Ryan Texts Me
Not as in the vowels. / I don’t think they know about those.
by Luke Janicki
Ryan texts me, Looks like Lindsey Lee
got laid off too could hit her up
as if that is something I would want to do. Well,
my heart goes out to her, and I will reach out,
but not to network, not about that just yet,
and I don’t think she is either,
but Ryan always talks in this way.
In the vaunted space where his energy
syncs up with what business people
pass off as language, I have seen nothing
except for elision. Not as in the vowels.
I don’t think they know about those.
I mean that when anything is removed,
omitted, when Ryan tells me
the NIH funding hit Path, same boat
as Rob basically,
what I hear is some kind of filmic
buzzing. I may as well be reading
an archane script, watching a foreign language
advertisement that is trying to be
an American advertisement, a newsish post
remembering when the coverage
of invasion in Ukraine was interrupted
by an Applebee’s commercial,
spliced like th’vowel, spliced like o’erhead costs
were my friends, Jake too being removed
recently, and Eric, and Alex, and I’ll sound
like a broken record, so I won’t say
any more about profits, margins, earnings,
but the value, the value,
the value ascribed to the task of copy-and-pasting
text from one Adobe InDesign document
into another, the misspelled word that is
the company’s name I am compelled,
by assumption, to write into email responses,
is no merit in this life. They elide
one employee with the next, don’t speak
to the former for legal reasons. I lied,
one disadvantage giving way to the next dollar,
doler, d’or, golden; I lied,
maybe they do know something
about how words work.
Luke Janicki lives in Seattle, Washington. He has published poetry in Trampset, Funicular Magazine, Ghost City Review, and other publications. He has been nominated for Best of the Net 2025. He holds a B.A. from Gonzaga University and an M.Ed. from the University of Notre Dame.
