Issue 16: July 2022

Dear Reader,

Is it just us, or can you feel it too? Summer seems to bring up a particular kind of longing, unique, distinct, different from all the longing we feel throughout the year. Languid, open, sometimes extreme. You might experience it through a smell (brine, wet grass, lavender, outdoor grill, city garbage), through sound (birds, music, children playing), taste (is it iced tea, buttered corn, fresh watermelon?), or any of your favorite things. Of course longing isn’t about something so concrete, so attainable. Quite the opposite. We long for the other self we could have been—our better, faster, smarter, freer, messier self. We long for the loves we have lost, and the ones we haven’t found. For healing the irremediable, for a future already lost in the past. We long for all that we might have missed looking through the peepholes that frame our lives. We love and need stories and poems because they help us imagine what lurks behind the peephole. 

To summer and reading and feeling the unattainable that lies beyond longing.

The Editors

Issue 16

July 2022

Stories

Essays

Poems

Issue Cover

“What’s on the Other Side?” by Philip Rosenberg.

Rights

ISSN 2643-3273. Copyright © Cagibi Literary LLC.

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