13

Someday anthropologists or aliens

will find all our phones

and read our lasts.

We will have said things like

“if I never see you again, I need you to know

I love you.”

We will have made frantic confessions

We will be so sorry

for not tipping the waiter well enough,

for stealing that parking space

They will wonder how many of us

ever received the messages

meant for us

They will make our memories

into stories

In two hundred years

none of us will have names

But there will be records

of what people are like

when they are about to die

I suppose it is the same way

we have always been

We make lists now, daily, most of us:

In case of a shooter or a war:

Who will I text

to say I love you?

Even a people as cruel as us

still wants our last words to be

the truest thing we know, and

these days I don’t know anything

more

than who I love