Our introductory note is from poet Kelly R. Samuels. She has two wonderful poems featured in this issue, and she was first published in Wild Roof Journal in Issue 16. Her most recent full-length collection, Oblivescence, was published this year by Red Sweater Press.

Aaron Lelito, Editor in Chief

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I am writing this on the cusp of departing for Banff. It is May and the lakes may still be frozen, there. How strange to think of—given that where I currently am the crabapple trees have already dropped their blossoms and the lilacs faded. Dandelions abound. The Black Valentine green bean seeds I planted are breaking the ground’s surface with their bent necks.

Traveling somewhere new can, obviously, transport us; we might see what we have wished to see for years and be left awestruck. Literature and art also possess this capability. Reading a poem or prose piece, or looking at a painting or photograph for the first time, can serve as introduction—an open window to a startling new landscape.

Interacting with creative works can also resonate by calling up the familiar; here is something I know, something I recognize. Friend, mother, balm.

Issue 26 of Wild Roof Journal does both.

Hannah Larrabee writes of “a black hole that is 40 million times / the mass of our sun and shrouded in clouds of primordial gas” and, yet, also “the inner life of [a] friend.” There is the mother in Katharine Chung’s poem: “this gracious heap lying asleep” while “The leaves of spring outside are restless / under their bud shells.”

We can imagine sitting in Marie Carbone’s chair with its thousands of daffodils behind, and even further beyond those—lights. Or gaze at the saturated colors and suggested watery textures of Matthew Fertel’s “Untitled (from Tempest Respite series),” in itself another world.

There is the unknown and the known. There is also fragility. When reading Sean Stiny’s “Cacti in Caliche” I was reminded of this and of how early I was able to plant my green bean seeds this year. It is not yet summer here in the Upper Midwest, but yesterday it was over 80 degrees. There was, and still is, the haze of wildfire smoke from Canada, driven by southeast winds. Stiny writes of the Southwest: “The shoulder season, a hotelier turn of phrase, is the only time to visit. . . . The heat is unsteadily becoming more inhumane.” Though there is the pink of camellias in Devony Hof’s poem, there is also “an oil-stained wave.” What we travel to see may not be there someday, or may be altered irrevocably. “Yes, the season had changed,” Cerid Jones writes. Best to experience it when you can.

Thankfully, this issue of Wild Roof Journal will be here to return to. Take a look through that window.

Kelly R. Samuels