Touch

Winter 2021

Limits on touch, we’ve come to find, seem to highlight the limits of words. A word is the zoom call version of what it signifies, just like there’s no open bar at a virtual wedding. A six-foot hug is mostly just lonely. Words are all we have right now, and it turns out, after this many months, they’re just not enough. And so, instead of words, we asked our writers for touch.

We said in the submission call that our definition of touch was necessarily constellatory, and that is certainly true of the work presented here—one can easily imagine the lines linking these stars together. What we didn’t anticipate, though, was the sheer intimacy of what we were given; how our writers responded to our call not with the touch of a hand offered to a stranger, but the touch of a childhood, or a kiss, or a photograph, or a ghost, or a death, or Anne Boleyn’s tinseled throat, trying to sing. Which is to say, they responded not with their hands, but with their lives—the unregulated currency of touch. Thank you for this, writers.

Amazing too the work we can do at such distance! The editorial team—which never met in-person, which never exchanged so much as a high-five—was nonetheless intrepid, thoughtful, and adventurous, lighting up their screens each day with an enthusiasm and excitement rarely found in video-conference-based communities. Thanks, team, and cheers.

And so, in absence of touch, in lieu of proximity, and in overwhelming gratitude, Reader, we hope the warmth of what is here suffices, for now.

—MH