Issue 42
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Letters from the editors, LIT 42
Dear Reader,
We bring you LIT 42 and today it is the spring Equinox. It is equal portions light and dark as we hinge between season’s, a magic trick of perfect balance and of liminality, a pause on tippy toes before we leap into spring. With this issue we turn the dirt to release the smell of fresh earth from winter’s stasis to the sun.
Keep digging and you’re bound to run into some buried things: some bones; a broken headlight; a love letter. Shadows crease and collapse, keep digging: a medical journal from the 1950s,
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An interview with Robert Polito and an excerpt from “After the Flood: Inside Bob Dylan’s Memory Palace”
by Charlotte Slivka
Robert Polito’s After the Flood: inside Bob Dylan’s Memory Palace is encyclopedic in scope with a poet’s narration. It breaks down Bob Dylan’s career during the years 1991 – 2024 and conjures the shape of his resurgence from the underworld after receiving the Grammy’s Lifetime Achievement Award; an award intended to honor him and bury him under a monument to his past simultaneously. What should have happened next in the wake of acceptance was the convenient hush of a great musician who had had a good run, then relegated to the pasture of cultural history,
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Dialogue Between Authors and Translators: an interview with Peruvian poet Roxana Crisólogo and translator Kim Jensen
by LIT Translation Editor John P. Apruzzese
Noise, in poetry, is rarely only noise. It is the residue of migration, the pressure of history, the friction between languages that refuse to settle into a single meaning. In this LIT Global Voices conversation, Peruvian–Finnish poet Roxana Crisólogo and United States poet and translator Kim Jensen meet in that charged space where poetry, politics, and translation converge, not as separate practices, but as forms of attention. We were honored to publish Jensen’s translations of Crisólogo’s poems from her collection Kauneus (Beauty) in LIT 41 (Fall 2025).
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Two Flash Fictions
art by Jenn Powers
by Zach Murphy
The Limbo
The cicadas are extremely loud this summer, and so are my mother’s outfits. The leopard print high heels, the oversized sunglasses, and the hat sprouting pink flowers are some of the more understated pieces in her wardrobe.
“You don’t hear about the sun when it’s behind clouds,” she once told me as she put on her beet-red lipstick in the mirror.
My mother always looks so beautiful, even when she’s sad. Every time she comes back from the Friday night Limbo parties at Brunson’s down the block,
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Pacifier and Museum Trips
photo curtesy of the author
by Arthur Mandal
Pacifier
I have a memory of my father burning one in front of me as a child. It drips plastic fire between us, onto the ground, and I’m screaming insanely as a ball of burning yellow flame grows bigger and then gradually smaller from the pinched fingers of his hand.
Every so often, the lesson would be recollected and re-articulated, something along the lines of: “We all need to have our metaphorical pacifiers burnt in front of us now and again.” Even when I was fifteen,
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Goodbye from the Edge of the World
art by Richard Hanus
by Angie McCullagh
Half hidden by the filmy curtain, I watch a man wheel a human-shaped bag from the house across the street, the gurney rattling over exposed concrete. With hands shrink-wrapped in blue Latex, he shoves the gurney into the back of a station wagon and lowers the tailgate with a muted thunk.
Redheaded triplets live with their two mothers in that house.
I text my neighbor Carla to ask if she knows who died but she doesn’t answer.
