This year, spring has come to central Florida with shifting moods. Cooler temperatures in the mornings remind me that winter has not quite left, but the air thickens in the afternoon and reminds me of the summer storms to come. Earlier this week, a tornado skipped overhead, heaving bleachers across the tennis courts at school and tearing down fencing while we found shelter, reminding us how quickly the familiar can become undone. It’s a fitting backdrop for this issue, one that lingers in the space between destruction and renewal, the physical and emotional lines that separate past from future.

Selections in our spring issue hold that tension close as they circle themes of memory, place, and transformation. Michelle Lynch’s “Still” opens with imagery that sets the tone for an issue deeply attuned to nature’s rhythms: “Everything here / waits / for recognition to return.” Jeanne L. Bamforth’s “Boundary Monument” further develops this engagement between the natural landscape, history, and experience, grounding us in the weight of both physical and metaphorical boundaries, and of the marks that establish them. Susan L. Lin’s cover image reinforces this issue’s focus on liminality, both in physical space and emotional states, and suggests a recognition of the fleeting yet indelible marks we leave on landscapes, on each other, and on ourselves. Fittingly, the issue closes with Val Margolius’s “Philosophy” and the ways we tether ourselves to the world. The poem’s final lines—”For a moment, / I have never wanted to die”—offer a moment of hard-won clarity, a fragile but real affirmation of life.

Issue Thirty-Six includes poetry and prose by Aiyana Masla, bart plantenga, Cecil Morris, Connemara Wadsworth, Cynthia Pratt, Diane Perazzo, Francis Opila, Jeanne L. Bamforth, Michelle Lynch, Robert W. Hill, Samantha Marie Daniels, Shannon Guglielmo, Stephen Joffe, Stephen Mead, Steve McCown, Val Margolius, Whitney L. Duncan, and William R. Stoddart, and images by Katherine Schander-Triplett and Susan L. Lin. The cover image is by Susan L. Lin.

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 read the issue online and order print copies at this link.