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.
'The Way We Are / No More': walking, talking, the woods, the city; separate nations of mountain and flats, forgetting what he wanted to say and so did you, but 'we both know / What we're talking about.'