VERSO / vol. 7 is a new form of sharing art and culture. Each month we’ll curate contributions of writing, poetry and visual art packaged along with personalized editorials and deliver them monthly.

We’re happy to share editorials and photos of already shipped packages with you here.

Dear Reader,

A whale has wandered into the San Francisco Bay this week, chasing anchovy. A pair of night herons appear on my morning walk. In the headlands, sea spray and coastal spring light provide a chance to breathe into a wind break of eucalyptus and stare into the temporal green of surrounding hills before they turn dry, ignitable. This is a chance.

In an already troubled world, the pandemic year has wreaked more havoc, and we have found or lost focus, sanity and truths in various ways, calibrating and recalibrating amid disruption, despair, anger, fear and hope. Our communities are not safe. Our workplaces, artistic spaces and societal infrastructures are not equitable. Violence is unabated. There is not enough accountability, not by a longshot. And so much vulnerability. And yet.

Rae Parnell’s fantastic zine and much needed instructional guide to apologies is a studied, shared personal reflection on vulnerability and a relatable heart map for the emotional terrain, centers of experience, physiological responses and contexts in which we are constricted. It is at once serious and uncomfortable work, asking us to examine dissonances within ourselves and to be aware of how we can resist “the urge to weaponize shame against one another”, as it is inviting, wishful and collaborative, delicious foliage leaning into pathways for reconciliation, growth and repair, places where we can see the harm we have caused someone else, and say I am sorry.

Rae Parnell, Sorry Seems To Be The Hardest Word — Rae Parnell, *Sorry Seems To Be The Hardest Word*

Without the act of seeing, though, we are divorced from the ability express our insecurities, recognize our emotions and admit our mistakes, on a micro-level as well as in terms of the macro-apologies that Parnell refers to in the zine’s epilogue, and those of us who purport to be antiracist allies must not look away. A compass point for this season of VERSO / is Christina Sharpe’s In the Wake, in which she suggests some of the work of Black annotation and Black redaction as “a counter to abandonment, another effort to try to look, to try to really see.” If when presented with annotations and redactions, we try to really see instead of becoming dismissive and defensive, “other kinds of perception are not only available, but inevitable” (-Toni Morrison, quoted via Sharpe) in ourselves and in our art.

Aisha Madu’s Under a Groove layers perception into an “insistent Black visualsonic resistance to that imposition of non/being” (again Sharpe), requiring us to look and look again at the bodies, how they are situated and buoyed, the spaces within the figures, the shapings around them, what over- or underlaps and constricts, the fluidity and stillness, the lines—arterial, chains, containments, traces, extensions, air bubbles— the many ways of seeing this composition, as suffering, as solace, as elegant, as elegiac, as refuge, as shackled, as slumber, as sound form, as a drowning or a drowning out, as minimalist, as infinite, as a dance, Here is a chance.

Aisha Madu, Under a Groove — Aisha Madu, *Under a Groove*

What reverberates and resides in the indigo doubling of hearts in the illustration is tactile, offering orientation and proximity, openings and vantages for feeling into, and out of, the constrictions. For being moved, by love, or the groove, in a rhythmic intensity, wave-like and spacious, if only in one of the multiple overlapping time-spaces invoked, or in a momentary touching of hands in which one body says to the other, to itself, I see you, I am here.

In the openings between cypress and shoreline, I watch the sky. I consider equinoxes, weather, the climate, how even the rain is racist. How “the past that is not past reappears, always, to rupture the present,” as Sharpe tells us. What will burn this year. What will flood. To whom I owe an apology and for what. What each of us wishes.

xxx,
J.A.
with apologies to Funkadelic