ISSUE 9.2 welcomeissue contents> poetry> fiction> nonfictioncontributorsinterviewsfeatured artour editors Mea Andrews“Languages are a way of connection and knowing even bits of other languages opens up your ability to connect with people and their culture and experiences.” Jessica Baker“both were leaving me with a lot of unresolved anger, but while I couldn’t do anything about Katie, I could take care of the ants.” Ellery Beck“When attempting to make things strange and surprising, smaller direct images in between the more shocking ones tend to keep my poems grounded.” Cameron Bocanegra“I imagined the Bible’s women as modern women and saw them scapegoated and shamed religiously at school.” Rohan Buettel“I felt a strong sense of frustration, boredom and a desire for activity. Yet a human desire for action has no effect on the inexorable processes of nature.” Chelsea L. Cobb“every single person who has an Achilles’ heel, no matter their gender, sexual orientation, belief, creed, etc., has this body part on them that is named after a (rumored) queer demigod.” Hannah Dow“But I realized at a certain point in my life that placing my trust in men, as well as Catholicism—bodies that professed to want only to protect me—led to disillusionment because of the false promises and manipulation” Jessica Furtado“People expect romanticism and flowery phrases, but love and poetry are so much messier than that. Love is unexpected and chaotic.” Jen Gardner“I told him that it felt like women’s minds would never be as valued as men’s bodies.” David Gillette“I can’t imagine building a story without first knowing where it is taking place since that gives me a stage where I can see my characters move and interact.” E Kerr“I think the multimodality of the work directly correlates to how trauma and identity manifest; the representations of trauma and identity in my writing and my artwork, are as close as I can get to my even more material traumatic experiences and identity expressions.” Elizabeth Kirkhorn“The writing process itself—tackling layer by layer, section by section, admitting to more and more with each pass—definitely felt reflective of how we come to terms with our battle scars.” David Meischen“The narrative drops back and moves forward, interweaving scenes and events that allow me to explore two versions of what family can mean.” J. B. Polk“What if? What if, tomorrow, I open a book, or sit at my computer and discover I can’t remember words?” Shalini Rana“This is the first angry poem I’ve written, tied directly to this racial microaggression, but it actually arrived out of writing and thinking about my favorite tree, which used to live on my university’s campus before it got cut down.” Amanda Roth“For a while, it felt like the cardinals that arrived at our backyard feeder were our only friends.” Frankie A. Soto“I want to be authentic and flawed and human. I want the reader to know there is bravery in emotional connection, in redemption, in honesty within yourself.” Samantha Steiner“I understood this story was about the Big Questions, the who-am-I and how-big-is-this-universe questions. A hypothetical planet and a mentally vulnerable protagonist feel like entry points into that conversation.” Meghan Sterling“While being a mother is the tenderest, most powerful experience of my life, the longing for solitude and wilderness can become overwhelming.” Karen J. Weyant“In essence, I didn’t start this piece exploring different pressures between young men and women, but it turned out that way.”
