DEANNA SIRLIN
Deanna Sirlin, Intimate Distance, 2026
Video by Deanna Sirlin with Poetry by E Hughes, Music by Bill Rea and Performance and Technology by Kaia Lee
For Deanna Sirlin’s Intimate Distance by E Hughes
Even in the shadows, there is a horizon—
distance and light contouring the soft
gradients of azure and fuchsia. These hands
like redwoods, pullulate from the same shorn
body, a mother buried and rooting into a carnation
afterlife. These hands gather in a ring shout,
a canopy drawing in its color, as it does its water
from mist and fog, gone periwinkle
in the sun’s zenith. We stand in awe of such
tacit and ancient wisdom: Time can heal
no wound, no senseless injury—only mark
as purpling and sapphire scars, the distance
between what we have lost and what we are now
beginning to lose. These hands cradle the sun’s
hymnal of forlorn light. This crown shines with
zealous shades of harlequin and picotee,
which seem almost like anticipatory gods—
waiting patiently at the clear blue edge of time
for us to refuse our foolishness, to surrender
our insipid refusal of darkness within light.
E Hughes is the author of Ankle-Deep in Pacific Water (Haymarket Books, 2024), which was longlisted for the 2025 Maya Angelou Book Award. They received their MFA in Poetry and MA in English Literature from the Litowitz Creative Writing Program at Northwestern University. Their poems have been published or are forthcoming in Guernica Magazine, Indiana Review, Gulf Coast Magazine, Colorado Review, and The Rumpus—among others. They are a Cave Canem fellow, a 2024 Friends of the San Francisco Public Library Laureate, a finalist for the 2021 Elinor Benedict Poetry Prize, longlisted for the 2021 Granum Fellowship Prize, and a semifinalist of the 2022 and 2023 92Y Discovery Contest. Currently, Hughes is a PhD candidate in Philosophy at Emory University. Their dissertation, Without Ground: Blackness and the Aesthetics of Unbeing, considers the racial consequences of metaphysical inquiry after Immanuel Kant through a comparative analysis of continental philosophy and African American and African Diasporic literature.