[Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet 33] • Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet No. 33

The 30% Non-Dead-Tree Issue (0% Dead Tree Edition), guest-edited by Michael J. DeLuca.

> It’s no watershed moment, much as I’d love it to be; *Conjunctions* just did one they were even-keeled enough to call *The Nature Issue*. And there have been anthologies, and even the occasional novel-length text, every few years since the anthropocene started: ideas in narrative form I’d probably never have thought to lump together into anything until I spent a month reading submissions for an LCRW issue I claimed would be themed on “humanity’s relationship with the earth”.

It was gratifying and calming to learn that people other than me and not just the talking heads do think about these things. In fact, the experience bordered on the sublime; it restored (some of) my faith in humanity. This is what art, speculative literature in particular, is for: unrestrained thought in a form that if we let it will touch every part of what makes us human and thereby foment more of the same.

I asked for optimism, I expected cynicism, I got both. We’re not going to make it through this thing without a sense of humor. I tried to find complexity and overlook the easy answers.

**fiction**

Carmen Maria Machado, “I Bury Myself”

Alena McNamara, “Starling Road”

Giselle Leeb, “Ape Songs”

Michelle Vider, “For Me, Seek the Sun”

Deborah Walker, “Medea”

D. K. McCutchen, “Jellyfish Dreaming”

Sofia Samatar, “Request for an Extension on the Clarity”

M. E. Garber, “Putting Down Roots”

Eric Gregory, “The March Wind”

**nonfiction**

Christopher Brown, “Winter in the Feral City”

Nicole Kimberling, “Cook Like a Hobo”

**poetry**

Leslie Wightman, “The Sanctity of Nature”

Ingrid Steblea, “Another Afternoon in the Garden”

Kelda Crich, “Child Without Summe”

Peter Jay Shippy, “Singing Beach”

**art**

Kevin Huizenga

Dmitry Borshch

Steve Logan