Christopher X. Shade Cagibi News

Issue 3: July 2018 // Recovery

3! Welcome to the third issue of ’s literary journal! Let this letter be your guide, or skip to the table of contents below.

Summer. A season to recuperate, if it weren’t for the extreme heat, wildfires, floods, landslides, tornadoes, Supreme Court nomination battles, the collapse of world diplomacy, the eroding of democracy, of our civil liberties, of plain good old civility. Then, between iced tea and ice cream and iced whatever you can get your hands on there is a tennis match to watch and Nadal recovers from two sets down in a heated Wimbledon quarterfinal while twelve young boys and their soccer coach are rescued from a cave submerged under flooding water and the world feels like a cooler, better place, for a moment. It’s a rare moment.

Recently, while at a Buddhist retreat as respite from an acute loneliness, or call it a kind of isolation disorder (peculiar, in this city of millions), one editor discovered the mourning cloak butterfly. A harbinger of Spring. Its dark wings, purple-black, with a white band along its margins; its pattern has been likened to a girl who, disliking having to be in mourning, defiantly lets a few inches of a bright dress show below her mourning dress. This young girl, so easy to imagine, heartbroken, angry—and isn’t it easy to imagine her act of defiance against ineffable loss, lashing out at grief, lashing out at the process of recovery? Very much believable. In this, can we see ourselves?

For a special themed section of this issue, made a call for submissions on the theme of recovery from authors the world over. You will find prose and poetry expressive of recovery in all of its fashions and guises, including the disease of addiction, including childhood trauma, and including even the mourning cloak. And like the mourning cloak butterfly, these stories may be inspirational for you, a harbinger of a Spring in your own recovery seasons. To defy, to improve, to relapse and rally; to recuperate, to convalesce. Recovery is a journey. It is how we survive. It works, until it doesn’t, in which case we fall and begin all over again.

In the non-themed sections of this issue we again bring you new and established voices from near and far. In Features, poet and teacher James Graham from Ayrshire, Scotland, guides us into the reading of Paul Celan’s poetry and introduces ’s new On Reading series.

And for writers, and anyone who’d like to try a hand at writing about themselves: how to begin? Author and teacher Thomas Mira y Lopez shows us the way in an On Writing series piece, “Opening Your Personal Essay.”

Chess Days garden 2
The artist’s garden, Red Hook, Brooklyn

One editor visited the artist Veronica’s garden (where there are butterflies!) and worked with her to curate a selection from her Chess Days for this issue’s visual art feature. Part painting, part diary, each entry on handmade paper is a sketch followed by a typed version of its text.

In poetry and prose, you’ll find holiday child’s play from bestselling author Beverly Donofrio (who will be reading at our Hudson Valley retreat in October) and sunscreen towelettes, pottery, a Steller’s jay, a chunk of American football, a wedge of Spanish sunlight, and so much more—and, we must mention, butterflies in Big River, Saskatchewan.

Sit back with a chilled beverage of your choice, find a cool spot, and enjoy your way through Issue 3 of .

The Editors.

Issue 3

July 2018

Features

Stories

Essays

Poems

Issue 3 Special Section of Prose and Poetry

Photo: © Stefan Hengst. All rights reserved.

Issue 3.1

Features from 

Another Way Through the Cagibi

Not sure where to begin reading this issue? Here’s another way through the cagibi. Skip around, find your own reading path. Discover a work of prose or poetry you’d like to sink down into.

ISSN 2643-3273. Copyright © Cagibi Literary LLC.

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