Our introductory note is from Rebecca Faulkner, whose striking poem “Housekeeping” leads off this issue. She was first published in Wild Roof Journal in Issue 9. Her full-length collection, Permit Me to Write My Own Ending, is a finalist for the 2024 Sheila Margaret Motton Book Prize, and she has a new collection of poems that engages with the life and work of five mid-century women artists. I’ll hand it to Rebecca to say a few words about Issue 27.

Aaron Lelito, Editor in Chief

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It’s early September in Brooklyn, and a few of Prospect Park’s mighty oak trees already wear a smattering of yellow leaves. Acorns are dropping; their cups, or “squirrel bowls,” as I thought of them as a child, are scattered across the asphalt of Third Street Playground. By the time Issue 27 of Wild Roof Journal is published, the trees will have transformed again, cloaked in scarves of red and gold. This magnificent city park (less trafficked than Central Park and far superior to it, in my humble opinion) has been a haven for me and my family for years now. My daughters grew up climbing trees behind the Picnic House; birthday parties were celebrated on the Long Meadow; and I have been running the same route, around the lake and through the woods, for over a decade.

Perhaps because Rosh Hashanah — Jewish New Year — usually falls in late September, I always think of this season as one of reflection and renewal, of fresh starts and the possibility of growth. Back to school, with pencils sharpened and stiff new shoes. Issue 27 of Wild Roof Journal points to change and transition in many forms. Its art, poetry, and prose speak to us of endings and beginnings, exhausted soil, and open doorways.

Melissa Hughes writes of the “space between glistening surface and ocean floor,” asking the reader how it feels to be monstrous; unmoored. Timothy Geiger’s speaker feels his age “in the rush at my temples,” then adds, “but of course, there is no turning back.”

And if we do turn back, we find nature uprooted — cracks in what we presumed to be solid ground. Visual art reveals what is hidden: surprise, decay, and still the possibility of renewal.

Rich Spang’s remarkable photograph, titled “The Path of Small Scurrying Things,” shows us the point of a roof and its adjacent chimney, barely visible behind a thicket of bare brambles. It’s sinister, save for small patches of blue sky at the very top of the frame.

Emily Krill’s “Handwritten Sea,” the issue’s stunning cover image, provides contrast between sea and sky, with an ocean collaged from blocks of letters which do not float, but hang suspended beneath a yellow yarn sun.

Talia Borochaner powerfully demonstrates ways in which memory can be preserved in “[t]he smell of the lavender dish soap saturated into the washcloths crocheted by the women who came before me.” These “small hauntings” resonate deeply for me, as a writer in thrall to talismans and keepsakes. Mementos provide us with clues to the women who came before us, and the women we are becoming.

In Emily Kerlin’s “Pears,” she writes of hope for a new year: “but this year, / a bowl of pears / on the table, / just ripe and too many.”

And later, Cleo Griffith reminds us that “by being still alive, we make choices. / I choose flowering, struggle though it may be.”

This new issue, with its hopes for a new season, is rich with promise, filled with art and writing that chooses to flower, in spite of struggle. I invite you to join me here, watching the season turn, as Nicholas Olah says, “like a ball of yarn / unwinding / in slow motion, quiet / like the sound / of starting over.”

Rebecca Faulkner
Brooklyn, NY
September 2024