Dear Reader,

It’s a brilliant late afternoon in January, and Bracken is shifting from one state of being to another—from the scatter of collected pieces that seemed to call to us in our search, to the formed arrangement—this shape, this bloom, that is our new issue.

It impresses me how the sense of transformation runs through this gathering of poetry and visual art. On the most obvious level, there is much breakage, decay, and dying going on in these works. But what seems to be captured, what’s coming across, is the sense of changing states, from one form to another, rather than a sense of ending.

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Poetry

Tina Blade Spawning Season

Lawrence Bridges Ghost Towns

Nicole Brooks Becoming a Field

Patricia Caspers One Saturday in September

M. Cynthia Cheung Two poems

Risa Denenberg Still Life with Moving Parts

Lynn Domina Bobcat

Violeta Garcia-Mendoza Two poems

Mary Beth Hines Flying, Falling

Alicia Hokanson Two poems

Romana Iorga A Perfect Tombstone Has No Name

Jill McCabe Johnson Starlight Tour

Scott LaMascus Migration Dread, Kingfisher County, Oklahoma, 1978

Michael Lauchlan Two poems

Kurt Luchs Dead Snapping Turtle

Melanie McCabe Two poems

Frances McCue Feral Went the Fodder

Lorrie Ness Felling the Sycamore

January Gill O’Neil Ghostlight

Paulann Petersen Wake

Gus Peterson Hand Axe

Ana Reisens The Arrival

Abdulrazaq Salihu Exile

Martha Silano What Isn’t Broken

Judith Skillman Skittish Horse

Tyler Smith The Book of Lilies

Donna Spruijt-Metz Sarah’s Antique Sake Cup

Elinor Ann Walker Three poems

Art