Disclaimer — by Bob King

Dear Mom & Dad,

The poems you are about to read yes are partly products of my particular childhood, but please
know that I’m not coming from a place of credit or blame—well yes, of course credit—but no
blame, even if it’s difficult to have one without the other, a home without a front door, a
refrigerator without a light, reaching in for what might be an orange without a rind, & maybe
inside that is a new world, heirloom microbes grown from quark-like seeds, full of water,
plankton, possibility, fish eventually crawling from a tidal pool & then walking upright & into a
new neighborhood full of the fantastic, the magic of oxygen, teeming with life & conversations
& even more ways of living, & then repeating the cycle in completely unforeseen ways.

+ Inspired by The Chaos Machine: The Inside Story of How Social Media Rewired Our Minds and Our World by Max Fisher (2022) & The Coming Wave: Technology, Power, and the Twenty-first Century's Greatest Dilemma by Mustafa Suleyman (2023).