Editor’s Letter

Today I’m nostalgic for a rainy day. Brigitte and I roasted up some Ethiopian coffee and sliced up some oranges to share and pair. We turned on Mulatu Astatke’s Tezeta (Nostalgia) - fitting. We sipped in the quiet moment of peace, which was rare for us up to that point. The oranges spritzed and the rain pattered the dirt. The coffee was warm, we were home for the first time.

Every Pisces season, I’m filled with Déjà-vus, Déjà-rêvés and realize the present moments around me melding to my futures ever-changing multi-dimensional reality, whether solemnly or wistfully. Here, I feel illuminated and lucid. This is spring’s song of rebirth to come of the grey foggy nights illuminated by moonglow.

On days like this, in the shadow of full moons, I dream of the future (which up to this point was rare.)

For the years leading up to this, all I knew was fear, a queer future that was cut short. Nothing in sight, reduced to the dustbin of history. Never-ending nightmare cycles of state, family, and interpersonal violence. (And Let’s face it, state violence is far from through.) I dreamed of escaping to somewhere I would be loved unconditionally.

Here, I was nothing. The empty parts of space, not the stars. A line that shakes me to this day from Bob Dylan’s “Masters of War,” which unfortunately resonated as the only future aspiration I could fathom…

You've thrown the worst fear
That can ever be hurled
Fear to bring children
Into the world
For threatening my baby
Unborn and unnamed
You ain't worth the blood
That runs in your veins

When our future is so callously threatened and degraded by threats of unjust war and erasure, we are cut off from life itself as we breathe because we are cut off from imagining a future worth living.

And then children are born anyway and you have to start thinking differently. The future has to be worth living, look at the smile on their face. The radiant giggles of tomorrow. You realize the generations of aspirations before and beyond you. They will have to dream of a different world, and so will we.

There’s something morbidly comforting about the people in power crumbling around you. Illusions dispelled. Empires fall around us like leaves from a tree, but with the weight of pianos. Systems so heinously absurd that it makes you laugh that they continued this long. The future of never-ending violence was always impossible! We were born to create, not destroy! It was us with the power all along.

I see history move slow and then fast. I feel a new world sprouting below me fertilized by the blood and tears of those who cried, suffering before us. And I weep with them that they can not see the blooms of tomorrow with us. And I grieve endlessly with the living, the dying, and wandering, displaced. I scream at how unfair the world is. I rattle my bones because I can’t take being human anymore. So much suffering exists in the world around us, all by the undeserving sick hands of colonial violence.

As cruel wars continue to ravage the world and our siblings around us, we must remind ourselves that it’s not normal to feel nothing. Feel everything. Get angry, cause chaos. Don’t try to make sense of madness. Rattle the bones of fragile systems of hate with love instead. “Freedoms just another word for nothing left to lose” and with all illusions lifted from the world before us, there is nothing left to lose. Uproot everything tilling the soil for tomorrow's beautiful seeds.

I see a radiant future where white supremacy is reduced to the sick nothingness it is and is untied from the seams of our future, fragile as cheap thread. I feel the pulse of a tomorrow where we realize that land destroyed by settlers was never meant for them in the first place. I dream of a future where we roam freely, where language and race isn’t a barrier. Where we plant seeds from our loving hearts, hand in hand. A future where mother tongues meet and the illusioned fog of fear’s destruction is lifted from our radiant, persistent planet. Where babies grow into elders and elders into the humble joyousness of children. Cared for and treasured.

Whenever I think to myself, I want to fucking die right now, I realize this is my spirit's desperate cry for a new beginning. We live through thousands of these iterations in our lives as frustrated, crying, ever-expanding beings. On these days, be kind to your tantrumous self. Dance like a little freak. Throw paint at a wall. Wallow with a friend or scream in the street. Identify that tomorrow doesn’t have to be like yesterday, and will not be by nature of continuation.

Open yourself to everything possible, especially a just future. And on days when you don’t know what’s next, you may walk into an exhibit named “Subliminal.” You find a poem by someone with your name from a past life, calling to you to listen…

We are still united
though no one can tell
through the smoke and mirrors
shattered pieces of the memory
of what once was One
indivisible individuals of the sun
ethereal made material
quiet
Om

Listen to the silence and the sacred songs
sing along
no whispers
every voice must be strong
the world is our own
no one can be here alone
part of this land; flesh and bone
and heart pump blood and soul
with eyes to witness and hands to hold
and pass something along
till we are all gone

-excerpt of supporting poem for Resilient Fragments: Echoes of Diaspora by Dana Dajani

Be all that disgusts and delights you (because you will do just that anyway, whether consciously or not)

The future is ours, let's hold tight. Free the world of violent oppression everywhere.

Interconnected in wonderous solidarity,

-claude joven dana (resident pisces & grandpa of the friend group)

co-signed by katie harrison & peter rogers