Jed Myers

Projector

I’d curl the film around the bright sprockets,
seat the square holes onto those metal teeth,
and thread the celluloid over the glass plate
behind the lens, so the beam could project
the frame-by-frame story onto the sparkling
screen I’d stretched and hooked up in front
of the class. It wasn’t a job I liked.
It was to discover I’m not made for tech.
I did take to wondering, while the rest watched
in the dark, while bicycle safety was modeled
by smiling ghost-kids on their silvery roads,
while Jascha Heifetz attempted to thrill us
again with his bow, or gray combines ripped up
wide rows of wheat for our airy white bread,
wondering, then, about what gets projected,

presented, inserted, fed…. I’m wondering
these nights again, the lamps off, screen lit
with snippets on fires, the plague, my need
to take turmeric daily, the web’s own selection
of swimsuits just the right fit for my love,
and swarms of warnings, more than I can heed,
uprisings yeasted left and right, the next
wild contagion pitching its warm-ups
in some Central-Asian bullpen, predictions
Wyoming’s caldera will eat the American
West, an asteroid’s aiming to knock us off
orbit, and dare I not password-protect
my passwords, what then. My stinging eyes lick
the salt of the alerts. Whatever I click on
brings on more spin, and I’m in my dust devils,

sucking at scandals, yes choking a bit
on the whirling particulates, still swilling
the whirlwind. I imbibe revelations
as if they were heaven-light, herbed medicinal
akvavit shots, blood-cleanser, swiggable
tincture of anticipation in this creaking
room whose walls flicker with the world’s
glinting sharp instruments. I do remember
the soothe of that insistent clicking I liked to get
lost in beside the projector, that hyper-quick
metronome keeping time for the dancing
picture, a ticking brisk as the frictionless
flourish and trill of Yehudi Menuhin’s
black-and-white violin the machine launched
into the chalk-dusted air. I’d look

into the beam where it widened between
the bulb-shine and that illumined rectangle,
to witness the aimless flecks, that floating grit
scintillant like early clumps of the cosmos
drawn to our star, first mineral stuff
of the unformed Earth—I’d have that sense
of before, before any thought, before a myth
brought an army of nomads together, or a mind
found the Hunter Orion out there in a cluster
of stars nowhere near each other. Tonight,
I wonder about all the lost minds clicking
on warnings they want or need to just hold
their lives together. The little screens offer
an incessant feed on the demons among us.
What would it be, to thrive on raw wonder?

Isn’t there room in the void around all things
visible, room wider than the fields
where Orion paces and waits? Space for more
doubt and hope than our whole hoard of beliefs?
I’ll step out tonight, lose the Hunter, see
if I can erase the names Rigel and Bellatrix,
drop the belt and sword, gather the beams,
and muse on what presses a human creature
to swallow the spores of alarm, to stiffen
and point, to pipe a strained conviction
the throat constricts to a whine, to curse viral
visions of child-abductors, blood-harvesters,
world-ensnarers…. I’m wondering how
the projection mechanics and circuitry work.
The wetware must be just like mine.

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Jed Myers is author of Watching the Perseids (Sacramento Poetry Center Book Award), The Marriage of Space and Time (MoonPath Press) and four chapbooks. Recognitions include Southern Indiana Review’s Editors’ Award, the Prime Number Magazine Award, The Southeast Review’s Gearhart Prize and The Tishman Review’s Millay Prize. Poems have appeared in Prairie Schooner, Rattle, Poetry Northwest, The American Journal of Poetry, Southern Poetry Review, The Greensboro Review and elsewhere. Myers lives in Seattle and edits poetry for Bracken.