Small data
I keep reading about the importance of big data,
but it is difficult for me to be enthusiastic
when I am already so personally invested in
small data
Which is to say, I want to know deeply esoteric
details about your life; the colour
of the jumper you wore the night
you first realised you were gay
The brand of dog food
you bought for the childhood labrador
that you loved and who loved you
that first taught you death is real;
how you cried for weeks afterwards
People who don’t see the value in small data
have never, obviously, been in love
We kiss like a slow dial-up connection,
transfer nanobyte-sized files
that spell out every frustrating
intricate thing about ourselves
& if my heart is a zip file
I want you to unpack me
like 3D WordArt
sprawled haphazardly across the
Geocities webpages of each other’s
bare boned Web 1.0 bodies
We gift one another
boxes upon boxes of floppy disks
for things that could be said more succinctly
with one hard drive —
Our love is not a hard drive
Our love is not a hard thing
About the author
Alex Gallagher is a writer whose work primarily explores queerness and transgressive bodies. Their work has been published in The Guardian, Overland and Kill Your Darlings, among others. Alex’s first poetry collection, Parenthetical Bodies, was released in 2017 through Subbed In, and they are currently working on its follow-up.
