Editor’s Note:

Dear Reader,

When we put out the call for work that explored “Heat,” we invited writers to approach heat as a state within and beyond temperature, flavor, intensity, and touch, to consider heat literally, figuratively, or somewhere in between. We sought work that complicated and confounded us, work that made us see and feel seen; words that prickled our skin, that burned.

This issue’s nonfiction selections explore “Heat” as indignation, as electricity, as desire—or lack thereof. “A Restaurant Named Desire: On Servers and Actors Who Want” (our author’s debut essay publication!) takes us from the sweltering kitchen of a restaurant into acting classes and back again, interrogating  the question what do you want. “My Mother’s Libido” is a raw and heartbreaking examination of the relationship between a recently widowed woman and her aging mother. “Dead Bedroom,” an essay about the lack of sexual intimacy in a monogamous relationship—and the niche internet communities it inspires—looks at the lack of heat between two people as a type of desire itself. “Mess with Electric” is a non-linear narrative about nerve damage and the memory of an indomitable father whose one fear is electricity. “Pilot Light” is a story of feminine rage, about being gaslighted by men that is both an anguished scream and a rallying cry.

Our poetry selections  realize “Heat” as a literal and metaphorical force, from the well-fed undercurrent of fragility, to burnings big and small. In “My Favorite Birds Decline to Migrate” environmental decay and desiccation signal a collapsing world. “Years of Drought” explores how dust and drought impact land and human spirits. Simmering discontent ruptures into a zealous confrontation with a sanitized world in “Make-A-Wish.” “St. Agnes Foreseeing Her Deaths,” engages with a paradox: the heat of ‘joy’ which ‘consumes’ also contains. The speaker of “Notes from Anne Sexton Suicide Club” navigates fractured identity in the pull of self-destruction. Fire and ruination strip life bare in “Then Everything Was Red.” Black rivers run, a single tree stands in the aftermath of destruction in “Poet Laureate of the Post-Human.” And “Your Release” is a brief, brilliant look at death and fear.

Our selected stories conceptualize “Heat” through unrealized desires, destructions, excavations and escapes.  In “Conference Diary,” away from home, an academic faces headfirst their delayed grief in surprising waves. In “Daniel,” a lifelong friend confesses to a severe transgression, and a young man must parse fabrications from truth. A wife and mother escapes from the quotidian and reckons with unrealized desires in “Crescendo/Cascade.” In “White Teeth, White Lies,” a bartender keeps scores of her lover’s compulsive fabulations. A group of friends throw a rager while coming to terms with their mortality as their neighborhood burns in “This is The End.”

Together these works examine how heat disrupts us from the outside in, from the inside out, and orders our world in disastrous and defining ways.

Our printed issue also includes the winning works of our annual Witness Literary Awards, selected by our generous judges: Wendy Chen (Poetry), Monica Macansantos (Nonfiction), and Alejandro Heredia (Fiction). 

We here at Witness wish you a happy, hot, and propulsive read.

– The Editors

2025 Literary Awards

Fiction

Winner: C. A. Traywick, Baby Killer

Runner-up: Li Sian Goh, Sophia and Ying, on the Class Computer After School

Poetry

Winner: Ola ElWassify, The Art of Translation

Runner-up:  Elizabeth Wing, Last Stop on Route 636

Nonfiction

Winner: Yelizaveta Renfro, When You Write about Trees

Runner-up: Michelle Polizzi, States of Exploitation 

Crush

Fiction

M. Colón-Margolies, Conference Diary

Jenna-Marie Warnecke, Crescendo/Cascade

Emily Rolen, Daniel

Emmie Kline, White Teeth, White Lies

Alexandra Salata, This Is the End

Poetry

Kaitlin Dyer, Your Release

Bryce Emley, St. Agnes Foreseeing Her Deaths

Jona Colson, Notes from the Anne Sexton Suicide Club

Todd Davis, Then Everything Was Red

Alan Elyshevitz, My Favorite Birds Decline to Migrate

Brian Heston, Poet Laureate of the Post-Human

Katherine Shehadeh, Make-A-Wish

Dennis Cummings, Living by the Quarry

Nonfiction

Kaley Hutter, A Restaurant Named Desire: On Servers and Actors Who Want

Mollie Fox, Pilot Light

Julie Ae Kim, Dead Bedroom

Sarah Fawn Montgomery, Mess with Electric

Alice Elman, My Mother’s Libido

Front Cover Image: “Heat” by Charlie Joy