Letters to June // 02

Throughout the month of June Boshemia will be publishing letters addressed to the most romantic month of the year.

Dear June,

Your second week marks an impressive benchmark for Boshemia. It's a little over a year now that we've been online, and now we are going to publish our first magazine. Today.

It's so appropriate that our magazine would land in June, the month of Pride, the month of celebrating love and visibility and rebellion and the happy beginnings of a new summer.

The enormity of this benchmark is not lost on me. For one, I am terribly nostalgic for print magazines—in such a way that I was always hoping that my old stacks of VOGUE, Bitch, and National Geographic would amount to more than just obsession, really. Happily, the magazine team shares in this obsession of reviving this "dying" medium, and their careful, masterful work speaks for itself.

Over the past week, I have written thank-yous, a Letter from the Editor, a reflection statement for a community scholarship, and dozens of flurried and scrambled texts all attempting to express the gratitude and satisfaction I have in my soul at the completion of the project. But all of these hurried mediums feel insufficient in summing up the emotional experience of creating such a seamless fusion of art and text. Perhaps because it's only beginning.

One feels stripped raw at the end of this experience; we are baring ourselves to the world in a bigger way than before, both in terms of geography and in content. [We also haven't slept.]

Our poetry, our artwork, the personal narratives of women and men we adore; it's all there. A perfect soirée playlist, an examination of nudity in Reykjavik, a discussion on the intersection of black feminist identity and anti-jewelry, a symposium on coming out, and a reflection of the 80s genderbending trifecta of pop music—all there.

Personally, I am daunted by the publication of my poetry series, Vignettes of Lovers in Summer, but it feels like the right time. The series is introduced with this photograph, by Emily Jessee. This image gives me such a feeling of summer in its most essential expression. I revisit this image often.

I look at this beach, and think of the people who will read my poems about lovers gone by and wonder if they were real; I hope they think of their summers gone by, too. I think of queer girls who will read our essays about coming out and maybe that will be their own prompting to find their truth.

I think of the women we haven't met yet who will next week hold in their hands the perfect-bound lovechild of a tight-knit collective girl-gang from 4 countries. Maybe they'll listen to our playlist, maybe they'll start their own 'zine.

Sometimes I forget the enormity of our project and of the people's lives we have touched and will touch. It feels too surreal, though, still, and so I can not bask in this, not fully, until I hold a copy of my own.

I'll see it next week, on different shores, in the country that calls to me earnestly at all hours.

Thank you for reading us, dearest month of June and Boshemians.

All my love,

E xx