The Nearness Issue / July 25, 2026

Near You, Sixty Years On, Say This, Bear It Close, Pick Up

Today's issue sponsored by 1440.
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Welcome to The Nearness Issue, where distance finally gets closed. Today's poem, "Arenal," takes that idea and carries the reader up close to a volcano, where the mountain stops being scenery and starts to feel alive.

Elsewhere in this issue, I go looking for people who closed the distance. In Echoes, two poets share the same July date, sixty years apart: one who wrote every poem like a phone call, and a Texas poet born to speak for her own ground. In Devices, the smallest words in the language only work up close. In Testaments, a poet plants an orchard so the whole neighborhood can reach the fruit. Finally, in Creative Spotlight, I dial an old number and a stranger reads me something true. Scroll on. The gap is smaller than it looks from here.
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Talk soon,
​
Jason
​jasonzguest.com​

In this issue:

Featured Poem ​Arenal​ A visitor stands close enough to feel a volcano breathe. Echoes ​The Phone Call and the Homecoming​ Two poets, one date, one long-distance call answered. Devices ​The Grammar of Right Here​ The smallest words in a sentence do the closest work. Testaments ​The Orchard He Would Not Let Go Wild ​ A poet who measured love in rows of fruit trees. Creative Spotlight ​Somebody Answers When You Call​ An old phone number still answers, if you dial it.

Featured Poem

Arenal

Arenal
​By Jason Z Guest

Your head stays
in the clouds
most days,
but do not fret.
You are fine
to miss
the rush and run below,
the lens and clicks,
gas and fumes,
the Sí and No.

Near you, my feet feel
and the earth shakes.
My body, pressed
near to your heart,
close to your green
crowns and vines,
fronds and leaves,
blades and stalk,
toils on a soiled floor.

Your space
tends to my exhaustion,
catches my eye,
wets my touch,
shades and shields,
gives and takes,
with both friend and foe, and
I, on guard,
size each step
as your tears slow
to a fueled flow.

Please, show me the scars
on your face;
flare your red hair
so that I may fancy
the night's glow on
the lake low,
before we must say goodbye,
and go.
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About Jason →

Echoes

The Phone Call and the Homecoming

On this day in 1966, Frank O'Hara died on Fire Island at forty, hit by a dune buggy on the beach in the early hours of the morning. He had spent his career closing the very distance that nearness names, publishing a manifesto seven years earlier that argued a poem should work the way a phone call works, addressing one person, not posted to the world at large. He often wrote on his lunch hour at the Museum of Modern Art, catching the afternoon or a friend before they could get away.

Sixty years later, this date holds a second nearness, built on staying rather than reaching. Lexie Dean Robertson was born in Lindale, Texas, on this same date in 1893, and spent her career in Rising Star, where one of her poems stops at dawn to let the grass listen for the first frost. That refusal to write about anywhere she had not stood made her the first native-born Texan named Poet Laureate of Texas in 1939.

O'Hara and Robertson pulled at the same instinct from opposite ends. One reached across distance. One stayed close enough to know her own ground by name.

Meet the Texas poet laureate born on the same date O'Hara died.

Meet the Laureate →

Devices

The Grammar of Right Here

​Deixis is grammar that demands proximity. Words like this, here, now, and you carry no meaning until someone stands close enough to fill them in. Strip the moment away and the words go blank. Say "this" to an empty room and the word starves for a listener. Say it face to face, and it lands like a hand on a shoulder. No dictionary can save them. Only distance kills them, and only nearness brings them back.

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​William Carlos Williams proved it with three short stanzas taped to an icebox door. He ate the plums his wife was saving for later. He knew she would find the empty bowl before she found him, so he left words in his place instead of an excuse.

That is deixis doing its only job. The words land only if you already share the kitchen, the plums, and the guilt. Pull the poem out of that house and it turns to nonsense. Keep it close, and the smallest words carry the weight of a whole confession.

Read the note that started it all.

Read the Note →

Testaments

The Orchard He Would Not Let Go Wild

Ross Gay writes like a man closing distance for a living. His breakthrough collection, Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude, presses up against things most people walk past: a robin on a fence, a friend's shoulder, a bee working slow through a garden nobody planted for it. Gay does not admire these things from across a room. He names exactly what they smell like and what they cost him.

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That instinct left the page. In Bloomington, Indiana, where Gay teaches at Indiana University, he became a founding board member of the Bloomington Community Orchard, a nonprofit that grows fruit trees on public land and gives the harvest away free. No fence guards the fruit. No line proves you belong there. You walk in, you pick what is ripe, and the orchard treats your hunger as reason enough. It is nearness turned into infrastructure, built to outlast any single conversation.

That line cuts to the center of his work. Joy, for Gay, is not the opposite of grief. It sits right next to grief, near enough to touch it. His essay collection The Book of Delights runs the same wager at a smaller scale. He wrote one short piece by hand every day for a year. Each page was proof that attention is its own form of closeness.

What Gay proves, book after book and tree after tree, is that nearness takes maintenance. An orchard needs pruning and watering and someone willing to show up on a cold Saturday when the other volunteers stay home. A poem needs that same unglamorous return. It demands the same refusal to let a good thing drift out of reach. Gay carries nearness in his bones because he keeps choosing it, on purpose, in public, for free.

Meet the poet who turned nearness into a public orchard.

Meet Ross Gay →

Creative Spotlight

Somebody Answers When You Call

In 1968, John Giorno hung up the phone after a call with William Burroughs and kept the idea that started there: let the telephone carry a poem instead of small talk. He patched ten answering machines to ten lines and gave New York a single number. Whoever answered read you something true. A stranger's voice replaced the dial tone.

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The calls piled up fast. Within a few years the FCC, and then the FBI, were asking questions about what was moving through the wires, and by 1971 the original line went dark.

Giorno died in 2019, but the idea did not. Dial-A-Poem is live again. It has grown into a network that stretches from New York to Mexico City to São Paulo and beyond. Dial the original number. A voice still comes through. No screen gets involved.

The average person spends hours a day staring at a phone and only minutes hearing an actual voice come through it. Dial-A-Poem flips that math on purpose. Pick up. Somebody is already on the line.

Dial the number and let a stranger's voice close the distance.

Dial the Poem →