This issue begins in celebration and foreshadowing with the winners of our 2025 Summer Prizes in Fiction & Poetry: Mohammad Salah Sahragard’s short story “Morphine and the Knight,” chosen by Deesha Philyaw, and Susan Muth’s poem “Main Post Chapel,” chosen by MICHAEL CHANG. Painful, grief-laden, faith-stricken, and raw, these works remind us that stories are a door to deeper listening. They are harbingers of achievement and also, of great labor. Congratulations to our winners, and thank you to our judges for fine and attentive reading.

From celebration, we move into dis(union): a state of. This themed gathering of work asks what it means to live inside of fracture: be it nation, party, household, or self. Fractures made by empire, extraction, silence, and disbelief. Fractures in weather, inheritance, and Earth, where severed roots still reach toward one another underground. The pieces in this issue show us that disunion is felt most in the body. In these pages, we observe the eerie fluorescent abundance of a Whole Foods, systems of surveillance, the debris of memory against the rising tides of an American marketplace that is charged and dangerous, depending on who is allowed to browse.

As we read through submissions for this issue, we were reminded that the state of disunion is not abstract. It lives in the aisles of our daily lives, our family archives, courtroom records, the news cycles, in our dreams. We publish this issue at a time when public life feels crowded with documents emptied of accountability, when networks of crime spill into view all sinew and rot, when spectacle makes a meal of what justice will not touch, and when political division is too often mistaken for a binary map of two sides rather than a deeper crisis of relation. Beneath it all are the eternal questions that art and literature seek to address: Who is believed? Who is protected? Who is made disposable? What forms of truth can survive being handled by power? We are surrounded by disclosures, denials, redactions, accusations, and performances of outrage.

This issue does not offer union as a form of harmony or easy repair. Instead, we sit with the rupture, to remember that even in disunion, the soul can remain, and perhaps even find joy among a state of breaking.

Here something living presses upward, insists we witness, and calls us back toward what we owe the relations that hold us, like a seed split by the life it carries, like thawing river ice breaking so the current can speak again.

You can purchase the issue through our Submittable, or view it on ProjectMuse.