Flash Drive He clicks on Send each one point-seven seconds, and that's only for Earth. At each impulse a new arrival takes its place within the flash drive, which is neither large nor small nor has in fact dimensions, since the files it stores do not. Do other documents, say, wife or child or brother, recognize this new one, which, like them, has neither form nor features? Still, they're here, and the Supreme Techie that clicked them here knows not just names of all, but DNAs, hair colors, pronouns, denominations of those who had such, and body temperatures, from body days. What is the purpose of this drive, which files away our vapors in its vaporous self? Maybe the key that Sends to USB can open, too, maybe can populate new solid worlds with new-jelled and new-knit migrants who somehow know these worlds and how to flesh them till the finger next taps Send.
Donald Mace Williams is a retired newspaper writer and editor with a Ph.D. in Beowulfian prosody. At ninety-three, he lives alone and independently in the Texas Panhandle. His latest book, Wolfe and Being Ninety, is a hybrid of narrative poem and prose memoir.
Amethyst Review 