Out of Touch Screen

Noah Eli Gordon

Sometimes starting with a title
Infuses the work
With an insurmountable dread
How is one to fulfill such a promise
To make good on the pact
That art in the end allows
For a kind of connectivity
Life otherwise lacks
Or lacks in those more
Contemplative ways
Since mixing the ingredients
To say a batch of cookies
Is in its own right a sort
Of connectivity if done together
If my hand touching flour touches
Your hand touching the same flour

About This Poem

“My daughter and my fiancée were making cookies in the kitchen. I stepped in the other room and wrote this poem. Over the course of the last year or so I’ve written over a hundred poems like this, each composed entirely on my iPhone. I wanted to see if an art dedicated to presence and immediacy might offer itself as a balm against the technology that serves otherwise to eradicate the art from both of these conditions.”
—Noah Eli Gordon

Noah Eli Gordon is the author of The Word Kingdom in the Word Kingdom (Brooklyn Arts Press, 2015). He teaches at the University of Colorado–Boulder and lives in Denver, Colorado.

Poetry by Gordon

The Word Kingdom in the Word Kingdom

(Brooklyn Arts Press, 2015)

"The Big Book of Therapy" by Bob Hicok

"My Life Was the Size of My Life" by Jane Hirshfield

"On Happier Lawns, I" by Justin Marks

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July 6, 2017