SUSHI ROBOT PREPARES THE WAY
According to the students at my university,
among the features of the new cafeteria
that opened in fall is a Sushi Robot—
which I thought would be an updated version
of Rosie the Robot Maid from that old sixties
cartoon, The Jetsons, until I searched
the internet for a helpful YouTube
which showed me a boxlike contraption
smaller than an ATM but larger
than a water cooler, capable of pressing out
a uniformly thin square of cooked sushi rice
upon which one can proceed to quickly lay
a sheet of nori and on top of that,
precisely measured slices of avocado,
carrots, and crab sticks
before the revolving belt platform
retracts and an arm pushes down
to fold the roll in thirds
before sliding it out onto a waiting
plastic tray. First it was the Roomba,
that circular robotized disc
quietly whirring as it went, eating dust
from room to room. Next came all the talk
about the self-driving Tesla X, capable
of accelerating from 0 to 60 in two
seconds flat. Some think this is the beginning
of our end, a future drawing nearer when we
and our hungers will simply be extruded
from one end of a pipe to the other for the sake
of efficiency, with no intervening time to meditate
on what it all means. Will there be any
further need to work, or will everyone have
access to basic income? With work distributed
to mechanized devices, will we finally enter
the temple of true pleasure, knowledge of which we
have only ever known because of its differentiation
from pain? Will there be reading and writing,
will there be poems? Will we hold our fingers up
to the light, trying to recall what they were for?
Dr. Luisa A. Igloria is the winner of the 2015 Resurgence Prize, the world’s first major award for ecopoetry. She is the author of Bright as Mirrors Left in the Grass, among many other titles, including two new chapbooks, Haori and Check & Balance. She teaches on the faculty of the Master of Fine Arts Creative Writing Program at Old Dominion University. Visit luisaigloria.com for more information about her work. This poem originally appeared at ViaNegativa.us.
© Luisa A. Igloria. Used with permission.