Art is never an indulgence. Particularly when it represents the creative instincts of people unwittingly left out, forgotten, actively erased, or oppressed. If nothing else, through making our art, we can express freedom of thought and expression – the elements that make us… us.

Creating space for art has been an honor in my life and I encourage you to try it. Whether it’s giving yourself permission or encouraging someone you love and respect to go for it, let’s make more space for each other, shall we? It has to come from the grassroots even more so these days, especially when you look at recent National Endowment for the Arts discrimination priorities.

Speaking truth to power may be the only resistance we have at times. No creative act is too small. I can wave a sign or stand in solidarity with those seeking peace, freedom and autonomy, but publishing people even in the tiniest forms still feels important to me as an editor. Perhaps we can take this opportunity to find new inroads, new connections, and new ways to share our work together.

Speaking of sharing work, what a batch of unusual and curious pieces we have in our Summer Micros section. Aaron Sandberg’s Longview made me realize that remembering the past through our touchstones doesn’t have to be empty nostalgia. In An Artifact of Loneliness, Benjamin D. Carson gives us merely two lines to evoke our own baggage with memory. Genevieve Bentz’s Brood drops us into a sticky summer metaphor that’s laced with criminal mystery. Workshop by Lesley Warren explores the cruelty of an artistic process –oh my darlings! In four mere lines, Kathryn Pratt Russell’s Festival Act rescues us thanks to one charming dog. Kath Wu’s Death by Fours interprets a number that has always brought me luck. In Roly-poly by Sarah Siedel, we go beyond four-legged creatures, ten beyond! And it’s Shira Dentz’s haptic is a skinny poem revealing a new way of seeing summer’s all-star fruit.

Please be safe this summer, writers and readers,

JR

JR Walsh 
Micros Editor