Our introductory note is written by Amanda Emilio. Amanda contributes the poem “In Praise of Przewalski’s Horses” to this issue. She is a musician and writer from Long Island, New York, and she is a reader for Epiphany. Her recent publication credits include Amethyst Review, Overgrowth, shoegaze literary, and Gather.  

I’ll hand it to Amanda to say a few words about the issue.

Aaron Lelito, Editor in Chief

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It is mid-September here on Long Island. I am listening to the faint dissonance of cricket song and noticing that dusk is deepening nearer to full-night sooner and sooner as each day inches closer to autumn. I’ve always enjoyed the strange in-betweenness that this small window of time has to offer; the cool evening air signals summer’s departure, yet the days’ pleasant warmth tricks me into believing we have more than enough sun-filled hours left ahead. It’s the best of both seasons—nostalgia and anticipation—commingling to create a fleeting middle ground. Within this issue of Wild Roof Journal, you will find writers and artists broadening the scope of this transient space, inviting us to consider its discomforts as well as its beauty.

Kat Zagaria does just this in “Horizons,” where motherhood is like a fulcrum upon which identity tilts, in constant flux: “I am acutely aware of our liminality. Its uncertainty grips me. I falter under the weight of expectations: society’s, my child’s, and my own. But sometimes, for one glorious moment, I am in balance, till it is gone again.” And in Rebecca Keith’s poem “White Flowers Like Phonographs,” there is an ephemeral quality to familiarity, to its state of sweet stasis: “Sometimes / there is a breeze. Sometimes it’s that wet city blanket / we would drive into or leave behind / for as long as we could get away / but always return, garbage rising from the pavement / to greet us.” These pieces have reminded me that life itself is circular and nothing in this world is permanently affixed; there is only nowness and how little of it we can truly command.

Nature can often be our greatest teacher when it comes to putting the art of such surrender into practice. In Hikari Leilani Miya’s poem, the elements are sentient beings, inspiring us to reconfigure our relationship with the unknown: “swamp stops asking where all the time has drained. stops asking / why the rivers bleeding away from them have stopped flowing — / water has once again begun to trickle over parched roots, dried veins.”

Mirroring this motif, in Christy Umberger’s poem “Mountain-Cold Clarity,” faith becomes a revelatory act of yielding to the wilderness in order to trust and pause: “The creek pulls me like it pulls itself. Today, I’m obedient: / stopping, even as I fight a tightness in my belly to leave. . . . I have no reason not to sit. I want to sit. Why / have I always done the thing I don’t want to do?”

There is also a pattern of suspension, absence, and a longing for a reality that is “other” to the one being lived in. Echoing this, Sarah Weir’s photographs feature bodiless dresses, appearing to me as memories fashioned like ghosts: semi-present, yet wholly gone.    

Throughout Issue 35 we are transported by heartfelt honesty and dreamlike images to realms that teeter and cling, journey far and yearn for home again. The writers and artists featured in these pages capture the inscrutable feelings of life spent at the threshold, reimagining potentials in vivid worlds that exist just beyond the borders of limitations and beliefs.

While reading this issue of Wild Roof Journal, I hope you feel a restored sense of connection to the collective experience as I have. As Heather Swan writes, “suddenly I am a particle / in the cascade of earthly change, minuscule, / and yet still capable of wonder and applause.”

Happy reading,

Amanda Emilio