Jennifer Militello | Poetry | Antisocial Media via American Poetry Review

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 like freight. The chapters

there can tell you an octopus has three hearts,
that snails breathe 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.

“Antisocial Media” originally appeared in American Poetry Review and has been reprinted here with permission of the author.

Jennifer Militello Poem Jennifer Militello is the author, most recently, of A Camouflage of Specimens and Garments, forthcoming from Tupelo Press in 2016, and Body Thesaurus (Tupelo Press, 2013), named one of the best books of 2013 by Best American Poetry. Her poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, The Kenyon Review, The New Republic, The Paris Review, and Best New Poets. She teaches in the MFA program at New England College.