Winter 2024. Letter from the Editor. Darcie Friesen Hossack

Another child is dying in Gaza as I type. Another one now. And now. And now.

A mother slides into the blood of what’s left of her son, her daughter, and picks up a severed hand to hold, one last time. A father gathers the pieces of his children into a Ziploc bag so they can have a grave that isn’t under their shattered home.

In Israel, women wait, wail for their husbands, their sons, to come home. Will they? Will they still be themselves if they do? And what is happening to the women and girls still held by Hamas, who slink through their tunnels, paid for with bread money, meant to feed their people?

Does anyone outside Israel remember the music festival now? The kibbutzes now? The murdered families? The hatred that was ejaculated into women, into girls, before a shot to their heads?

And Ukraine. Do we still weep for Ukraine two years into Russia’s invasion? Or think of Sudan, ten months into a war of unspeakable violence that must be spoken and loudly, for all the world to know. A war that’s been invisible to the West, including myself. With gang rapes (there are always gang rapes). And the killing of parents in front of their children (there is always killing of parents in front of their children). 1.7 million refugees have fled their homes.

In Russia, Navalny is dead. Who will fight for a different vision of Russia now? Who will dare oppose power now?

For those of us at WordCity Literary Journal, the poetry and most of the prose in this issue deal with war. It is dedicated to those lost to and lost in the violence of humankind’s collective failure to love one another enough not to take aim and kill. It is an indictment of our failure to elect (where that is possible) leaders who understand that the loss of one innocent life is one too many. A memorial to our human failure to see ourselves and our loved ones in the faces of the “other.”

We have no solutions here.

Terrorists and authoritarians and the corrupt, those who have destroyed their own humanity for the sake of power, and hide from the consequences of their own crimes, will not stop and will not surrender.

At the same time, on the streets of our cities, in our shops and workplaces and schools, we throw sticks and stones with our words, too foul to repeat here. Too foul, too, to close our ears and refuse to hear.

Antisemitism is on the rise. Islamophobia, too. And instead of reaching to one another with compassion and mutual sorrow, to many of us tighten our fists with hate for one other and for each other’s flags.

Stop. Just stop.

That’s what we ask.

Take this time to read. Read aloud, even. Listen. And really listen to the words in this issue. To what those who are in pain have to say. And then go out and love your neighbour, knowing that everyone is your neighbour.

Please.