caylee weintraub

EDITOR’S NOTE

The pieces in issue v take readers into the earth and beyond.

In his opening poem, “Miami Circle,” Jay Snodgrass describes the excavation of a fallen Miami hotel. He explores what lies beneath these constructions, and in the ending line, a dark hole tells readers: “you are a recess.” From here, we become part of the underground.

Once inside the earth, these authors continue to literally and metaphorically bury readers within it. Max Kruger-Dull describes a speaker who “buried my father with his reading glasses and a copy of Animal Farm, a winter hat, mittens.” Leslie Lindsay in “Breaking Ground” describes earth so frozen the speaker is locked outside of it. Timothy Michalik, however, imagines an above-ground death in “Motel Ambient,” where the speaker “crossed my arms in sleep/as if I were already dead.”

These writers image people-as-earth and people as creatures-of-earth. Summer J Hart in “A man is an earthworm in this respect” describes a being “strung up by the boots.” Later, she writes of “the man in the wheelhouse/ tightens the silver belly/ of an eel/across his forehead.” Beings in issue v are transcendent: “I step into your life/You leap out of mine,” as Timothy Michalik writes.

Writers take us into the earth and also away from earth. Lauren Johnson in “10,000 Feet Above the Earth” gives us a view of our planet from above: “Glowing roads of traffic flow/slower from this height./I don’t recognize my home/from this lunar point of view.” She and other writers examine how earth has become estranged from us, and in being estranged, becomes an entirely new world of its own.

Welcome to our world. Won’t you stay a while?