… sometimes, everything feels like hopeless bullshit. The sheer muchness of it all…I don’t know how to make shelters anymore. I don’t know how to make beautiful places. (And to think I wrote this note before Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. Somehow, shelter as a concept is even more precarious.)…

I have to believe in the power of art, in the power of making. I have to believe that we can still, despite everything, be creators.

Here is proof. We are still making things. We are making poems of joy, stories of sorrow, collages of pain, erasures of old letters.

Nadia Arioli, Excerpt from Editor’s Note, April Issue, Thimble Lit Mag

Flurries and freezing with wind. I swim. Then, as promised, take the dogs out. March is a month that hates to give up its power, even after the spring equinox, it wants winter to hold on. The wind bites. I wear gloves again. Walk fast to keep warm. Eager to be at my desk. Need a poem for tonight; have it in mind to write about the lamb being born. That’s what I do, but the page is blank, and there are so many many possibilities of where to start. I get off to a false one, but it gets me in, and I keep going until a first draft is done and sent off. I have four poems from the letters published—erasures from my mother’s love letters to my father—published in the April issue of Thimble Lit Mag: “Our little ‘rush’”; “wishes”; “snug” & “3 cents.” These are the first of the collection to be in print. 2023 seems like such a long wait for the whole collection to be published as a book. I trust it will be worth the wait.