Flight 24.2 begins with what we cannot quite hold: a hand slipping from another in cold water, a cage unlatched at dawn, a door splintered by what forces its way through. These pieces dwell in the aftermath of belief and the brink of its unraveling. Two women drive with something unnameable in the glove compartment. A town gossips its way toward calamity at the lake. A daughter screams in the car and calls it singing. Animals hear a gunshot and move toward the suburbs. Across genres, we are made to confront the costs of devotion, whether religious, romantic, or national, and the strange intimacy between care and harm.
The poems in this Flight move through elegy and endurance. Salmon surge toward a dam that will not yield; crates fill before sunrise; a door becomes fear itself. We travel from Ohio hills to inundated villages, from hospice hallways to ships full of empty windows. Translators carry across languages the ache of war and exile; speakers reckon with inheritance, distance, and the thin line between closeness and catastrophe. Even in the face of extinction there is lyric precision. Don’t look away. Light persists, though it may be dim.
Elsewhere in this Flight, longing drives the plot in fiction that tests the limits of charm and complicity; essays that weigh motherhood against motion; and a photo diary that renders time as both rupture and loop. Our reviews and interviews consider the labor of shaping a book across a decade, the way translation can make even time bleed, and the way desire animates a novel’s every turn. And in our artist feature, we linger with work that dares to be “cute” and powerful at once, art that stares down dismissal and multiplies it into something unruly and sharp.
We invite you to move slowly through Flight 24.2, and notice what remains caged, and what has been let loose.
Read more about the contributors for v24n2 here.
