I don’t know much about oceanography, but I will say that I’ve always enjoyed that world—the colors, shapes, textures, different species, and the quiet despite all the activity. I especially appreciate how even the largest sea animal appears weightless.
The state of the world breaks my heart every day. Broken hearted, I stay online. I can’t log off. Because my career and schooling are all done remotely, I tend to struggle with boundaries regarding screen time, with knowing when to break away.
Like many of you, I have been spilling my guts online to the world because the guts of the world keep spilling. None of it is pretty. But it’s one of the things that, having searched for basically my entire life, I found that tempers the chaos that lives rent free inside my head.
The managers of Lunch Ticket all agreed that issue 26 needed to have a theme, and that theme had a responsibility to call for work relating to what we are seeing in society. We wanted a theme that resonated with Antioch University MFA’s mission of advancing “racial, social, economic, disability, gender, and environmental justice,” and we felt it was time to take a stand, to let others know our thoughts and feelings on today’s state of affairs, that we stand in community with those fighting against the various systems of oppression and those demanding an immediate and permanent ceasefire in Gaza.
Welcome to the Antique Shoppe. Here you will find chains of entangled generations, layers of dust caked on old family photographs and journals, and rust crawling up the legs of various pedestals. For some, it is your first time inside an antique store, but for most of us, this is the place we’ve referred to as home.
Writing feels impossible now.
Necessary, but impossible.
I don’t want to try making deep metaphors right now. I don’t want to inch my way to some profound realization, hoping the reader is inching along with me. Just writing those words, the poet in me felt inclined to add a metaphor to the previous sentence, as if everything needs to be earnest and pretty.
If you are an artist of any kind, chances are you are no stranger to The Unknown. In fact, it has probably been a motivating factor in creating your art. I know it has been for me. Wrestling with The Unknown is a fundamental part of the human experience, and the human experience is a fundamental part of art.
It gives me great pleasure to introduce Lunch Ticket’s 19th Issue, themed That Which Has Yet to Emerge. This issue is nothing if not a reflection of our strange and unprecedented times. At the end of 2021’s first act—this June intermission, if you will—we present to you a collection of work that brings hope, humor, seriousness, and solidarity to a moment we have never experienced before.
A literary and art journal
from the MFA community at
Antioch University Los Angeles.
We’ll keep you fed with great new writing, insightful interviews, and thought-provoking art, and promise with all our hearts never to share your info with anyone else.