Kathryn E. Hill

Issue 19

Signals

Would you prayerfully join us
For our world-class krill oil
We will enjoy the spiritual feast

Operators are waiting
No, no, these are truth-telling firefighters
Who will take your call now

To cover their butts
An iheartradio station
There’s an epidemic of fatherlessness and

People call me a hero
(That’s not something he gets to dictate)
Standard data and message rates apply.

Find us on facebook
If there is a recording of him he’s toast, it’s toast, we’re done
Fast, easy, and affordable

Possible arson. A nearby school was also vandalized
A big announcement is expected to happen this coming Tuesday
The ultrasounds of third-trimester babies shown on big screens

I’ve suffered the ills and evils of generations of my family
That’s coming up at 4:15


Source & Method

In May 2019 I decided to surf through the AM radio channels on my commute instead of the FM channels. I was immediately struck by the collage of language, contexts, and messages produced when changing channels rapidly. The lines in this poem came from one fifteen-minute period of flipping through AM radio stations, voice-to-texting everything I heard. The order of the lines in this poem is not the order in which I heard them.


Kathryn E. Hill  holds an MFA in fiction from Arizona State University. Her fiction has appeared in venues such as AGNI Online, Juked, Juxtaprose, Monkeybicycle, Pacifica Literary Review, Passages North, and elsewhere.


Photo by Atik sulianami on Unsplash