Remember the Typewriter

By DAVID LEHMAN

Remember rotary phones?
What did we do back then
if we didn’t have a phone
and had to walk a mile
to get to the bus stop?
Remember telephone booths?
Remember when the question was
how many college kids can fit into one telephone booth?

Let’s say I wanted to get a message to you.
Do you remember what we used to do?

Remember the typewriter.
Remember the haiku
on the wine-stained menu.
Remember the answering machine.

We said goodbye
under the clock where we kissed
at the train station
and that was how everyone knew
that I was going to die
in Anzio or Monte Cassino,
I, the American, a veteran amnesiac
who tells stories backwards because
he doesn’t know much about history.

Remember the telegram,
the last unfiltered Camel at the station.
Remember the typewriter.
Remember the Maine?
Remember the Alamo?
Remember Pearl Harbor?
Remember the radio?

And I had never seen you unclothed
before the night before the day before
There was a knock on the door—
The cops burst in—
There was a dead man on the floor—
and you stood there looking guilty as sin—

But I threw away the script
I spoke from the heart
For love was everything
Love was meat and drink to us
And love was only nature’s art,
Remember?

 

David Lehman, editor ofThe Best American Poetry series, has recently published a new collection of poems, Yeshiva Boys.

[Purchase your copy of Issue 05 here]

Remember the Typewriter

Related Posts

November 2024 Poetry Feature: New Work from our Contributors

G. C. WALDREP
I am listening to the slickened sound of the new / wind. It is a true thing. Or, it is true in its falseness. / It is the stuff against which matter’s music breaks. / Mural of the natural, a complicity epic. / The shoals, not quite distant enough to unhear— / Not at all like a war. Or, like a war, in passage, / a friction of consequence.

Caroline M. Mar Headshot

Waters of Reclamation: Raychelle Heath Interviews Caroline M. Mar

CAROLINE M. MAR
That's a reconciliation that I'm often grappling with, which is about positionality. What am I responsible for? What's coming up for me; who am I in all of this? How can I be my authentic self and also how do I maybe take some responsibility?

October 2024 Poetry Feature: New Poems By Our Contributors

NATHANIEL PERRY
Words can contain their opposite, / pleasure at once a freedom and a ploy— / a garden something bound and original / where anything, but certain things, should thrive; / the difference between loving-kindness and loving / like the vowel shift from olive to alive.