Note from the Editors

Amal says: This winter has, in many parts of the world, overstayed its welcome. Any charms its jewelled frosts and six-fingered flakes may have had are long past: its sparkle's cold; its cold is drear; its drear has nothing left of comfort to it. Coats, blankets, woollens chafe, and bare skin longs for spring.

So into the chattering season's teeth we throw this small morsel to sate it once and for all: here are songs of love and death, poems of winter's beauties but also of their banishment, of confrontation and change. Against the pale brilliance of glass, diamonds and cold stars are set colours all the brighter for striking against white — rose petals, apples, the feathers of hunting birds. This is an issue of women grasping their stories by the shoulders and shaking them into difference, tattering gowns into more comfortable wear; impossible as it seems, dear readers, Winter will break itself against a blossom growing out of a shoe.

Caitlyn says: Winter howls on here in Ottawa. Today I saw people venturing out without hats, hope of spring in their hearts. Tonight I looked out the window to a wall of falling white and the scrape of the snow plow. Sometimes it feels as though it will last forever — that we will remain eternally under the spell of the Snow Queen. Perhaps poetry can melt her cold heart?

I hope that you live in a part of the world where there are flowers blooming. Please greet them for me, and enjoy this issue as one last offering of winter — a shiver, a shimmer, and the brightness of light on snow.

Amal says: Thanks are due to Zarina Liew for this issue's delicious art; to our comestible contributors for their exquisite poems; and to you, dear readers, without whom our snowy march would be bootless.

Enjoy.