2098

I’ve never seen space but it’s probably a waste, i hear they rent rooms for two thousand apiece, sure they have breakfast but what’s with the lakes?  it’s like they filled craters with chlorine and grease.  feh! like i said by the time our kids are eighty, they won’t even know Barbra Streisand’s version of Happy Days Are Here Again, the robots will take us all on their shoulders, they’ll remove all our bracelets and eat them all vile we never should have made those smart phones so so stylish 

to hear the hindsight followed us here who did that to us it was all of us but who made them have arms and a smile the tin man would take a mile if he ever knew, if he ever knew

watercolor memories the foresight in wondering can it be that those were the simpler times but what about the times before that and that and that was it industrialization was it natural evolution what is the organic process of a people?

If you get one of those new high rises in Red Sand City tell me how the salt water pool is, tell me if there are laundry machines in the apartment, let me know how much you pay so i can know i will still be able to afford my large television if you ask Siri she will tell you the dimensions of our wandering, she will lead you to the slinky jumping down our staircase, we continue to imagine living life in peace

 

Salt, Fire

seventeen violet strings
sifting the seaweed sand
that you know as me

in love with expectations
our very own ikea
disassembled ideals

what you decide to walk upon is
what you become
a happy slug whose

fate falls in salt, fire
children are awed
as a seed of

self-observation or
conceit
cracks

 

Yolk

sun almost at woman’s head
she’s pregnant and holds back
my hair when she says

a swallow bird gulps while a gulping bird swallows.
A Google employee passes by,
steps in my sick and scrolls as he strolls

 

 

Rachel Kass is a New England-based poet with work recently featured in Bomb Magazine, The Bombay Gin and Maudlin House. Her first collection, Jewess in a Forest and other poems, was published by Dostoyevsky Wannabe in October of 2018. Follow Rachel on Twitter and Instagram @rhamphoid.

featured image: Bob Modem