From the Editor
Dear Reader,
Twenty-five years ago, Lower Manhattan’s Twin Towers were struck from the sky and burned down. We who watched, mostly on our TVs, were indeed, as the terrorists had intended, terrified. Sudden mass death literally out of the blue shocked us speechless—maybe even secretly shamed us—into an intense if still-wordless feeling of inescapable fragility.
We’d never thought of the skyscrapers as fragile, but those monuments of our market empire, by their stunning collapse, proved themselves so. Safety was an illusion. Our vulnerability so acutely palpable, we, as a nation, mounted a retaliatory response, so that we might feel protected and strong again. Our long counteroffensive would cost many lives.
We’re not very good at holding the truth of our fragility. Even when our bones are strong, our muscles thick with power, and our minds resolute with purpose, still, we are naked before the world’s batterings. And even when there are no attacks heading our way—no missiles or drones or planes—there’s time, with its storms, quakes, tumors and viruses, wearing upon us.
To be able to feel our true fragility—to know, in heart and mind, how unsteady and brief is our presence in life—is a gift. It permits us to ponder and act in our actual context. It wakens our courage to speak now while we can—to offer the hand of comfort or refuge or forgiveness today and not wait.
But this keen awareness of every next moment’s possible finality—it’s almost unbearable. We need the company of others—artists, poets…those who will stand with us in our fragility—to show us its beauty, and to honor the uncanny bravery of breakable, crushable things.
I believe our cover artist, Iskra Johnson, leads us well into the varied renderings of fragility found in this issue’s poems and images. As I revisit the offerings of Issue XV, I feel the steadying presence I need to go on being brave. Here we are, with or without the dearest familiars who’ve traveled with us. Even the mountains are giving way to time’s assault, though in the small thin forms of the living world we may more readily recognize the courage to be.
I hope you’ll find the sort of company you need here in the work we’ve gathered for you. These are days, again, or still, when hardness and destructiveness are worshipped by too many—when shouted commands, pounded fists, and worse replace the dignity of tolerance and restraint. To embrace and uphold our mortal give—risking flex to the edge of fracture, like a shell or a twig—is a bolder grace, and a way toward peace.
—Jed Myers