The creative nonfiction in this issue speaks to the unanswered, the missing, and what we are left with when those whom we long for are gone. These selections broke my heart a little and I don’t mind, because they captivated me with their approach. They are clear-voiced and certain, each one so very different from the next, and speak of loss in ways that stilled me.

In “Northern Lights,” Marin Sardy recalls a moment with her brother one winter amidst tall snowbanks, underneath dazzling colors blazing brighter than they had ever seen before. “But here now my heart pounds,” she writes, “because in the time since that night it has come to mean something else. That night with Tom—when I still used to say, I have a brother and not yet, I had a brother. When I still thought things would happen, for him as for me.”

In “A Poem,” Hannah White catalogues the artifacts she finds from her troubled father’s life after he has passed. Among them she discovers, “A pack of menthol cigarettes, a framed photo of my sister and me, an album of photos of soldiers on the operating table with missing limbs in his ER in Iraq. Sobriety coins. 1 year, 2 years, 5. I stopped counting.”

Sandra Carlson Khalil revisits the at times grating relationship she had with her mother-in-law in “Belle-Mère,” writing of “the time in the car I had the hiccups, and she reached over, so close I could smell mint on her breath from her morning tea and placed her hand on my shoulder and kept it there, telling me not to worry, that Jesus Christ himself had cured me. I kept driving, eyes ahead, her hand hot, growing sticky against my skin, hoping for a hiccup, hoping to prove her wrong.” Yet in taking this closer look at the care her mother-in-law once showed her, Khalil begins to reckon with an enduring remoteness in her own mother.

Angela Townsend beseeches a higher power in “Lord, Make Me Farfalle” one who might transform her into the better version of herself she envisions, finding inspiration in pasta of all kinds. “Lord, make me farfalle,” she begins. “For too long I have been curled in upon myself. St. Augustine diagnosed the proud as incurvatus in se, turned inward. Were sin made of semolina, it would be tortellini. Even now, I flatter myself. I try to pass as a dumpling.”

Finally “In Heaven and Earth,” a meditation on a fresh season of grief, Susan Gilbert Guerrant recalls how “sometimes when I went out on clean, clear nights between snows and took in the scatter of stars against the indigo sky, the lacey silhouettes of leafless trees, the still holiness of all that white, I could feel my heart slow and my breath even. Often the silence was broken by an owl’s haunted hoot. I longed to hear him call your name.”

I’m grateful to these contributors for these intimate invitations to places of mourning, resignation, and rivulets of repair. Maybe making art is a tribute to the ways we endure protracted yearning, that toggle between feeling so keenly what we’ve lost while also moving forward; unearthing traces of meaning from what is mostly unfathomable.

Thank you to our contributors for these delicate, bracing, singular works of creative nonfiction. It’s been a gift to read your writing; to have the privilege of publishing your words in our pages.

Sincerely,

Ronit Plank
Creative Nonfiction Editor
The Citron Review