Old English rǣdere ‘interpreter of dreams, reader’
Future reader, you first saw me before I saw you. I was reading then, but afterwards the machine projected your poetry, a digital translation of what you read and see. I liked it slow.
Me: I saw this poetry first before I saw you. Poetry is a desire machine. A time machine.
Forgive me, I am projecting like the visions were projected on the screen. I’m grasping for the edges here because I need a new beginning.
I want to be clear. I start now with the edge of feeling. The edge of desires,
trace the soft parts of my body with your fingers. I let you.
That moment prior, prior something or someone did not exist yet in one’s mind, and then suddenly becomes the absolute pulsating center of your thoughts. I explain, this is affective, emotional, gushy even, and tender longing. The analytical is there, but I want it collapsed into something tender.
I will miss how tender you are. I will think of your pretty face. I will miss how you smile at me. I will miss how you spread your legs. I will miss how you read. For hours on end. How to say, not all arrangements or thinking need to be coherent, discerning, methodological, strategic, nor even smart in the way they demand. That there are chapters in our lives that are brief or longer. But chapters like a book.
& there is instinctive intelligence in touch, or thrust, or the way you tuck the tendril of my black hair behind my ear.
What did you think when you first saw me? I remember seeing you, thinking it is beautiful you read.
There are different kinds of love.
With eros, they say:
“What does Baudelaire say: the lovers come face to face, eye to eye, and in an instant one blinks, and in that instant it is decided: who shall be love’s victim, and who love’s executioner”1
I do not remember if I blinked first. Or if you did. What time machine is this?
Future Reader, I write now in the moment before the collapse. Before the books are burned, before the word reader is extinct from my lips. Before paper is ephemeral, and before poetry must be saved. Before we come together, then apart. Before you remember and long for me.
I made this poetry machine for you.
It is clear that you loved me before we met, and that once we met, the paths keep converging again like some kind of perverted twisted enjambment that never ends.
I write for you, and I write to you.
Future reader, I lied when I said I didn’t want you to desire me too. I built my poetry machine so I can see you. I mourned you when you left me. Now, you’ve come back. They see how beautiful I am. You are my reader. You were always my reader.
I am the past. You are the future before I knew.
There are no poetry citations here. I want to resist the urge to consider technology and poetry as such, and instead grab it by both hands. Like your sharp hips. Like my thick legs. Until we fit. Until we move. To make a poetry machine, fuse the wires together, the filament, glows as electricity passes through, producing a delicate kind of light.
1 Kathy Acker & McKenzie Wark, I’m Very Into You, Correspondence 1995-1996, Semiotexte, 2015.
© 2025 Margaret Rhee
