Out of Touch Screen
Sometimes starting with a title
Infuses the work
With an insurmountable dread
How is one to fulfill such a promise
To make good on the pact
That art in the end allows
For a kind of connectivity
Life otherwise lacks
Or lacks in those more
Contemplative ways
Since mixing the ingredients
To say a batch of cookies
Is in its own right a sort
Of connectivity if done together
If my hand touching flour touches
Your hand touching the same flour
Copyright © 2017 by Noah Eli Gordon. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on July 6, 2017, by the Academy of American Poets.
“My daughter and my fiancée were making cookies in the kitchen. I stepped in the other room and wrote this poem. Over the course of the last year or so I’ve written over a hundred poems like this, each composed entirely on my iPhone. I wanted to see if an art dedicated to presence and immediacy might offer itself as a balm against the technology that serves otherwise to eradicate the art from both of these conditions.”
—Noah Eli Gordon
Noah Eli Gordon
Noah Eli Gordon is the author of Is That the Sound of a Piano Coming from Several Houses Down (Solid Objects, 2018).