Here in central Florida, the temperatures have climbed, predictably, into almost triple digits, but we’re still waiting for the seasonal pattern of regular afternoon thunderstorms. The grass that lines the walking path in town has turned brown and brittle under the early summer sun, and there’s an anticipation deep in the ground that longs for rain, for greening and growing.

Our summer issue opens with the loss of this possibility in Keith Morris’s poem “Miasmic,” with “dead tendrils lost in their search / for what will not return,” and there is a search to regain this buried potential that runs through the work in Issue Thirty-Three. Kristel Rietesel-Low’s poem “Property Line” similarly describes “Clay, impenetrable, / covering where prairie once was,” and the death of a butterfly in Madison Silva’s poem “barely left a shadow of an imprint.” There is, however, a mark left on the speaker of that poem, as she considers the effect we’ve had on the world–not in abstract, but in the very real impact we make on the beings we share this space with. Although this impact often feels like a destruction we can’t hope to undo, there is, perhaps, enough that lies dormant to give us that hope. Kelly Terwilliger’s poem “Animal Traces” explores a connection between a boy and the world that begins to seem both magical and also entirely natural: “not deer, / not boy, / just sprung / into the forest.” And at the issue’s conclusion, the speaker of David Q. Hutcheson-Tipton’s poem finds, at last, “a mustard / seed of (?) faith this iota of trust in no explanation in // unknowing.”

Issue Thirty-Three includes poetry and prose by Becky Boling, D. E. Green, David Q. Hutcheson-Tipton, Gregory Meece, Jaime Lam, James B. Nicola, Jamey Gallagher, Jen Schneider, Jimmy T. Christon, John Saint Sylvain, Keith Morris, Kelly Terwilliger, Kristel Rietesel-Low, Madison Silva, Margaret B. Ingraham, Martin Agee, Nicole Gnezda, and Rachel R. Baum, as well as images by Amelia Shields and Kathy Bruce. The cover image is a detail from Kathy Bruce’s Intricacies of Connectivity, which appears in this issue.

Digital and print versions of our spring issue are available through Mag Cloud. Digital versions of the issue are free, and perfect-bound print copies of the issue cost twelve dollars. You can order print copies and read the issue online at this link.