Most poems about death ask to be remembered. Nathaniel K Smith's speaker asks to be examined. The opening lines set up a tidy frame: "In 2014 I was born / And one hundred years later / I die." The speaker's life spans exactly a century, and the tenses slip so that a death in the far future arrives in the flat present of "I die." The colon that ends the stanza works like a door opening onto an inventory. What follows is a set of instructions for an autopsy.
Those instructions are almost all imperatives: "Cut," "Age," "peer," "Trace," "Scatter." The poem is free verse, with no rhyme and no steady metre, and it doesn't need either. The commands give it its pulse, and the body supplies the order, moving from brain to flesh to eyes to fingertips and finally to bones. The speaker becomes a site to be excavated, and the poem borrows the vocabulary of geology to say so. The brain holds "strata of radio signals / Layered deep like the ocean." Signals are invisible and weightless, yet here they settle into physical sediment, as if a lifetime of broadcast had been laid down in the skull like silt on a seabed. The simile also hints at depth and drowning, a mind submerged in what it receives.
The same layering carries into the next stanza, where flesh is aged "by the layers of / Grime and smog." The line break after "of" delays the dirt, and the verb "peer" then hangs at a line's end and pulls the reader through the eyes into the next line. What the eyes show is "distortions / Burned and worn by the rivulets / Of twenty four seven news cycles." The verbs combine fire and water. "Burned" suggests an image seared into a screen, while "worn" and "rivulets" suggest slow erosion, a channel cut by a trickle that never stops. Writing "twenty four seven" without hyphens lets the phrase run together with no pause, which suits the constant noise it describes. Smog and news sit side by side, so the poem treats physical pollution and informational pollution as the same kind of residue.
The one tender moment arrives in the shortest stanza: "Trace on my fingertips the keys I have / Caressed from birth." Caress is a word for lovers and children, and here its object is a keyboard. "From birth" is the most pointed phrase in the poem, since it suggests no life before the keys. The fingertips carry the evidence of intimacy, but the intimacy was with a device.
The final stanza is the longest, a single sentence that gathers force as it goes. "Scatter my bones like birdseed" is a strange, almost gentle image. It recalls scattered ashes, and birdseed is meant to feed something living. But the bones go "Across the landfills and the wreckage," and the purpose is not nourishment. They are bait, or a trail, so "that they might find the screens that once told me / I was loved." The "they" is never named, though the poem suggests future searchers, and "might" makes even that discovery uncertain. The word "once" implies the screens are now dark, dead technology. The poem ends on "loved," and the sentence has made clear who the speaker thinks did the loving. It was the screens that "told" the speaker so. The line leaves open whether this is consolation or indictment. The love may have been real, or it may have been only a message displayed on glass.
That ambiguity is a large part of the poem's interest. It avoids lecturing about technology and instead lets one body hold the evidence: a brain full of signals, skin full of grime, fingers worn by keys. Its restraint also helps. There is no rhyme to sweeten the ending, and the metaphors come from the same environment the speaker blames. By imagining a death a century ahead, the poem asks what a future observer would conclude from our remains, and the answer it offers is unsettling. People would find a body that was shaped by its media, and a love that survives only as a message on a screen.