Dear Hannah and Scout,

I’m in Los Angeles and wondering if I’ve made some sort of mistake. I think I am so financially irresponsible, I think I am so un-regulated. I find myself unable to and uninterested in saving money. Today and yesterday I spent hours researching how to deal with identity theft. I’ve been dealing with identity theft off-and-on for 10 years, since I graduated high-school. But I feel no urge to truly engage; it feels against my values to punish. Still I’ve felt some desperation to find out who this person is, living in Bakersfield, CA, opening credit cards at Home Depot in Texas. I spoke with an Assessor recorder in Kern County to figure out who is on the lease at the apartment complex “Samira Jade Abed” lives at so I can call the leasing company and ask if someone named “Samira Jade Abed” lives there, or if even that is an illusion, or if there are many of them all taking stake in who I am and what my name has to offer.

The anxiety eats me shamefully. I would rather have fun and spend all my money on chia seeds and thick cotton shirts, iced coffee, and listen to these citizens of LA who seem so lonely, so desiring of love. They speak all the time to each other about who they are wanting to date and how they will make it happen. I write the conversations down in my journal. These young people who say they “just need 5 months and she’ll be mine,” these girls deciding which of their two crushes are more masculine, who discuss their behavior with exacting analysis, this man, in a loud tenor, asking his married bosses what they think “real and true love is.” Today a man gave me his business card, ostensibly because he liked my dress and wanted to buy one for his costume design business, but when I went to his QR code, all I saw were a few music videos of him singing. I went on a long walk from Highland Park to Koreatown thinking of Oblonsky from Anna Karenina and when he says:

‘Himmlisch ist’s, wenn ich bezwungen

        Meine irdische Begrier;

Aber doch wenn’s nicht gelungen

        Hatt’ ich auch recht hübsch Plaisir!

(‘It is heavenly when I have mastered my earthly desires; but when I have not succeeded, I have also had right good pleasure!’)

Then I returned to my sublet near Highland Park and with my current housemate and her girlfriend we paged through Lloyd Kahn’s book Shelter, about DIY architecture. We looked at dome houses in Mali adorned with spires for every child born, how to construct knots that tied perfectly around cross-shaped sticks, little nests birds would climb into and become swallowed by, sleeping inside them like in wombs. I wish there was a way we could all get whatever we wanted, that we could all live together forever, everyone I’ve ever loved, in close proximity, even the ones I feel unable to imagine seeing again, and have a sort of un-jealous harmony.


I drew my feelings above ^.

I think now about these lines, from Julian Tanya’s poem “all growed up”:

what mediates entanglement

and could

I walk through

the adumbriated networks

lunar ateliers’

iridescend gondoliers

the color of your truelove’s eyes

god said find a door

and paint it

I feel in this work a real erotic pleasure beyond the union of person with person. Or rather through the union with our beloved, a “truelove,” the opening of a reciprocal enlightenment. A world of interstitched communities, a commune of artists in their “lunar ateliers,” spliced as the poem is enjambed, moving as though in a Bauhaus dome, each room opening to a new one. I am moved by the way words generate proximity in this poem, reassembling its architecture of “true” and “love,” as of compound space. The potential for the poem to express in its geography a “love” that is not beheld to the laws of prosaic grammar or typical (should there be a typical) conceptions of home-making as either complete separation or complete enmeshment. “[E]ntanglement,” here, is not just a mashing of things together — these “lunar ateliers” are satellite spaces orbiting each other, unities that define space as both autonomous and communal, artistically utopic. The “door” is a physical space in the poem doubly under the domain of the artist and the reader. We imagine both painting the veneer of the door (adorning it with the beauty of our own work) and painting it into existence itself (imbuing a sense of autonomy to the creation of our own networked euphoria).

Is there a limit to pleasure, and is it possible to never experience it, even in Heaven itself? I find myself debating this sometimes in my own blessed existence, when I wake up and am sad even in my borrowed sunny LA bed. In the shifting geometry of Valerie Hsiung’s
Evolution, a book-length poem excerpted in this issue, the visually stuttering steps of the poem’s beginnings mimic its Sisyphysian movements:

Not knowing how he got here, he will

spend the whole day sick with the feeling

    of a new home.      He will hide in it

so we mistake it for his home.

