Dinner Call – by Anders Villani
ISLAND | ONLINE ONLY
You’re playing Age of Empires.
Your settlement, still new, in its dawn, glows
at the bottom of the screen like a starving
Coonara’s embers. The unmapped rest is black. I’m here
to call you out of here. Our mother has
done agnolotti with smoked eggplant and pumpkin.
Medicine-bloated. Loquat in a bird bath. In your
underwear—always the spent elastic, the hole in each leg
where you pinch to flatten the fabric under jeans.
I could put a finger through a hole
right now. To the webbing. To thigh. Screw
my body into yours. Speak to you as you.
Would the device change? The poet’s call
to no one. Its truth and foolishness and oath.
We used to watch each other play games like this. Watcher
more ashen than controller. From the threshold
I watch an armoury pop like a cat’s claw from a pad you were squeezing—
forge sound-effects. More lit map blackens what’s veiled
or seems to. No one can cure you. Chanting it powers you.
Agniology: the study of ignorance. Screwed in, I could be the ecstasy
that lets you see your kid self blaze the toboggan run, feel that dawn
-dusk vehemence ribbon the hills with something
let’s not call answers. What’s unknowable
you can’t not know, can’t fail to know. I like to think I get it. How it’s floor
and ceiling. Build a hospital. Build a cathedral.
A gaol. Build the age’s grandest library
for the Goths to sack—every pixel. From those cinders
this hunger. You want matching tattoos.
Nespola trees. Black, with red roots. On the thigh
because we’re both looking at your thigh.
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Image: Parker Sturdivante - Unsplash
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