The Beautiful War

Rebecca Wadlinger
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The mocking bird outside my window has learned to imitate a car alarm, which in my opinion is the saddest repercussion of “the information age,” a term I learned years ago when a ray of heated electrons traveled through a vacuum onto a screen so that my brain could rearrange dots into the human sent to inform me. And still, questions remain: Truth or beauty?
The mind, can it be satisfied? I offer you half a sandwich if you’d like to think this out. No, my mind cannot be satisfied, not with this week’s strange headlines: In remote mountains of Borneo scientists find an army of rainbow toads, last seen in 1924 and thought to be extinct. Earth may have had another moon, and in Sweden police arrest a man trying to split atoms in his kitchen. “It’s just a hobby,” he says. My hobbies are smaller and vanish mysteriously like moons. I like to walk and notice things. Front gates left open. The notch that stays knee-level even when the tree grows. In my pocket someone across town asks for me and has sent radio waves to the station to do so. This is the best thing about the information age. How everything is both far away and close. How I can take you with me wherever I go.

Rebecca Wadlinger is a writer living in Portland, OR. Her translation of Norwegian Poet Gro Dahle’s A Hundred Thousand Hours is available from Ugly Duckling Presse. Rebecca earned an MFA at the Michener Center for Writers in Austin and a PhD from the University of Houston’s Creative Writing Program.