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The theme is "Savagery"

THEME DESCRIPTION:

This summer marks the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, a document that describes Indigenous peoples as “merciless Indian savages.” That phrase still echoes as a reminder of how language can wound, distort, and justify violence, and how the label savage has long been used to mark peoples, cultures, and lands as less than human.

For this issue, we invite you to enter the word savagery from any direction it calls to you. It might mean exploring the word was it has been used politically. Savagery might mean brutality, survival, or the flux and flex power. It might point to what is wild, untamed, instinctive, feral, lush, or ungovernable. It could live in the natural world, in desire, in grief, in joy too large to be polite. It might name what society tries to civilize out of us, or what refuses containment in bodies, landscapes, histories, or hearts. We welcome work that questions who or what gets called savage, who does the naming, and what happens when the word is rejected, reshaped, or reclaimed.

Connections to the Declaration or to Indigenous histories are welcome but not required. We are equally interested in personal, ecological, political, mythic, or metaphorical interpretations. Take us somewhere unruly, take us down desire trails to history, bring us to the now, to the future. Let the word unpetal.