Words: they are, in a sense, the thing. We're communing through them, you and I, at this very moment. No big revelation to point out that language is powerful. You'll laugh, you'll cry, and so on. But why arrange an issue around a tool so primary, a system of symbols already so much a part of all of our other issues to date? Shouldn't we consider showing, as it were, rather than telling? Isn't this like those other bad ideas we've had and discarded: the aborted magazine about magazines, the failed paragraph about paragraphs? 

We worried: this theme will be too broad. It will be unfocused, uninteresting, like ordering water at an otherwise engaging meal. But then we remembered: water isn't just the good for you, non-alcoholic drink of choice. (Milk is for another issue.) It's also in the meat, the sides, the beer you didn't order. It's the only ingredient in everything on the menu (besides love, or so claim some establishments). And it does, in fact, have a taste worth knowing about, like the background noise of the air conditioning, the refrigerator—because those are things present where it, our experiences of excitement and sorrow, actually happen. 

So our sense was that we really ought to look a little deeper at these bug-like things, these words. And so we have.

Thank you, as always, for reading.

Issue cover image: No Land. Issue back cover image: Mark Abramson.