Two Poems

by A. Z. Foreman

Hymn of Meat & Rage

The future's not a place. It is a chokehold—

the red eye of a drone blinking through smog,

scanning the bone-dust of what we called cities.

Sometimes the words I spit start shorting out

like neural mods fried in the skull's wet cage,

singing static where poems used to scream.

To think we used to hope for flying cars!

This is a landfill of faces, pixelated

to zeroes where the Overnet will lick

thoughts clean before you think them. History

is a deleted file. I walk the slag-heaps,

where rivers boiled away, their beds cracked like

junkie veins. Air hums data's insect-whine.

Children without a name, eyes barcode-black,

scavenge for scraps of what—hope? A can?

They palm a dirt that has forgotten green,

while satellites hymn the surveillance gods,

their lenses sharper than a sniper scope.

I smell a freedom sweet as battery acid,

and cough up blood that's half my own, half code.

We used to dream of stars, of ships to brave

the bruised lid of the sky. Now stars are dead

signals that bounce from server graves. The only

voyage left is a swiping of the screen

that sells you back your memories, edited.

Once, in a blackout, I found a man half-dead,

his arm a stump where implants got torn loose.

We talked about strange things like trees and flowers

animals that had the power to fly.

I gave him water, left him to the rats,

knowing survival is a thief's cruel art.

And I have seen a boy, his face a glitch

of scars, hack his own leg to kill the tracker—

he laughed, then bled out in the outer district

while error messages begged his submission.

His ghost's still out there in the grid, a virus.

My sister's eyes were wired shut just last spring,

to make a node in Highside's neural net.

She screamed my name through static, then went dark.

I carry her knife, its edge my only law,

and cut my breath from others when I must.

I never met the Uppermen. I hear

they have all-natural skin and still taste food.

They watch us crawl, our lives a streamed charade,

each move a qubit to feed horny hunger.

I hacked their feed once, saw my face in red,

marked for the grinders in the slag district.

The past? A whisper getting past the filters,

Overnet ghosts like San Francisco's ruins

or Tokyo's wasteland, screaming Don't Forget.

Forgetting, though, is currency now, minted

in each click, each nod to the algorithm's whip.

I often carve my name in realspace spots

like antique bathrooms or an old steel wall,

not for fame, but to prove I was, I am—

a system glitch, a throat that can still cuss.

The risky business of the soul bangs on,

clanging against the troublesome, unplugged.

The Overnet was built to make you kneel

to code. I keep a tongue they can't reboot

to silence. Let the drones hunt, let the screens

devour— I'll sing the hymn of meat and rage,

of hands that still remember how to break

and build. In the ash-cache I find a qumix

as sharp and hot as groin-pain. So I hurl it

into the network, and it takes. The spark

is small, but it is mine. It burns like the

human in me, refusing to go dark.

A Song in Love & Filth

The droneswarm whine is bonesaws through the dusk

as I keep crawling through the blasted husk

of cordite-reeking, rebar-ruined Akron

looking for you, my love, or what's left of you.

Your name—Lara— burns my mouth like bad booze,

a word I shout on copper-tasting wind

imagining it finds you, alive, not gutted

by the militias' led or hunger's gristle.

Drunk Uncle Sam gave his gun quite a blowjob

and war came fast. Fever cumbered a nation's

veins and the country splintered like a skull.

I saw flags (one red, white and blue — one yellow)

flap over barricades as men turned meat.

This part of the Ohio River: sewer

backed up with bodies and god knows. No way

to kill the miles to where you might well be—

Cincinnati, maybe, or further south.

The radio once cackled your name there

in static lace before the signal died.

I swallow nasty air and keep on moving.

Jimmy's ghost scowls out of my sleep like Jane's

who slit her throat on grass one moonlit night.

They tell me love is a fool's bet in this,

where drones hunt heat and patriot guns hunt hope.

But I still see you flickered in a face

through a bombed-out diner's window, almost heard you

in the tune hummed by some mad scavenger.

I like to think I'd know if you were dead,

the way a bullet knows what heart to crack.

I only know this quondam nation's carcass,

though fetid, is still Molotov-flammable.

I risk the checkpoints and the Minutemen

whose faith is crosshairs. Lara. Lara. Lara.

I wonder if you're hiding in a cellar,

the way we used to, living through this noose.

Or are you particles, or worse, already

somewhere out there in the twilight's last gleaming.

My guts ache. My hands are unsanitary

but I will make a name for you in wreckage,

in soot of a world that forgot its language.

The war's a meat-shop, but I am not meat,

not while your shadow pulls me through the mire.

If you're alive, I'll find you. Through the fire

and droneshot. Through the patriot zones. Through each

festering bone of this republic's corpse.

