no internet no breath no god no chair just her fingers
rubbing themselves into themselves while the smile freezes and she’s a wax
dummy in a neon museum where the scream comes with the soundtrack of barking
radios and the skin of the day peels back to reveal an atlas of nerves not
nerves like bravery nerves like you can hear the ants marching in your teeth
and every whisper comes with a map legend and all the places are wrong Florida
is 90 miles away and still the chasm is deeper than that a chasm between what
was promised and what can be found under the fingernail of the saint Cuba
twisted back in time with cigars and ghosts and algorithms in guayaberas the
twilight land where things appear twice first like postcards then like regrets
and they are not the same not the same at all and the constitution sings a love
song to civil rights while a thousand tongues are tied with red tape and
unmarked envelopes and the devil stands behind the curtain selling gin soaked
decisions to the daughters of the revolution who lost their patience in line
for sugar bread and the memory of their fathers old shoes and then the true
story comes with bleed marks and ink ghosts i just got off the phone with a
dear friend and the line crackled like fire and she said she couldn’t plan
because the future was laughing too hard and i heard the future snorting behind
the curtain polishing its boots and making a list of what to erase she is a
human but not in the way they say on tv she bleeds like old stamps she dreams
like a bomb she eats crackers with her eyes closed and asks the question when
the choice comes like a bullet like a butterfly with razors for wings and then
that little gremlin appears holding a cocktail and a label that reads sin and
maybe that’s just the name of the show or maybe it’s the password to get into
the next version of this dimension and there’s this girl who keeps shouting
fuck being a slave to perfectionism and every letter she writes is a spell and
every misspelling is a rebellion against the tyranny of autocorrect and the
ghost of the english teacher she buried in a ditch full of red pens and report
cards and she smiles with teeth made of broken clocks and says don’t correct my
spelling because spelling is a system and systems are soft prisons and we
already have enough of those already enough of those already enough of those
and i start to see the painting again the wires exploding from her crown like
lightning like roots like cracked antennae tuning into frequencies the rest of
us forgot existed and she is not a woman she is a transmitter and the others
beside her are receivers or maybe echoes or maybe just shadows acting like
people and the diagram pulses again red green black synapse and spike dendrite
and flame and the tiny graph in the corner beats like a heart that forgot it
was supposed to keep going and the silence starts to rhyme with the room and
the room is full of ancient thoughts and old beer and Aristotle looking
sideways while pointing at the crack in the floor where the idea escaped and
now it runs wild in the sewers of philosophy gnawing at the ankles of reason
and cackling like a meth-head god and then i hear someone whisper from a throat
made of cassette tape they say everything is up in the air but the air itself
is down here with us full of smoke and neon and old perfume and it's not the
uncertainty that kills it's the silence the way it coils and loops the way it
waits the way it pretends not to be looking and then the towers bleed again red
into blue into memory and the devil waves a flag from a gin bottle while
singing the anthem of not quite real and the pulse diagram spikes again and the
receiver convulses and the message is clear and the message is noise and the
noise is truth and the truth is not welcome here and the air starts to peel like
old paint and underneath is code just code the truth was a glitch all along and
the girl says that’s okay she likes glitches and she’s not afraid of being
wrong and she says thank you for listening and she hangs up the phone and the
signal keeps ringing anyway
