A few weeks ago, my grandmother fell, something she had been afraid of doing for a long time. She’s always believed she has brittle bones and has said often that she knows she would never recover. After I heard her shout, I ran down the stairs, toothpaste smeared on the corner of my mouth from unfinished brushing, to find her lying on the floor by an ottoman. Her head a scant inch from its wooden base and her ankle swelling, swelling, swelling. It grew purple in minutes, any pressure on it stealing away with her breath. The words hospital and emergency room echoed from my mouth and my husband’s mouth and my grandfather’s mouth. But my grandmother’s voice drowned us all out. “What will you make for dinner next time you come?” she asked once, then again more firmly. Her eyes were wide and urgent, as if that question were the most pressing thing in her life. As if the answer to that question – in all its simplicity and softness and potential delight – was a promise that would carry her through whatever came next.
In Ada Limón’s poem, “Instructions on Not Giving Up,” she writes of the leaves beginning to grow on trees after the end of winter, of the way they grab viscerally for life after the hardship of winter:
the leaves come. Patient, plodding, a green skin
growing over whatever winter did to us, a return
to the strange idea of continuous living despite
the mess of us, the hurt, the empty. Fine then,
I’ll take it, the tree seems to say, a new slick leaf
unfurling like a fist to an open palm, I’ll take it all.
The pieces in this issue know the insistent unfurling of Limón’s new leaves, recognize the way they open themselves up to the world regardless of what will come next. They understand my grandmother’s frantic reaching, her need to hold some soft future in her palms in order to wade through the jagged present.
This issue was a joy to assemble. We are so grateful for every moment spent in its tender and grotesque spaces, for the way it champions the coexistence of monstrosity and gentleness. It reflects the brutal winter and the tender shoots of spring, and, most importantly, it reminds us that they cannot coexist without each other. We hope you enjoy every moment.
With warmth,
Hannah Newman & Jesse Ewing-Frable
Editors-in-Chief
Sweet Tree Review