Ryan Nhu
Summer 2025 | Poetry
Pornographesis
1.0
He happens
upon a lake, hapless
helpless, latent—
when lapping
upon his lap, then an Apple
laptop from the shore tip-top shape, surely
he must twitch it awake?
How plucky
once alive, the message
in New Robotica: You Must Enter Your Life.
(Pupils dilate to daffodils.)
One foot in the water one foot in the web
he’s all but ready now
to approach The Real.
2.0
It’s not that
the screen is a mirror but rather the mirror
that is a screen.
He parrots Copjec
parodying the feminists taking Lacan to town
for so much as gazing & glazed are his eyes
by now. By brows furrowed & rows
of selfies he knows he’s not getting
the picture.
Why don’t you lie
down? Dr. K barks & start the story over?
It’s all very Daddy from there.
3.0
Likely the likeness
of his image will survive him.
Like every like online
the lake must be scrolled through.
Scrolls through his dead
or dying like Charon
or Sharon Osbourne or a born-again story
of a body swiped left
left swept
under a rug. Archive
into ash. Well, his eyes well up. Upward the well
in the sky he reels. He had all those
buckets of peace to himself.
Ryan Nhu is a poet and writer. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Margins, Tyger Quarterly, Feminist Media Histories: An International Journal, and elsewhere. Born and raised in southern California, he currently lives in Chicago and is pursuing a doctorate in literature.