LETTER FROM THE EDITOR:
WINGS, HEAT, AND THE HARD SEASON YET FINISHED
BECCA RAE ROSE
To bring KALEIDOSCOPED into existence meant I had to surface from where I’d stored myself. Like emerging from a long sleep, from the cool workings of the underground. It meant coming out of isolation, reaching towards others for help, for support, for stories.
When I think of where I was six months ago when the making of this began, I think of a cave; I think of my dad. When I was young, he took my aunt and uncle spelunking—to traverse the cold damp of the earth’s own belly in the Wind River Range of Wyoming, the ancestral homelands of the Shoshone, Cheyenne, and Apsaalooké people. They didn’t return when they were supposed to—my mom waking in the night to find my dad still wasn’t there. Turns out a hiker had pulled up their rope. After eight hours underground—the steady drip in the dark, tunnels slick and tight like skin, the rock’s subcutaneous layer—they found their exit un-exitable and so they spent the night.
My dad tells me they passed the hours taking turns rubbing each other’s feet, an act so moving to me it comes alive as if my own memory. They each spun the warmth from their hands and passed it around and around to who needed it most, not knowing if what they were waiting for would come. Search and rescue found them in the early morning, and while I wasn’t there, I imagine them, one by one, reaching up the cold shaft for a rope newly thrown. Their eyes adjusting to light they hadn’t known for a whole day’s cycle. Being replenished with the warmth that had been so limited only moments before, that they had gladly given away to each other.
When I think of where I was six months ago when the making of this began, I think of a cave; I think of my dad. When I was young, he took my aunt and uncle spelunking—to traverse the cold damp of the earth’s own belly in the Wind River Range of Wyoming, the ancestral homelands of the Shoshone, Cheyenne, and Apsaalooké people. They didn’t return when they were supposed to—my mom waking in the night to find my dad still wasn’t there. Turns out a hiker had pulled up their rope. After eight hours underground—the steady drip in the dark, tunnels slick and tight like skin, the rock’s subcutaneous layer—they found their exit un-exitable and so they spent the night.
My dad tells me they passed the hours taking turns rubbing each other’s feet, an act so moving to me it comes alive as if my own memory. They each spun the warmth from their hands and passed it around and around to who needed it most, not knowing if what they were waiting for would come. Search and rescue found them in the early morning, and while I wasn’t there, I imagine them, one by one, reaching up the cold shaft for a rope newly thrown. Their eyes adjusting to light they hadn’t known for a whole day’s cycle. Being replenished with the warmth that had been so limited only moments before, that they had gladly given away to each other.
I don’t know if there were bats in the cave of the Wind River, but I like to imagine there were. I have always felt a deep adoration for this feared creature. Their tender huddling. How they hug themselves to sleep with long leather-wings and cradle their young at their feet. How they refuse straight lines in favor of the whirl and dip, that their seemingly erratic flight is a well-evolved way to snatch insects from the wide unfinishings of air.
Bats must reserve their cache of fats for the winter’s low bug supply. They cave. In groups, called roosts. They go into a state of torpor, furry bodies pressed together, better able to stave off the cold when they mass their thousand bodies into one. Their heartbeats slow down, they stop responding to stimuli, they go into a kind of necessary half-death. And bats aren’t the only ones—many species survive this way: mice, hummingbirds, butterflies.
What do you do when you must torpor alone? Who will ward off low temperatures from entering your blood, from dissolving your body’s store for the hard season.
Bats must reserve their cache of fats for the winter’s low bug supply. They cave. In groups, called roosts. They go into a state of torpor, furry bodies pressed together, better able to stave off the cold when they mass their thousand bodies into one. Their heartbeats slow down, they stop responding to stimuli, they go into a kind of necessary half-death. And bats aren’t the only ones—many species survive this way: mice, hummingbirds, butterflies.
What do you do when you must torpor alone? Who will ward off low temperatures from entering your blood, from dissolving your body’s store for the hard season.
It was August when this magazine began in earnest, the first time many of us had talked to each other in months: the toll of social distance. Our first meeting taking place just days after my father was released from the hospital, where for a week he was treated for COVID-19. He hadn’t been getting enough oxygen; his heart working too hard in compensation, arrhythmic. Unable to visit him in recovery I was across town in my mother’s backyard, sitting between a Ponderosa and a Juniper. The editors and I gathered in virtual communion; we talked about kaleidoscopes, transformation, the need to honor what’s unfinished. Like waking, I noticed the trees that flanked me smelled of vanilla and gin.
