Remote Work

By

Everyone meets online now. The skin
of the screen responds to your touch,
your sentience sent, delivered, read.
.
Swipe up on your tears and smile.
Sunlight on the elms, laughter
out of season: The work of love is done
.
remotely, a quantum entanglement
of limbs. Strangers stare
at laptops in apartments on
.
the opposite ends of history.
We are kites without strings, strings
desperate to be strummed, sound holes
.
listening for gooseflesh on the far
end of the wind tunnel
between any two human beings.
.
You can’t trust someone’s profile pic,
but if you listen to the ancients,
we weren’t better off with faces. Blow me
.
a kiss, and the ghost city I am
dismantles like a dandelion clock.
Press a button here, and on another
.
continent, the pictures hang crooked.
You don’t have to attend in person
to your own hands-free attempts at love
.
and war and art. There are no
fingerprints on anything we make.
Don’t get too attached.

Amit Majmudar