Grenadier

Posted on August 1, 2021 by Broede Carmody

I pour a blush of wine
into my housemate’s glass.
Orange tiles & succulents in jars.
Rolling through sulfur is hard
when you’re stuck in other muck.
There can be too much adrenaline
stim. As an example, what will we call
summer when it’s more than four months long?
Yesterday, I thought I saw my
dead friend at the depot: black Docs,
leggings, two ribbons of hair falling
from undercut. Our friends are counting on us.
I don’t mean a lonely medical droid. I’m talking
before Alderaan’s demise. I wonder if
there’s guilt in hyperspace. I already know
the answer: in-game & at that market a sonic
imploder detonates my mouth.

Posted in 102: GAME | Tagged

Impossible Borders

Posted on August 1, 2021 by Andreas Mertin

Instructions

Impossible Borders is a ludic response to the distorted everyday of COVID-19 lockdowns, where once familiar spaces were imbued with new meanings.

Drawing on a range of experiences and shifts of perception—like the hardening of hands due to constant washing, or how a softened gaze tessellates the leaves of a house plant—seven 14 word poems were composed and ‘distorted’ (from the Latin distorquere—‘to twist apart’) across a disc of seven segments, obscuring the original poems while inviting unconventional reading approaches.

We recommend using one of these reading patterns:

Option A                                                                                                             Option B

                              

You can read the downward poems in each segment (Option A), or you can read the poems by way of an inward spiral (Option B). After reading each poem in your selected pattern you can start at the top of the next segment and repeat the pattern to read the next poem.

You can start with either or neither, but whatever reading pattern you choose will require being constricted to the confines of the disc. External devices (abacuses, cards, die, dictionaries, grimoires, etc.) as well as internal stimulants (preconceptions, prejudices, apprehensions, etc.) are encouraged, but not required. Methodical application of these devices will yield consistent results. It is up to the player to determine if this is preferable.

Warning: reading patterns other than Option A (including the recommended Option B) may create ocular disconcertion.

Posted in 102: GAME | Tagged

What Animal Could You Beat in a Fight?

Posted on August 1, 2021 by Damen O'Brien

a Twitter Found Poem

I’m glad you asked.
It would have to be small. Maybe an insect. Not poisonous ones.
Would I be wearing body armour? Or some kind of stiffened leather?
Do I have the advantage of surprise or terrain?
Any animal which is low to the ground, if it is snowing,
or a kangaroo because they can’t go backwards.
Definitely a goat or a goose. Geese are not as tough as people think:
I’d slide under its wings and grab it by the neck.
I could probably take a bear if I had to, once the adrenalin kicked in,
15% survival chance. But not a Gorilla, Gorillas are a one punch K.O.
Yep. A whale or a shark. But only on dry land.
I won’t fight mythical creatures, though: griffins and armadillos and Big Foot.
You. You’re not an animal? Then myself. If someone cloned me.
In a fistfight, I couldn’t take a Puma, but I could beat a racoon.
I’m glad you asked.
I’m glad you asked.
Tactically, spiders and snakes are out, and I can’t fly, so not birds.
You can’t let a panda get in too close, it’s all about reach.
I’ve been thinking about this for some time.
It depends on the rules: I could beat most animals in chess.
Not vertebrates, even jellyfish, though. Jellyfish will swarm you.
I’m glad you asked.
Could I make an alliance with some of the animals against the rest?
Nothing smarter than a cat.
If I was a samurai, then easily killer bees.
Oh wait…no weapons? What about the animals? Do they have weapons
or are they declawed and defanged?
No point choosing wolves or big animals. They don’t exist anymore.
A cougar once you tire it out.
A human can kill anything.
We are the ultimate predators.
I reject the premise of the question.
I’m glad you asked.

Posted in 102: GAME | Tagged

A Field Guide to Triplines

Posted on August 1, 2021 by Angela Gardner

Before crystal and gold dolphin
wind down end of the day emotions wash so hard
overlooked lavishly by the blunt attention of mirrors.
Aeroplanes high time to relax the concept of failure
is hideous. Between ignoring and not hearing there is
a difference where human error constructs its unreliable
batteries. That we would eat each other shortcuts loss
of signal, as if the difference is the remote is on the blink
and the robot you are, that I am, follows us and trouble
-some diagnostic knobs direct us in circles. The dogs
are excited because we’ve found the switch to turn you on
and all it took was a remote salvaged from a plastic toy.
In my hand, a difficulty, a comfort you fall within
enough to shake the messages you leave.

