Even here in Florida, the winter is a dying back, and the question of what is retained in that death–what truth or beauty remains, and how it will emerge as the world cycles toward spring–is central to many of the pieces in our winter issue.
In “& Friend,” the poem by Aiyana Masla that opens our winter issue, the speaker searches for “a poem that will save your life” by cutting to the core of the present moment, a core that holds beauty in spite of the feeling of imminent loss the poem evokes. Many of the pieces in this issue grapple with loss, with the attempt to hold on to beauty and meaning in the final moments, with the question of what remains when this present folds into an uncertain future. As Marda Messick’s “What’s Inside Us” concludes, “What’s inside us, this being / human, aches”–or Susan Eve Haar’s “Seventy”: “The body knows, but it’s not talking.” There is an uncertain transformation that holds the possibility for what Paul Ilechko’s sonnet calls “something new and unheard of” in the future beyond the death of the present moment, a future envisioned sometimes as the flight of birds, or in the recognition found in Abigail Myers’s “The Sower” that the individual is “the mother bird and the egg and the nest.”
Issue Thirty-One includes poetry and prose by Abigail Myers, Aiyana Masla, Alan S. Ambrisco, Alex Missall, Bart Edelman, Becky Boling, D. E. Green, Fred Chandler, Jeff Burt, Jen Schneider, John Repp, Jonathan Chibuike Ukah, Liza Libes, Marda Messick, Monica Fuglei, Nancy Nowak, Patricia Zylius, Paul Ilechko, Sandy Feinstein, Steve McCown, and Susan Eve Haar as well as images by GJ Gillespie and Angel T. Dionne. The issue’s cover image is a collage by GJ Gillespie.
Digital and print versions of our winter issue are available through Mag Cloud. Digital versions of the issue are free, and perfect-bound print copies of the issue will cost twelve dollars. You can order print copies and read the issue online at this link.
WILLOWS WEPT REVIEW 