For this issue, we are examining the building blocks that make up our society and considering how to dismantle them so that we might create anew.

“Prayer appeared before me once I reminded myself of my own poetry, which is the most authentic form of prayer I know.”

“My goal was to create space for those most vulnerable and amplify the voices of those on the fringes of the video game community.”

“This anthology is an unfinished map of queer possibility.”

“No ending—individual or collective—comes without transformation.”

For this issue, we want to know what it means to take action amid the everyday crises that we are living through, and what that action can look like: gathering our resources, our people, our time.

What do rivers remember and where do they invite us? I invite you to take your time with the rivers, questions, and longings in this issue.

When I curated this anthology, I was fixated on the idea of “change”: What it means, what it holds, and what it can be.

Whenever I can’t stop thinking about something, I know I should write about it.

With every subsequent phase of this process undergone, a new layer of sinew, muscle, and flesh was added to the skeleton of my dream.

For this issue, we want you to look at what and who is near you. Here, we are thinking about the word proximity. Its silences, opportunities, and actualities.

What are the institutions — family, religion, education, and beyond — that dictate your understanding of the world, and where do you locate the sting of disillusionment?

What we need is a value system, and not just values. How can we create a system that helps us understand and structure our lives in a way that allows us to thrive by environmental design?

What does it mean to prize joy, to make it a personal discipline? How do we claim the kind of joy that creates a rupture for passage through all the horror and despair?

Regardless of what segment of life we come from, the context of our everyday has been disrupted; how, then, can we rethink how we fit into the social fabric?