Tattoo the outline of the wasteland on your organs before it shatters
the cold mud hardened to mirror glass, the desiccated grass crystallizes into shiny towers
without an internal structure or clear function
the temperature pleasant and regulated automatically, coffee streams from dispensing machines, no one ever has to open a window or imagine an outside world
bodies and goods circulate in glass and steel carapaces but they are secondary to the flow of
data, affects extracted from the flesh in which they were once carved
not containers but conductors, solid and opaque
made of abstract forces and flows
a grid of amulets, a cybernetic Stonehenge, geometric stones glistening maliciously
they reflect the complex patterns of migratory birds, data clouds, escape routes
but if you look up all you can see is an empty sky
uniform grey stasis because you paused the lot, the clouds of information, gas, frozen
kerosene, the flocks of shiny black feathers
and afterwards you erased everything: the lines the vectors
and you stared at the sky until your eyes filled with tears and all the bodies became translucent
most of all your own
you saw fat flow through your veins, strawberry milk, sugar crystals
memes about dolphins, work, trauma
you wanted ten thousand bees, a gothic love affair between zooming servers deep underground, your skin soaked, wrists and thighs bound with fibre optic cables
you wanted something expensive, something shiny, something rare
which someone or something had suffered for
but like not too much
you got checklists, scripts, procedures, regulations
grey wall-to-wall carpets that absorbed ambient versions of pop songs, the variants began to generate themselves in codal nether regions where you go in search of the sublime
© Translation: 2026, Michele Hutchison
