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MY SCANNED HEART
After calling a Canon customer
service technician at a place known
only as 1-866-261-9362
and threatening to hurl myself
or my new scanner (or both) out of
the window unless the “Optical Character
Recognition” software was explained to me
in my native language, I was finally
able to scan my mother’s poems
but what I didn’t count on, the machine
not being a phone, neither landline
nor mobile, was the quality of the sound, was
hearing my mother’s voice as I re-read
her poems, and so I proceeded to weep
all over my new scanner, tears making way
for non-digitalized full-on sobs, the way a rivulet
develops into a raging torrent, when
I heard someone cry out, “Ma! Mom!” in
a voice that sounded an awful lot
like mine, and everything ended up
drenched, the memories,
the machine, me.
The scanner worked.
Only my hard drive crashed.
December 10, 2013