We’re in a frenzy of anticipation as we await the moment when Issue 9.1 will arrive in our humble suite. We’ve taken to peering out the door and squeezing the feeling from each others’ hands, and of course we’ll all shriek in a shattering-glass-type register when we spot a delivery person with a pile of heavy boxes. Apologies to the colleague down the hall. We sort of attacked him as he was moving into a new office and possibly ruptured his eardrums (if the blood was any indication). Our mistake.

As we continue to wait oh so impatiently, we pass the time rhapsodizing over our favorite pieces. To share the pining spirit, we post below some contributor comments along the lines of love and longing.

Angela Ball: “Testimony” contains thoughts of an itinerant life. I was remembering how in a small town you were always seeing the person you were secretly in love with—he would show up with unnerving frequency—as if thoughts could summon a person. The Apricot Stars played for Apricot Street in New Orleans long ago—my boyfriend’s father was pitcher, and his uncle was catcher. His mother met his father by coming to the games. It was a happy thing.

John Wall Barger: A few years ago I briefly dated a beautiful woman. Her exes and lovers began appearing everywhere. When we were out for dinner. On walks. They waved from trucks. They were even on TV. I am not usually a jealous person, but I felt overwhelmed by this onslaught. I started to think of these people she’d been involved with—all her admirers, in fact, which were many—as a kind of herd, or a single hydra creature, drawn by the gravitational pull of her beauty. They seemed to hover and glide with her when she entered a room. In dealing with my jealousy, I tolerated them, and then learned to sincerely appreciate them.

Joshua Weiner: When Sarah asked me out on a first date, to see Mel Gibson’s Hamlet (1990; and vastly underrated), I had already seen it with some friends a few nights before. “Oh yeah,” I floundered nonchalantly, “I’ve been meaning to see that.” The next night I drove across the Bay Bridge, from Oakland to San Francisco. She made a pesto lasagna for dinner that was near fucking Platonic. But our friendship would not long remain so. We went to the movie in a theater near her North Beach neighborhood. The first line of the poem begins the rest of the story. Reader, I married her.