Issue 12 [Winter 2022] – LETTERS JOURNAL

WINTER 2022

Editorial

A friend, when asked what three images they associate with the word “return,” replies immediately: a golden retriever, a boomerang, and death.

The golden retriever: a frenzy of floppy ears and flapping tongue when engrossed in chase. Furious with joy and just as focused, goldens run to retrieve a ball or bone, fetching to return. Their play is a product of pattern, of recurring interactions between themselves and others. Return, here, is ultimately rooted in relationship. It is the result of expectation, contingent on loyalty to places, people, and/or events.

A boomerang—some stick sent out to come back again. These boomerangs’ forms are fitted for their functions. In this image, return occurs according to the natural bent of being, happening along our carved-out curvatures and crafted corners. Where we are whittled-away—and what remains—shapes our movement to and through the world.

And death: that dissolution inhering within any way of going, the break-down latent within all our turnings and re-turnings. Death is a reversion—ashes to ashes and dust to dust. Like death, return retains an ending that is, ultimately, a back-to-the-beginning. To return is to come, in some sense, undone.

In 2022, what might return—whether to “normal” or a more malignant repetition—have to teach us? I’d encourage you to read the following pieces in order, to turn over and tinker with this theme as you view the contents of this publication. I hope, ultimately, that this issue encourages you to return to it, that some piece or poem—whether through relationship, a participation in your natural bent, or a reaching-into that most fundamental feature of yourself undone—beckons you back.

Alexandra Marie Green
Managing Editor

Poetry

Cameron Morse

No Recollection
Labor Day

Katie Schmidt

Sonnet for Maya in Lieu of a Letter

j. d. hart

our soul’s day

Nathan Jowers

The Immolation of STS-107

Rebecca Pickard

Moon Landing