What Are You Reading?

BRIAN FEHLER

April 3, 2020

They sit before me

Not six feet away but six miles,

Sixty even — no not even, for

what are these panic-demic days?

I see them on a screen and they see me

and we all see each other: a sea

of square-inch faces, all of us

settled in places intimately familiar

to ourselves, startlingly glimpsed by all

those square-inch people spread out over the

now-forbidden world.

And I ask them: What are you reading, now 

that the world is — 

I pause, not long but long enough

for one of them — six miles, sixty away

to say: Now that the world has fallen apart?

And we laugh.

For what else is there to do, for all of us

pixel people to do, but laugh, as we sit

together-apart, trying to hold on?

BRIAN FEHLER is a sixth-generation Texan who teaches rhetoric and writing at Texas Woman's University. He holds a PhD from Texas Christian University.