“I wonder where lines might be drawn between our digital and material selves—word and flesh / photo-tag and skin-tag. Can we, anymore, break free of our machines to locate or resuscitate our bodies? Whether we are ever post-pandemic or not, what remains of our ability to be—alone or together—in public? This poem refuses even these rhetorical questions. To bridge the before-times, the in-times, the end-times, the now-times, the what-is-times, this poem remembers movement and static both. It coughs the sputtering fragments it finds of leftover language. It exhausts itself easily.”
—Samiya Bashir