"Command Central" by David R. Flores
by Alan Elyshevitz
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St. Audrey hosts a trade show whose electromagnetic cordons
keep us attentive and untroubled by dreck. She conscripts an armada of memes that float from eye to eye, preventing self-reflection. St. Audrey bears the wattage of East Anglia through classical wires connecting homes to commercial output. She demonstrates how a winch of consumption may hoist us to prosperity. St. Audrey shows us the cat in a window framed by liquidity and lace. She walks the dog at a virtual Ely where pets disappear through a digital funnel. St. Audrey is happy. She twerks and steals our numbers of value, then hands a percentage to private rocketry. A throwback to public charm, St. Audrey celebrates packaging. She loves, truly loves the wet smell of cardboard shipped with the overrepresentation of geese in paintings by middlemen. At her workspace in an ionized abbey, she wallpapers hidden fees and our temporal mistakes. St. Audrey promises lemonade as the outcome of all our botching, so long as we agree to cosign antonyms. Trusting her, we will not founder in systemwide crash. A black ice skid will come to rest in synthetic fluff in which we may sleep comfortably. |
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Alan Elyshevitz (he/him) is the author of a collection of stories, The Widows and Orphans Fund (SFA Press), as well as a full-length poetry collection, Generous Peril (Cyberwit), and four poetry chapbooks. He is the winner of the James Hearst Poetry Prize from North American Review and a two-time recipient of a fellowship from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. www.aelyshevitz.ink
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