The gaps between words and lines are mysterious; they are intense. Perhaps they are reflections of the “he” that hides in the poem. The space of the poem itself, full of perforation, examines the loneliness of a person surrounded by different actors. These actors’ absences live as strongly in the poem as do the actors themselves. The poem itself lives that loneliness.

I miss you guys but feel an odd peace. I hope we can be together again soon.
Samira


Dear Hannah and Samira,

It's July, but really, it's spring. It wasn't spring this spring, but was instead cold then wet and hot, then cold again. The character of spring is often like late summer, or the earliest days of winter. And today, this July day, for the first time all year, the character of spring is made present in Chicago: dry soft air and cool clouds.

My recent wish: to call up a friend and plan to talk on some porch or bench. To schedule uninterrupted hours of conversation. There will be no event beyond this talking. It will be like talking on the phone. This is a really simple and attainable wish, I know. I am watching a couple hug intensely in the doorway of a bakery. I bet the two of them have talked at times for hours.

I've been reading Courtney Bush's new novel, Learning (Joyland Editions, 2026). I've found a reason to cry on nearly every page. In Learning, love is something one gives away, not for reasons of family, biology, nor even “passion.” It is also not given away in the spirit of reciprocity, with the hope that love ought, in its occasionally cyclical manner, be returned to its feeler. Instead love is morphed into a bulky and spontaneous labor, radiant within everyone, and provoked by the precise and dirty world of children who cry and sing. I have not often read something that has paid children such careful and diverse attention as this. The children do not solicit love because they are innocent, but they do not garner love by way of seeming troubled or in need, either. Love emerges in this relation: in the struggle of and with the friendly, lonely, difficult, intelligent child. To even write out this phrase, “intelligent child,” feels counter to Learning's world, as it supposes some plane on which children require such a modifier, are clarified or enhanced by its addition to their being. As though it were not to them already attached through intricate laws of their own. Children are already “good,” but are not so because they are blank.

Children are all over the poems that have appeared in our journal. Across seasons they come and go, returning with difference. I am relieved by this. In her book-length poem, Valerie Hsiung (whose beautiful new book, The pedestrian, was released by Nightboat Books earlier this month) writes:

Green on green.  Puzzled.        Children are
  the last hunter gatherers.   They tell me things.
      Like “He is hiding
            but not who he is.        Our skin is not a door.
      Not even a window.       It is atmosphere.
      Nothing, not even skin or atmosphere,
      has a mind of its own.

            Touch creates sounds.    Sound is audience
      of touch, the laws of physics.
        A child,s laws touch me.
          Premonitions move backwards.

I am blown away and to pieces by this poem. I am moved to copy all of it here, to write about it simply by transcribing it word for word. But I'll start instead with this small part of it.

“Children are / the last hunter gatherers. They tell me things.” Collectors and knowledge transmitters, living within a particular and efficacious law, children tend toward and around Evolution's speaker. The children are cast as “audience” to the very speech we might assume is their own. In this way, both figures — speaker and child — are responsible for reported rather than invented speech. Poetic transmission is also the domain, in part, of Nora Claire Miller’s work:

Dear world, I have finished my recording.

Ok, said the world, but what’s your favorite font?

This one, I said, and then I flung it towards the light.

Rather than make something from nothing, something is recorded and redeployed. Here, this something becomes a shapely projectile, “flung” into our lighted line of sight. Through this flinging, gathered sounds curl-up into fonts. This is the world’s demand.    

To call speech a “recording” or “reported” is not to say that it is uncreative. Though the result of gathered material, language maintains a divinatory capacity. By producing and receiving reportage (hunting, gathering, and sharing language), we play legitimate audience not only to what is here, but to what is left out. In Hsiung’s poem, what one “witnesses” — as you mentioned, Samira — maintains its attached absences: a gatherer of touch and sound becomes equally responsible for the occlusions of touch and sound. “He is hiding / but not who he is.” The child reports upon the subject who is exposed and thus is hidden. What we might call his essence is apparent (having not hidden “who he is”), but his form is reported as missing, not here, nowhere that we can see. He is himself, but is himself hidden. Where has he gone?

