Jim Stewart
Air Quality Index
The sky's been blit with the color
of an LCD screen streaming cheap CGI,
the scary half of a Marvel movie poster,
or the kind of show we would put between us
to pretend we could share the couch
One would like certain words adjacent
if the space has enough dimensions, as in
I like to play with my pet blank.
I do. But the beagle terrier cross and the tabby
don't bother to fight anymore. I picture the car closer
to the black & white piebald sleeping in the walk in closet.
A dot product gives a sense
of nearness when plotted, and though
we've been distant before, I fear
we'll be shown orthogonal. And in different quadrants
distance stops having meaning. Sequoia smoke
from Nova Scotia settles over the estuary. The skyline
is a cloud mirage castle.
I know this smell; was it five, ten years ago
when northern California burned, or was it the time
we had to evacuate the house in Oregon?
Now, is there anything left but shared accounts?
A bunch of semi-random strings I invented
when passwords could be easy to remember
enshrined in our story like secret sacred mantras?
Even that costs money now. The channel's
new terms of service call us out
on our pretense we are a unit.
I'd imagined an experimental way to tell this,
a 2d plot or nodes with edges.
But I was scared to write it at all.
The last time I put you in a poem
there was a ring in the box. Now I must tell you
it's in there again. Hasn't every generation
said the end was just a little further down the gradient?
And weren't they always right?
I have seen a billion universes
They're all the same. Every time
the ice dam broke in Utah, floods
swept out the Columbia River Valley, left
acres of vineyards, that eternal
Taco Bell on the corner of Rand.
Every time the elms in Yale Park
dropped papery seedling discs, sap-stuck
to windshields, piled on curbs until
they tore the park out for the bookstore. You think
my choice of major, your first kiss, rose
to the collapse of the spin of some pixel flash
entangled to a CRT showing
some late episode of Gilligan's Island?
A billion times I was born into this
simulation, same seed every load. Every time
that elevator to the 7 at Grand Central breaks.
Every time the white horse serves cheap
tonic, haddock shiny with grease. If you look
close enough, they say, you should see
the shortcuts, misplaced voxels, lazy-
loading truth waiting till you bother to ask. They can't
find it. No one has the cheat codes. You think
if you load a new map it'll play any better?
I've watched this season a billion times, dishes
piled in the sink, back door open for the cats. Every time
they closed the ferry dock by the KAWS Mickeys. Every time
the waterfront towers devour the sky bite by bite. It always
ends this way. You think the next binge you'll want
to sit here all the way through? Every time
it ends this way. Every time we fall in love. Every time
we hurt each other till the show's canceled. I don't
need to watch it again. I know I will.
Jim Stewart has been published or has poems forthcoming in In Company, New Mexico Poets after 1970, Liminality, Rattapallax, Passengers Journal, The City Key, and the Moonstone Arts Center's Ekphrastic Poetry anthology. He co-edited and designed Saint Elizabeth Street magazine and hinenimagazine.com. He teaches programming and logic in New York.
