Dear Readers,
6.1 is our 21st issue. Can you believe it? I think this may also be our longest issue. Every time I would accept a new piece, I would think to myself, Ah, but I’m giving myself more work. But then I would also immediately think, How could I not?
Robert Creeley had an idea of language, although he would not put it this way, as a necessary and impossible substance, with its own limits and possibilities. So too is a thimble, impossible to shelter more than a finger at a time, but necessary to do the work of mending.
Poetry and stitches come in lines. That probably doesn’t mean very much, because banks also have lines. But for what it’s worth, this thimble is for words: 21 volumes of them, ten fingers of them.
In this issue, we have a marked trend of loss and absence. We have hospitals, death, snow, aging, funerals, email addresses no longer being used. At first, the idea of a journal of shelter being filled with loss felt like a contradiction, or at least a tension. But I’ve mulled it over, and I’ve decided it’s apt. After all, we would not need shelter but for living in a fallen world. I don’t believe the story of Adam and Eve in a literal sense, but I still think it’s true. Once, we were naked in the garden. We fell, and then we needed fig leaves and then huts and then luxury apartment complexes with designated parking.
Even if the need for shelter is a sad one, at least we have words and interesting things to build. We have tree houses and metro cars—places that can become holy. We have stitches in our fig leaves but the craftsmanship is masterful.
May we all plant a new garden. May we all make a church in whatever shelter suits us best, however impossible it may be.
Best,
Nadia Arioli