If not, I'll carry you still. North or south

I sing your life against the pistol's mouth.

(March 4, 2094)

This gate is rifle-flanked. A yellow flag

hangs like a leg shot with a fifty-mag

dragging its bile out of the morning gold.

They scan my fake chip, hands hope-stiff and cold.

The Minuteman waves me on through. His taut

face is a mask of oath-bound diddleysquat.

I squinch back "thanks" and gates behind me thud.

There is a boy behind me coughing blood

into his mother's coat. They do not pass.

The road to Buffalo is now a crass

reel of new barricades, old bits of guns,

old phones, graffiti trees, the skeletons

of cars and corpses now relieved in hell.

I hear it's nine weeks since the city fell

again. The shortwave statics in my pocket

with threats. There are no maps here, just a socket

for eyes in scars. I walk beneath a sky

turned a spent ammo color. Checkpoints lie

everywhere through their teeth at all the sane

whom Minutemen or Patriot Troops disdain:

the travelers and passengers like me.

My hands are empty of all but memory.

I think how Lara sat with me way back,

picking the buckshot out of my sick back,

winters ago in that old roofless place's

basement. I think of wet hair on her face's

cheeks, how I made her laugh as if to fix

the ending of a world. At Checkpoint Six

they make me kneel and strip. They do not find

the name stitched in my heart. They do not find

her photograph, long burned behind my eye

where no searchight can see or trooper pry.

A drone like a grotesquely swollen fly

is muttering above my flinchless head.

Flinching, you learn here, is what gets you dead.

Ashes of two states grace my boots. The trees

along the roadside there are hung with these

sad uniforms of dead boys who believed

there was a flag worth dying for. I grieved

for the republic when it died, but shed

all uniforms. I wear no flag. Not red,

white, blue or yellow. I bow to two laws:

The hunger and her name between my jaws.

At Checkpoint Seven men think they are free

and force a bullshit prayer out of me.

I say the psalm with lies tucked in my palm.

When they ask where I'm going I say home.

I say it in a flat voice, bullet-plain

with Crystal Beach a whisper in my brain.

It's not a lie if you see through the chrome

enough to understand the only home

is person when the world has started playing

Russian roulette with an old crossbow. Braying

drones over there toll ration's end today.

God damn the UFR and USA.

Tomorrow I will find her or will not.

Tonight I cross the next with just my gut.

Tonight I still love her more than my bones.

Tonight is still the road no army owns.

(March 6, 2094)

My name is Lara. I relearned to sing

here where air doesn't smell of anything

other than pine and rain in the thick quiet

of a world acting like it isn't burning.

They built this remote place from bones and will,

wired gardens to the solar panels, cut

ties with the outside madness. We trade seeds

for stories and have learned to love our toil,

burying the worst of ourselves in the soil.

I tell no one about Chicago, Mike's

laugh by my ear when sirens started drowning

everything else. About the way I lost him

in the squashed bodies and the gulp of smoke

that ate our names whole. Mike and Lara. Who?

They say the city is just ruins now,

that UFR flags fly on wrecked cement

and nobody with breath has made it out.

I'm lucky. So they tell me. In the evenings,

I walk the outer fence and count the breaths

like rosary beads. The world across the river

ends in barbed wire and absence of all news.

I plant tomatoes and pretend I don't

hallucinate his shadow in the clouds.

I mend clothes for the children who I hope

need never know the tricks to dodging droneshot...

I mend my own hands into fists of hope

and open them again when no one is looking.

Sometimes I dream of him— clean-dirty boots

tracking ash into that old kitchen, arms

full of the promises he couldn't keep

but never were his fault, his voice that cracked

jokes as if we were still just human beings.

I wake to hear the zero of the wind

clawing at eaves, the taste of blood for having

believed in one more night. They say let go

they say that specters are bad company,

civilians don't survive the Minutemen

but my heart never learned geography.

It still listens for footsteps up the road

that no one uses anymore, still waits

to hear the knock almost beside the point.

I tell myself that he is gone and lie

into myself again with a lit lantern.

The harvest will come soon. We will preserve

what we can, store good things before the frost.

But every season feels like intermission

and I stare south as if hope were one more

crime that I have yet to be punished for.

BIO: A. Z. Foreman is a linguist, poet and/or translator who has had a somewhat odd life. He is currently pursuing a doctorate in Near Eastern Languages at the Ohio State University. His work has been featured in the Threepenny Review, ANMLY, the Los Angeles Review and elsewhere including two people's tattoos but not yet the Starfleet Academy Quarterly or Tattoine Monthly. He wants to pet your dog.