Issue Twenty-Four: Spring 2022

Our spring issue begins and ends with poems of creation and loss. In the opening poem, Madeleine Gallo's "Naming Fireflies" considers the power of speech, of naming as an act of creation. The speaker considers she "could have been this or that" except that her mother's "naming kiss" brought her into being: "here I am, still bodying words she once exhaled." In the concluding poem, the speaker of Jill Evans's "Afterlife" seems to share this sentiment, seen through a lens of loss and grief. The poem's closing questions the act of speech as it relates to life and the meaning that life has: "as if / all / that lasts / after life / leaves / is words?" Issue Twenty-Four also includes poetry and prose by J. Adams Oaks, Becky Boling, Jeff Burt, Alice Campbell Romano, Heather Candels, Kenneth Chamlee, Gretchen Gales, D. E. Green, Elisabeth Harrahy, Cheng Him, Overcomer Ibiteye, Steven McCown, James B. Nicola, Mervyn Seivwright, Philip Venzke, and Christian Ward as well as a series of images by David A. Goodrum.