Many of the pieces in Apogee Issue 07 deal with mourning: JP Howard’s powerful essay on losing her mother; Soraya Shalforoosh’s poem narrated on her late father’s birthday; and Fatimah Asghar’s poem, where the speaker asks about a young boy “executed in an alley way”—“Can we get him back?” Themes of childhood lost emerge in radhiyah ayobami’s essay on teenage motherhood, and in Hadeel Salameh’s short fiction, wherein she explores the trauma of human trafficking through a dreamscape. Loss permeates the imagination and memory as Jorge Ignacio Cortiñas writes in his lyric essay, “Memory is not any one person’s task, memory is something we build together. The reason for this is because memory is a burden.” Issue 07 is a home for these memories. We offer them to the community to hold with us, in hopes that our many hands will ease the weight.
