Our introductory note is from Marthine Satris. Marthine works as the associate publisher and editor at Heyday, a nonprofit, nonfiction press dedicated to stories and books about California’s history, natural world, and peoples, especially voices speaking to the revitalization of Indigenous Californian culture. She’s interested in capturing the daily beauties, the intersections of humans with our more-than-human world, and the densities and mouthfeel of language that attempt the impossible task of translating material existence into one the reader can experience.

I’ll pass it to Marthine to say a few words about Issue 30.

Aaron Lelito, Editor in Chief

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I have been taking photographs of the Western horizon out my window in Oakland. Not every day, but just about. I take photos of the row of palms that lined the edge of the Borax King’s estate; now they line 9^th Avenue. But really, each day, I am taking a picture of the sky, of its variance between grey muddle and bright white and the pinks of evening. A high heat of blue one day and the socked in morning that follows. And so I am especially drawn to the painting “Spring Shadow” by Jo Rose, included in this issue, which holds a moment of light and the way the angle of the sun shifts colors along a long horizon line of trees.

I grew up near the ocean and so summer should mean the advent of an all-day, all-body fog. I live now at the inland edge of the San Francisco fog belt, where it peels off early most days. It’s properly called, I learned a year or so ago, the marine layer because it comes from the ocean, from our proximity, here in the Bay Area, to the Pacific, and how the heat lifts up the ocean and carries it to us, and then the wall of hot air rising in the Central Valley holds the fog in place over our heads and over the palms, my horizon weather vanes.

In this issue, Devorah Levy-Pearlman has her own palms, mysterious and loud and ominous in the hot winds that barrel down from the mountains in Southern California. I love how the opening lines of “Cul-De-Sac” twist in the wind: “I can’t explain why but I think it grows darker every year. / I can’t explain why the Santa Ana winds whacked / the fan palms like plastic clacker toys.” Chel Campbell’s collages, on the cover and interior, also jar the viewer into taking surprised leaps through metaphor when a dignified woman is behatted in both antlers and a frog in one and in the other a wasp is camouflaged in paper ephemera.

The poems in this summer issue also invite us to shed anthropocentrism and immerse our imaginations in beings entirely other. We hear the voice of a plant in Claire Wolters’s “Goldenrod,” where the plant in question is “flourishing / where I am / not wanted,” a self-determination admired on its own terms. Claire Poshusta’s bees tell us of the danger of a home that seems safe, but under increasing heat turns into a trap: “and we swarmed and we swore / suffocating— / the exit covered with propolis.”

We visit the tidepools and rockpools of the coasts in Victoria Brooks’s piece, where the intertidal speaks in collectivity to a person who yearns to be more individual, less all-consumed by connection — “You don’t want to be an us? We love being an us.” How do we balance our need to be seen for who we are with our need to feel immersed in connection and exchange?

When we first enter the world, we’re severed from our mothers, the first disconnection. I remember the first years of my son’s life, when I felt him growing ever more distant from me, feeling like every crawl, every step, every night he fell asleep on his own was one more thread snapped. But poems in this issue reconnect these webs as well. For Daniel Lurie, in “Salvage,” he and his mother, harvesting a garden in the face of incoming destruction, become like the seagulls at the shore, “poking / around shells and fishbones” — the storm, the seagull, the mother and son all are one in their ravaging, in their salvaging. Piera Chen’s poem “Recessed Luminaires” brings us tenderly and kindly into the world of her mother’s dementia, as the poet finds wonder in the word “elopement,” alongside the fear of loss: she notes the yearning, the unresolvable questing of our minds that even as they fail “in their unremarkable decay, still // know of a place where they will find / the lover waiting.”

Lily Tobias finds another answer for us in her lyrical poem “One, Another”: “I see that there are worlds // we build inside one another, somehow familiar homes.” Swetha Amit mourns the loss of a beloved family home that was respite and offered ancestral connection, beginning her recitation with, “It was our grandparents’ home,” rebuilding her family’s house in words and inviting us in.

To end the issue, and turn a full circle back to the ocean, K.L. Johnston’s “Sand Bucket” opens the portals of moon snails, “their perfect / operculums / then and now” the connection between their ancestors in ancient seas and the sifting sands we share with them today. And Larena Nellies-Ortiz’s photograph of where the land meets the sea, the “Threshold” of an entire continent, reminds us that the coast is not a place, it is a process, a churn and a wearing down, a transformation through waves that rhythmically return yet never repeat, always ushering us farther in and farther on.

Come to the beach on the long days ahead. Find in the wrackline the treasures we can turn into words long after the sea has swept back up the shore.

Marthine Satris