It’s Important I Remember That We’re Not Bearing Witness, We’re Watching—
BY CORTNEY LAMAR CHARLESTON
which I will attempt to explain, but first
I must find my smartphone.
I feel as naked without it as my clothes must without me
in them providing shape and structure.
iPhone. Android:
the way it pulses in my pocket after a stimulus signals in,
how it holds and withholds so many words within
its hard casing, the ability to focus on the subject it possesses
leads me along like the figurative heart by its whims or intuitions;
it enraptures the soul or, perhaps, ensnares it, digitizes
said ephemeral entity that ballads are born from in bytes of data.
Like Osiris, I’m stored in so many pieces in so many places;
like that god of the underworld, the judge of the dead,
I will be murdered by my brother, by which I mean
someone with at least one association we share
even if we do not wish we shared it.
These days, I’m not sure we feel the same way
so much as a share of one feeling split millions of ways
into a twitch above the eye—
you and I phone and droid, seeing but lacking in-
sight—which is likely why
the legs don’t get the signal and the hands
don’t get the signal and the moment overwhelms us
because it is too much data to process for what
we’ve been compressed to by the scale of devastation
except in that instant when we finally wiggle the phone free
from our pocket and point it at the crime—
though not in accusation
as devices can’t do that, only a person,
and there isn’t one
anymore.
