Welcome to the Spring 2026 issue of Nine Mile Magazine. As you read through it, I hope you’ll slow down and savor these poems just as I have. I think the finest compliment a poet can receive is: “your words have come from a great distance to reach the page.” Think about the journeys these words have made. 

 

The next thing I hope you’ll think about is the candor and intelligence on every page. Oh, I know we don’t have pages anymore. But I still think of magazines this way even when they’re digital like this one. 

 

Also in this issue is Gary Whittington’s translation of “The Book of Pilgrimage,” from the middle of the three “books” included in Rilke’s The Book of Hours. Others have translated Rilke, but, as Gary shares, these can coexist, and thus they reveal different approaches. “I allowed my choices to be informed by my own devotional experiences. Perhaps, in a few cases, I found something that others missed."

 

I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that two poems from our Spring 2025 issue, "Shrivelment & Namelessness," by Victoria Korth, and "Citizenry," by Thames Joseph Ellis, have been nominated by one or more of Pushcart's Contributing Editors for a Pushcart Prize. Congratulations to them both.

 

Art is a field. We enter it, and we’re individually and collectively suffused with a renewed sense of the mystery of life. Art is not what we say it is. It’s always just beyond our narratives. And as any astronomer will tell you, no one has ever seen the night sky. Your eyes permit you to see a subjective Platonic and imperfect model of something ineffable and delightfully strange. 

 

When I was a little kid I said to my very Lutheran Finnish grandmother: “I wouldn’t want to be God.” “Why?” she asked. “Because I like surprises.” I said. 

 

May you be surprised by the delights to be found herein. 

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Stephen Kuusisto

Nine Mile Magazine