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What are healthy forms of intimacy?

That’s what Daisy Atterbury asked, cross-legged on my living room floor. I knew we had arrived then; that we were not just speaking to each other, but had been re-shifted into another, more dangerous, more productive collaborative zone.

Is it a meeting?

It was the start of the semester, and yes, we had staged a meeting. The goal was to set intentions for the months ahead. Asking questions was our chosen mode and method (s/o to Chy Sprauve). After nearly 15 years of higher ed, I was finally learning to reframe my world into statements of inquiry: in my writing, in my teaching, in my living. It was Daisy was pulling me in.

How do I relate to the social environment that is produced by Daisy’s question, by her poems? What ecologies do these words produce, worlds I’ve been drawn to then into, over the last four years? Even now I find I am wanting to echo her voice in the same moment that I am wanting to write about the particular landscape she’s been sounding. I am wanting to write about her arresting (now colossal) manuscript, Relief Route / The Karman Line, which I’ve been reading in stages. All italics are in Daisy’s words: either from or around that script.

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