I’ve been speaking to the eyes, so when you lower that disposable blue mask to unveil nose and mouth, I recoil at the sudden revelation of ingress, and I am reminded of the time I went poke poling along the shoreline near San Simeon and released a brown rockfish after it looked at me and I felt its heart beating in my own orbital socket. What I’m trying to say, friends and neighbors, is that the words in our 24th issue may rattle your panes and knock the frame a bit askew, but it’s good to be reminded in this time of Covid that we’re nothing if not a daisy chain of relations. Are you ready for twenty such mnemonics? Then let us begin . . .

***

Bonnie Billet: “My Body Is a Circus” and “Found Object – Composite Rock”

Anhvu Buchanan: “My Father’s Hands” and “Whatever”

Roxana Cazan: “An Archeology of Hurt,” “Ode to a bell pepper,” and “Ode to hunger”

Matt Chelf: “Rubber Hammer”

Matt Dube: “Do what thou wilt”

Zaqary Fekete: “My Queen”

Greg Jensen: “The Years Are Crossed,” “Walk in the Dark,” and “Easy River”

Matt Schumacher: “From the Book of Winds and Catastrophic Weather” and “Automatonophobia”

Danielle Shorr: “House of Birds”

Bill Siegel: “Shock Therapy”

Charles Springer: “Virtuosity” and “Name on It”

Jingshu Helen Yao: “Hair”