Welcome to SEXTET Issue III: Offerings, springing into life, appropriately, as the northern hemisphere emerges from winter darkness into warmth, into light.
In this issue we’re looking at themes of hope, ritual, sanctuary, and remembrance, inspired by the life and work of Derek Jarman. In 1986, following his HIV diagnosis, Jarman moved to Prospect Cottage, a derelict fisherman’s hut perched on a vast shingle beach in the shadow and unending hum of Dungeness nuclear power station. In this barren, almost post-apocalyptic landscape, harried by harsh winds and the burning tang of salt spray, Jarman nurtured a garden in the endless stone field, making offerings to the future until he passed away in 1994 from AIDS-related complications.
The seeds proffered in our call for entries were sown and cared for by our contributors until they sprouted into poems and stories, and we arrive among them now, stepping carefully along shingle paths; wandering through works that, like the plants at Prospect Cottage, embody persistence under pressure. Here and there, amid a scattering of driftwood dolmens, rise mounds of sea holly, thrift, horned poppy, and crambe maritima; deeply entrenched growths shaped by exposure, gales, and brine. In Stone to Sand, Jean Kim Chmelensky reimagines the monstrous in Kafka’s Metamorphosis as a single grain of sand, drifting through parental anxieties and disrupting societal systems. Dreamwork by Christopher Law and What Nashville Has To Offer To The Universe At Large by Caleb Merritt tread lightly through disorienting environments where the voice becomes dissonant and belonging is always provisional. In Zola Mooney’s Head, Augmented, we accompany a body unable to align itself fully with its surroundings, aching for transformation and renewal.
Gathered around a totem of shore-rusted metal, the planting turns toward ritual: artemisia, valerian, sage, rue, horehound. Plants for prophecy, protection, purification, dream magic. In Methods of Divination, Erin Bondo finds the sacred in the mundane, where ancient practices sit alongside Google searches and an IKEA rug. Megan Cunningham’s Passing Time: Casual Games for Hitchhikers draws on the instructional poetics of Yoko Ono and the Fluxus movement, advocating for process over product and inviting readers to leave something behind for future travellers. Lenten Harvest by Tess Lockhart frames labour as sacred, where the act of clearing land reconnects the speaker to ancestral memory, while in Mid-Autumn, Trong Le condenses perception into a single heightened, almost ceremonial, act of attention.
A circular bed beyond, collared by a ring of sawtooth stones, corrals teazle, periwinkle, vetch, alexanders, restharrow – for now, at least. These wandering proliferators are difficult to constrain. In 2 dactyls on a cloud by M Hibbitts, grief circulates without an exit, and who has not been mired in that fog? Who by Caleb Merritt fractures the interrogative, breaking the borders of its own containment. Galina Dukov’s The Slippery Thing traces a life spent searching as the self becomes as elusive as the thing it seeks.
And then there are the more ephemeral blooms: poppies, cornflowers, day lilies, marigolds, tulips, forget-me-nots; a kaleidoscopic tangle that comes and goes with the cycle of the seasons. In Glacial Erratic, Michael Alcée uses the slow thaw of a snowbound landscape as a place of both loss and restoration. Bruce Thierry Cheung’s G holds memories in a loop, using a lift’s numbered floors to index a life of love, labour, and loss. Two Schools by Elizabeth Wein juxtaposes two geographically and culturally distinct classrooms; bulbs packed with potential.
In the depths of the garden we come to the stands of the well established, slow growers: elder, dog rose, blackthorn, and gorse, carrying histories in their branching limbs. Here we find Rozalija Grace’s The Yerl o Buckingham Wauks on the Saubath, in which desire is deeply embedded, and amplified through the endlessly lyrical textures of old Scots. In Smell by Trong Le, scent is an archive cataloguing nostalgia, identity, and social transformation, while in Sublimate Me, Daniel Cartwright-Chaouki dissolves the boundary between self and landscape entirely, becoming one with the woodland, composting into memory.
Turn now, and look back down the paths. See what has taken root and flourished, even here. “We are together in a garden,” Ellie Williams incants in The Garden At The End Of The World, in which the collective nurturing of a precarious utopia reminds us of the importance of community, and that hope is something that can be actively cultivated. In alignment with Jarman’s vision, the garden is a site of defiance where tending, imagining, and sustaining each other becomes a continuous ritual of survival, and this issue of SEXTET exists in that spirit: each work here an offering, a gesture made without certainty, extended nonetheless.
Thank you for being here.
–Fee