Often, birders will assign phrases to certain birds’ songs such as the Barred Owl supposedly sounds like it is singing to the same inflection as “Who cooks for you?” My favorite saying is for the Carolina Wren. I am god-awful at sound identification, but Carolina Wrens are loud and sound like they say “teakettle, teakettle, teakettle, tea.” If I could make art, it would be like the art in Petite Marie Bette of Wrens just having tea together.
Spring is finally (fucking) here, and it is my favorite season. Though Carolina Wrens are here all year, something about hearing them call for teakettles together as the flowers pop out of the earth and green leaves start budding out of trees is so much different than the idea of them scavenging for tea bits in the color-leached winter. Like Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s “Sonnet 21” of the Sonnets of the Portuguese, I could sing about my love of spring like a cuckoo song—repeating itself over every hill, plain, valley, or wood.
For this issue, our brilliant writers had a completely open theme, and the pieces they sprouted make me proud to bring to you all for the first edition of the spring.
Moon Zaman reflects on how it feels to be a fourth-year and what she has learned of herself in the past four years in "Senior Thesis." In her poem "nothing in nature," Emma Keller contemplates her personal journey from a pre-pandemic version of herself into the present as she begins to see her "petals" regain "a hopeful hue." Juliana Callen offers a collection of poems capturing striking moments as the months go by in "A Collection of Poems as the Months Go By."
In "Connect-dle: Stories of Human Connection as Told Through Puzzles," Andi Sink details how a mobile word game moves to connect people across the globe into a puzzle-loving community. Eryn Rhodes offers us an alluring short story of chasing cats through time in "An Infinite Beacon." Cecilia Moore then offers us a very Macbeth-esque poem in "Of Thick Night and Keen Knife."
