wireless — Nathaniel Im
anyway, i keep thinking about the old laptop we passed around after school,
blue light pooling over our faces like a second puberty—hot,
cords under your desk, knotted around our feet.
do you remember that? the fan’s buttery whir, the screen
exhaling its pixel glow while we typed to each other from
four inches apart, earbuds splitting one song between us.
god, they were so tangled—the rubber lined ones
hoarding earwax, secrets, they tugged and caught
impish phrases swapped on laggy desktop calls, our voices
jittering like cicadas against the plastic mic grill.
kids now won’t understand what that click was like, i swear
light shifted the moment the plugs aligned, a small spark sending
minute currents pressing inward and tracing
narrow seams of heat as they bloomed where the metal met metal. remember?
only then did the static settle into a low buzz in our brains.
pretty soon we had bluetooth, though, and in the room
quiet spread thickly across the walls
rising and falling like a lung set loose from its body.
soon everything would move that way. weightless, instant and
to touch nothing became the rule, whooshing cleanly over our bent knees,
untethered currents skimming overhead, quick as breath, wires splitting infinite.
video is so crisp now,
washes the screen into one mean plane.
xeric shadows thinning to husks under that overbright sheen,
you now watch them slide down, smooth as rain on glass,
zero softness left for anything that moves slower than its light.
Nathaniel Im, a junior at Portsmouth Abbey, engineers wearables that predict falls in the elderly—analyzing a stride's rhythm the way he scans Latin verse for meter and caesura. He's developing Kinetic Verse, a digital anthology pairing poems with movement visualizations, and preparing his first print collection. When he's not writing or coding, he's wrestling his dad in the snow or plotting Secret Santa twists—his veggie-hating brother once unwrapped ten cabbages, Pokémon cards buried underneath.