Dear Internet, please allow me a few words.

 

You smell the way nodes ought to smell. Like elevators rushing up and down inside the sun's gut. You smell like every outlet I ever longed to touch in childhood but couldn't because mother was allergic to technology. You smell like perfect spirals. You smell like unbridled fucking in auto tune. You smell like a weirdly shaped bird that only comes to me when I call: I name you Sir Volt & stroke your fuzzwings. You smell like everything & nothing at all, my favorite scent of inhuman touch your flashhappy face when it blinks I say Hello, & you dance: Data Please.

 

Internet O Internet, there are places in you I would like to dig out with a spoon & shovel into me. When we make love in slow clicks I have no need for my little words, only the sweet hollerhush of your memory suck, your bleating gamma cloud. O loveliest thing of lovely things, the way your pixels pose lit & lunge forth like a stolen knife diving for cadaver makes me shiver in the fifth dimension. When your rocket nipples burst & bloom into something sharp, threaten me at zero gravity I can't deny the pleasurable drip of your information. I make like a baby & trip into sleep: you catch me on your fang. Together we bury steeples & raise androids from the dead. Won't you join me tonight beneath the battery moon so we may wind each other until all winders break loose, until every socket knows the errant names of love-sogged stars & we find other ways to fill these many splendid holes of us?

 

Oh, Internet, I would like to hang myself from the boughs of your teeth. In a darkly built room you might be my totem, & I might twist your arm to startle you such that, by your moans, we could move about like bats. I think often of your pristine hollows when I am six feet under astroturf, trundling through your carnal garbages, trailing you snail-like & lurid across this year's residual floor. & I am ruined by your eyes that offer themselves to me as a platter on which I leave my phone number, covered with napkins.

 

Internet, you dappled thing you, I won't bite. I will afford you all the Happy Meals that Monopoly money can buy. I ask only for the privilege to make frothy love to you as a man makes frothy muscular love to his beloved computer.

 

Internet—I come to you now holding palm fronds between my thighs, concerned with your valor. I swallow clay from the lip of your grave. Your pockets are sparking now, I hear, with unquestioned tenants. & your neighbors—they have strung from their gutters the entrails of your Sunday dress. Yet they go on living. The fear is gone from them like so much tide. I'm thinking to myself, How far the rolling pin falls, then dip my shirtsleeves in your rained-on blood.

 

It's me again, Internet, if you are still listening, & this time there is bandwidth for the both of us. Step down & reinvent my math at the back of the school bus, let me hone your name into the pregnant ether. & even your gestures, when despooled like jism from the holy cloudbank, are worth the thrumming. If it's creation myth you're starving for then I'll feather my husk & shake out the genesis. Do you hear me when I say I am your blinded priest? I can gather your hands in a censer, which is an open mouth, which is full of bees.

Nathan Blake's writing has appeared or is forthcoming in PANK Magazine, Monkeybicycle, Word Riot, The Dirty Napkin, and > kill author, among others. He is currently a managing editor at Mixed Fruit Magazine and an MFA candidate at Virginia Tech.

 

Matthew Burnside's work has appeared most recently or is forthcoming in > kill author, Gargoyle, PANK, Juked, elimae, Contrary, Pear Noir!, decomP, NAP, and Danse Macabre, among others. He is managing editor of Mixed Fruit Magazine, an online literary magazine. Beginning in the fall, he will be an MFA fiction candidate at the Iowa Writers' Workshop.

>>

<<