Curatorial Note

How is "elsewhere" made?Who might inhabit these worlds-ancestors, insectoids, kin, a god?What speculative powers help to articulate the contours of such dynamic fields of relation?The creatives in this issue bring elsewhere into view as they reveal acute desires for intimacy, acceptance, transformation, and liberation.They meet these needs with creative practices of world-building in which technique, whether footwork, metaphor or color theory, opens "golden portals," as our cover artist Darryl DeAngelo Terrell describes.The artists convened here are each, as poet Miriam Saperstein riffs, "a tambourine/rustling with the end of all worlds" while they, to borrow Amber Janay Cooper's term, desperately-persistently-jubilantly "conjure" new ones.From where do new worlds emerge?When the origin and destination of such novelty are unlocatable, how do we get there?In this issue, our goal is to confuse the standard terms of discovery by refuting the overrepresentation of and investment in divine and human form.Presenting the work of six creatives across a range of media, we define queer creativity as cooperative ground where artists act as coconspirators.In this way, creatives who express grief through religious memory and personal geographies unearth what we call an intercession.If strangers who lack knowledge of each other can build alternate realities for one another, then artistry must be the act that mediates the seen and unseen.Here, the Lower East Side's poetic request to be held is received by the ancestral waters of Chicanx folk Catholicism.While queer flesh of Korean America cries of estrangement, Washington DC's unchurched are reassembling the terms of gender through their depiction of the first mother.Elsewhere, the femme spirituality of Black Detroit and Dominican Republic's Santeria build mediums of travel that begin disclosing thresholds to an alternate horizon.Reflecting on technique, loosely proposed as the relation between process and expression, we, the coeditors, noted intersections across these artists' methods and visions.For example, mujero and Cooper both employ a dialectic between deconstructing and reassembling to resist and transform supremacist utopias.Specifically, mujero connects the breakdown and recrafting of Air