Note from the Editors



Amal says: It's cold here in Cornwall, but damply: a cold to sneak up on you, sink its way through your fingerbones while you reflect on how it surely isn't very cold at all. It's cold, but there are already snowdrops brightening the ground, daffodils beginning to appear here and there, and a slow lengthening of light.

This is an issue of needles and thread, sails and shrouds, white hair, marriages, winter berries, bare trees, wood-wives, and several iterations of moon. We give you these poems with chilly hands, and a promise that they too will sink into you and sip primly from the heat of your secret places.

Tremendous thanks go to Rose Lemberg, our guest artist for this issue; Dmitri Zagidulin, meticulous Web Beast of great renown; Jennifer Smith, for proof-reading prowess; Stu West, for miscellaneous maintenance and tea; our incomparable contributors for their poems; and to you, dearest readers, whose patient gazes are as warm breath to our wintering hands.

Fill up a hot water bottle and enjoy.