The more common green screen was irritating, so we went for the amber. Gold C prompt against the black background. This wasn’t a system for a math geek seeking out a formula for all the prime numbers, or a computer kid learning FORTRAN. I was a poet. He was a philosopher. We had two cats.
The computer was in a sun-room, on an antique dining table, the chair’s seat thread-bare. If I leaned back, taking two minutes to fill in the image before I continued writing, the back of the chair would separate ever-so-slightly from the legs, creaking.
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| My study, Front St. Amber monitor & daisy-wheel printer |
I would write in the morning, before class. In the winter, the tall windows would frost, I could see my breath. A space heater glows. The sun rises. The cursor blinks. Orange seeps in every crevice.
Poems about trees, about family, about our narrow kitchen. About Picasso, about snow, about Bach. Poems with pain, or at least, what I thought was pain. Poems about anger. Poems about love. Or at least, what I thought was love.
A year later, I had my own apartment and a degree in English. I was a houseparent at a group home for teenage girls, though I was just past teenager myself. I was as eager to leave this town as I had been to come here. I had the computer. He had the cats. I had my poems, amber words burning into the morning dark.
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