By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
Poetry, childhood, desert, concrete, chacks, a small handwritten `o`, and the other side of the world come together in a page about how place and youth make equality possible without making people the same.
The poem is spatial in an interesting way. It treats memory as something gemmetrical, measured by steps and surfaces rather than by dates alone, while the tiny handwritten mark makes the turn into geometry feel visibly revised.
The Only Place. To have known you — to be young at a time. Poetry makes all equal, but not the same. First geometrical step past three shacks in the desert or on the concrete. There I am and there we are on the other side of the world, though we were children and never been any place else.