At the height of the pandemic, I became a new kind of laborer: a student-teacher, a strange, two-faced role.

Teri Vela’s “Superstition Sonnet” invites readers to dispense with everything they think they know about the sonnet. It is not the rules of a form, but the warp and weft of intergenerational violence and prevailing softness that tethers these intricate lines together into a powerful reverse origin story.

In her dazzling suite of text poems, image poems, and art, Tina Lentz-McMillan designates the negative space in every page as an intimate collaborator in her story. Her speaker is an un-silenced witness: of obsession, desire, and the ache of longing—and of what (and who) lives on even in the liminal territory of erasure.

Noelle’s imaginative, multi-layered piece grapples with inherited technologies, nonlinear logic, and finding intergenerational healing through the collective.

Savannah Bowen’s La-Pa-La tells the story of two young siblings living in Haiti—one of whom must grapple with the mysterious disappearance of the other. As the surreal begins to eclipse the real, a beautiful unraveling takes hold, leaving readers to wonder whether love may be the only certainty in this or any universe.

Michelle’s poetry and collage act as a bridge between beloved, departed souls, ancestors lost to undocumented histories, and unborn future lineages.

In a world where writers operate within the confines of page and word limits, Sionnain Buckley is a visionary without regard for parameters. In her poem, “The Time-Space Synesthete Draws You a Picture of What You Can’t See” Buckley renders a world where time has a shape, where every word has weight, and where the experience of glimpsing through the speaker’s vast, synesthetic scope will leave an indelible impression in your worldview.

Haruka’s poetic double-sided accordion visual narrative honors the intertwined destinies of two queer souls, inviting us to share in the relief of healing wounds together across timelines and past lives.

Everywhere in Natasha Loewy’s art, the ordinary and discarded are transmogrified into affective (re)creations that toe the line between tension and fragility, levity and weight, and joy and grief. Despite a wide range of materials used, Loewy’s larger body of work boldly rejects the notion that “good” art will stand the test of time; on the contrary, many of her creations are designed not to resist, but to relent to the passage of time, as all natural things do.

Brian’s painting and poem unearths the depths of connecting with his inner child through the strokes of his paintbrush in an expansive, nonlinear process.

Madeleine Bazil’s poems toe the line between tenderness and unabashed longing. Intimate, urgent, prismatic—yet unassumingly brief—every word is threaded together with the precision of fate, and every stanza is a carefully-crafted room within the palace of the speaker’s vivid memory.

Jody’s audio poems weave a multi-sensory tapestry that unpacks communal tending, self-compassion, and the shedding of self-doubt.

The gift of Jeni Prater’s poems is their effortless ability to render the mundane a miracle, the invisible seen, and the “unconventional” a beautiful new future. As her words search for life, sifting through the complexities of biology and bureaucracy both, her readers are unwittingly captivated by the tenderness of her tireless pursuit.

In her captivating photo essay, Esther peels back the layers of memory to better understand her immigrant family’s migration, survival, and identity journeys.

Erin Langner is well into adulthood when she is suddenly overcome with nostalgia—and guilt—about her long-since-over childhood obsession with the late R&B icon Aaliyah. In her essay, “The Sound of Absence,” Langner is a reporter and poet both, investigating the psychological phenomena of cultural erasure while also penning a heart-achingly tender ode to the things we love and lose, and the things time begs us to leave behind.