They’ve taken the temperature of our city and rubbed its feverish veins. Sweat starts to rise from the open sidewalks. Blinds drawn, screens opened, faces lit from below. Our thoughts begin to throb. Soon the waxing and waning of clothes. You have learned how to process noise, how to read it, the feeling one should take from certain words, like machine-gun or Glendale. The kind of noise that endures— the flashlights that refuse to fall from the sky, the millions of radio waves washing through your body, carrying need, carrying the voices of a discount television jingle so far from its origin. So much loose change has rattled down the glaciers of your brain. The Hot 100 from last decade, the colors of the old revolutions. Top five sex positions for dealing with existential crises. Any algorithm can take you to that which you were not searching for. How to dissolve— like a country does or like salt on a tongue. And then to touch the other’s wet mouth, where the nerves fire faster than a bloodless coup. No one outside. Get on your knees. You or me or both of us. Though I’m not doing my job. Though I just came to report that it is raining.
Grace Li is a Californian writer and currently studying in the MFA program in poetry at San Diego State University. Her poems can be found in Tupelo Quarterly, North American Review, and Los Angeles Review.
Featured Artwork: Surf's Up Jay Armstrong is a writer, musician, visual artist and editor of ANON Magazine living in Austin, Texas. “All graphics are analog-based, circuit-bent, for the initial purpose of projecting live.”