Poetry: Smartphones In Paradise by Martina Reisz Newberry

By ​Martina Reisz Newberry

Eden was never further behind us 
than it is now. The lives or moments 
we might have found there are 
captured forever in arrogant 
and proliferous photos.

Click: Eve putting on lipstick picked
from a lipstick shrub in front of her.

Click: Eve eating a banana 
and drinking coffee from a Starbuck’s Tree.

Click: Adam working on an old junker
under an elm., tools scattered everywhere.

Click: Adam playing catch with an young
Orangutan. 

Click: The llama, that spitting son of a bitch
spitting at a baby rabbit who is
playing with a kitten who is swiping
at the tail of a puppy.

Click: Eve with her head in Adam’s lap,
a bunch of purple grapes on his knee.

I know for a damn fact that Eve smiled. 
She smiled in prayer and praise, 
smiled as she sniffed at, then bit into, 
the faithless fruit offered to her. 
(There is a selfie of her and the serpent, 
eyes glittering, smiling at the apple– 
or whatever it was–in Eve’s hand, 
delighting in what appears to be 
an aura, a benevolent halo around 
that juicy sphere.) 

That life was gone even 
as they were living it

Thanks to [email protected], 
we are able to see Adam, Eve, 
and the sulky llama 
(who ate the core of the finished fruit) 
as they are about to enter the real world 
via Highway 50, recognized as
The Loneliest Road in America.
It is, of course, a selfie which
[email protected] took herself.
In it, everyone but the llama is smiling
and the photographer’s arm 
is stretched as far out as it can go. 
It shows clearly the holy faces 
and the endless road behind them
identical to
the endless road in front of them.