Enjoy Being Human

Katie Manning

The Book of Peers
all that remains of Second Peter

dear friends
do not forget this one thing

everything goes

you must
follow
like a thief
like a day
like a thousand years

everything
everyone
every
ever

the earth
will disappear with a roar

after-dinner conversation

tv, i almost miss your
call now 1-800
and for just a dollar a month

you no longer light
our retinas and somersault
into our cortices

we have given our faces
to other screens and learned
to program ourselves

what will our grandkids think
of our old tablets
and kindles and nooks?

they’ll be so coolly retro.
they’ll be burning
real paper books.

About Katie Manning

Contributor headshot, Katie Manning

Katie Manning is the founding Editor-in-Chief of Whale Road Review and an Associate Professor of Writing at Point Loma Nazarene University in San Diego. She is the author of four poetry chapbooks, and her first full-length poetry collection, Tasty Other, is the 2016 winner of the Main Street Rag Poetry Book Award. She has received The Nassau Review Author Award for Poetry, and her writing has been published in Fairy Tale Review, New Letters, Poet Lore, So to Speak, Verse Daily, and many other journals and anthologies. Find her online at www.katiemanningpoet.com. She can also be found on Facebook at www.facebook.com/katiemanningpoet and Twitter at @iamkatmann.

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