Typewriters, Landlines, And Sonnets, Oh My

In Sherman Alexie's  What I've Stolen, What I've Earned he toys with an unusual form of sonnet. There is no rhyme scheme. There is only a loose concept of couplets. It's one justified blob of fourteen numbered ideas.

I've tried to be strict with my own ideas of coupleting and making the foot adhere to my idea of what a sonnet foot should be.

I'm still not in love with giant justified blob with numbers in it, and I might reformat it later, but here it adheres to Alexie's visual formatting.

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Sonnet With Forgotten Phone Numbers
Adam Stone


1. She says she says she says that she is losing what she says her memory was because of her damned she says cell phone. 2. It used to be I needed to remember all of these numbers. Everyone close and familiar was a seven digit she says nickname. If they moved away they became ten she says and easier to forget. Now everyone is a picture if I remember to take it, she says a ringtone if I remember how those work she says but most often I don't answer my phone anymore because I don't know she says who anyone is. 3. She says a lot of stupid shit. 4. But maybe she's right this time. 5. She says also that she misses landlines and rotaries both on the phone and the road. There's something so satisfying she says about circles How you never know when you're finished with something or when something is beginning. 6. She says she misses typewriters even though all the letters are on the keyboard of a computer that can remember things that even 1980s typewriters couldn't hold in their memory. 7.That's just it she says I don't want to trust some machine to remember how I felt while I was typing a letter. I want to see the paper. She says. I want to see where I dented the paper. She says I want to see the stories scars as they happen. She says I don't want to watch it happen on some screen and wait for it to print out later. 8. I say You would have made a lousy x-ray technician. 9. She says something she says I can't hear because she says newfangled phones are always breaking up. 10. She says this over a 1992 barely cordless phone where all the numbers have been fingered away. 11. She doesn't say fingered of course that's my word. She doesn't acknowledge the physically missing numbers on her phone. It's the numbers in her memories she's concerned with. 12. She says click click she says static she says something I can't hear because she's moved too far away from the base. 13. The call cuts out which she will surely blame my cellphone for though I will be using it to check my bank account while she will be slamming her phone with her fist and pressing the useless buttons on the base. 14. She will try and remember where she put the notebook with my phone number in it because she can't remember which button on her phone used to say Redial.