Binaries
by Cate Kennedy
from The Taste of River Water (Carlton North: Scribe, 2011)

In my parents’ lounge room, after Christmas lunch,
I am listening to my brother, the computer programmer,
explaining the principles of cyberspace.

“It’s basically a system of binaries,” he says,
“permutations of zero and one. So the data
may be stored as, say, zero zero one one one, zero zero one.”

My mother sighs, next to us on the couch.
She is knitting a cable-knit cardigan.
“You kids,” she says.
“I’ll never understand how you get your brains around it.
It’s beyond me.”

And she turns back to her knitting,
purl purl plain plain plain, purl purl plain.