Poetry / Matt Trease

:: from rcvrdtxt ::

rec: 09:51:08
fr: unknown

sHe wS bOrn w/ rOsEs
iN hEr i’S & I’m
luKnG2 sTeEl a
bEauTifUl iMg N
uNuSuaL PrCeduRe
wRitTn iN stOne. I
jSt hV 2 cHop oFf
thEse hNds

From the writer

:: Account ::

This poem was com­posed on Twit­ter via my Motoro­la Rzr phone in north Mil­wau­kee in Jan­u­ary of 2009. For 20 days in a row, I would set an alarm on my phone to go off at a par­tic­u­lar time dur­ing the day (e.g., 3:15pm, 7pm, 11:30pm, etc.). When it went off, I would stop what I was doing and com­pose a 140-char­ac­ter poem on the spot using lan­guage I found around me at the time. My goal was to try to make these as expan­sive as pos­si­ble, so I took the log­ic of SMS abbre­vi­a­tions to an extreme, leav­ing out near­ly all the vow­els and quite a few unnec­es­sary con­so­nants. I also embraced mis­spellings that con­veyed more the sound of the words. A few years lat­er, I pulled them off my Twit­ter archive and noticed how they resem­bled these recov­ered arti­facts of a near-extinct era of media, so I reframed them as these arche­o­log­i­cal finds, recov­ered com­mu­ni­ca­tions, not unlike the palimpsest texts found among the tombs of ancient Egypt, hence the title of the chap­book-length col­lec­tion this poem comes from, rcvrdtxt. In the process of putting the man­u­script togeth­er, I added the line breaks and cap­i­tal­iza­tions, and I made some minor edits for clarity.

Matt Trease is an artist, IT Admin­is­tra­tor, and astrol­o­gy junkie liv­ing in Seat­tle, WA. His poems have appeared in The Cordite Poet­ry Review, fill­ing Sta­tion, Otoliths, VLAK, small po®tions, Juked, Hotel Ameri­ka, Fact Sim­i­le, and oth­er pub­li­ca­tions. He is the author of the chap­book Lat­er Heav­en: Pro­duc­tion Cycles (busylittle1way designs, 2013).