Spring has arrived with shifting moods—mornings that still carry traces of winter, heavy afternoons hinting at storms ahead. Earlier this week, a tornado skipped overhead—a reminder of how quickly the familiar can be undone. It’s a fitting backdrop for this issue, which lingers in the space between destruction and renewal, the physical and emotional lines that separate and join. The issue opens with quiet yearning: “Everything here / waits / for recognition to return.” And it finds its way to close with hard-won clarity in “Philosophy”: a fragile affirmation of life, a meditation on the ways we are tethered to the world

Issue Thirty-Six includes work by Aiyana Masla, bart plantega, Cecil Morris, Connemara Wadsworth, Cynthia Pratt, Diane Perazzo, Francis Opila, Jeanne L. Bamforth, Katherine Schander-Triplett, Michelle Lynch, Robert W. Hill, Samantha Marie Daniels, Shannon Guglielmo, Stephen Joffe, Stephen Mead, Steve McCown, Susan L. Lin, Val Margolius, Whitney L. Duncan, and William R. Stoddart.