Today I looked up and saw a star crying across the sky. How did she know? Did she see me crying, too? When her tail of salted yellow dust and old magnesium green light lit across my eyelid shield for a moment I laughed because I, too, know how to color darkness know what it’s like to burn and yell and laugh through an unspoken language of ash. I wished upon her falling for rest for less from this body yet I remembered to be of this body is to be graceful and grateful for this pure burning can be fruitful and destructive and she must know there is joy after grief, after, after, after, she must know her language of color is real and true because I saw her falling from a separate darkness while looking up and felt her tears of history attempt to cure me in a land not meant for tenderness and silent loving, in dark, in light, in the real, in the way tears can never fall until we can bear no more until we bear it all and we cry for one another, until we cry for one, until we cry, until we cry until we cry
Avery C. Castillo is a Mexican American poet, artist, and editor from South Texas. She is pursuing an MFA in Creative Writing at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley. Her work is published in various anthologies and literary journals. Visit www.writingsbyavery.com for more.
Every empire sings itself a lullaby. —Lena Khalaf Tuffaha
Many sacred things live in the woods of my childhood where dreams go at night.
I said sacred but meant scared. The rabbits collect tears on little leaves. They are the rabbits of history.
When they take our tears, they are acting as confiscators. They refuse to let us have what we weep
to help us with our shame—not to keep us from it but because we don’t have any.
We don’t understand. We think we are living quietly, the way rabbits do, staying low and hidden
in the violets along the edges of things. We don’t understand that rabbits do not seek
soft lives. Their bodies are made of fierceness and scramble. Their throats are big with screaming.
None of the rabbit-hearts beat in the woods anymore. They left the woods for fields so we could see
them coming through the bluestem like an invisible thread pleating fabric. Yet we lull ourselves.
Yet we tell ourselves stories about soft things that send us to sleep in the woods without heartbeats.
Linda Dove holds a Ph.D. in Renaissance literature and is an award-winning poet of five books. Her work has been nominated for four Pushcarts, a Robert H. Winner Award from the Poetry Society of America, and two Best of the Nets. Despite a recent move to the east coast, she still teaches remotely at Woodbury University in Los Angeles, where she founded MORIA Literary Magazine.
“Look up” is what I hear myself telling our seven year old almost every day. They say it could help us avoid text-neck. More importantly, there’s something grounding about witnessing the endlessness above us, how it holds space for both chaos and calm, for both the known and unknowable, and room for possibility. And every seven-year old should experience endlessness every so often.
Welcome to This Makes up the Sky: A Year of Looking Upward.
I’m excited to introduce myself to you as the newest Women Who Submit Blog Managing Editor. In the months prior to submitting my proposal for this series, I spent some time thinking of ways to continue writing while the world continues to erupt. I thought about the sky and how everything it holds is connected by that very thing, that perfect relationship of gravity and orbital motion. And when I came up with the series, I thought about what it means to create a shared space where writers can explore their own relationship with what the sky holds. The sky, in all its iterations, offers us a universal connection point—as simple as it sounds—we’re all under it, all witnessing its changes, all carrying our own interpretations.
Over the coming year, we’ll explore six themes that together tell the story of our shared sky. We’ll begin with Dreams – those just-above-the-surface visions that shape our understanding of what’s possible. From there, we’ll witness the mathematics of flight through Birds, explore the systems that animate unwritten rules in Weather, investigate the always shifting narratives of Clouds, contemplate precipitation in all its forms through Rain, and finally, we’ll discover the architecture of collective movement in Murmurations. For each theme (except Murmurations), we’ll publish four pieces that approach the subject from different angles, different genres, different perspectives – creating a mosaic of how we understand and experience these elements that make up our sky.
As a publisher, I consider myself lucky to have been able to approach anthology curation as a form of collective meaning-making. It’s a practice that might begin in what feels like a selfish place – this desire to reach out, to gather stories, to make sense of the world through perspective. But what comes of it is always so much more, I mean, isn’t this why we write and read and create and…all of it? Research has consistently shown that engaging with art and creative expression provides tangible, memorable real-life benefits for our emotional and psychological wellbeing. When we write about our experiences, when we share our perspectives, we’re not just creating sentences and paragraphs—we’re participating in one or more forms of collective healing. Studies show that we’re activating multiple brain regions and circuits, fostering neural connections that support regulation and cognitive resilience. In times when the world shows its horrendousness, a slight turn toward reflection and creative expression becomes essential.
I truly hope you enjoy reading each piece throughout the year, and the collective sum. And for those interested in submitting work, please read through the submission guidelines. I look forward to reading your work—your poems, your flash fiction, your essays, your hybrid forms. Each submission is a way of mapping the world around and above us, of making sense of both the physical and metaphysical. Through your words, we’ll build a constellation of perspectives, a year-long exploration of how we understand, imagine, and inhabit the space above us.
Looking Forward, Jessica Ceballos y Campbell
Jessica Ceballos y Campbell, Blog Managing Editor (she/they), is a writer, content strategist, publisher, and advocate whose work has been published in numerous anthologies and journals and three chapbooks: Gent/Re De Place Ing (2016), End of the Road (2017), and Facilitating Spaces 101: A Manual for equitable Arts Programming (2018), and has produced a ton of literary events throughout LA. She lives with her husband, seven-year-old, and their gato in Los Angeles, where she runs a small press and where she is ever-attempting to work on Happiest Place on Earth, her poetry contribution to conversations around memory, place, and belonging, inspired by a trip to Disneyland while in the foster system. www.jessicaceballos.com
