Fall has begun to arrive—slowly, and felt more in cool wisps of pre-dawn air than anywhere else. Storms linger offshore and make their afternoon way here less frequently, but the afternoon sky holds the scent of rain even when no drops fall. The season itself—like so many things in this moment—seems unsettled, pulled between renewal and ruin, between danger and possibility. This precarious liminality, a sense of being suspended between what we believe will endure and what we fear might destroy us, runs throughout this issue.

Our fall issue opens with a pair of prose pieces by Richard Weaver that unsettle the fixity of things: “dreams of ceilings become floors” are challenged by the ceiling, which “refuses to compromise” its place, at least for now. This tension exists, however, in places beyond the physical, as Jen Schneider’s “Why Trust Isn’t Real” traces a fragile line through literature, superheroes, power, and faith, concluding: “It’s always been fiction, / I’m a fool to have believed / my own story.” Kimberly White’s “Ten Days Underwater” insists that “learning to breathe in water is easy, as soon as you agree to drown,” yet Gospel Chinedu’s “Nursing the Ocean after a Cyclone” tells us, “the fishes are drowning in their / own water.” The environment is both witness and subject to the political moment, and the work in this issue suggests that what happens to bodies, to memory, to land, and to water cannot be divorced from systems of power and governance, which carry “burdens . . . vast like the sea of my god.” Like the unsettled season itself, these pieces hold us in that tension between endurance and undoing, asking us to dwell in a possibility that is neither hopeful nor hopeless.

Issue Thirty-Eight includes poetry and prose by Ahrend Torrey, Connor Fisher, Fendy S. Tulodo, Gospel Chinedu, Jen Schneider, Jenny Isaacs, Joanne Esser, John A. deSouza, Kimberly White, Kristin Van Tassel, Richard Weaver, Rob Hardy, Sarah Banks, and Sarah Watkins and images by Kathy Bruce, Marissa Glover, and Richard Fox. The cover image is by Richard Fox.

Digital and print versions of our fall 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.