EDITORS’ NOTE

“The future is something I can breathe in. I can breathe in time like words, like complete sentences.”

My Diary, Billy-Ray Belcourt

Encompassing a body is our first introduction and chance at sovereignty, so what does it mean when our bodies become landlocked states? How do we escape the oppressing confines of surveyed statehood? These are the quandaries at the heart of all the pieces in this year’s Summer Issue. Throttled into scenes of familial pasts, the too real present, and extraordinary futures, our authors and artists show us what it means to listen to the rumbling inside your body that mimics the hum of the land underneath you.

As you wander through these pieces, think through the way your breath changes with each one of them. Catch the hold that sits in your throat while reading through Indigenous Fiction Prize winner, Jessica Doe’s story, Poached, where stereotypes and exploitation become the perfect stomping ground for Native feminist interventions. Feel the sigh that releases upon being confronted by the words in Tacey M. Atsitty’s Elegy for My Breath, “I want to heave—/just let it all in—or out, breath near its / breaking height.”

For the Summer 2025 edition, submissions did not disappoint, especially alongside our inaugural Indigenous Fiction Prize. A prize following the same sentiment as last issue’s Indigenous Poetry Prize, to center and publish Indigenous voices. As all the members of our brilliant fiction staff read and curated submissions to hand off to our prize judge, the wondrous and always inviting Debra Magpie Earling, certain patterns arose, ones that bled onto the art, non-fiction, and poetry selections. Images and interventions centered on grief, bodies, bodies of land, and the tensions of assimilation and reculturation created a map of breaths. A landscape filled with shutters, sighs, heaves, waves and phews that give way for an autonomous and liberated future. A future constructed and ignited by every one of the 18 writers and artists who have contributed to this issue.

As we review, we anticipate a theme to emerge organically. Pieces come in, we read and discuss and lend a hand at carving and assembling a cohesive issue whose theme arises as each step comes.

The rumbling rises, begging for relief, for breath, whether it be a sigh or a heave. To make room for breath is to make room for the expansion of an existence once destroyed. The inhale, a breath of the past, speaks to the history of our body and the land. A sentiment Marie Anne Arreola contemplates in The Grammar of Collapse, “Is culture the shape we make in the air when we resist? Can we prefigure liberation-as if resistance were not just a performance, but a blueprint?” Thus, as we exhale, we let go, we anticipate the many acts that have been humming inside of us all along: rewriting, revenge, remembering, and reflection.