Melissa Holm Shoemake

Meditation over a Lagunitas Beer with iPhone

                        after Robert Hass

All the new technologies are about loneliness.
In this way, they resemble the old ones,
the radio, for example, connects waves
of sound to your eardrum, your eardrum
to some other part of the world. The thrill of a faceless man
delivering the weather report in a character-stricken diction
now a wholly inadequate cure for lack, but still we wear air pods
as a constant barrier, as a guard against old school conversation.
Or we devour metal and plastic hand-held notions with our eyes,
constantly made new, born from the now seemingly archaic blackberry.
A text is an elegy to the human voice.
We chatted about it drunkenly, at first, then quickly
between work meetings and in the emojis I sense
an inability to understand humanness, or subtleties in the expressions
of an actual face. After a while it seems structures dissolve:
less than sign, three, colon, parenthesis, u and i. There was a love
I once had for the agony in a voice during a phone call from a stranger,
their thin thread of fear for the unknown pulled a tone of involuntary
comfort from my lips. I felt a delicious wonder in who they might be,
how she brushes her hair out of her eyes or the length of his beard.
Appearances don’t matter of course, unless it’s a profile picture, which
used to only mean a face upon which one gazes from the side and not
a representation of all that you are to someone you may never meet.
i is a technological stand-in for the body and in moments when skin
is screaming to be touched, another’s flesh against our own is more
a passing forgotten wind, than a place we return to. Don’t speak,
finger glass, swipe left, swipe left, swipe left.

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Melissa Holm Shoemake lives in Atlanta, GA with her husband and two sons where she works in college administration at Emory University. She holds an MFA in poetry from the University of Mississippi and her poems have appeared in various journals and anthologies including The Southern Humanities Review, Harpur Palate, Iron Horse Literary Review and The Southern Poetry Anthology. Her chapbook, Ab.Sin.The. is available from Dancing Girl Press.