collage by Irene Lyla Lee

We live in a time of collective shifting and transition. As the world around us rearranges itself in real time, it is impossible to read the news, call home, or participate in community without encountering the many faces of displacement. Now is a time when people are forced from their homes, when families are ruptured, and natural disasters are leveling whole towns. Displacement implies a movement that is not planned, abrupt, or is somehow incompatible with the surroundings. 

The choas of displacement puts the small things in focus as the reader adjusts to broken lines, interrupted timelines, and severed limbs. Bodies are connected to land and ancestors who have endured irreversible change, which begs the question: does adaptation ever end?

When the split happens, many are left to tell the story: the bugs whose steady persistence lives on. The bellies of snakes. The soil and sand. Within the storm of change which is both natural and forced: political, climatic, societal and temporal, our writers found small mirrors, doors, and actions to help define displacement, not to heal it, but to give it a place.

Cassandra Gutterman-Johns, Anna Zagerson, Irene Lyla Lee 

Focal Point – Robin A. Li

Preparations – Ana Larrieu

Entomophily – Yuna Kang

Metonymy – Ravneet K. Sandhu

a meditation on the US healthcare system – Maggie Waller

My Father’s Voice – Erin Holbrook

The Wanderer – Sarah Druhan

Bug Eater – Kayla Monteiro

cicadas – Maggie Waller

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Wild Garlic is a publication of the Brooklyn Women’s Writing Group