By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
The Way We Are No More stages a broken conversation between woods and city, difference and recognition, until two speakers forget the words but keep the understanding.
The poem keeps moving between landscapes and political divisions without letting any of them fully explain the separation. "Separate nations / Mountain and flats" makes geography feel like a form of estrangement. Forgetting what to say becomes oddly intimate, because both voices lose the language and still know the subject.
Under the two-line title 'The Way We Are / No More,' a faltering duet moves between 'the woods' and 'the city,' asking 'Can we go down / To the city / And hear the sound' even as both speakers admit 'I forgot it now / And you did too.' Difference is framed as estrangement on a geographic scale - 'Separate nations / Mountain and flats... entirely different.' The poem's tenderness is in its shared forgetting: 'I forgot what I wanted to say / And so did you / But we both know / What we're talking about.' Understanding survives the loss of the words.