“You are not a drop in the ocean. You are the entire ocean in a drop.” — Jalāl al-Dīn Muḥammad Rūmī

After writing mainly poetry for a few years, I started a novel this fall—and things, fractal things, started happening. The world shot out in every direction. People who didn’t exist started talking to me while I was buying frozen broccoli or attempting to parallel park. Suddenly I wasn’t just myself. Suddenly I was carrying an invisible cosmos, electric and crackling, gestating in my heart near the metaphors and big green feelings, the little mossy room where all the poems live.

Poetry tends to feel to me like expansion—a drop sliding back into the ocean, a return to the bigness of that primordial home, the one with everyone in it, all saltwater and Dionysus, thrumming with shared humanity, everything shimmering, everyone one. This new kind of writing felt different—a turning inward, toward the drop, the tiny universe of one differentiated self.

Issue #16 absolutely celebrates this thrilling, paradoxical weirdness of being a person: a being that both belongs to a universe and is itself a universe, a keeper of an ocean in a technicolor drop.

This issue crackles with the luminous absurd.

Cow eyes are stolen. Chickens are slaughtered. “Memory is a ruptured drain,” writes Sabyasachi Roy. Cicadas unlatch their bodies—and language unwrites itself—and “Rumor has it that, if you meet your doppelgänger, one of you will die,” Angela Townsend writes.

Death is evaded. “Death is more of a passage than an ending,” writes Nancy Wayson Dinan. Death occurs in the future-perfect tense. We visit a graveyard with Bobbi Salas. We visit the underworld with Hollie Dugas. We visit a “version of heaven pitched at the end of Mad Men,” with Kimberly Gibson-Tran.

The body recurs, kaleidoscopic.

“I believed my lover’s version of my body for years,” writes Gordon Taylor. “Flesh, bone, and crushed little stars,” writes Andrew Christoforakis. “I wrote down calories like commandments,” writes Allison Zhang. “How much more or less of herself existed last month, last year,” writes Selen Frantz. “I have a favorite finger on your right hand,” writes Maggie Rue Hess. “The people are shining with headlamps and glowsticks,” writes Kaia Stead. “I watch them balanced like precarious birds on the roof, envious they get to work so close to the sky,” writes Sean Thomas Dougherty.

This issue is one part singularity, one part collection of twenty-seven radiant drops, bursting with life, fully gorgeous, fully individuated. A bunch of shining oceans in loving, electric conversation.

A giant thank you to everyone who worked on this issue and helped bring all these oceans into being.

Thank you to our incredible contributors for creating gorgeous work, for letting us platform and celebrate your creations, and for being absolutely delightful to work with throughout the whole process.

Thank you to our readers: Rachel Brown-Rooney, Reyna de Jesus Contreras, Cathy Earnest, Lois Grimm, Eden Hall, Cass Heid, Ericka Macarthy, Chuck Mains, Melanie McGehee, Cari Tellis, Alexandra Thomas, and Krystin Williams. Thank you for your careful reads, for your insightful comments, for the gifts of your attention and time.

Thank you to Paul Matthew Carr (our web designer/master) and to Matt Hinton (our photographer and a program alum) for making our website readable and gorgeous, a place where people want to stay.

Thank you to our genre editors: Lori Green and Kimberly Heiman (creative nonfiction); Sarah Lyons, Ciahnan Darrell, and Vito Balice (fiction); H.T. Reynolds, Tasha Saint-Louis, and Moxxy Rogers (poetry); and Murryn Payne (scripts). Thank you for navigating an astronomical number of submissions, believing in the power of the PowerPoints and the magic of the discussions, choosing a fabulous collection of pieces, and working with the authors to make everything shine.

Thank you to our production staff: Cynthia Kolanowski (our production advisor); Jess Van Orden (our production editor); Lois Grimm (our production assistant); and D. Nicholas Penglase (our proofreader). We had some wild formatting, and you handled all the intricacies with patience, brilliance, and grace. Thank you for your attention to detail, your genuine care, your willingness to experiment, and for making this gorgeous issue not just possible, but radiant.

A huge and special thank you to our editorial advisor, Dawn Leas. Dawn, thank you so much for keeping everything running smoothly; for your communication, organization, and brilliance; and for supporting both the beauty of the issue and the wellbeing of everyone involved. Thank you for keeping us on track and allowing for expansiveness and creativity. We truly couldn’t ask for a better editorial advisor, and I’m beyond grateful that I get to work with you.

Finally, thank you to Dr. David Hicks, director of the Maslow Family Graduate Program in Creative Writing at Wilkes University; and to Patti Naumann, the program’s administrative assistant, for your ongoing support for both the journal and for the program. I love being a part of both of these communities, and I couldn’t be more grateful they exist—thank you both for making them the fabulous, special things that they are!

Please enjoy these twenty-seven pieces—each a gorgeous fractal wholeness, each an ocean in a drop.

With electric warmth and technicolor love,
Lizzy Ke Polishan
Managing Editor
River & South Review