We intended to start this journal – conceived at a small cocktail bar in the Flatbush neighborhood of Brooklyn – in the fall of 2023. It seems incredible that this was two years ago and so much shit has happened since then. There is of course the orange elephant in the room. The U.S. shifted from a state that seemed bleak but maybe manageable to this chaotic mess of bad intentions. It was also a time of stark transitions personally – a cancer diagnosis and a year of treatments, regular heartache, job stresses and radical transformations, family struggles and celebrations. You know, all the stuff that makes a life hard but somehow totally worth living. 

When we began to select the poems for this first issue, we noticed the way that memory works in each piece. And how the poems speak for and to our own lived experiences. This is memory without nostalgia, its sterility, its scaffolding over what is difficult and true. These poems are an antidote to the nostalgia trip. They let us ride along with our own vulnerability, with all the detritus that is stuck inside ourselves –  and revel in that. In whatever this current moment is.