by Yara Farran
Each New Year, I pledge
to be more human,
move in 20/20 and unknot myself
from the snares
of any misplaced, mechanical doubt.
Telling myself that: we can always find out
where the light went, after the sunset strays,
and we park behind Moon’s glow. That this will be
different; no Tin Man spared from their own self’s reflection.
I plug in and hear about the second coming delayed again in each time zone.
I look at the face of my love behind a screen –
my living, breathing billboard muse whose gaze could sink ships even through
the thick brush of clasped eyelashes.
At the supermarket,
I play human
when I make animal sounds to others near the produce aisle: red, green, yellow blush.
but I speak like the internet at home
and try to recreate the likeness of a soft clementine and
the rough side of a copper peach – I am sticky, sticky, sticky,
as my tongue clicks to make words that arrive to exploded ears. Our
metal parts trying to speak
and find a shared shelter.
And you. I want
you to sound human, too,
even if draped in pixels and
the predator’s flesh.
Together,
aren’t we fearsome figures?
Data in motion without a safe place to go,
A generation peeking from the blinds, yet sharp in their fragments;
aren’t you scared now
that you can see me
hidden
YARA FARRAN is a Lebanese-Canadian writer interested in documenting the mundane, the extraordinary, and everything inbetween through poetry and fiction. Three of her poems were published in The Maynard’s Fall 2018 volume, and she continues to work on developing her first poetry collection.
Fearsome Figures can be found in Augur Magazine Issue 3.2.
