In the excavation of a closet
\npacked with my siblings’ left-behind belongings
\nI found a floppy disk
\ncarefully labeled in my sister’s middle school hand
\n(bubble letters were all the rage)
\nwhich read:<\/p>\n
PRIVATE: do not read!!!<\/em><\/p>\n Perhaps if I was the kind of sister who pried It was a time of obsolete technology that we can’t easily access now; <\/p>\n Doubtless there is some other historical repository I am more interested in hers than mine Who were you when I wasn’t looking? In the excavation of a closet packed with my siblings’ left-behind belongings I found a floppy disk carefully labeled in my sister’s middle school hand (bubble letters were all the rage) which read: PRIVATE: do not read!!! Perhaps if I was the kind of sister…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1532,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[3597,3442,680,15],"class_list":["post-73511","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-marathon-poem","tag-2020halfmarathon","tag-2020poetrymarathon","tag-poetrymarathon","tag-poem"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73511","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1532"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=73511"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73511\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":73757,"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73511\/revisions\/73757"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=73511"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=73511"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=73511"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\n(and had a computer with a working floppy drive
\nor the mischievous motivation to acquire one)
\nI’d excavate that too
\nand see what the sister who loved pink and flowers and bubble letters
\nheld precious and private.<\/p>\n
\nit was a time of opposite adolescences spent in baffled unfamiliar separation.<\/p>\n
\nin the warren of my parents’ new basement
\nwhere I will find my own PRIVATE!!!<\/em> files,
\nfloppy disks, yes, and also CD-ROMs;
\ninternal and external hard drives;
\nbusted computers with maybe-salvageable memories; —<\/p>\n
\neven though we both may have forgotten what is on our own.
\nEven though I could ask:
\nWhat did you-then think? About me? About your new school?
\nAbout buying pink gel pens and learning to write bubble letters?
\nAbout living in a house where privacy required warnings?<\/p>\n
\nShould I keep excavating? Can we? <\/p>\n[Prompt 17, Hour 17] Write a poem about a form of technology that is obsolete or is headed that way. The technology could just be referred to in passing, like a telephone booth, or it could be a CD that is the focal point of the poem. The degree of focus on the obsolete technology is up to you.<\/em><\/h6>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"