I’ll be honest with you: I’m not writing much lately. Or reading much, though I should be finishing vol. 2 of Remembrance of Things Past. Mostly I am listening to Bon Iver’s new album, or songs by my beloved best friend Lani who just released her first full album, both musicians who remind me how hard it is to be kind to yourself and how often the prevailing experience of being a person who makes art is feeling a sense of shame.

I have excuses: a new job, the general you-know-what, I took up running again, I have a deep and belligerent resistance to doing the things that I ‘should.’

There are tethers. Thinking about Jorie Graham’s terrifying and beautiful visions of a techno-futurist-present-tense in her latest poem in NYRB (she’s working on a new book I’m sure because she always is and I love her so much). The Frick reopened last weekend and I spent several perfect minutes alone in the garden listening to the fountain. I fully intend to read Ariana Reines’ new books. There are three or four essays I keep meaning to start writing. But I don’t want to. Or I can’t.

This note should be about the issue, and I hope that somehow it is. We always try to have fun at ballast, I love when the reverence and the irreverence collide, I think it’s where we really do our best editorial work, but I can’t deny reading over this issue that there’s a certain necessary darkness here. A big sadness. Poems about being in prison. About how to talk to god. About absence and grief and war. About working a shitty job. About addiction. About missing someone so much.

I am going to send Lani Elena Zhang’s “Streetcar Funeral,” I think she’s really going to like it.

—   Sara Judy, for ballast