By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
"Near Future" imagines a woman reading trouble in the landscape and in her own body, while the speaker decides that living the truth means staying with her anyway.
The opening bone after the last slaughtered animal makes the future feel stripped to aftermath before the woman even speaks. Concrete and voices moving through her veins give public pressure an intimate, bodily form. The final loyalty is simple but not naive, because it comes after the poem has already admitted how much trouble surrounds her.
'Near Future' opens on aftermath -- 'Nothing but a big bone / after the last animal / slaughtered' -- as a woman 'looks out there / And says it's troubble', sensing that 'behind her / back of concrete' they are 'talking down / through her veins'. The speaker concedes 'you have / to live the truth', and even granting she has 'been down the road', his loyalty holds: 'I think I'd stick with her'.