Soft Dangerous Planet

by Alyssa Naimeh Kattan

Dear Readers,

We’re very excited to announce a guest writer today—our talented poet friend, Alyssa Naimeh Kattan. Alyssa builds little worlds with her words, and if you want to read more of them (because of course you will!) you can find her bio and links to her writing at the end of this post.

Without further adieu, here is “Soft Dangerous Planet”…

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Soft Dangerous Planet


We had built a delicious little universe.

A planet with an excess of gravity,
where the air at first light was viscous;

we compressed it like honey in a piston,
our bodies two halves of a mindless machine

made to crack rapture open along its seams—
a timed explosion, a systematically obedient thing.

I wrapped my head in blankets, my palms in cocoa butter
to stay supple and willing, quiet and forgiving.

We worshiped with our mouths, our language of half-sounds
and made-up words. The first piece of my every full breath was yours

to inhale and contort, to spit out; mission abort once the sun
waxed yellow and life in outer space looked better.

The streets hummed with artificial life forms:
family outings—you, me, and Percy,

who would watch from his bed, chewing a bone
as you showed me no mercy. Sundown always the same,

curled into one, a single clump of peach fuzz and muscle
rising and falling in an easy cadence, an animal fed solely on patience.

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Alyssa is a writer born and raised in Brooklyn. As a half-Arab, half-Latina, first-generation American from New York City, her work tends to squeeze itself out from meditations on identity and the perilous search for rootedness. Alyssa graduated from Johns Hopkins University with a BA in Creative Writing in 2024 and has had her work featured in Wilder Things, Warehouse, and Marque magazines.

You can find her on Substack, Instagram and Medium. Additionally, she shares her meditations and occasionally her poems on her podcast, @honesttogod, available on all platforms.

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