Since the onset of COVID-19, many of us have attuned to touch in different ways. Touch, to make contact with. How do we touch? Some of us have gone longer than ever before without touching other humans. Some of us have embraced touch across species. There is the touching and being-touched of grasses, branches, and butterflies in the light, as in this issue’s cover image, Milkweed Meadow by Jay Alexander. There is reveling in the microdrops of rain carried by the wind, alighting on a leaf, as in Jess Cherofsky’s Luscious. In this issue of The Hopper, we offer the touched-touching of ideas, thoughts, and bodies.

In our call for submissions, we invited writers and artists to share their experiences of ecological networks through sensuous encounters. Across these folds and ripples and waves, spirals and helices, these writers and artists expand what it means to sensuously connect with the world: tickle of honeybee, sticky popsicle drip, ant on your tongue. We witness and welcome embodied ecologies, queer ecologies, disabled ecologies, and ecologies of contact. We are touched-touching in the textures of dialect in Harry Clough’s “Curglaff” and in the queer bodies of Anna Laura Reeve’s “Vegetable X.” We feel the desert sun in “Abiquiu” with Zoe Boyer and the late summer humidity in John Macneill Miller’s “Mudpuppy Run,” and we enter the magical spacetime of the Duluth Rose Garden in Natalie Vestin’s “Rosarium.” As the work in this issue demonstrates, to touch—to make contact with—is a manifold of possibility. 

In “Seeing with Fingers,” Jyothsna Phanija writes, “For you, fingers have mirrors. Only thing is you need not force them towards your face. / You find your senses activating with each listening.” Yes. Let’s turn to these writers and artists, to touch and be touched together.