Spring 2022
Our Spring 2022 issue features interviews with Carl Phillips and Danté Stewart, visual art by Carolyn Guinzio and others, along with a wealth of poetry, essays, and fiction revolving around themes of Eros in ecology and theology.
“A Squandered Heart is the Root of All Images” by Carolyn Guinzio
“Typewriter Tree Lime Kiln Point” by Jeannine Hall Gailey
The Greenland Shark
by Meghan Kemp-Gee
Slow, slow
as anything, my life,
my autopsy, my
stomach slit and spitting up my
mandible of my
last love
my juvenile polar
bear, my unknown one,
his un
known fate only I know,
the day I found I
knew him
in deep water, deep as
night, how late one night
he, his
saltlogged hairs suspended
like his four long limbs,
dearest
emaciated, hung
in his tremendous
slowness,
elegant descent, to
me so slow, my love
and his
million-dollar ribs crowned
gorgeous glowing with
a crown
of illuminated
anthropods, his holy
slowness,
his hundred-hour cascade
from ice to love four
hundred
year me, I loved him, found
him, only I know.
an excerpt from
If I withheld my passion from everyone who didn’t feel just the same as I do, then yes— the places my heart aches for would remain immediately less crowded. I could enjoy them in solitude. But that isn’t what the planet needs, on a larger scale. It needs people to see these places, love them wildly and fiercely, and channel that love into action. Sharing my wilderness places, directly and in photographs, and drawing other people into my emotional bond with them, plants the seeds of adoration. With time and care, and repeated exposure, they grow. I know that from watching my oldest son. And those seeds will become saplings and strong trees with roots deep in the earth. This is the kind of connection, an integration almost, upon which the preservation of the wild earth relies.
I couldn’t spark that in Katie. I was a little young, and far too naïve. But the lessons I’ve learned, that day and many others since, have gifted me a different framework around which to build. I know now how much work that spark takes, and the importance of not giving up on it. That I need to blow gently, add small amounts of fuel, coax the tiny flame to life. I know to persist, to push back against indifference, to gently correct and encourage. I know that burning need in me can be spread in the right conditions. And I know that in order to maintain that ferocity of spirit, I need to feed my own soul – to take, in turn, from those whose fires burn as bright if not brighter than my own.