Letter from the Editor

Dear Reader,

Welcome to Issue 7 of Sinking City—today, in the first days of December, the humidity has finally lifted its stronghold from the air in Miami. As cool rain breaks from the bleak sky in sideways sheets & floods the potholes on my street, I am reminded of our hurricane season past & all of those living real-time in sinking cities across the globe.

This year, Miami was lucky to escape the hurricane roulette unscathed, but has continued to hold space for climate refugees from the Bahamas, the Windward Islands, and more. For those of us in South Florida and other regions impacted by Rising Waters, these experiences serve as a bleak reminder of the real-time gamble of our environment: of how climate change has, and will continue, to put our lives and homes at risk indiscriminately.

But, even as water swarms in the sky above me, I know that, as Antiquity suggests, the slow burn of our collective existence is what tethers us to one another. Sometimes, we may forget that the concept of the communal is our best tool in combating what seems inevitable.

As Soleil Davíd writes, it’s “an astronomical thing, our yard of silence.” Together, we strive against the deadened, apathetic spirit which seeps into the ground like Formaldehyde. Together, we live dangerously, create dangerously, and can exist purposefully—we are The Invasives who are undoubtedly Faced With Extinction. We are the imaginary lakes and the houses near them, throbbing toward stillness.

In Sinking City’s seventh issue, 17 writers, poets, and artists tackle what it means to be a part of this race. They question the notion that We’re Fine—that there’s nothing left worth questioning. As I write this letter, the clouds above me are fracturing to make the sun’s light vulnerable to all of us flitting below, and I am grateful to all of our contributors for being a force in that fracture.

On behalf of the MFA program at the University of Miami, I write to welcome you into this space: the one between endlessness and ourselves. I hope that the pieces included in this issue can guide you—to splinter, to rupture, to shatter—something in the landscape of us.

Sincerely,