The Northville Review
an online literary journal
The Information Delivery System

Corey Mesler

The IDS had broken down.

Many of us didn’t know which way

to turn or how to tell someone else

we didn’t know.

In our homes the water runs

constantly. Our eyes cloud.

We put our best men on building a

new system. Some say

they will never be through, that

information has become that dense.

Some say we will have to find other

ways for people to

know people. We wanted to go out-

side but wondered if it

were safe. How could we tell? Some

of us cursed the day we

built the Information Delivery System,

the day it became all inclusive.

Some of us approached others and

stuck them with sharpened sticks.

It was a beginning.

Some of us took those same sticks

and made marks in the sand.

Too close to the waves, flashed in our

brains, a memory perhaps.

We moved away from the water. We

moved closer together.

Soon, the sticks became burdensome.

Some of us thought that without the

sticks we would need a new IDS.

Some of us wanted to wait for that to

happen. Some of us prayed,

O Lord, help us in our whatever this is.

O Lord, give us new information

that we may impart it to others. When we

can, of course, when we figure out how,

O Lord, our most imperative First Cause.

About the author

COREY MESLER has published in numerous journals and anthologies. He has published four novels, Talk: A Novel in Dialogue (2002), We Are Billion-Year-Old Carbon (2006), The Ballad of the Two Tom Mores (2010) and Following Richard Brautigan (2010), a full length poetry collection, Some Identity Problems (2008), and a book of short stories, Listen: 29 Short Conversations (2009). He has also published a dozen chapbooks of both poetry and prose. He has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize numerous times, and two of his poems have been chosen for Garrison Keillor’s Writer’s Almanac. He also claims to have written, "Tie Me Kangaroo Down, Sport." With his wife, he runs Burke’s Book Store, one of the country’s oldest (1875) and best independent bookstores. He can be found at www.coreymesler.com. He also spent an hour and a half with Michael Jackson and his then wife Lisa-Marie and their entourage in his very own bookstore. But dearer to his heart was Gene Hackman's visit. He did indeed love Brittany Murphy and her death still makes him sad.