Here we are, yet another fledgling online literary magazine. This past summer, like many others before us, we found ourselves longing to launch our own publication. Throughout our first submission period, we’ve been asking ourselves what Sooth Swarm can add to the world (both literary and “real”). Maybe we won’t find our answer until the second issue, or even the seventh, but, even now, we know that Sooth Swarm exists as a space for poetry and microprose to inhabit at a time when we’ve had to make new homes for ourselves.

 

So much of the writing gathered in this issue shares a focus on different stages of life—infancy, childhood, coming of age, motherhood—and the dynamics between them. In one poem, we’re shown the intersection of girlhood and grief, and in another, we’re pulled into a mother’s wants for her children.

 

These poems are, in many ways, our proof of life and living.

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As writers and readers, we always come back to places we’ve never left; we examine and unravel. These works are our returnings to the present, our way of unfurling the quiet thriving beneath.

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Marie & Erin

December 23rd, 2016

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