Intervals—we all are always in the midst of things: between physical spaces, moments of time, changing tones.  

 

        The difference of pitch in tones. This has been on my mind lately—how we say “I miss you” or “I’m sorry” or “I love you.” Think about all the ways we can say something and why it changes. Our voices getting harder or softer. The gaps of time between the utterance of the words compressing or growing longer. So much caught up in how time and speech dance with one another. 

 

        For me, this difference in tone intersects all the other meanings. Just recently, I was helping my daughter move. As we covered the change in terrain, from sidewalk to subway, station to station, neighborhood to neighborhood, her world changed too. Not just physically, but the tenor of things, the sonic habits of people in the world. Now even in the midst of Manhattan, her life is quieter. The street noise less insistent. Climbing the stairs from the ground floor to the fifth floor, I could feel my heart beating, hear that my voice became a bit more breathless. “I’m coming” sounded different floor by floor. Now as I think of her, my heart is a bit softer. She is one more step into her own life.  

 

        Now, I am home again. That city interval has passed. My school semester is busy—and the emails stream in. Questions and needs for this moment. Questions and needs for the spring semester. But at this moment, I am sitting with a cup of tea and savoring the lull—extending it. Outside I can hear a child laughing. The dog is on the chair, eyes half-closed. Through the shutters, I can see the trees—leaves shades of brown and gold now, sky more visible in the gaps, brightly blue. Peaceful.  

 

       When I talk to people about travel, I always mention my tendency to stay in one place for a period of time, my love of lingering. I sense my embracing of intervals—space between places, an awareness of boundaries, walls or ramparts or columns or fences; an awareness of moments, all the befores and afters; distances both physical and emotional and temporal. All of it reminding me to slow down, to be grateful, to savor what we have. 

 

       Perhaps it is the notion of lingering and savoring that captivates me as a reader too. Here readers might linger in Noah Davis’s poems as he captures wintry moments of time, the spaces between freeze and thaw or Daniel Nathan Terry’s poems that place the reader in the space between psychosis and sanity. Kerry Beth Neville shares her love of words and story—and horses, dogs, children, and living. So, linger in this issue—in the places, captured moments, changes of voice and understanding.