Issue 6: Poems of Provocation, Activism, and Witness
in partnership with Split This Rock

A note from Sarah Browning, executive director of Split This Rock

'Icebound' by Kristina Gehrmann[Image Description: In the pearlescent light of sunset, two 19th century ships (the HMS Terror and HMS Erebus) sail through arctic seas. The leading ship passes through a narrow archway of floating ice. At this hour, t…

'Icebound' by Kristina Gehrmann
[Image Description: In the pearlescent light of sunset, two 19th century ships (the HMS Terror and HMS Erebus) sail through arctic seas. The leading ship passes through a narrow archway of floating ice. At this hour, the sea and sky are almost indistinguishable in the coloration, for the stars sparkle in both.]

'Ascend: They Thought They Could Bury us They Did Not Know We Are Seeds' by Chrystal Robinson-Shofroth.
[Image Description: Centered against a dark background stands a woman-shaped tree. She encircles the earth with her roots and embraces the spiraling, labyrinthine stars with her branches. Blue streaks like emotive rain fall from her branches into the waves of blue and green that rise to meet her roots. In the golden center of the earth, a heart-shaped seedling sprouts stalk and roots.]

'Doorway Into my Soul' by Chrystal Robinson-Shofroth.
[Image Description: A portrait of the artist as a woman in bright red. Her body dissolves into a multicolored flowing aura, which curls around the page and surrounds her heart. The heart itself is a hybrid of the traditional symbolic heart shape and an anatomically correct organ, as if to represent a dual symbolism of emotion and physical body. A doorway opens in the surface of the heart and an eye pears out. Chaotic darkness overwhelms the edges of the image, pressing against the shadow-blurred edges of the figure and the heart, like the floating tunnel vision of an on-coming stroke.]