Poetry |

“A Zoom Reading in Which Fanny Howe’s Computer Dies”

A Zoom Reading in Which Fanny Howe’s Computer Dies

 

 

Church ladies lift their nostrils

to the camera — their noses are like fists. Is that

eighty-year-old eyeroll for the unreality

 

of a digital room? For no touch in it?

Fanny is walking around

holding her glasses by the temple tips

 

as her hand runs over her room. In the world

of touch, what whispered thing would have been

whispered at a time like now? What

 

shifting of chairs, what stuttering door

creaking open? Islanded mute, we are to each other

far away houses. We speak within. We breathe

 

to no ear. Fanny begins to read, and through

the screen of her screen to mine, she says

shes wearing the wrong glasses. Oh technology —

 

just failure made more efficient. We hide our bodies

and they present themselves anyway — like a can tipped,

bag split open to old apples on the sidewalk, and no

 

raccoon in sight. Then, the chime:

a little ding almost pleasant,

some programmer’s gentle reminder

 

to connect to power, but Fanny

keeps reading and mid-sentence

disappears as instantly as we entered

 

her home — no knock, no greeting.

Is this death? But the hands, the mouth,

they were there. If a poem is a score

 

for a living voice, a song known only to a body,

what disappears the body takes the poem with it.

Sure, we can talk of eternity, of what lives on

 

past this blinking, this scratching of arms.

But lets make no mistake — even if no body appears

to listen, there is or was a body leaning across a table

 

for another word, and another one. Oh

Fanny, dont go. Were still with you.

Contributor
Lily Greenberg

Lily Greenberg is the author of In the Shape of a Woman (Broadstone Books, 2022). Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Relief, About Place Journal, LEON Literary Review, Hobart, and Third Coast Magazine, and she is the 2021 recipient of the Dick Shea Memorial Prize for Poetry. Lily holds an MFA from the University of New Hampshire and lives in Nyack, NY where she serves as Grants Coordinator for Columbia University.

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