Issue six is a weird forest full of noises.
There’s the forest there is,
outside,
and the forest within —
the one that can be eaten, uneaten,
and brought to life by a violin.

There are things that sound
and things that don’t,
and there’s the sound, or something like it,
that that not-sounding makes,
as in Philip Gross’s The Long Acoustics:

‘Night in the hall of long acoustics, the whispering gallery 
      from which no sound, once made, escapes 

nor any no-sound’

and as I write this from a city surrounded
by forests no doubt feeling
the pre-twitch of spring
I can hear on repeat, but soundlessly, 
Schoenberg’s Transfigured Night,
based on the poem of the same name
by Richard Dehmel in which
two lovers walk through a dark forest on a moonlit night.

There are absences of sound that evoke
the absence of forests,
words that fail so much they succeed
in saying what seemed
unsayable, and I think
how great it is to have
four poems by Elisa Gabbert,
who writes, in Poem with a line from Antigone,

‘Strange, how this happened
to me, this nothing happening.’

and how in Personality the speaker says

‘I could be queen of the flowers’.

The poets here use microscopes
on plants and lives and microphones
on the echoes of echoes and explore
what strange alterations one life makes
on another.

In this issue, the soil is resonant,
funny and painful, painfully funny.

As Maria Sledmere writes in Deciduous,

‘Let’s make a new
garden from old wounds.’

Matthew McDonald