Slips of information

                                   By Jennifer Militello

Antisocial Media

It's easier to computer than to crash. It's easier

to computer than to hold a hand or knit

a winter together from headlights on the highway.

It's easier to computer and be a hybrid and

cross from bowels and eardrums into hours

lit and roaring by light freight. The chapters

there can tell you an octopus has three hearts,

that snails breath through their feet. It is easier

to have no arms or breath, to position through

colors and jumps shoreless as steam. No

surfaces. No verbs to be. No mussels

or bellows or congestion or caffeine.

No lens to focus, no Rome to burn. Who can

do when the roots are so untidy and

the branches rack like antlers against other

branches. It's easier to computer than

to guess at a savior. Than to whisper slips

of information to the flesh. Let language construct

mere dewdrops of light. Let the circuitry

gauge the need and make it clean and make it

so heady it is erected, a remedy, in its ease.

There is no destination. No grave in place of a person

loved in the past, no identity classified, factual, no glass

to break open in the fisted hand, no cracked windshield,

no hurricane. Or there is, but it is closed inside its box

smaller than the box for roses, dead and moldered

by the time they reach the door, delivered only once.

From The American Poetry Review, March/April. 2015.