Anachronisms are like bad apples
in a medieval painting of the garden.
A portable typewriter with broken keys,
a 1956 tubed radio without batteries,
a grandmother corseted, grim.
Past relics voicing thin gramophone tongues,
mechanical ghosts groaning machine tones
from a junkyard underworld with no human
to wind their guts; they, like the war-born
grandmother, cry out to the digitals for
permanence.
Instead, wither, decay, while the new human
thumbed instruments buries the old.
—
Ralph Monday has had over 200 poems published in literary journals and online literary sites. A chapbook, All American Girls and Other Poems was recently published, and a book Lost Houses and American Renditions is forthcoming from Hen House Press.