Samira, you have written that this “he” hides in the poem. But I feel that it might be the poem itself from which he hides. There is something antagonistic and wry at work in this piece, as humanity itself is sometimes both antagonistic and wry. The poem feels at times like a protective spell, though also, like a spell's other face: a curse. Shouldn't poems be allowed this register, too? What would it take, Evolution seems to ask, to look with clarity at violence and disappearance without enacting a regime of recuperation? Or, further, to look at care or rehabilitation without turning away from pain? I feel a kinship between Bush's Learning and Hsiung’s Evolution at this reciprocal knot:

He was like a black flower     my son
    and I was his eye. I pretended he was alive
because death was almost all we had.
  A child touching all her weapons.
My woman putting her man in his sling.
  There is a wildness inside the caretaker
that no longer lives at the surface.

Children with all of their weapons, caretakers with their wildness, no longer “at the surface.” How do we love them? What does it mean to love in the face of our difficult and polluted relations, “To need: the most beautiful love / Because it is polluted[?]”

Where we might want to see distinctions between these figures — the child, the caretaker, the reporter — the poem once again presses otherwise. I am a machine ; I am my mother ; I am a child touching herself. These voices are not the same, but their difference does not affirm separation. These reported instances of confident uncertainties and nonrecuperative remembrances slide before the reader in a series of open quotation marks. Speech begins and begins again, never seeming to end. A dialog unfolds, but without speakerly distinction. As do conversations with the dead. The poem does not volley language between definitive subjects, but inaugurates an open channel between the here and the elsewhere:

I stay
  just outside
reality but the telephone is connected through and between
  glass. At the hospital the cleaning woman
sprays the handprints. The earth should not be celebrated,
  sequestered. We should
know what it wants from us
    and go slowly to      on the landfill.

Tethered to the earth by only (but with great veracity) a landline, Evolution imagines something beyond where we are by gathering up what is already here. This poetic subject is captured well by the child hunter gatherer, or, as depicted in the above stanza, by those who move slowly toward and around the landfill. We must tend to the hospital, to the sickbed, to the sequestered world as a salvager tends to the dump. Everything is contaminated, but nothing is beyond our interest.

This poem scares me. In places, it makes me want to hide from it, too. And in scaring me, it comforts and excites me. No longer must I be alone with my fears. Nor are they relegated to the zone of nihilism.

I asked if I dared.     Not waiting
  to hear an answer.     Another world lovingly watched
them communicating with motions.

Not waiting but nonetheless insisting, the speaker dares us to join her. I want to. I want to be in partial view of that other world, capable of casting a loving glance upon this one.

You two know I love and miss you. It goes without saying, but I still like to say it. Last night I watched an amazing puppet show, it was called “Horse Play.” As the title implies, the puppets depicted horses. Some of the puppet-horses were mounted on wheels, while others were the work of shadows. Light had a significant role to play in the production. One horse was performed by the body of a person rather than a puppet, though they wore a large mask, turning them into a kind of puppet. The masked person danced to "Ring of Fire" beneath orange and red lights, and smoke. This sounds a bit comedic, as I describe it here. But it was eerie and beautiful, as though this horse had wanted to dance to "Ring of Fire" for thousands of years.


Love,
Scout

Dear Scout and Samira,

Another world is lovingly watching us. You both describe how these poems figure other worlds, ones that float far afield and yet are connected through a wire, or an orbit, to this one we have. In dream, play, reverie, trance, nearby worlds open, and then the door closes back up. We can be startled back here and realize we never left. This is a cause for worry. What do we do to bring these bright worlds closer here, where we are? Or, might we want to keep these distant worlds at bay? They too can feel unsafe. When I was a girl in the schoolyard, other girls spoke of a girl they knew who had entered a trance she had never left. They wanted to conjure the same kind of trance and see where the girl in the center of that trance would go. I was afraid that any of us could get stuck. Who would we sacrifice to go there, to find out?

It upsets me that in Percy Shelley’s Queen Mab, Ianthe’s spirit must leave this earth to discover the means for Earth’s renovation. Queen Mab visits Ianthe in her sleep and draws her spirit from her body. Ianthe’s lively, animal body stays asleep on the couch, distant from her disembodied spirit, now apparently free. Mab takes Ianthe’s spirit very far from her sleeping body. Together they travel in a magic car so far up into outer space that the Earth, now only a little light, seems very small, and the contingent actions of human history shrink down too.

