Poetry / Jordan Cobb
:: Sticky Fingers ::
Before minimum wage increased, & I had to think about taxes & salaries & little treats, we lived in a neighborhood with three designs the builders liked to repeat, where I would shoplift lipsticks down at the local drugstore, the Walgreens where (eventually) I got a job behind the beauty bar, but often, when we were short-staffed, I’d sell Marlboro Reds to the local boys with their fake I.D.’s, or, on Friday nights, cases of Coronas to the men who spent their weeks sleeping in empty rentals in the city, who’d give me wide smiles & check out my ass when they thought I wasn’t looking. Corporate had installed cameras in the rafters, but I could spot them, too good at hide & seek; so, no one ever caught me swiping colors on the backs of my hands, or sneaking the bullet tubes into the pockets of my pants, but when the assistant manager & I were found in the break room with my top down & his cock out, well —
:: To the Software Engineer Who Has Seen My Sex Tape ::
I wonder how you found it. Was it a chance encounter in an endless stream of files? Those videos recorded & delivered by the self-driving cars your company set loose in San Francisco. Did you get excited? Have fun watching me, three shots of Buffalo Trace deep, climbing on top of the man in the backseat who suggested rawdogging as we accelerated slowly down Divisadero. Did you imagine the irony of touchscreens glued to headrests begging for five star reviews? Did you wonder why I did it, or think of me like one of those girls starring in a Fake Taxi scene or patiently waiting for direction on the casting couch. Truth is, I did it because I could— because I was wearing the kind of wrap dress where all I had to do was push aside the polyester fabric & tug down the lace cups of my get-lucky bra. Unbuckle his belt & swing a leg over his gym rat thighs. For one night, embrace the thrill of a different life. Of course, I forgot we could be on camera. I hope, when you watch it, I look great. Tits sitting high & back bent just right. Maybe, I got lucky before you got your copy, & someone was kind enough to blur my face.
From the writer
:: Account ::
“Sticky Fingers” is a sonnet based on a true story, where I was encouraged to resign from my minimum wage job as a teenager because the (adult) assistant manager and I were caught making out in the breakroom during one of our shared shifts. At the time, I was seventeen and in high school, while the man was twenty-five and had lied to me about his age. While I was punished in response to our actions, he continued to work in that job for years. I think it is interesting how inescapable it can be to be a woman—to be both a sexual object and virginal—depending on who one is interacting with.
“To the Software Engineer Who Has Seen My Sex Tape” is an epistolary piece, addressed specifically to the white collar employees at Waymo in San Francisco. When the cars were initially piloted in the city, the average citizen didn’t have a lot of knowledge about their design, beyond their autonomous nature. Months later, the San Francisco Chronicle published an article about all of the cameras in the vehicles and how many people had been caught having sex in the cars. It caused me to reflect on the nature of surveillance capitalism, especially within a city so driven by technology. In a contemporary society where nearly everyone has a camera on them at all times, we’ve become numb to the strange panopticon we now reside in. Incidents like sex in robot cars are funny, but representative of the greater invasion of technology into autonomy.
Jordan Cobb (she/her) is a queer American poet. Based in NYC, she completed her MSc in Creative Writing at the University of Edinburgh. Her work has appeared in The Shore, jmww, The Storms Journal, Rise Up Review, The Columbia Journal, Jet Fuel Review, Camas Magazine, Outskirts Literary Journal, Cherry Tree, and Fugue Journal. She is @on_the_cobb on Instagram.