We Work!

How do we balance our tech-love with retaining our humanity?
Devon Balwit

Devon Balwit

3

 min read time

Loudspeakers announce dawn.
Each barrack offers one
climate sacrifice, a death
to offset emissions. Someone,
somewhere, tots up how many
needed per day. Those remaining
work, “All that I am for all we can be
our credo, the crescendo of each tune
on Office-Spotify, the worker of the month
a live-streamed god of motivation.
Our children grow in Kinder-Halls
to maximize efficiency. They also labor—
swings and merry-go-round, even fidget spinners,
feeding the grid. Evenings, old and young
get thirty minutes of Nature-Time,
Oculus Rift niching creatures of choice,
realer than real. Hooked into sleep-suits,
even our tossing and turning transmutes
into Joules, a whirl of counters
to fend off extinction.

Read this poem on Apple News.

Cover photo by Martino Pietropoli.

Devon Balwit

Devon Balwit teaches international students and writes poetry atop the Cascadian Subduction Zone, where she hopes the "Big One" will wait a couple hundred more years.

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