Object Permanence
By Melian Radu
Knowing my passion for celebrity nudes reached back to the last days of Netscape Navigator, Siri dutifully told me of the latest gossip site to promise their release.
Lawyers had sued to block the nudes’ coming to light and thereby confirmed they exist, she said. I resented the assured existence of any celebrity nudes I had yet to see, insisting all stars were both clothed and unclothed until the moment the webpage was loaded—at which point truth would be made clear.
Siri disapproved of my inaccurate interest in Schrödinger and his daguerreotype nudes, whose bits I’d heard were coffined up behind some Princeton research paywall full tuition granted access to. She explained I could save my money: how all nudes took form already, stored as light in fiber optic cables stashed in the oceans’ aphotic sands. HTML5 would dredge up everything.
Hypertext did not excite me, but I had to admit pleasure at the thought of seabed celebrity nudes leaked by wolffish. Would they float? Form islands? I saw archipelagos of nudes in a cold Atlantic full of them.
I asked Siri what she thought of my nudes, the lighting I’d used—their dark, private silhouettes. Bring your umbrella, she said. I looked at the thick cloud of my nakedness above, and agreed it was possible for rain.
Lawyers had sued to block the nudes’ coming to light and thereby confirmed they exist, she said. I resented the assured existence of any celebrity nudes I had yet to see, insisting all stars were both clothed and unclothed until the moment the webpage was loaded—at which point truth would be made clear.
Siri disapproved of my inaccurate interest in Schrödinger and his daguerreotype nudes, whose bits I’d heard were coffined up behind some Princeton research paywall full tuition granted access to. She explained I could save my money: how all nudes took form already, stored as light in fiber optic cables stashed in the oceans’ aphotic sands. HTML5 would dredge up everything.
Hypertext did not excite me, but I had to admit pleasure at the thought of seabed celebrity nudes leaked by wolffish. Would they float? Form islands? I saw archipelagos of nudes in a cold Atlantic full of them.
I asked Siri what she thought of my nudes, the lighting I’d used—their dark, private silhouettes. Bring your umbrella, she said. I looked at the thick cloud of my nakedness above, and agreed it was possible for rain.
Source: Poetry (June 2019)