I stand with my family in front of the television.
We watch the screen but really
the screen is an obstacle to sidestep. Really our formation,
shoulder to shoulder like a line of attentive dolls,
is a ruse. We’d all like to say we’re just doing our best
but some of us are lying. Some of us watch
the pixels glitch and imagine a planet hanging from a string
on a ceiling mobile. All of us are dizzy,
bloated, staring down the barrel of a future
we’ll never quite get the hang of.
Some Tuesday morning years down the road
I’ll feel a mosquito nibble my ear and smear it to red oblivion
without second thought. If an event horizon by definition
shields its observer from their opposite
then my god, what is light, what is the contrast
between what used to be a mosquito and what persists
as my skin? The future is coming
whether we’ve got the hang of it or not.
All those years back my mother reaches out
and wipes the television screen free of its gnawing static.
Jacob Griffin Hall was raised outside of Atlanta, Ga and currently lives in Columbia, Mo. There, he is a PhD candidate and works as poetry editor for The Missouri Review. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in New South, DIAGRAM, New Orleans Review, New Ohio Review Online, and elsewhere.