Portland Community College | Portland, Oregon

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Whether or not we choose to change feels more like a repercussion of human agency and free will. In “Apex,” a character must navigate a world she cannot control, yet she still has some choice in how to exist within it. Her agency lies in how she reshapes herself.

Metamorphosis can be painful; some things, like a caterpillar dissolving in the cocoon, are left behind. In “Ode to My Other,” we’re invited into the sorrow of that shedding—a longing for who we were, or who we might have been. Even an absence of stress can reveal us to ourselves, allowing us to explore ourselves more. In “The Meat Tenders,” transformation is messy and brutal; still it contains enormous personal significance. Growth is rarely gentle.

Other stories show us what it means to witness transformation in someone else. “Girls Grow Faster” explores how the changes we don’t choose—or don’t yet understand—can shape us powerfully. Sometimes change can leave us lost, grasping for straws, only to learn what it means later in life. In “Let’s Get It Together, Okay?” the protagonist knows something must shift but needs help to name it. Sometimes, we need others to evolve.

And sometimes the person who helped us find ourselves can be taken away from us, making grief change us again, like in “To Terese,” a powerful elegy for a person who changed the author. In their absence, we remember the people who helped us become.

The world would be a very mundane place if things were not constantly transforming. Change might be the only thing that is constant. In poems like “If It Falls” and “The Dead Houseplant,” we see time’s passage in seasons, in small deaths, in fragile blooms.

If change is inevitable, how we move through it is uniquely human. Sometimes we resist. Sometimes we surrender. Sometimes we rebuild, and sometimes we make heavy revision. Nothing stays still. And, sometimes, there’s comfort in that. We hope the works you find in this issue of Alchemy resonate with your own changes—those you’ve chosen, those you’ve endured, and those you’re still moving through. You are not alone in the struggle. In this issue, we are holding space—for anger, for joy, for mourning, for collapsing into nothingness & re-emerging as a changed self. For metamorphosis.

— Alchemy Editors