Jon Riccio is a PhD candidate at the University of Southern Mississippi’s Center for Writers. Forthcoming poems appear in SurVision Magazine and Word For/ Word. A 2018 Lambda Poetry Fellow, he received his MFA from the University of Arizona.
Typewriter Museum
Quorum alphabet, a distraction when my father cancered. Additional hours for the Smith-Corona exhibit. Remission not long. Typewheels, their semblance to satellites. Yesterday we talked open versus closed casket. He’s undecided, wants an obituary picture from his hairstylist days in Kalamazoo. Early typewriter keys were coin-sized orbs struck against the platen, a device (part steamroller) fed on paper secured by metal fingers left and right. For pallbearers he narrowed cousins down by shoulder-width and strides privy to where men in my family begin their bald. Selectric anatomies bannered above the donation box. Holes in a docent nest. Corrective tape jumbled around keypad innards, spacebars like kneelers in a pew. He divided his life into zeniths and font, worked X years as a typesetter in steno clubs. His beer steins pass to my brother. Variety mechanized the semicolon. Syllables blackened rows of sheets. Stomas the span of nectarines. Maybe it’s the remnants we mistake for obsolete. Some relics you stroll, others quietly breeze.