Detail from "el inmigrante" by Saul Martinez
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About the cover:
“el inmigrante” by Saul Martinez
This artwork was inspired by Raul Gomez-Eudave, an 18-year-old from Othello, Washington who one early day in 2025 was stunned to learn that his mother was arrested by ICE agents. From that moment on, he was left to fend for himself while maintaining his family, his senior year in high school, and simultaneously learning to run the family food truck business as his mother once did.
Here, Raul is represented by the chinook salmon, itself a fighter, a migrating creature which battles through gill nets, fish hooks, dams, disease, and other forces of nature just to make it to its secondary home in the ocean. Five to seven years later, now grown and experienced, it must fight once more to reach the headwaters of Canada. The chinook is a natural wonder. We respect it for its beauty, its ability to provide sustenance on our dinner table, and for its resilience.
In this painting, Raul is depicted as barely making it in his environment; without his mom, he is — in a sense — a fish out of water.
— Saul Martinez
Instagram: @sahul_arte & @cafeconartet
From the Editor:
Hello.
This month, I wanted to write about Trans Day of Visibility. I wanted to write about autism. I wanted to write about mental health month and Cinco de Mayo... but instead, I ended up writing a poem.
Like Neruda said, “Llegó la poesía a buscarme.” And it’s not a gentle thing, usually. This time, it simply would not let me be until I wrote it down.
Until I was diagnosed with autism, I didn’t understand why the way songs and snippets of speech got stuck in my head was so different from what other people described. Poetry is like that. Writing in general, sometimes.
It can feel like a haunting, especially if I’m trying to ignore it. If it gets strong enough, it will spill out of my mouth unbidden when I open it to say something else.
That’s what it was like this time around. So... I don’t know what to say. Maybe there isn’t a message. Or, if there is, maybe the message is that sometimes all you can do is give voice to the things that are haunting you.
— Sara Quinn
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