These Days
TASTE
We’ve developed a fondness for “mid-century murk”—meaning the last mid-century, not the one soon to come with its increasingly toxic air. We’ve developed a taste for the coldest of cold cases being worked by impossibly earnest child sleuths or laconic county sheriffs in tiny desert towns. What is making the phone lines crackle? Does this noise sound menacing to you?
We’ve developed a necrophiliac’s taste for remoteness. Those just beyond living memory are the most distant, the strangest of strangers.
TASKS
Each day I stare at the gap between “and” and “then” with the sense that, if I am very quiet, something important will come out of it. Am I languid, pensive, or anxious? Any one of these words is a polaroid I am reluctant to inhabit, yet, taken together, they make a pyramid, that most stable of forms.
SIGNALS
Everything the children do is a reenactment of something half grasped or glimpsed. We call such portrayals “play,” but they are similar to the way aliens might attempt to communicate by reproducing signals from old TV broadcasts, including the static between stations.
This one uses a falsetto to indicate that there are two of her, the one speaking now and the one we will never hear.
Password
1
As if the problem were
that I couldn’t stuff
the bulky text
into the child’s backpack
and was late for a class
I never registered for
so long ago!
2
“Business tiptoes
in a world of masks.”
“People relate”
to a transparent sham.
As if genre
weren’t camo.
3
Strange to wake rested
after these dreams
of disaster and scandal
not registered as such.
4
When I’ve stared long enough
at the rough skinned,
snub nosed, or
tough nippled
lemons,
I will give attention
to World Password Day.