by Jadyn Marshall

We slouch

To make ourselves smaller.

Like iPhones.

Our shoulders are mudslides,

Our spines the canes

That our grandfathers stooped on.

Our grandfathers are the problem, actually.

Grandmothers too, and parents and peers.

All the people wearing boots

With deep treads.

It’s all their fault.

Well, maybe not all.

Also to blame is gravity.

We are not Flintstone kids,

We are not tigers

Or charming leprechauns.

Advertisements? We defy ads!

We are too techy,

Too savvy for our own nonsense.

Who needs a TV when you

Carry the world in your pocket?

At the click of a button

For $4.99 a month

Ads disappear forever!

We obliterate them!

They are banished to the world of the cloud,

Where they will be struck

By lightning and eaten by a fox that sounds

Suspiciously like a telephone.

Pardon, an old telephone.

The distinction used to matter,

Though now communication has been solved

So that it has less and less matter.

Can you see it sideways? Too big.

We charge through life,

Splitting apart the atomic barrels of knowledge.

We master a universe

Which has gone

From infinite to compressible

In picoseconds.

Don’t cover the moon with your thumb—

Cover the galaxy with your thumb drive!

Closure vastly improves when frosted with a “.zip.”

We are the generation of

The internet latchkey kids.

Why leave a note on the fridge

When you can pop open a tab

On the omnipotent Google?

Birds and bees?

Those are for nerds and fleas.

Why seize the day when you

Can seize the data from the cloud?

Clouds always reminded me of trees anyway,

Ever since I got tired of

Drawing individual leaves in kindergarten.

We don’t have curiosity anymore,

The full blooming, two-hundred pound,

Weeks on end

Curiosity that drove people to

Discoveries like penicillin,

The printing press.

Big things. Touchable things.

Instead, we have Google.

See how I fit a whole world of information

Into one word?

I slouched

Even though I knew

That smaller isn’t better,

Even though I knew

That the secret to life lurks

Under the internet’s

Tech-tonic plates

In the metallic core that grounds it here.

I am on death row

Waiting until the quest for information

Eats away at meaning

Like a weightless termite in a gray lab coat

Puppeteered by the passive voice.

Until even a word on a screen

Is too broad and straight

Like a saw against

The tallest orchard tree.

I can’t wait for the day

When gravity gives up

Conspicuously,

Like a kid who’s too good

At hide and seek.

It’s hiding in the grave

With our slumping shoulders.

We have to learn

That we can’t just

Make things smaller

Until we don’t see them.

Or even worse,

Try to press

(command z)