We chose this issue’s theme, Change, over a year ago in June of 2023. At the time, the theme made sense. Callista and I were headed into our first year of university, Rayan and Amalou were going to med school, and Reina had just graduated. We were interviewing to add new editors to Ripple and getting ready for our first year of teaching free writing classes. We expected change, and we thought we knew what it was, and we ran towards it as fast as we could.

Change did happen, but not the way we expected it to. We got busy with our own lives, which moved and shifted in strange new directions. The issue was meant to be published in October and by October none of us were where we thought we would be. Then the issue was going to be published in November, and then December, and then we started wondering if we were even able to continue running Ripple.

Yet we kept immersing ourselves in the poems of this issue. This issue is everything I love about working as Ripple’s Editor-in-Chief, which is also everything I love about poetry. It’s such an obvious way to put it, but I love poetry because it says something. Reading these poems, I thought of their authors, going through changes of their own—changes like the ones we were going through, changes so different we couldn’t imagine them. I thought of poetry as a moment, poetry as opening your mouth in the middle of everything that’s happening to you and saying it. We’re open for submissions of all genres, but this issue is all poetry. I think poetry is the most important thing in the world.

There are so many poems in this issue I keep coming back to. It’s such a strange thing, being trusted with someone else’s work, their voice. I wondered, as I worked on this issue, why I think I should be the one who gets to know these poems so intimately: rereading them late at night, switching around the order, leaving the tabs open on my laptop. Seeing these little moments in a life, the moments where you stand in the middle of a great change and you say something. Via Ruiz’s poem takes place “as fires bloom/ on the hillside/ like poppies.” Mubarak Said writes “while a butterfly blooms beneath a boy’s nails.” And we still write—because we need to, or because we love to, or both.

Which is to say that Ripple Lit is not ending, completely. It’s changing, and without knowing it we chose the perfect issue to mark this change. Our current format of biannual issues and long submission periods is now unsustainable, and we have a long list of plans for the future, but for now all I’ll say is that we will hold on to what we love about this magazine. What we love is the power of words: across borders, across time, across changes expected and unimagined.

This issue marks the moment we step into the future. We hope you love it as much as we do.

Happy Reading,

Nina Ballerstedt, Editor-in-Chief

and 

The Editors of Ripple Lit