”God Is Watching” collage by Anna Zagerson
As writers we are in constant observation of the world around us, absorbing, translating, and channeling what we take in with our senses. We bring feelings and ideas into sharper focus by making them tangible, giving them shape and heft and further dimension through careful description. For this issue, we asked for work that considers “everyday gods,” a charge that pushes beyond personification. This theme also gives a nod to polytheistic traditions and the cultures that currently, and historically, dictate and have dictated that there is inherent life in all things. Whether we acknowledge it or not through ritual or awareness, we give the things of our day-to-day, a spirit. Here we want to acknowledge the forces in our lives that shape our understanding of our trajectories, that provide us shelter and safety, that challenge. The ones that are there even when we don’t see them ourselves.
In our sixth issue of Wild Garlic, the writers have poured emotion into ordinary things. What is most significant about these gods is what they reflect back to us in the way they provide exterior illustrations of turmoil, strength, and in the way they ask questions back to us. A small god like this is a mirror, but not a perfectly clear one, fragmented, almost, or easily missed as we look for the large, and awesome gods of mythology.
We are always in relationship to the things around us–a tree looks at us funny, a glass of water is charged with anxiety that worsens the longer it is left out. There is a slowness required to find these gods. We assign human qualities to things to make sense of them: personification amplified to its extreme, so that washing machines extend empathy, cacti stand solemn as cooly unified guardsmen, and stones hold messages.
Heaven and Hearth – Eve Waters
Haikus – Katherine Bourgeois & The God Dog – Varuni Sinha
Hokey Pokey Solidarity – Megan de Guzman
Ode to the Office on Park Avenue South – Emery Wright
steeped, honeyed tea bags – Grace Holcomb
TIME, UNKNOWN; – Ashleigh Genus
Issue 6 Wild Garlic is a publication of the Brooklyn Women’s Writing Group
Wild Garlic 