My Robot Is Pregnant theme song!

as in, proof of a recession

By Katia Kapovich

Europe’s Gate

A red boat sailed on muddy grass
on the bald lawn between the
checkpoint and the rusty dumpster,
two mismatched oars crossed X-wise by the gate.
It rained flags on this side and ropes on the other.
One bird squealed in and out of the blue mist
depositing droppings on your hat
as you were about to step across the border.
A trapped flag clapped about its metal pole,
then flipped violently like a gunshot, because
that’s what flags do under rain. You looked back,
neither turning into a salt pillar,
nor hearing the Minotaur in the maze
behind your back, where a customs officer struggled
with a pump’s unruly hose that writhed over whatever
sewers gush with filling the air with blessings of manure.
And while the officer twining with his hose lost, no hell broke loose.

When you can’t sleep it’s good to read poetry. Most will nearly kill you with ennui. You’re gassing up the chainsaw with the first stanza, the tree drops at the second, and you’re sawing logs by the third. The risk is, you might find a good one, or get just one line stuck in your head, like a rusty dumpster, so that now you’ll never sleep right again.

When you ask for a story, do you mean about the battle with Indians at Powder River? William took shot from a Springfield Trapdoor by the whiskeydrunk Sargeant and later healed crooked and two inches shorter in one appendage. That story is over a hundred years old and only an old tintype in sepia remains to prove it. The bison, the Indians, the homing pigeon, those stories aren’t lost, just ignored. Boring.

The thrill of the internet age is the same thrill of every revolution: putting power in the hands of the individual. My first personal computer, and the start of my personal revolution, began in 1998. I bought it brand new because I didn’t know what I needed and took a salesman’s advice. How’s that for independence? Every step of the way I had to hire and pay to use it. Modems, ISP, a printer, a website, a programmer, a designer, it was a team of tech support from here to India and thousands of dollars for “extras” just to get a sniff of what the promise was: independence and freedom to create and explore.

The moral? Becoming digital did not help me tell my stories.