editor’s note
CAYLEE WEINTRAUB
We have been conditioned in our contemporary moment to hold life and death as opposing forces. The writers in this issue, however, dissolve this border.
In Ana Caballero’s poem “Mammal Thirteen,” she writes in the opening line “Me breed baby be.” There is both a genesis of language and existence in this moment, which culminates in the final line “Me break baby breathe.” Here, Caballero links life and death together in one moment that functions as simultaneous creation and destruction.
This theme lingers in other stories and poems of this issue. S.E. Hartz’s “Field Notes of a Climate Scientist, 2020” invokes the dying natural world: “I have signed on/as a night watchman for the end of the world” as well as the tacit possibility of renewal and destruction in the final line: “How lucky am I, to mourn only futures?”
The works in this issue probe at the borders of consciousness and existence. They push language to its limits to express the complications of daily existence. The writers in this issue craft moments which, like slipknots, come undone when pulled. Come on in and take a look around, won’t you?
Caylee Weintraub studies at Florida Gulf Coast University. Her writing has appeared in Narrative Magazine, Polyphony Lit, Imagine, The Word Exchange, and The Mangrove Review. She has received the Claudia Ann Seaman Award for Fiction, Honorable Mention in the Johns Hopkin's Creative Minds Fiction contest, and first place in Florida Gulf Coast University's Writing Awards fiction and nonfiction categories. She is an alumna of the Yale Writer’s Workshop, The Kenyon Review Writers Program, and Iowa Young Writers’ Studio.