Miasma,
and the air between us.

Miasma — a disbanded medical term from the Middle Ages — was once thought to be the root cause of plagues: the belief that bad air itself spread illness. It's also called the night air. COVID-19, ironically, actually is spread through the air. But unlike the plagues that preceded it, we understood this one, and could act on that understanding — the spread of information, of support and compassion, became one way to slow it and to heal.

the night air is a place to record personal experience of that pandemic through a single collective poem — one that, over time, reveals our shifting moods and varying perspectives from all over the world. Where past pandemics left behind mostly official records, this one happened alongside a technology that let us connect and share informally, personally, with anyone, anywhere — and this poem is built from exactly that kind of sharing.

We asked people to reflect on their lockdown: not only the struggles, but the sweet triumphs, the connections made, the things discovered about themselves and each other, and what they were leaving behind to make room for something more fulfilling. Five words at a time, in the tradition of the surrealists' Exquisite Corpse, those reflections become one continuous, anonymous poem.