Dialogue in Time

We are all connected
Not anymore!

Echoes from the past
I can’t hear you
I am losing you

Technology will surpass us
Mind the picket signs
Mourn the picket fences

Technology—we may have it wrong
It does not amplify us
It only comes into contact with us

It does not really know us
It has no authentic clue
About who we are

I hope this can be changed

I accept it in this way:
I call you
and I raise you ten

Nighttime

There were sheep
There were cows
They roamed near me
Nuzzling my legs

I was there
in a field
concave
bursting with energy
on that little plot of land
Cows, sheep and
buttons dot the landscape

Suddenly there is a
mixing of tenses
a milking of syntax
and the realization
that in 2020
YOU CAN CALL ANYTHING MILK

Wring out the almonds,
coconuts, udders, soybeans
oats, yogurt, chocolate
It is milk

There is a bowl on the table
in the dream
Convex, oblong, white
waiting
Hungry for its purpose to be
filled

I wake up:
This is the true room
where I live
when I am not walking through the

thick mud of obstacles

I get on the Internet and see
a third-grade vocabulary test
Question: What is an obstacle?
Answer: White people.

***

Barbara Tramonte is a poet with poems, essays, and stories published in literary journals and anthologies. She has published a book of poems, Letter to a Friend with the Oyster Couch Blues (1987), and a chapbook Oddities, published in 2018 by Finishing Line Press.
She worked as a professor in the school for graduate studies at SUNY Empire State College for many years and have worked as a poet-in-the-schools in New York City for a decade