Steven Schroeder | Cities of Conversation
for Amy
In Guangzhou, when I have to use a cellphone
to arrange a meeting with a friend, I become
one of those postmodern peripatetics snatching shards
of conversation from the air on a busy street.
I wonder how she can hear me when
I speak as though she were
walking beside me but she isn’t, and there
is nothing to speak into. I hear only parts
of what she says, and I think we have become
adept at restoring cities of conversation from
broken remnants, finding our way in them
with an imprecision we learned
to tolerate by degrees when the cities were still
standing but had begun to crumble.
from fallen prose. virtual artists collective | 2006
