. . .
We may sink and settle on the waves. The sea will drum in my ears. The white petals will be darkened with sea water. They will float for a moment and then sink. Rolling over the waves will shoulder me under. Everything falls in a tremendous shower, dissolving me.
Virginia Woolf
. . .
AROHO rides a cresting wave.
The embodiment of our anthem’s vision—to paint a new world where our room is the waves—is transforming from metaphor to a crystalline, voluminous directive, shaping the collective work of which you are a part.
We honor your intuitive artistry in this moment and ask: Which waves are rising for you?
“Myeongsuk/Reverie” by Judy Schavrien
Myeongsuk was a well-known model in the San Francisco Bay Area. My hands, painting with pastels, imagined her in this reverie, sensual, bittersweet.
___________________________
When he read to me, I became light, as bright as the late afternoon fog
Wafting over hilltops near the Golden Gate Bridge.
He sat near me, like a loving father, reading to his little girl.
The dulcet tones, the sonorous sentences, the phrases sublime.
Elevation. Salvation.
Flotation.
The lilt
The tilt
The books are closed now,
But sometimes, in the hush before sleep,
I still hear the rise and fall, the cadence
His voice shaping silence
Into something that loved me
The lilt
The tilt
And then
The lift
Of everything unspoken
“Flotation—The Weightlessness of Words” by Viki NA
We are furloughed
waiting lonely
dispersed like seeds
to the wind
for life to begin again
oh stability
¿dónde estás?
the backs of the mountains are bare
shoulders
shoulders
no longer blazed orange
we are naked
as naked as Cerro Grande
after Las Conchas blazed
as naked as the feeling after sex
when you remember yourself again
oh endings
you never fail to make me cry
And I beg you, dear reader
why am I here?
where am I going?
“Brevity/Neomexicana” image and poem by Mary Roalstad
submission inspired by “Thunderstorms Quench My Thirst” Seed Vessel by Melanie Kirby
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Every song is a story, she said.
We tell as many as we can gather.
To give ourselves, if we are
the only listener, a dignity of privacy
in the good, pure sound. And for
them who might hear you in the street
below your window. We learn the stories
to become what we cannot otherwise.
And tell them newly as our bond with
the sound daily reinvents us
from belly on out to feet.
“The Good, Pure Sound” by Stephanie JT Russell
