Compression #1

Next time you touch your phone, think of skin. Pink skin, pressed

against the screen’s interior, bulged—folded—like a large intestine.

New instance of an old ouroboros. And outside the window, this

half height, only small green lump of hills behind buildings. My mouth

against the glass, and my breath against its surface. Think of your

mouth. Place the phone inside your mouth, and I’ll call you—

I’ll speak to myself, with my own voice, and with my own words,

but modulated entirely by your saliva. A surface of my self. When I was

younger, biting down on a bit of cord, I never imagined all this thinness.

Now I graze my hand against concrete for a sense of solidity. This is not

solidity. Virtual images. Thin vectors of images. Breath or residue on surfaces,

crossing, vaguely, the gyri of the brain—like handprints on an elevator wall.

And outside the window again, in a series, opens fold upon fold of unpeopled

hills, glass—a syllable’s distance between compression and comprehension.

Calvin Smith is a poet based in Wellington. Some of his poems have also appeared in Starling.