Posted in 102: GAME | Tagged

a gordian knot

Posted on August 1, 2021 by Alice Bellette

i never was one for
patience and strategy

biting down on the bit,
an anxious habit

pop a blakfella
on the line up –
soft furnishings to dress
the set of your scene,
to brandish completed puzzle cubes –
kids upload videos
to YouTube, demonstrating
that one trick, still
give yourself a pat on the back

like a Magic Eye puzzle –
an optical illusion –
to look at me
there is just flat image,
to perceive the full picture
you have to change your
point of view

Always Was
Always Will Be

all to service your brand.

Posted in 102: GAME | Tagged

A Game of Life You Don’t Always Know You’re Playing

Posted on August 1, 2021 by Ion Corcos

A short history of songbirds: declivities, banging pans,
eyes scratched out of religious icons painted on cave walls.
In the marrow of debate, the preservation of power.
You pretend not to see: in stones, the disappearing trees,
the lobster flaying its disconsolate torso in a steel pot.
An ichthyologist detonates explosives to study fish.
No apologies, only a timetable outlining the dates
of all the season’s matches, and the arenas they will be played in.
Survivors of a shipwreck are paid out in instalments;
the ones who can prove in a document they are dying
can apply for a supplement: unrooted plants, honeybees,
yellow lichen. In a department store, on the entry level,
women’s attire; here you can consult a fashion expert,
ask about the meaning of life, entangle yourself in saying
the word ‘fossiliferous’. It is here that you throw dice,
sign a piece of paper that you are, in fact, rudimentary,
and insecure, and require a credit card to ensure your name
is not forgotten, or erased. At the back of the displays,
administration, where your application for eternal remembrance
is approved, sent to government departments, a catalogue
of businesses, and finally, to pharmaceutical corporations
and airline companies to ensure that you will resign yourself
to visiting amusement parks and circuses on a regular basis.
Nothing is insurmountable on this journey, as long as you abide
in the umbrella practice of the requirements of hammers.
The world is an oyster, they say, and you are a clam with no eyes.

Posted in 102: GAME | Tagged

A Compendium of Failed Relationships

Posted on August 1, 2021 by Jenny Hedley

Posted in 102: GAME | Tagged

Reverse Reverence

Posted on August 1, 2021 by Ray Cox

.
..
…
…..
……
……..
………..
Reverence ……………
Reverse and you and I ………………..
your______[radiant] compass
_________omission, only _____
____I glisten. And _____
________[glory]___distance_______
we_wander … _________________space
[luminous]_____glinting._____span
Stars_____connect[ing/ion/ed]
ever________and upwards.
To roam and_______, gliding
________was only _______
______in our [glory] and
and__________as if________could
into [transmutation]. We traverse
______dots and_______transform
Higher and [escalation] as______becomes
as we climb [ascension].
lighting our way
and radiance
Stars in their multitude
out the_______window.
little [colour] [contour] leaves waving
on the dash. Me with my
Me in my little pot jostling
and out, skyward and [surpassing].
and______as we thrum past
The rain-streaked roadside gleams
at least, not like this, not like [reverence].
Never thought I’d ever travel

Posted in 102: GAME | Tagged ,

First Game

Posted on August 1, 2021 by Carolyn Masel
Rayman II –
before you m’dear –
we got a taste who she

couldn’t even on a chair
without sideways
mysterious
on the floor
three at most
she moved him
around
big cloppy shoes
air where a neck

stepped him forward
through the water-fall
turned
turned and then
through the water-fall
turned
turned the water-fall
the water-fall

Rayman so
no quest
instead
delight
moment moment moment moment

Posted in 102: GAME | Tagged

LuLi

Posted on August 1, 2021 by Deirdre Camba

The name LuLi actually originated from the island’s constant state [of] flux:
“lulubog, lilitaw”, which translates to “sink, float”.
– Archipelago

Once, far from my city, there was an island, and then there wasn’t, and then there was an island. This morning, my house was in the city, and then the city lost it. From the bridge, I could see the edge of the river, and then I couldn’t, and every dog was barking outside, until they just weren’t. Between there and not, I was rowing a boat to the island that is and isn’t, looking for dolphins. But wild animals know better than to stay around the morning after a storm. All the time, water stretched around me. I remember thinking the sun is unbelievable and soon, this island will be. I dug an oar into water and hoped for sand, for mud, for the new edge of a new river. I passed the island because it wasn’t, and I passed my house. Every wild animal passed me: dolphins, and barking dogs, and one carabao after another. After that: unidentified clutter. Once, I had a future. Today, I have an oar and in my mind, an island. I don’t know the difference between high tide and low, only now and after. I keep wading for my house, far from the lost edge of a river that isn’t. In my mind, my city loses one house after another, which means I’m almost not alone, flung so far into the water that all the time, stretches around me. From my boat, there is an island, and I am close to it. Wading near the edge of the world, I am close to it.

