Leah Souffrant
$6
published in Ottawa by above/ground presscold, point, numberscold in Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte; point in Just Us: An American Conversation by Claudia Rankine; numbers in MLA Handbook 7th Edition.
Numbers often seem cold. The stiff meaning of them. One cannot be two. But the romance of knowing! And then the cold devastation! Twelve is very specific. I’ve preferred “a dozen” or even “some.” I’ve preferred to make what is precise become vague, soft, imprecise. Even numbers can point us towards different things, different scales of measure, different amounts. Two miles is rather different than two apples. But this is the point of numbers, to point us to a shared point, to agree and understand something about how we take in the world, what it is to us in common. Is this cold? I ate two apples. He slept for two hours. She fell in love with two people. The numbers warm up. I see the apples begin to take shape, the shadow of one leaning across the other, the two cores tossed together in a trash bin. The numbers line up on a graph, the x axis and the y axis, but here the finger points to the place where something intersects, the point on the graph where cold becomes warm, where you show me what you’ve discovered and I see it.
as the twenty-ninth title in above/ground’s prose/naut imprint
June 2025
a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy
Leah Souffrant is a writer and artist and the author of Entanglements: Threads woven from history, memory, and the body (Unbound Edition Press 2023) and Plain Burned Things: A Poetics of the Unsayable (Collection Clinamen, PULG Liège 2017). She teaches writing at New York University.
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