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.

Image: Parker Sturdivante - Unsplash


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Anders Villani

Anders Villani is the author of two poetry collections, Aril Wire (Five Islands Press, 2018) and Totality (Recent Work Press, 2022). He is the assistant poetry editor of Australian Book Review.

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