A few years ago, the publisher Alfred A. Knopf started a program to celebrate Poetry month—this month—by e-mailing a poem a day to those of us who signed up for the service. I always forget all about it until the next April 1 rolls around, at which time I start receiving the first of 31 daily poems.

Today’s e-mail contained the title poem from Mary Jo Salter’s A Phone Call to the Future: New & Selected Poems, which seemed relevant to those of you who wander here. I won’t reprint the entire poem, but if the opening section below intrigues you, you can listen to it read by the author in its entirely here.

Here’s how it begins:

1.
Who says science fiction
is only set in the future?
After a while, the story that looks least
believable is the past.
The console television with three channels.
Black-and-white picture. Manual controls:
the dial clicks when you turn it, like the oven.
You have to get up and walk somewhere to change things.
You have to leave the house to mail a letter.

Waiting for letters. The phone rings: you’re not there.
You’ll never know. The phone rings, and you are,
there’s only one, you have to stand or sit
plugged into it, a cord
confines you to the room where everyone
is also having dinner.
Hang up the phone. The family’s having dinner.

Waiting for dinner. You bake things in the oven.
Or Mother does. That’s how it always is.
She sets the temperature: it takes an hour.

The patience of the past.
The typewriter forgives its own mistakes.
You type on top sheet, carbon, onion skin.
The third is yours, a record of typeovers,
clotted and homemade-looking, like the seams
on dresses cut out on the dining table.
The sewing machine. The wanting to look nice.
Girls who made their dresses for the dance.

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