technophobia/
by Beth Gordon
I don’t know what to do with the robots who live like cockroaches in my phone. This one looks like
my maternal grandmother: her mouth hinged: a squeezebox of monotone syllables & unlikely words:
a doppelganger of wrinkles. This one looks like the squirrel in my garden if the squirrel in my garden
was periwinkle blue. This one looks like my nightmare after watching Journey to the Center of the Earth:
lava swallowing me like a gnat. This one looks like my childhood beach if my childhood beach had
no rot. No jellyfish corpses. No empty beer cans. This one looks like a jellyfish corpse repurposed as
a fountain of youth. This one looks like a phone booth as if the new machines don’t understand that
the old machines have been dismantled: unassembled: melted into the lake of fire. This one looks
like a funeral procession: every pallbearer has three hands. This one looks like a sunflower grave:
yellow & deep. Every petal on the verge of eruption: every garden spider an ambulance in disguise.
Beth Gordon is a poet, mother and grandmother in Asheville, NC. She is the author of five chapbooks, Morning Walk with Dead Possum, Breakfast and Parallel Universe (Animal Heart Press), The Water Cycle (Variant Literature), How to Keep Things Alive (Split Rock Press) Crone (Louisiana Literature) and The First Day (Belle Point Press); and one full length collection, This Small Machine of Prayer (Kelsay Books). Her second full-length collection, Alchemist or Arsonist, is forthcoming from Acre Books in 2027. Beth is Managing Editor of Feral: A Journal of Poetry and Art, Assistant Editor of Animal Heart Press, and Grandma of Femme Salve Books. Instagram, Threads and BlueSky @bethgordonpoet.