The rollout of this issue of Lullaby Machine was slow. As we crawl out of winter toward the spring of our second editorial year, we’re glad to finally share this collection of fourteen pieces of poetry, interviews, visual art, nonfiction, and fiction. Without an official theme, Issue 003 invites readers to consider the act of seeing as not only perspective-widening but also a potentially radical choice to contend with our stories as they molt. Sweeping through landscapes as far afield as the caves of Tibet, an apocalyptic Montana motel, and the ultra-magnified fields of yellowing Vienna grass, these Lullaby contributors ask us to look change in its many faces.
Our saturated media landscape can subsume the nuances of local and global crises into a different problem, larger but infuriatingly diffuse: the crisis of our own attention. What we see matters, but so does how we are able to see it. There can be consequences to sight-without-seeing: missed shadow, curves, glint, definitions. The aim, as John Berger put it is “to see the appearance of a thing (even an inanimate thing) as a stage in its growth of which it is a part. To see its visibility as a kind of flowering.” “there are things that I’m finally dreaming about,” Jenevieve Ting writes in sleeping heart, “things that I can feel.”
What would it mean to study the phenology of mundane objects, like Brea Souders's beauty salon posters in her Blue Women series? Or to sew the edges of our attention into a new quilt, like Tianyu Yi'?s “i dream her ashing her blunt in the estuary they tried to name rikers.” And C Green's: “When you have seen the essentials of every direction, start collapsing space. Pick up each corner like a fold in a blanket and tuck them.”
Other parts of Issue 003’s call to attention: Rose Robinson's reminder to listen long enough to hear. Cora Kircher's meditation on the allure of distance and a.k. barak on how being half-fullfilled tastes. Purple-red poems by Nia Watson and Veronica Sirotic. And conversations with Joanna Walsh and Jamieson Webster about the voices that build our digital and in-person worlds.
We’re excited to continue sharing issues and lullabies. It’s been a joy to grow our community of readers and contributors during this first year. We’ve got more in the works and can’t wait to meet more of you in-person: stay tuned for events this summer if you’re in the NYC area.
