another term oft-repeated and taken for granted. In this issue, girlhood is re-written and re-inscribed upon. For Erin Noehre, it is that “that rawbone / girlhood place we touch and tug / misdeeds from.” In the calamitous face of these boundaries, the speaker of Noehre’s “rebellion” flouts convention, she “sneaks a wayward glance.” Dana Ysabel’s speaker meditates on her mother, who “grows up by the oil depot, spends girlhood / breathing petroleum.” Ironically, she recounts, “I am told this is a narrative of resilience.” Girlhood is re-visited in Shelby Pinkham’s “GIRLWOUND,” where it manifests as the loss of childhood innocence. “I want to know my sister’s inaudible sounds,” Pinkham begs, but “how do you describe a / voice you no longer remember?” Moreover, Taylor Jordan Holmes’ “Supplications” interrogates the Venus myth, asks for a deeper understanding of gender: “Venus, we understand, is not a place to arrive at or to leave, but a reflective surface, a beckon to turn inward. Not a body but a celestial cluster of impatient meanings.” Our fleshly bodies serve as a mere presentation of our souls. Holmes, for her part, points to the fragile ecstasy of erotic touch with another, how it connects us more fully to ourselves, the sheer wonder of being messily, numinously alive.
So slow down. Take a minute. Reject the turnover of the news cycle; breathe into these moments. Spend some time with these pieces, with your people. Derek Yen’s “Vertigo on the Train” offers an everyday beauty, “Finding faith in homing to people. Homing / like the humming of a HEPA filter. / Finding each other.” And don’t forget to look back. Kashi Saloni’s “cleansed body is made holy (2 Timothy 2:21)” reminds you that the past is not the better country, that this colonial, genocidal present is reflected in the stains of history. However, Saloni insists, there have always been people praying, in all their forms, “a child’s / handwritten letter in the Arabic alphabet / neatly folded and stamped to a mother overseas.”
I leave you with the call-and-response in alma valdez-garcia & imogen xtian smith’s poems. In “spit takes,” valdez-garcia and smith’s speaker asks continually, “Where are we going?” I read an answer in their poem “willing 2b/curious”: “if you don’t understand the language, learn it.”
Let us learn each other’s languages. They give us the strength to envision and fight for a better world.
Anonymous Editor
October 2025
