"…I’m just sort of putting my ear against the thing and trying to discern its heartbeat…”

Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South and the dissolution of a modern marriage.

Then the space between us got bigger. The first time I noticed he’d been detaching, I saw an opened tube of toothpaste in the first floor bathroom.

Decomposition does not happen in isolation. You cannot decompose alone.

With the closure of bookstores and in-person readings impossible, sales opportunities for small presses have largely been stymied to the point of near fatality, and the fallout is widespread.

It is difficult to track the speaker of Shimoda’s poems, as his work permeates the delineation between self and other. With this untethering, Shimoda creates a body of text and formal space that unites human and nonhuman aspects of the desert, embodying it as something internal.