Slice Issue 22 | Page 4

SLICE CREATIVE DIRECTOR, CO-PUBLISHER, FICTION EDITOR Celia Blue Johnson BUSINESS DIRECTOR, CO-PUBLISHER, NONFICTION EDITOR Maria Gagliano ART DIRECTOR Jennifer K. Beal Davis ASSOCIATE ART DIRECTOR Matt Davis EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Elizabeth Blachman POETRY EDITOR Tom Haushalter NONFICTION EDITOR Christopher Locke ASSOCIATE FICTION EDITOR Randy Winston ASSOCIATE POETRY EDITOR Trevor Ketner READERS Keren Alshanetsky Kate Belew Noah Burton Matthew Daddona Eleni Demetriou Dave Essinger Bobbie Ford Christianna Fritz Lizzy Harding Marae Hart Jess Kibler Ian King Liz Mathews Roshani N. Moorjani Bryan Myers Casey Nichols Grace Oluseyi Chelsea Paisley Kate Pigott Jackie Reitzes Rob Roensch Julia Specht Gregory Stewart Cindy Withjack Michele Zimmerman SLIC E IS SUPPORTED BY SLICE magazine is made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature. DEAR READER: M y borders have been invaded. As I work on this Borders-themed issue of SLICE with the authors and my fellow editors, a person is growing within the borders of my skin. To her, I am a universe—the swell of my belly is the edge of her space on this earth. I’m pregnant with my first child, and I’m shattered by strange, everyday miracles. And as I work— on the issue and on the incessant labor of creation—it occurs to me that the greatest gift of literature, of language, is the ability it gives us to bring another self, some other mind’s spark of consciousness, inside our skin. COPY EDITORS/PROOFREADERS It also strikes me that the fiction, nonfiction, and poetry in Issue 22 are on the Dan Avant Eve Blachman Vanessa Christensen Angie Hughes somber side. We asked authors to write about borders, and in the current political climate, physical borders have become harsh places, as you can see in our stories about no-fly lists, refugee camps, xenophobic regimes, and walls that keep out the SOCIAL MEDIA ASSOCIATE poor. In the third installment of our International Exquisite Corpse series, four Eleni Demetriou authors in four languages create a story in which a woman’s consciousness and a shadowy institute morph and change until the opening from an extracted molar BOARD OF DIRECTORS Sarah Bowlin Matthew Lansburgh Kimberly Thompson Shane Welch Adrian Zackheim Renée Zuckerbrot becomes a border crossing where an angry guard rants about illegal entries. Raquel Salas Rivera’s poem “note for a friend who wants to commit suicide after the hurricane” (accompanied by Ricardo Alberto Maldonado’s powerful intro) is a post–Hurricane Maria cry of pain. To Rivera, a border is something that separates us, the reason we might abandon one another without power or supplies—the “great hole of fuck-it.” But then the poem tells us that a border can also be a place where we SLICE , Issue 22 touch: “Come in and I’ll give you food and shelter while I have it,” Rivera writes. Copyright © 2018, SLICE Literary, Inc. In many of the pieces in this issue, you’ll see that borders are lonely walls we SLICE  magazine is published semiannually by SLICE Literary, Inc., a 501 (c) (3) draw around ourselves and others—Frost’s good fences that supposedly make good nonprofit organization. If you would like to help support SLICE , please visit slicemagazine.org/donate or email us at [email protected]. neighbors—but they are also the cultural gray areas where we can understand each other, the shadowy spaces between childhood and adulthood, truth and lies, one person and another. If our consciousness is a maze, as Sofia Bonati’s painting on the Visit slicemagazine.org for information about upcoming issues, submission guidelines, and subscription rates. cover suggests, then we might use language to navigate the borders of the maze. We might tell stories in order to bring another human inside the borders of our skin. SLICE is printed in the United States. ISSN 1938-6923 Cover design by Jennifer K. Beal Davis Cover art by Sofia Bonati Painting on previous page by Sofia Bonati TO SUPPORT SLICE PLEASE VISIT US AT SLICEMAGAZINE.OR G, SUBSCRIBE, AND TELL YOUR FRIENDS! JOIN THE SLICE MEMBER COMMUNITY SLICE members are part of a community that believes emerging writers are critical to our cultural conversation. We are united by our love for storytelling and our fierce passion for nurturing unheard voices. slicemagazine.org/membership. Learn more at Cheers, ELIZABETH BLACHMAN Editor-in-chief LET’S GET SOCIAL! Tweet or Instagram @sliceliterary and hashtag us with #slicelitlove