“Outside Work” (2024)
Albert John Belmont
Oil on Canvas
Every seven years they deleted the internet. Wiped away the drunken party pics, the careless tweets, the vitriolic rants, the curated photostreams, the sleek online storefronts, the personal blogs, the newsreels, the advice columns, the cat videos. They called it a reset, but really it was an intervention. An awakening. An absolution. A much-needed pause for a world that forgot nothing, except how to forget. Going back online felt like scattering from the summit of Ararat to repopulate the earth. Everyone reconstructed their social networks from scratch, forced to decide anew whether to befriend their seventh-grade bullies. Fistfights spilled into the streets, turf wars over the most desirable domains and screen names. The fatalists mourned their old avatars; the intrepid ones reinvented themselves. The archivists wrung their hands and began again the slow, thankless work of digitization—uploading, page after painstaking page, all the yearbooks and census records. Symphonic scores and scientific treatises. Maps, letters, and illuminated manuscripts.
Spiraling past the azaleas, a worker bee descends into a midlife crisis, fretting over her legacy, lamenting her meager yield—a mere fraction of a teaspoon. Hardly enough to measure, much less matter. So much for her sacred calling. She daydreams about taking a desk job somewhere. Maybe data entry. Surely she could handle spreadsheets, after all that honeycomb. The cells would be cleaner, anyhow. Less sticky. But she’d miss the warmth of sunshine on her wings. And no one will ever drizzle megabytes over their morning toast.
Not cached: whether the penny you found on the ground was heads or tails. How much jelly you slathered on your toast, unless you remembered to record it in your meal tracking app. What happened to the turtle you helped across the street. The number of toys your toddler flushed down the toilet. The slobbery kiss he gave you afterward, his chubby hands wrapped around your neck. The smell of onions sizzling in the frying pan. Your satisfied sigh at the end of a good book. Each incoming spark of creative inspiration—at least until you began typing it out. The mottled purple ripeness of the figs in your backyard tree. That moment at the end of your return flight home, when the downtown cityscape finally came into view. Unless you were wearing a smartwatch and your heart skipped a few beats during the descent.
Callie Dean: These prose poems are part of an ongoing series called “Metadata,” which explores the myriad implications of modern technology within society. I have found the absurdity and surrealism of prose poetry to be the perfect vehicle for exploring what it means to be human in an era of information overload and artificial intelligence. These poems, and others, will be featured in a physical installation this spring in my hometown of Shreveport, LA. If you’d like to learn more and stay up to date with my writing, please check out my website at calliebdean.com or follow me on Instagram or Bluesky @calliebdean.