Shelley dreams of this incredible elevation to escape the tyrannical here and now. But I still wish Mab could have shown her all this from down on the ground. I want her to get back down. I cannot enjoy these visions in Shelley’s poems. I feel a strong fear for that body left behind. I want the spirit and the body to always be joined. To be disembodied is not freedom.

This is why I am afraid of sleep. Dreams can last too long, and they can take us away from each other. They can also take us away from those creatures we discover in our dreams. We can wake up separated from those worlds and people we find, and really get to know and love, overnight. Nora Claire Miller’s poem, beginning with the line “It doesn’t matter which window the shrimps,” inhabits the precarious divide between waking and sleeping, as our speaker tries to recover a dream of shrimp flying out the window:

So long as I remembered the dream

from the other night, it must have been

the same dream from the same other night.

Each element deeply familiar to me

though I couldn’t describe it ten seconds later.

These dream elements we encounter are “deeply familiar,” and yet our waking language may or may not manifest their recovery. The difficulty verbalizing these elements “ten seconds later,” does not preclude their familiarity, the certainty of an encounter with their flying forms: it must have been. The poem produces emphatic speech acts to reencounter these shrimps. “Dear shrimps, are you prepared for disaster?” The apostrophic address—“Dear shrimps”—calls them, and proposes that they might reply. They are brought into the active present of the poem’s communicative circuit. This direct address allows the shrimp to fly from the dream through the window and into the ordinary, waking reality the poem furnishes. The speaker enjoins them to become “ready to go,” ready again to fly. Direct address, rather than mimetic description, prepares that window.

This window that the shrimp fly through, it’s a bit like that painted door you describe, Samira, in Julian Tanya’s poem: “god said find a door / and paint it.” We must paint the portal.

In the first of Claire DeVoogd’s two poems, both titled “Painting,” the speaker is also directed to paint, but by her friend James instead of by God: “He said make a painting / I write a long bar of red.” Paint and words collide, as lines become strokes of pure sediment and color: “Green / Flaking.” The poem that becomes a painting is “desiring to see something” in dense shapes. Forms drop down “densely” into a concrete reality. If in your reading of Hsiung’s poem, Scout, words are product of and “audience” to matter, likewise, here words accommodate matter, taking on real substance: color, sediment.

In DeVoogd’s second “Painting,” she narrates an earthly vision, appearing under her dog’s paw. Her dog’s paws are “indulgent to the matter, like / The hands of / A potter.” The dog becomes a sculptor, affecting the pliable material of the earth in its paws. The poem does not narrate a dream-vision like the one that Queen Mab imparts to Ianthe, but rather an interactive encounter with the world as it juts up in close proximity to the eye. She stares into the place between paw and puddle:

As I looked closer

I saw

The world they

Split, under

The weird pads

And curved nails

A form of life

That had been

Like some drama I had half

Apprehended

But not accounted for

Occurring beside us all

Along, in

The silty blur.

The weird structure of the paw has “split” the world. A small part of the Earth has been altered in the dog’s stomping path. The movement of the paw alters perception, too: a “drama” becomes fully known, an entire life occurring in the “silty blur.” This silt is suddenly alive. As the speaker looks even closer, a whole world of active, spinning material starts to animate, amidst scribbles and drifting leaves:

Salamanders

Shot up, from

Between the nails, and

Ran, like

Paint, from between the

Colossus nails, which were

I saw then, the

Sleek tusks of

Other, new-born species.

Salamanders, new-born species, the sleek tusks of elephants. Animals are running like “paint” in the expansive scenery of these nailbeds. Half-apprehended and half painted, this is an overstimulating vision. Sleep must follow. The poem ends when sleep begins:

We often sleep after

Seeing this kind

Of thing.

Things

Of this kind are

Often such

An anguish.

What is the “anguish” of this vision, an entire animal world spinning underfoot? I think part of the anguish might be that the “form of life” the vision reveals has been “Occurring beside us all / Along,” whether we were able to see it or not. We are often separated from it. But this anguish might also be like the shudder I feel when I think of the girl who got stuck in a trance, her brain flooded with too much imagination. The poem produces an earthly trance, one that overloads the senses. It can be distressing to see too much. The poem shuts its eyes.

Bijoux Forever,
Hannah