Thoughtful readers,

I have two poems to offer you. They're similar in approach--they're both science & technology heavy poems about borders and the US right now--but they have different vantage points.

Secondary Filters starts with a real offer my phone camera kept making, at the cold beginning of last spring. I've been sending poetry to Strange Horizons for years and years--they wrote very encouraging rejections of my pseudo-classical riffs, when I was still an undergraduate taking lots of Latin--and it's a delight to have a poem there at last.

I wrote Leaning On the Melting Point for the PoetTreeTown project, which posts poems in store windows around Ann Arbor. The link goes to a recording of me reading the poem (you might need to make a free account); the broadsides will be posted in April. This is a warmhearted poem about community--I wanted to write something I could imagine in the local co-op window--but it is, very much, about living in the US in 2026.

One of the consolations of winter is tempting cats into warm places. Here's Gennoveus on a princess-and-the-pea-worthy stack of blankets:

Yours, Ursula.