Posted in 102: GAME | Tagged

The lost poem

Posted on August 1, 2021 by Dugald Williamson

It had a sense of presence,
of solidarity in light’s embrace,
despite the blind-folding, the winding drive,
the tuning-up of crowded Tehran streets
dissonant in cupped glass; then voices only,
interrogation, an art-form of power
where everything fits, as in paranoia;
but nothing was lost on you.
In what was planted or removed that night,
loyalty travelled in a few straight lines
on the crystalline wedlock of light
in the mosaics of dawn in Esfahan,
the only words a faithful man
could bring himself to write.

Posted in 102: GAME | Tagged

Inheritance

Posted on August 1, 2021 by Christian Ryan Ram Malli

Often, it’s April in my chest, a tremor caught
just before I can say: fuck you
for every little thing you couldn’t do, for the sound
of jars losing their porcelain history on the floor,
the air, charged with your breath
and my breathlessness.
Rage is your only lullaby, and eventually I learned
all of the words. I can’t touch a man without
vibrating, the constant yearning
to knuckle things out of order that you swore
was love. No sense of tomorrow.
Once, in a room with all the noise
of an ailing city, I felt my own heart,
something alive inside me,
threatening to abandon the body that treated
it so poorly. Deep in the vein
of nowhere, I like to think there is a flash
stunning enough to blind me. That I can reach
to find an arm, knowing I can trust what I can touch.
No longer April, and the monsoons
would have reclaimed everything;
every sun that vanished after you,
the gaps in my palms every night I tried
to reach for yours,
and all of your sad wind.
Even us and the equal parts we hate the world.

Posted in 102: GAME | Tagged

Jennifer Nguyen has a secret, very sexy fetish

Posted on August 1, 2021 by Jennifer Nguyen
Jennifer Nguyen moves backwards in order to go forward. She cries frequently in order to cry less. Her work has been ingested by people she will never meet but nevertheless hope they were nourished. If you catch her doing nothing, actually, she is very busy, doing nothing, which, in her experience is the greatest something. And, if you think that last sentence was nonsense, that’s because it’s all nonsense.

+

Jennifer Nguyen is currently hardly working on her next book of poems, titled, ‘Have you gotten a real job yet?’ to which she thought nothing is as real a job as writing poetry, except maybe, literally anything else. The only logical conclusion she has to the question then, is, nothing and everything is real.

+

Jennifer Nguyen is having her 444th existential crisis. If you know what the hell is going on in this reality please contact her at: youdaredmetoreadmegatronxreaderfanfic@soidid.com

+

Jennifer Nguyen didn’t want to make this all about her so instead she will make some of this about bread. Blueberry bagels. Sourdough with cream cheese and smoked salmon. Milk bread. Melon bread. Twin sausage buns. Melon bread (again). Garlic bread. Garlic bread with cream cheese.

… — once, someone made her actual garlic bread with actual garlic they actually peeled and diced in real life, like, right in front of her. Needless to say, the whole experience changed her and now her only god is bread.

+

Jennifer Nguyen is the author of countless drafts of poems based on dreams that likely no one will ever read, due to her lack of motivation to edit them. Some were so horrifying it made her smile. Others so full of unconditional love it made her sick with bliss.

+

Jennifer Nguyen believes you can become anyone and anything you want to be so long as you believe it enough. For example: Jennifer Nguyen believes you can become anyone and anything you want to be so long as you believe it enough.

+

Jennifer Nguyen has a secret, very sexy fetish that the professional bio will not only die out and become redundant but be replaced by something that makes your body react violently as soon as you read it, like a snort of laughter that ejects snot, or a long, chest filling howl to the moon.

