Dear reader,
This, our final issue of Cipher for the uniquely strange and often awful 2020-2021 school year, wasn’t supposed to be called Touch. In fact, we voted almost unanimously that the theme should be Horny. Those who have done some digging through the archives lamented that Cipher used to be quite a bit sexier, publishing everything from editors’ diary pages to an Ask Amy style relationship advice column to detailed accounts of the sexual activities of bonobos (an article by Brittin Alfred from 2009’s Climax issue that we’ve republished here). We wanted to capture this sense of nostalgia and fun in a year where pandemic-related isolation has made things hornier for an awful lot of people. But we soon realized that maybe horniness was too narrow, that what we were feeling and wanted to explore was more nebulous, more serious: a general longing for touch in all of its forms. We want to touch the people we love and so many we lost, complete strangers, spaces and surfaces we took for granted.
We hope that you see —and feel, even from afar— this longing reflected in the contributions to this issue. Some of the pieces embody the horny humor we had originally envisioned, such as an anonymous writers’ vignette about a brand new Bunny vibrator, or a sometimes funny, mostly creepy night at a London pub to which Logan Smith so vividly transports us. Others explore touch in vastly different forms—take two of the 2021 winners of the Adelaide Bender Reville Prize in Creative Nonfiction, Skye Guindon and Tia Vierling, for instance. Skye details a personal and profound experience of a body in deep pain; Tia explores the ethics and implications of donating parts of one’s body to others, starting with pieces of hair. Another anonymous contributor writes of a pink jockstrap as a window into his history, identity, and home; Lauren Hecht sits with the agony of being unable to express her overwhelming love for her abuela through touch, one last time. And finally, in collaboration with the brilliant people of Colorado College SOSS (follow their work here), we bring you a virtual brainstorm of our collective thoughts on touch and their November Body Image Zine.
These pieces are beautiful, vulnerable, eclectic. Compiling the Touch Issue felt, even more than usual, like piecing together windows into our community. Maybe it’s because these pieces came in so many different forms from so many different places, maybe because working from Zoom rectangles always feels a bit disjointed, maybe it’s because, in many ways, editing Cipher is like carefully collaging with precious materials. I have learned so much from the parts and the whole, from the experience of reaching across distances great and small to piece together our publication. So in this spirit, I’d like to end with another messy compilation of thoughts that are not my own— what the Cipher staff has most recently touched or been touched by (defined, as always, broadly):
My laptop keyboard but that feels like a cop out, before that was a soap dispenser
My friends— I’ve been giving them lots of hugs these days
Myself
Domino’s garlic parmesan bread bites
Today I touched the earth, the soil, the sun. I repotted my plants and sat with the world and the air in all its beauty and glorious sublimity
Thank you as always to our readers for reading, our writers and artists for your beautiful work, and our staff for your constant care and dedication. As much as I wish we could hold physical copies of our magazine, sing karaoke in the same space, share gel pens and keyboards and takeout containers, I am truly touched by you all.
Still kinda horny,
Emma and the Cipher staff