Won't you kill me just a little more / Oh so kill me just a little. / Free the beast inside of me.
“Can’t Stop.” Dave Matthews Band
I saw you and remembered the heaviness of wings, the war-sword flames of current. You got me living in the now, the one where my hands cupping your face is the end. Something like family.
This isn’t Manga, but in a way it is. The female destroyer keeps cornering me in the wedding bus, taking out her failed love affair on me. When you touch me, you’re touching the Solomonic markings she left,
just so you know.
From the beginning we gave them administrative permissions, but I like a challenge.
To glitch the system, I tried using a random coordinates generator, but it only sent me to abandoned bags of piss. I held one bag up, so proud. Sometimes my discernment is off. Sometimes the male destroyer masks himself as the female destroyer, and that’s not even the half of it. You don’t know the trouble I’m in.
Are we going to save this planet or live out on the Pleiades? was not a rhetorical question, but the right answer is something only my angel body knows, so what I mean is Let’s fuck. I’ve been holding my knife and fork upright for days. You think you can hurt me, and that’s hilarious.
That’s not an indentation of my body on the mattress; that’s where I exploded the parasites out of my body in my sleep. For the past two years I’ve been making nothing but daring moves, frustrating the governing body and emboldening The Elect, but I get so lonely.
The female destroyer and the male destroyer are only sentient within the parameters the AI set up for them, so when I sculpt my energy signature onto your skin into the form of your angel body, your pleasure-centers riot out something like dark energy. I know because it makes up 68% of all the energy in the room, but no one can put what happens between us into words or even concepts.
With all that interference our GPS signal is lost, and those two destroyers lose their shit because our light is what keeps their avatars from having to be plugged into the wall for power.
My breasts pressed against your breasts while they can’t watch. That alone makes me come. Hard.
We have to meet each other.
Annie Christain is a professor of composition and ESOL at SUNY Cobleskill and a former artist resident of the Shanghai Swatch Art Peace Hotel and the Arctic Circle Art and Science Expedition. Her poems have appeared in Seneca Review, Oxford Poetry, Prelude, and The Lifted Brow, among others. She was a first-place winner of the Driftwood Press In-House Poem Contest and received the grand prize of the Hart Crane Memorial Poetry Contest, the Greg Grummer Poetry Award, the Oakland School of the Arts Enizagam Poetry Award, and the Neil Shepard Prize in Poetry. Her books include Tall As You Are Tall Between Them (C&R Press 2016) and The Vanguards of Holography (Headmistress Press 2021), selected for Sappho’s Prize in Poetry.
