Our eighth issue, Hidden Planets, Monster Stars, is "a veritable meteoroid of energy. This issue bears the stark birthmark of an earth umbilicaled to the Anthropocene, as well as to outer space and all that chaos. It's not at all surprising that falling cosmonauts close this issue, courtesy of Sonya Plenefisch, and that Jenny Grassl's "Making Grape Conserves" has "September" "cooking in the demon pot of suns." It's apt that, in Satoshi Iwai's "Pink-Active," the speaker's brother "has transformed into a three-legged flamingo living near the melted power plant," and quite fitting indeed that Harrison Demchick's ethereal mermaid hails from a tempting subterranean world known as "Magicland," where it is "never too hot." It's felicitous that, during Rick Krizman's tale, "little gods," "tiny lifeless faces with surprised looks" looked on "as the wind blew the grassfire back into the fields, and everything shushed." -- Matt Schumacher, from his Introduction