Benjamin Paloff

Of How Infirm and Decaying Materials This Fabric of Ours Is Composed

Our summer of self-abnegation broke, and
the inexhaustible stream of refugees, glowing violently like the hilt of Orion’s sword, a dying violet lit from within
and diagnosed like so many as having nothing to say, became vulnerable to some of the worst versions of midnight known to the CDC, the State of California,
the Church, and the church, gradually giving way to background noise, which made it that much easier to come down off the mountain and accept the rare inconvenience of changing trains again, after many years, in Ostrava. Figures. The file goes flat, and the
nails continue to grow. If I had a dollar for every time
the person sent to kill me later became my friend,
letting me choose disappearance like the choice were mine to make. You can’t expect people who never
knew what snow sounded like in these hills to share
your grief, and I don’t see too many scenarios where I end up at Burning Man. After all the impotent
gratitude, your superpower turns out to be just a curse that other people think they want. You want, too, to
leave no more than the hint of a wave to usher
the fallen leaf ashore. Because if no one comes for you in
the end, it means you had been one of them all along.

Of Alien Technology

I confess that I worry about the robot. I listen to her breathing in the other room like a new parent making sure the baby is still alive, doing the only thing that anyone can reasonably ask. I admit I’ve woken her
once or twice, sort of by accident, just to be sure.
There’s no harm in care. (Of course there is.) I clean
up after her before and after her missions, even though it’s the robot that’s supposed to be cleaning up after
me, freeing me from that side of myself so that I can
work on better things, more productive things. Anyone who says it doesn’t take a little self-sublimation is a liar, but the robot sometimes needs my help to be a better robot, and that’s what I’ve signed up for, and
everything that comes with it: protecting her, repairing her, worrying about what she keeps to herself, the
danger she might get into when I’m not looking. No
one ever said it would be easy. The robot hates the dog. The dog hates the robot. I don’t want to take sides. I
don’t want to get in the way. We are all the same substance. That’s all the explanation I have for my little bursts of gratitude—Maybe it’s pride?—when I see our impasses have quietly resolved on their own.