by Ryan McCarty
My students are going to need a picket
of teachers again, so I’m lesson planning
a chant while I’m hanging laundry on the line.
I’m not a luddite but I learned that driers blow
microplastics by the millions and my bare feet
prefer being roots in the cold morning grass.
No data streams required. I heard the company rolling
its muscle onto campus comes from Los Alamos,
the bomb builders. Remember when they were the fear
we tucked ourselves into balls for? That was just
science then too. It was building the biggest,
baddest, and fastest answers. It was a man
holding open a fissure dome with a flathead
until he died of a three-dimensional sunburn.
I heard the river running along the woods
where the project’s breaking ground
waters the poorer and blacker yards.
I’m predicting analytics correlating brown bodies
and dying grass when the water’s drank up,
like broken windows suggesting it’s time
for police to show up. I heard
the nature of questions we can’t even ask
yet can only be coaxed from the earth
using farming techniques that first require us
to dig out all the farms, boil up all the water,
automate all the jobs, militarize all the monitors,
and then – only then – will we understand
the kinds of problems we didn’t see before.
But it’s not as if we don’t know the contractor’s line
never picks up when the kids can’t stop coughing.
It’s not that we’ve never known someone
who could hold a match under the kitchen tap and light
the room. It’s not as if those flares couldn’t be made
of algorithms too, or someone won’t get off
when we wake up to another rainbow
slick of progress floating on our coffee. It’s not like
the story won’t just turn out the same
as when I taught middle school and the myth
they howled at hardest was the one where Odin
half blinded himself to learn how
to hold off Ragnarök, and Destiny told him
to keep both eyes on the problem at all times.
Listen to the poem here:
“We love South Hydro Park.” Photo credit: @stopthedata
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Ryan McCarty teaches and writes and talks to plants whenever he gets a chance. He wrote this piece, inspired as always by the folks standing up to say no to ridiculous and repugnant ideas, like building a huge data center and military supercomputer in Ypsi Township. The poem’s title is inspired by this MLive article.
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This is an original poem, brought to you by Poet Tree Town, a Washtenaw-based poetry-in-public initiative and celebration of local poets. Find out more about Poet Tree Town on Instagram and Facebook, or say hello at [email protected].
