Letters from the Editors
Dear Reader,
Let me begin by stating the obvious: we need art more than ever right now. We need honest and courageous words, and we need people thoughtfully engaging with them. Thank you for being here and taking the time to listen to the voices speaking through Issue 90 of Bellingham Review.
This issue is our largest yet. The volume of submissions we receive continues growing as the journal gains more attention and traction, so narrowing down our selections becomes increasingly challenging—not a bad problem to have! Please enjoy the breadth of experience and depth of perspective to be found within.
A few highlights include Palestinian poet Mariam Mohammed Al Khateeb’s “We return to ourselves exhausted from death”— translated by Sarkawt Sabir—which challenges the personal/political dichotomy with lines like: “I lie to my house when I tell it that I’ll come back as soon as this genocide ends.” Elisabeth Vasquez Hein’s electrifying essay “Given Names” offers a similar reflection but under different circumstances: “You know from numerous goodbyes that when you leave, to make it easier, you tell yourself you’ll be back.” And in “Eulogy for a Microsoft AI Chatbot,” Meredith Shepherd probes the nuances of humans’ relationships with non-human animals and AI personalities, offering nuanced insight into the violence humans inflict on each other and the love that persists even when it doesn’t necessarily prevail.
Issue 90 also premiers Window Inside, a folio featuring the work of incarcerated writers. For a little more information about this project, please visit the folio, where you’ll find a brief introduction along with the featured submissions. And while you’re there, don’t miss Johnny Lynch’s “Deaths of Despair,” a thoroughly-researched and deeply-felt essay that deserves a thoughtful audience.
Thank you to the writers, editors, first readers, and folio volunteers who made this issue possible. And again, thank you, dear readers, for taking the time to be here with us. Since Managing Editor of Bellingham Review is a year-long graduate student position, I’ll be passing the torch to the one and only Sam X. Wong for the next couple of issues. It’s been a pleasure and honor to be part of this project, and I wish you happiness, health, love, peace, justice, safety, and all the literature your heart desires.
Respectfully,
Kelsey Tribble Managing Editor
My tenure at Bellingham Review has been too short, the number of wonderful stories and poems I’ve read too few, the time spent with authors and readers at events like AWP and Fire & Story too brief.
As the world cracks open and continuously spills its violence and hatred a not-enoughness, all of the poems and stories and people I’ve encountered at Bellingham Review work together to cool the fire, erode stone, compost dead things into the fuel of new life.
In this issue, Alex Juffer’s “At the Rest Stop in Ohio” brings readers into the mind of a child as they witness a danger they can’t name. Meredith Shepherd explores embodiment, life, death, and AI in “Eulogy for a Microsoft AI Chatbot.” Dr. Adam Faulkner examines the roots of queer survival in “The Queerest Thing About Aspen.”
Through fear, through technological fascism, through fire, through political uncertainty, each of the stories you find in this issue whisper, live. It’s a message I’ll carry with me as I leave the Bellingham Review and forge new paths in other territory.
Sincerely,
Abby Kidd
Assistant Managing Editor
Dear readers,
I just finished making 100 ceramic dumplings with poetry prompts written in underglaze. Some prompts: who nourishes you? What verb orbits you? I sanded these porcelain dumplings a few days ago, polishing rough edges and yet, some are still gritty to the touch. In sharing Issue 90 with you all — one of our largest issues yet — I am humbled and in awe of all of the poems, stories, essays, and hybrid pieces here, many of which hold that sharpness alongside love.
Our cover artist Isha Camara shares two evocative pieces from her “MASK OFF: an understanding of slavery thru blk fem bodies” series. As a poet and visual artist, she writes: “I choose to honor the beauty of Black Womyn, to force the viewer to look into the gazes of these Womyn and listen. To bear the discomfort of our hyper-sexualization, our bodies bend for labor, into delivering generations of enslaved children, all for the sake of the white supremacist machine, manifest destiny, and her consumptive mission.” In opening this issue, many of these pieces call forth a seeing, a listening through art. From Charles Hill, an incarcerated poet, in “Heart on the Line”: “Dial tone, foot stone, full-blown, gemstone / I bask in the sun a jewel for no one to see.” And in Rodrick Minor’s “After Another Dialysis Treatment”: “Say what? Tired baby. / Lord took. Her pain. // Come home. / To what?” And in Ann Daniel Long’s “A Glossary of Illness”: “Medical Records: The autograph of my person as written by the other. Necessary data.” Each line, each sentence, each visual layer, stays with me. And I sense you’ll feel the same as you read. To publish such immensely powerful and beautiful work is an honor, a kind of love through insistence, during a time of immense destruction and ongoing genocide. As Veera Sulaiman, a Finnish Palestinian poet, writes in “A Love Letter”: “kiss your bruised / crown / mend the bone they broke / for the stone you threw.” These are necessary words written by necessary writers.
I am truly indebted to my incredible editorial team as we end this academic year, with much tenderness and gratitude to Kelsey and Abby, who have been bright beams of light among the chaos.
With nourishment always,
Jane Wong
Editor-in-Chief