German designer Maku Latua’s art graces the cover of our fall issue. Birds drape the buildings of a community while a giant mechanical bird fills the sky, flying past the town into the future. Many of the pieces in this issue exemplify a bird’s eye view of life. The main character of Megan Elliott’s “High Noon” suddenly sees the big picture of her marriage after her cat is killed. She realizes that despite questionable decision in their past, she and her husband are on the right path now. In Caroline Preziosi’s poem “Four Landscapes Looking West,” the narrator looks across the land and can see everything, large and small, from “the horizon cut / out of paper / the hills / in amber hide” to the “sunspots / printed down fingers / of light.”

 

In the creative nonfiction essay “Woven Lives: A Meditation on Yarn” debut writer Megan Largent sees how big events in life can be equated to the delicate work of crocheting. When a relative dies, she soars above the sadness and sees how “ the last row of his story had been finished, the string cut and tied off, even as our own stitches continued to spiral into more complex patterns of grief.” The main character in The Well in the Jungle, by Salin Shakya, is not looking down, but rather looking up. Trapped in a well, he can only see the small picture of his brief life, though the reader sees the bigger picture of horrors of war.

 

I hope this issues leaves you as the bird on our cover, gliding gently into the warm sky, able to see how all of us are small stitches in the larger, more beautiful design of the world we cannot see without wings.

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Enjoy.

 

Stephanie Katz

Editor-In-Chief