I’m gonna print that picture, the one you hated, okay? Greg said I could.
Don’t worry, not for the magazine.
The magazine can have an AI abstraction of you. Fair enough?

—Ariel Matheson-Fitchett

I am exceptionally fortunate to be printing a poem and a Midjourney artwork by the writer and UX Designer Ariel Matheson-Fitchett in Common Measure volume one. 

Excerpted above are three metapoetic lines drawn from Ariel’s otherwise pensive, ruminative, and tragic poem. Ariel is addressing the object of the eponymous poem, Amanda. Amanda is an elusive figure: from line to line she is both present and departed. She is both virtual and real. In these lines, she is being informed, in some ways asked for consent, for their story to appear in print.

What I especially like about the excerpted lines is the self-referentiality: the author is talking about the very magazine of the poem’s eventual publication — but they are talking to their character, at once a person and a photograph of a person; or rather, a third remove, an AI abstraction of the photograph. 

The author, like their poetic elisions of Amanda within the work, continues to hide the subject’s identity through virtual layers of increasing thickness. You get the sense that Amanda is someone the author desperately wants to protect, yet someone they desperately need to talk about.

I can’t wait to bring you the full poem, “Amanda (To hold you in my hand),” and the accompanying artwork, in the magazine. 

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