Volume 31, Issue 1 (2017) What are you afraid of?

What are you afraid of?

Daniel Schultz, as the Managing Editor, and I announced a theme — a semesterly debated topic — for this edition of A Midwestern Review with our call for submissions. Themes can be limiting, and so the challenge was finding a theme that sparked discussion or inspiration without excluding the existing pieces that people were ready to submit.

Whether all the magazine’s writers and artists crafted and submitted their works according to our theme is trivial. This theme just puts a name to a symptom of living. And so, we knew that the theme — what are you afraid of? — wouldn’t limit anyone. As readers open this edition, they open the doors to haunted houses, a roofless cathedral, fraternities, and family reunions; they wander through the scenes and bump into fear in the strangest of places.

Fear excavates our souls, leaving space. It’s a void that pierces our imaginations’ star-speckled universe clean through. Fear collapses on itself, a dying star, but hope — the traumatized glowing wreckage of its supernova — remains. Prose, poetry, art, and fear tell us about ourselves. Fear of loss and death tells us about v hat we love; people, living. We can’t see shadows without the sun.

A patchwork of this magazine’s prose and poetry, the cento in this letter sews together the sensations of fear. Please enjoy the Fall 2017 Edition of A Midwestern Review. It will make you laugh and maybe cry. lit may make you think, remember, wish, struggle, and hopefully wonder what are yon afraid of?

Fear
I felt his father reach through him
as if I were his mother; (“Bloodshot”)
her skin feels like tissue paper
and her bones jab me; (“Twiggy”)
unable to act, think, or even
breathe: (“All You Have Is Family”)
the flower’s petals blooming absence,
the soft, damned caress of loss (“Heartbreak”) —
the carpets red, the kebayas, tablecloth, fish
bones, everything sweating (“Talking Around It”) —
curl themselves around it
until they squeezed the life completely out (“Evil Eyes”)
to make it smell like blood, rotting plants,
people, and com. (“Tripped Up”)
“Sometimes I wished I smoked.” (“Saguaro”)