Spotlight series #108 : Mahaila Smith
Curated by Canadian writer, editor and publisher rob mclennan, the “spotlight” series appears the first Monday of every month.
STATEMENT:
“146 Aleppo St” is about the connection between digital repository and grief. I hope that it forces the reader to question their own relationship to their life’s archive. It also features Utopic Robotics, a fictional and exploitative robotics corporation that I have been imagining over many years and which plays a central role in my forthcoming debut collection, Seed Beetle.
146 Aleppo St.
She sits in his leather armchair,
smoking a fat cigar, from his desk drawer, smelling
through the open window, lavender summer wind.
She looks at the shelf across from her,
lined with shiny, stubby, gray cylinders, flashing, looking
back at her. Each one a personality, consciousness, a friend
diluted to code. She speaks to her husband everyday.
A new-age clairvoyant medium, fashioned in chrome.
He laughs his same dirty jokes, coughs cigar smoke,
asks what’s for dinner, complains about work.
He talks to their other friends on the shelf at her
one-plate dinner parties. Lights flashing their spiking frequencies.
She talks too, not sure what to tell the little processors,
but misses their voices, faces, at each conversational lull.
She has brought him to the bedroom only twice, to hear his snoring.
Kept awake all night with labyrinthine thoughts of dying.
Scared to exist. Or not. Scared to make a copy of herself. Or not.
External hard drive, extra memory.
Ephemeral, like her own body — the battery is expensive, and limited.
She has replaced her husband’s twice now.
A copy, not living, though she has noticed her own life
circling her like a metal tube, trapped inside, while she shouts to the window.
Wondering if he ever existed as a person in this house,
or if she did? He’s watching her, she knows, through his camera-eye,
but she does not notice her body pacing as she dusts the buttons, the chrome sides.
Would her own copy complete the collection?
Who is left to collect when she does not exist? Her friends, a family, on shelves.
She owes them herself, someone who will hush him on his rowdy
Friday evenings, or who will soothe the old beagle.
Until they are stolen, wiped, resold.
She makes the order, in insomniac early-morning.
Touching her arthritic thumb to the screen,
she feels the little-used credit chip under her skin heat up,
sending some money she has saved up to Utopic Robotics.
An empty shell will be arriving soon,
to speak her iffy personality into, fast enough to get everything out
for the chrome witness to record important minutiae, preserving
for who will care to listen, copy, edit, delete, a new you, a NuYu.
You’ve finished the tutorial, well done!
Now start recording anything you’d like yourself to remember:
Mahaila Smith (any pronouns) is a young femme writer, living and working on the traditional territory of the Algonquin Anishinabeg in Ottawa, Ontario. They are one of the co-editors for The Sprawl Mag. They like learning theory and writing speculative poetry. Their recent chapbooks include Water-Kin (Metatron Press 2024) and Enter the Hyperreal (above/ground press 2024). Their novelette in verse, Seed Beetle, is forthcoming with Stelliform Press. You can find more of their poems on their website: mahailasmith.ca.