We put out the call for submissions soon after, wondering if others would emerge to share the heat of a story with us. Almost 150 people responded. We selected sixteen of them, each unfinished in its own way—held together in this collection by the very nature of their loose fastenings. Like a roost of bats in a cave, or the wintering butterflies gathered around the trunk of a pine: one body ready to burst into a thousand refractions. How fitting that this is a kaleidoscope in both its meanings: a mass group of butterflies; a constantly changing sequence.
As I am writing this it is newly March, the very month these creatures all shake off their torpor and take to the air.
We put out the call for submissions soon after, wondering if others would emerge to share the heat of a story with us. Almost 150 people responded. We selected sixteen of them, each unfinished in its own way—held together in this collection by the very nature of their loose fastenings. Like a roost of bats in a cave, or the wintering butterflies gathered around the trunk of a pine: one body ready to burst into a thousand refractions. How fitting that this is a kaleidoscope in both its meanings: a mass group of butterflies; a constantly changing sequence.
As I am writing this it is newly March, the very month these creatures all shake off their torpor and take to the air.
What you’ll find in these pages is an unfinished number of ways to be unfinished, as told by sixteen creators. Unfinished like skin, a shoulder rattled with a tattoo gun, like a body that will listen to what it tells itself. Unfinished like bodies themselves, always shifting, rendered scientific with explanations, chemical collisions that activate soft machinery. Unfinished like sweet spots, but also like loss, how it unravels to make new depths where young deads are mourned, indefinite. Unfinished like heartbreak, the new light let in by fracture. Like butterfly wings fragmented from the abdomen; unfinished like ghosts and their noises. Unfinished like state-sanctioned violence, like a life sectioned off from its living inside a detention center. Unfinished like algae, turning the water thick, growing as far as the lake will let it. Unfinished like erotic, like a one-way street. Unfinished like dreams and their stitchings. Like screams, like want. Like ozone and photons. Like April light. Unfinished like labor and capitalism and hopefully like paychecks. Unfinished like memory, how it eludes the finger’s tip, like liquid, like tides, swelling and also receding. Unfinished like an internet search, how it always tumbles into something else, skirting the perimeter of what it is you are actually looking for. Unfinished like sediment, like syntax, like language, how we try and we try to wrap words around the feeling in a throat or a gut, to expunge it, to relate it, to translate it from my body to yours and yours to mine, and we are always, always, still, searching for the right word, the right phrase, the right feeling, and thus in the unfinished we are always, for each other, reaching.
To create this issue required presence, required reckoning, required us to reach for each other in what felt like the enduring cold of a cave we didn’t know how to exit, trying to warm each other up with what little we had left. When the editorial team agreed to help me make this project reality, it felt like the first time in a while I could locate another body in the dark: a roost, a kaleidoscope to winter with. The sixteen stories that you find here are the rope tossed down the chamber; frayed and unraveling as they are, it is because of them I emerged, kaleidoscoped by the light that they led me to.
This collection is unfinished in that each piece holds fast to the potential for more, but it’s not just that: they are also unfinished in that they are here, waiting, for you. Unfinished in their rejection of the static, in their need to be passed around, a kinetic build from us to you to we. Each piece created from thin, damp air, placed on the page with the trust that the body will keep generating more. Let them warm you. Let them wake you to this new season, where our work remains unfinished. Feel the light and break it with your body. The lift of heat from each facet. We are, all of us, spinning something into being and offering it up.
This collection is unfinished in that each piece holds fast to the potential for more, but it’s not just that: they are also unfinished in that they are here, waiting, for you. Unfinished in their rejection of the static, in their need to be passed around, a kinetic build from us to you to we. Each piece created from thin, damp air, placed on the page with the trust that the body will keep generating more. Let them warm you. Let them wake you to this new season, where our work remains unfinished. Feel the light and break it with your body. The lift of heat from each facet. We are, all of us, spinning something into being and offering it up.
Becca Rae Rose (she/her) is a poet from Sisters, Oregon, a town so small it doesn’t have a single traffic light. She’s a Leo rising double Aries and she has no idea what that means but somehow, it makes sense. On an ideal day you’ll find her in a Ponderosa forest with her feet in a cold creek, drinking a dairy-free milkshake and petting all the dogs. She is an Assistant Poetry Editor for Narrative Magazine and is currently pursuing her MFA in Writing at University of California San Diego. Her work has appeared in iō Literary Journal, InkSpeak, and Tides Zine.
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