For many, summer brings a much-needed respite: dazzling evergreen, gentler days, sun-soaked celebrations. Yet this particular summer has been a particularly lethal mix of tragedies and catastrophes, and from the artist’s vantage, the act of creating can feel futile. Yet when the process of compiling issue 6 began, I found myself drawn to the themes that ebb and flow throughout, and to the ways they are inextricably tied to the world in which they are born. Art is not created, nor can it exist, in a vacuum, I’m reminded; and in recent times, this has become an acutely urgent truth. 

 

In a world fraught with grief, we want our sorrow to be meaningful; that is, to point us toward something better. “I wish for the darkness / beneath my eyes to wisp / into a glow over my brows,” Suchita Senthil Kumar tells us in “Genesis.” “Once, / I asked my mother / how much suffering it takes / to martyr,” writes Le Wang in “The Lose/Lose Game.” There is longing, impatience, despair. And yet there is also a liberating power that we reap in confronting the mess, as JoAnneh Nagler describes in “Key West Moon”: “My guilt, my regret … all squeezed out of me for a few hours, left on this dance floor in shimmering sweat.”

 

Where, then, can we find the courage to salvage what’s left? Simple: we look not to logic, but the irrationalities that make us human. “What I mean to say is: if reason be corral, be conclusion, from whence springs this hunger, this need?” asks Esther Ra in “Reasonable Person Standard.” Similarly, in “PACKING IT UP—for artist Alice Aycock,” Michael Salcman writes: “We’ve planned for every contingency Nature allows beyond / the punch it can throw in our faces and my imagination  / of the worst, how it comes out of the sky and settles on a wing.” Salvation derives not from reason, but something more unruly, more compassionate—a willingness to leap even as the ground shifts beneath our feet. And as the world continually changes, so, too, do we. 

 

Flipping through this issue, I am both overwhelmed and profoundly grateful for these voices: their humanity and unwavering fortitude, for how they illuminate the path and call us forward on our own two feet. As you do the same, I urge you to sit with this work for just a little longer. To speak to it, if you wish. In time, it will respond.