A few weeks ago in Seattle, the rain was a cold, steady mist that made itself known whether we wanted it to or not. While we were there, we visited the waterfall at Snoqualmie and walked the market at Pike Place, past fish laid out on ice and produce stacked for sale—ordinary scenes shaped by water and work. Not long after we returned home, though, an atmospheric river caused historic flooding across the state, and the gentle falls at Snoqualmie became a torrent as the river reached its highest levels in a decade. These events reframed those earlier moments, making clear how quickly water can shift from presence to force. This issue grows out of a similar attention, examining the ways that human lives are entangled with the natural systems that sustain us—and, at times, overwhelm us. The work in this issue asks us to notice what we depend on, what we change, and what continues beyond our control.

Our new winter issue dwells in deep time and lived aftermath, moving between the geologic, the historical, and the intimately human. John Brantingham’s opening suite reminds us that “you can still see the ice age if you know / how to look,” positioning the natural world as both record and witness, its forces ongoing rather than concluded. Throughout the issue, landscapes hold memory and consequence: Sara Wilson’s encroaching woodlot, Cecil Morris’s arid west where bodies and weather strain against one another, and Barbara Daniels’s heron poised at the edge of water and loss. Other pieces reckon with inheritance and rupture more directly: Scott T. Hutchison traces human violence back to the first lifted bone, while Thomas Belton’s “Six Simple Machines” collapses myth, science, and war into a single turning mechanism. The body, too, is shaped by these forces: Becky Boling writes of aging and scale, Christine Potter of shelter and impermanence, Michelle McMillan-Holifield of what the ground absorbs and remembers. In prose, Maxwell Pearl’s meditation on loving trees insists on presence and refuge in a world that has made nature unsafe for many, while Joe Hilliard’s remembered fields become sites where history repeats itself, endlessly falling. The work in this issue resists easy resolution, asking us instead to sit with what endures—ice, wind, grief, wonder—and to recognize that to live within the natural world is also to live within its long, unsettled reckoning.

Issue Thirty-Nine includes poetry and prose by Angelica Esquivel, Barbara Daniels, Becky Boling, Carol Shillibeer, Cecil Morris, Christine Potter, D. E. Green, Joe Hilliard, John Brantingham, Laura Hannett, Maria Kalliokoski, Maxwell Pearl, Michael T. Young, Michelle McMillan-Holifield, Sara Wilson, Scott T. Hutchison, and Thomas Belton, and images by Olivia Do and Ryan Kittleman. The cover image is by Ana Brotas.

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.