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For the past few months, I have been carrying with me a book of haikus, or near haikus, by the Japanese poet Sayumi Kamakura, translated into English by James Shea. Applause for a Cloud, published last year by Black Ocean press in Boston, begins with these lines: 

In Greece’s Chinatowns, I saw Chinese immigrants traversing the streets but not in a flashy red-lantern-golden-gate-fortune-cookie-boba-drinks type of way but in a more waking-up-at-the-crack-of-dawn-and-opening-up-shop-and-smoking-a-cigarrette type of way. The Chinese immigrants in Greece were more lowkey. I was thinking this when I walked through the streets in the summer of 2026.

When I spent the summer in Portugal, everyone told me the street I lived on was dangerous. But in the daylight, the area appeared innocent. Clothing lines strung from neighboring windows, trash bags and cans filled with evidence of mundane lives: beer bottles, diapers, and old linens. From the view of my window, I could see a small woman pull laundry from the line and a man in his mid thirties lounge after a day’s work. My street smelt like cigarettes and in the early evening they sounded of laughter, shouts, and spitting motorcycles.

I met Kwiatkowksi over a series of events in September and October of 2025, as he traveled in the US with the Cheuse Center at George Mason University and Yale University. Grzegorz Kwiatkowksi is the Cheuse Center’s Visiting Writer from Poland, and the center is collaborating with him on a series of events that mark the tenth anniversary of the Cheuse Center, founded in 2016. The center was named after Alan Cheuse, whose father was a Jewish refugee to America, from Stalin’s Russia (now Ukraine).

The third broadside project featuring poetry by Moriel Rothman Zecher, art by Allison Grace Erdelyi, and design by Kevin Jones is a deep collaboration reflecting on our common humanity. .

I came to the Talo, a tributary of the Brahmaputra, with a head full of second-hand knowledge. Arunachal Pradesh and Assam had existed for me mostly as abstractions—borderlands in textbooks, settings in novels, places mentioned more often than known. This journey was an attempt to let those fragments loosen and rearrange themselves through direct encounter.

The locals say a stampede of Eriskay ponies predicts a single death. Last year, one of Eriskay Isle’s oldest men did not see spring. Which horse starts the stampede, and what does it sound like, feel like? I picture their small herd breathing heavy, a trail of trampled sand behind them. I arrive in the summer. Eriskay Isle is small, just 2.5 miles long and 1.5 miles wide, encircled by perfect white beaches. The ocean is so clear, I can see all the way to the bottom, can count each fish in each school that swims past. I climb the boulders on the east shore and plug my nose before jumping in. It’s cold; it takes my breath away.

I came to the Talo, a tributary of the Brahmaputra, with a head full of second-hand knowledge. Arunachal Pradesh and Assam had existed for me mostly as abstractions—borderlands in textbooks, settings in novels, places mentioned more often than known. This journey was an attempt to let those fragments loosen and rearrange themselves through direct encounter.