EDITOR’S NOTE
Caylee Weintraub

In the opening piece of issue vii, Siarra Riehl writes, “Speak to me in the voice of the lost woman.” Throughout these pieces, we hear echoes of lost voices.

In Heather Bartos’s nonfiction piece, “Apple Tree,” she describes her difficulty deciding whether or not to chop down an apple tree in her yard. Alida Dean writes of lost jokes with her ex, while the groom in Adam Carter’s flash fiction takes a risk for the woman he loves, as does the narrator in Alice Archer’s “Lefty.” In R.S. O’Toole’s “Defection,” two stacked backpacks are mistaken for a boy and Steffi Drewes confronts the unnameable in her poem “inklings.” Jim Richards writes of the painful death of a son and the tar of grief, and Camille Carter writes of women dressing in furs and people taking the moon; all of these pieces are echoing with voices that don’t appear in the writing, but which specter the background nevertheless.

In this issue, I invite you to listen for these lost voices and trust them to guide you to something beautiful.