Leanne Ogasawara writes of a precious book, The Orchid, its transmission and proliferation, of the Chinese Emperor’s collection and centralization, all while traveling through space and far into the future. Nic Anstell responds with a story of an artificial intelligence traveling the cosmos and approaching emotions through the accumulation of human languages. Boundaries break, gallop into the open, with leaky edges and tight sutures in poems by Ginger Ko, Megan Kaminski, and Cynthia Ling Lee (“microclimates formed between body and rock”). Our contributors respond with glimpses of speculative embodiment, on the edges of human and non-human others, tender, precarious, soaring among trees and dissolving among worms-for instance, in poems by Alexis Pauline Gumbs and CA Conrad, and in Charli Brissey’s videodance, which will be published in an online folio that serves as a digital companion to this issue (available at ).

We did not know what to expect, but we were again and again delighted, as new energies accumulated among the pieces that came in: surprising universes speaking toward one another, new conversations and alignments, all expanding beyond our own conjoined orbits. To assemble this flight crew, we asked poets, writers, visual and performance artists to bring us their smooth or rough, edgy, connected, recombinant or disjointed glimpses of different heterotopias: from Sun Ra’s funk to global futurisms, from crip fabulation to Afro-pessimism, from solarpunk to trans bots. Our travel themes twine around the cyber avatar, spaceship architectures, steampunk air messages from the multiverse.

Enjoy as the genres mix and flail in hyperdrive. Fly with synesthetic energies, grounded in delicious sensory embodiment. This issue offers invitations: dock with us to explore the tectonics of somatic imaginations.

In the Night Kitchen by Maurice Sendak