We once worked as clerks
scanning moth-balled pages
into the clouds, all memories
...
Chang spoke / Eng paused.
Chang threw a beach ball / Eng caught it.
...
Recall the frontier when the business
of memory booms, when broadbands uncoil
and clouds swell with sticky portals, amassing
...
I'mma a two-ton spiker hips fast rondeau
N'ere more, nay sayer feel this orbit rattle
...
There, garland dandelions round that idol
with a corn husk face & beard
patched with rat stubble from a barber's dust pan,
...
Overheard in the heat, the air, the fruit fly's drone
of the perfect helix, overheard in science's repartee
...
Raised on a cozy diet of conditional love,
I learned to emoji from teevee.
Now I'm hounded by gripes before my time.
...
In this world hacked from marrowed dust,
the half-breed assassin slays
men before they breed to corps,
...
Cathy Park Hong (born August 7, 1976) is a Korean-American writer. She teaches creative writing at Sarah Lawrence College. Much of her work includes mixed language and serialized narrative.)
Engines Within The Throne
We once worked as clerks
scanning moth-balled pages
into the clouds, all memories
outsourced except the fuzzy
childhood bits when
I was an undersized girl with a tic,
they numbed me with botox
I was a skinsuit
of dumb expression, just fingerprints
over my shamed
all I wanted was snow
to snuff the sun blades to shadow spokes,
muffle the drum of freeways, erase
the old realism
but this smart snow erases
nothing, seeps everywhere,
the search engine is inside us,
the world is our display
and now every industry
has dumped whole cubicles, desktops,
fax machines into developing
worlds where they stack
them as walls against
what disputed territory
we asked the old spy who drank
with Russians to gather information
the old-fashioned way,
now we have snow sensors,
so you can go spelunking
in anyone's mind,
let me borrow your child
thoughts, it's benign surveillance,
I can burrow inside, find a cave
pool with rock-colored flounder,
and find you, half-transparent
with depression.