ISSUE TWELVE (threads that bind) An excerpt from In Fertile In-between Places BY Alma Tetto “I had a vision in which I made love with the world. The form of my being, indistinguishable from all else, married to atmospheric particle, vibrated in cosmic intensities, quaked as a great mountain. I visited plateaus of whole-body pleasure and pain, a trillion years old, tied up in the archaic and endless Gordian knot of life. What is body and mind but continuity? What is this boundless and incessant unfolding of relation—of fertile pollination via crossing paths of thought being mixed and separated and claimed as our own? My words are not mine. I inherited a language that has moulded my ideas and sight into a particular form. The thoughts and feelings that pass through me arise from a perpetual untold stream as deep and unfathomable as time. I feel this region of being as me. I feel these words as original. I feel that I am singular, a being in motion through the landscape of family, of history, of social cues. I am not linear. I am tied up in chaotic mass below the surface of the earth. I am a conflation belonging to it all. I arrive at a place where history becomes histories, her stories, their stories: we are a multiplicity; each of us are many. Together, we make a raucous crowd.” Image: Bending the arrow of time by debra goldman, 2020