A LETTER FROM THE EDITORS

This is our first titled issue. It is combustible, teetering on the edge of a blaze, waiting to be ignited. The fire under a pot, the obliterating sun. When we received contributor Shakeema Smalls’s “Kindling,” the title made itself known to us. Fire can clear, can cleanse. Can decimate, make way for. It brings to mind the Tower of Destruction tarot card, which calls us to ask, what’s on the other side of the end of the world? In Space is the Place, Sun Ra teleports out of a club on fire to the desert, where he sits across from “The Overseer”. “The Overseer” pulls his own tarot card. Where can fire transport us? What can be seen through the smoke— about fate or future?

This issue deeply considers kinship as well. Figurative family, biological bonds, and belovèds broadly understood. Relationships get reshaped, and built, and contemplated. Over broken bread, on snowy sidewalks, in portraits of thoughtful eyes or a passed-down recipe. Some of these explorations are intertwined with divine presence. In them, prayer might look like being on one’s knees, or calling out to a saint/mother, or a gazelle alighting. Sacred stillness, or desire. Some of these pieces are prayers themselves— articulations of doubt and devotion and love. 

Contributor Shakeema Smalls offers us a guiding line in “Dying Planets”: “I came here to blaze with you.” 

Contributor Julia Mallory calls up “a sonic sacrament.” 

It is always our goal to foster ligaments between us. It’s our goal to make way for each other in a world aflame. As it has for the two issues before it, something cosmic happens when these pieces come together. They magnet to each other in a way that makes us interlocutors rather than curators. 

Come eat with us. Come blaze with us. Come pray. Come commune. Come in.

With love,

The Editors

December 2022