Over many years, moving my queries across genre, occasion and discipline, I've been urged to often ask: what must we do, looking into the face of Black life, to render the artistic forms we invent through our voices, bodies, and imaginations?

I've seen our work push the boundaries of voice and body; seen something at work that renders, even re-imagines Black Aliveness, as sane, wild, alert, infinite, and forever.

I imagine it all the time, or maybe I experience it all together, with you, us together, in this:

For Black Aliveness: Solace and Solidarity, I was honored to receive and to now share such dynamic and timely work and play, which speaks to our current currents, seasons of the usual beat of terror, and its concomitant orders of rage and inquiry that sings, signifies, slips, out of which, love is the bass, lines, violence vectors, and into the deepest seas, under the breathing surface: the call, and the response—

My call for every and any form, genre, discipline, media that needs to be, I am so happy is answered, here inside, may I keep asking? May you all keep thriving, my heart, an open tremor for you:

Into Black life, around it, a/contract, iz/collapse, i/Cull – Your singular art/ writing/ voices /bodies push me, and keep me...

What follows, comes poetry, prose, critique, image, picture, drawing, painting, video, song, sound, or other, as it/we radiate(s) across form into black lyric/black song/black portrait/black story/black experiment/ black drawing/black song/ black lyric/black rendering—

In ever gratitude, faith, and love,

– Ronaldo V. Wilson

Guest Editor / Interim Magazine