WELCOME TO the fourth issue of the Journal and nearly two years of Westbrae. Themes are not required for each issue but as the issue comes together, themes emerge. At least they do for me. Humans, we know, have a propensity to project their inner states of mind (subjective feelings) on the world around them. We refuse to exist in a vacuum; our minds are always directed at, or about, something else entirely.

The poetry in this issue beautifully captures this inward projection. John Allison Cannon takes the mundane act of grocery shopping and projects a raw, blushing passion onto a simple dragon fruit. Timothy Dodd directs our minds backward, projecting a deep, ancestral longing onto the fading ghost towns and cobblestones of his history. Josh Greenbaum looks inward at his own aging body, seeing not a temple, but a ramshackle house full of character, while Mike Mandzik traps us in the sterile, cellophane-wrapped confines of medical trauma, where the mind desperately maneuvers against physical pain.

Our prose writers push this concept even further, showing how we manufacture meaning just to survive the chaos of our lives. In Zach Wyner’s excerpt from The Vanishing Point, a young man confined to a concrete cell, anchors his humanity to the AI-generated voice of his dead father and the lingering scent of a girl on a t-shirt. Matthew Blasi delivers a hilariously profound absurdist confession, wherein his narrator’s mind completely disassociates to project a taxonomy of "evil" directly onto his own fibula. And Billy Field, staring down the barrel of a gun, projects an "x-ray vision" onto his attacker's tormented soul—a breathtaking moment of grace in the face of violence.

Paired with Dave Anderson's stark, highly textured linocut art, this issue is a testament to the mind's irrepressible need to orient itself.

Thank you to our contributors for sharing their inner worlds, and thank you for reading.

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