Day Four 2019 | The cellphone baby

The cellphone baby cries
bewildered by human voices
Unsteady in our arms
The cellphone screen filled with rhythmic red ocean waves
and a toenail moon calms her for a breath or two
Her skin
her hearing
her sight
her touch
her hair
her body
is wireless
her ancestors are blocked
her father is in jail
her mother needs a break
her grandfather disappeared years ago
and her grandmother holds her tight
comforts her comforts herself
comforts the past comforts the future
with her cry

The cellphone baby is sending analog signals to the community:
we need to reconnect across space and time
we need relationships that heal the separations
we need to be wired so that we can cry and laugh together
touch hands, faces, hair, words, songs, stories
across the room, across the neighborhood, across the city
with the technology of walking shoulder to shoulder

The cellphone baby cries
bewildered
by the wireless ways
the walls and towers
the policing and the stores
that warn:
Do not touch the merchandise or the inmates
Her cry is an old wound,
god’s unkept promises
our revolutions’ failures
She is being born over and over until we get it right