Not too many weeks ago, the city stilled under historic snowfall, and in the quiet that followed, you could hear the flakes of snow as they made their tiny collisions with the earth. But as the last few weeks have unfolded, all the early blooming things have shined their way back into visible existence, the way things do every spring, revealing yet again what Whitman described as “Urge and urge and urge, / Always the procreant urge of the world,” or the spring that Cummings compared to “a perhaps hand / (which comes carefully / out of Nowhere)arranging / a window,into which people look.”

In the poem that opens this season’s issue, Steven McCown’s “Genesis” describes the emergence of life, with the poem’s speaker feeling himself both overcome and awestruck: “An intruder, / I fumble in genesis.” And there is this feeling for me, seeing the budding life of springtime, feeling myself an observer, but knowing, too, that the new life of spring is also part of me, as I am part of it.

The cover of Issue Twenty is a detail from Creating Space by Laura Becker, and you’ll find this piece along with more of her work inside. Issue Twenty also includes poetry and prose by Sara Altman, Becky Boling, John Brantingham, Sandra Fees, D.E. Green, Soramimi Hanarejima, James Croal Jackson, Karen Mandell, D.S. Maolalai, Steven McCown, Matthew Miller, Amy Nocton, Asher Noel, Joe Oppenheimer, Leah Holbrook Sackett, Heather Sager, Federica Santini, Greg Stidham, and Eric Fisher Stone.

Digital and print versions of this spring 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.