no history

promise me you have no history
and you can join me

in a painless future
where robots harvest minerals from asteroids
that are barreling towards earth
where children play in seas of dead grass
breaths synchronized to the bounce of oil derricks
where intellectuals rework the palimpsest
until there’s nothing left but marxist cultural criticism
and paeans to the avant-garde of netflix shows
where content marketers spin new turns of phrase
while spinning corpses on spits
where tomatoes blacken and split on sight
and rainbow maize charms the sunlight
but turns a flat yellow in your hands

promise me you have no history
and you can join me
in immortality

Owen Schalk is a writer of fiction and non-fiction, among them two books on Canadian foreign policy. Among many other writing credits, he is a columnist at Canadian Dimension magazine. Read other articles by Owen.