Our introductory note is from Crystal Cox. Along with Daniel Lurie (published in WRJ Issue 30), Crystal runs Outskirts Literary Journal, and they released their first issue in August. As a writer, Crystal is interested in themes of twinhood, alikeness, familial and generational trauma, rurality, and home. Most recently, her work has appeared in Shō Poetry Journal and Opt West. Crystal also contributed two “Notebook Navigation” writing prompts to the WRJ Substack.

I’ll pass it to Crystal to say a few words about Issue 31.

Aaron Lelito, Editor in Chief

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I’ve been watching train tracks. In a new city, in a new state, waiting for the cars to roll through with their graffiti — artist name on top of artist name on top of corporate logo. The tracks feel omnipresent in Madison, just like they do in any relatively large Midwestern city. I can’t say that the tracks get more interesting each time I poke my head through the blinds and catch their harsh glint of light, but there’s some newness, some varying quality, that asks me to keep looking.

In Issue 31 of Wild Roof Journal, writers and artists are looking — at landscapes, at objects, at themselves. One thread that holds all this observation is light — but it’s not there to guide, in a clichéd sense. These writers and artists yearn to make light tactile, yearn to animate objects, yearn to grasp the fluid exchange between our internal and external worlds.

In her poem “Imagining My Imagination as a Kite,” Rose Strode envisions her creativity as an object she can’t quite grasp, lest it lose its movement and allure: “should I draw it in? / but sudden sun! blinding paraclete! and the red’s / a / blaze / oh / how / do I make / myself / that / light / ?”

In her object collages, cover artist Sarah Walko engenders a childhood love for “I-Spy” searches. “If This Is a Book” places butterflies next to an old circuit board, hangs cascading gold chains from a tiny fork, conglomerates beads until they appear like animals. There’s more to find with each look, more to be gifted with each reflection of light. In a poem brimming with natural imagery, Benjamin Green writes, “He tries to hold still / watches, listens— / so to be given.”

But what happens when we’re given too much? When our observations become oversaturated? When the meaning we’ve assigned accumulates past our understanding? How do we make sense of all we take in? In her elegy “There Is So Much to Hold on To,” Rebekah Chan mourns more than just the passing of a father. The speaker notices her father’s attachments that remain in this world, specifically in the memory and physicality of her own daughter, his granddaughter. Chan asks, “How do we measure time? In stanzas, sunrises, or birds? The distance from the people who left us? My daughter’s shoe size. There is so much to hold on to.”

I’ve been watching the city move around the train tracks, which cut right through the heart of a busy intersection. Cars either slow down and inch over the steel terrain or speed across with a thunk. Early morning runners hop over them without checking their footing. Children skip alongside them, parents in tow — a shortcut to the lakeside park soaked with late-summer humidity. When the train whistles itself into existence, which happens multiple times a day, I’m startled — reminded that the tracks are suggestive of this big machine, that they’re not just an object for me to observe.

Yet, in her self-investigative essay “The Field,” Anna Oberg permits me to think of myself in relation to the world around me. She reflects on photographing herself: “Light must attach itself to something. Some skin, some body. Some flesh. Or, mountain, or flower. A soft animal or hard subject. Some skeleton revealed when a closet door is flung open. This is how I become me — by seeing what the light creates when it lands on my body, my person.”

Light must attach itself to something. I repeat it in my head like an incantation. It’s more complicated than being part of the world I observe, but I’m here. You’re here. Issue 31 is here, and I hope you let its images, its color, its light attach to you like it has to me. As Marcia Trahan writes in this issue’s closing poem, “I was never alone, / that the earth held me in its small soft hands / and would have done so for eternity.”

Crystal Cox