+

Jennifer Nguyen recently sold her second collection of poems in a hot two-way auction where soju was guzzled down recklessly, and lips were pressed on lips. There, she said to her love, they don’t know her just because they’ve read her work. Only her most unpublishable drafts have that privilege.

+

Jennifer Nguyen is trying to (for the first time) achieve 100% true completion in Stardew Valley, on what is now her fourth or fifth save file. Please do not engage with her unless it is to bring her snacks (bread), where she will thank you by giving you a short tour of her farm and asking you: ‘It’s nice, right?’.

+

Jennifer Nguyen is really, really sick of writing out her name like this, so from now on will go by a small image of bread. Not the bread emoji but one of those cute pastel pixel breads you put as your cursor for your Myspace page.

+

The artist formerly known as Jennifer Nguyen asks that you do not refer to The artist formerly known as Jennifer Nguyen as ‘The artist formerly known as Jennifer Nguyen’.

+

[Pixel Image of Bread] recognises the opaque nonsense of everything you’ve just read and does not apologise for wasting time, as, we have all the time in the world. [Pixel Image of Bread] promises if you peel back the layers you will find a fleshy white banana that will allow you to transcend the oppressiveness of time and space, but only when eaten through the heart and not the mouth. If the nonsense is still opaque then it was not the right time and it might be someday but for now, it was fun and for [Pixel Image of Bread], it is all that really matters.
Posted in 102: GAME | Tagged

Switching Stages

Posted on August 1, 2021 by Joseph Jude

I thank you for this scene
Of your mother in a lounge room,

Your father in a garden and your brother
Who refuses to share his mind

But I should explain, at least, that your
Mother, from your story, has not flopped

Into a chair, in a room in your house
But in mine; and your father, see,

I have him here, looking out
Across a lawn, in our backyard.

Well, he does not notice your brother,
Your father, but we have this link,

Your brother and I, for he has
Known me, all of his life.

Now I ask, if my story is taking place
In your home — if you have marbled

My mother, in rooms which I have
Never seen before;

And so, is my father, in your patio
Sending out his cigarette-smoke-signals

And my brother, if you have him
Do you have that link, for he has known you

all of
your life.

I ask, if in these reborn scenes,

If disbelief
is what we share?

I have you next
to your mother,

In a haze, a wool of grief.

Posted in 102: GAME | Tagged

First Reading

Posted on August 1, 2021 by Andy Kissane

We begin rehearsals in a freezing warehouse
that was once a factory reverberating with the hum
and clanking of shuttle looms and the numbing
routine of days that chilled down into the soul,
that accumulated a tally of impoverished hours
spent tending a thread, a line of cotton, a line
of wool, all spooling and unspooling without end.
How privileged I am to be working at what I love,
to be collaborating with four men and five women
on a project that is destined for applause. I am
not one for speeches and group improvisations.
I will not impose some predetermined method
on the material. Instead, we sit around the table
and read the play. The lilt, grain and timbre
of their voices fills the room. There is no showing off,
no competition, simply the pleasure of imagining it
all unfold, as if a parachute is spread between us
ready to catch whatever shines and bounce it past our faces
while we watch it wobble, ricochet and spin. There is
not much to do but immerse myself in the listening.
And when Thao leaves her daughter, Mai, to go south
during the war, I suddenly see my father standing
next to my mother on the steps of the Saigon Opera House,
I see him buying a lottery ticket from a man with an open
suitcase and sitting down at a wedding feast with his friends—
all these young men smiling over bowls of rice. I must admit
that I’m hoping to find my father, or the ghost of my father,
that I long to be lifted up and swung through the air again,
to be wrapped up in his arms, to feel his cheek pressing
against mine, not the way he used to greet me, but now,
in this warehouse, in the pulse of this reading, to have
and hold more than the day when we last saw him,
when along with his ARVN comrades he shed
his uniform and abandoned his army boots,
leaving them unlaced and empty on a once frantic street.

Posted in 102: GAME | Tagged

Consequences at Fibonacci Cemetery

Posted on August 1, 2021 by Ian Reid

Take
your
future
for a stroll
along tombstone lane.
Droll: epitaphs alone survive.

As
you
stand on
a tilted
slab, whoosh! — out spins a
speedy bird from the hollow grave.

On
the
shadow
side, recessed,
there’s a small door with
a keyhole, but the key is lost.

Posted in 102: GAME | Tagged

ludic (II)

Posted on August 1, 2021 by Stu Hatton

The game seemed a hustling object, a whatever.

Who was adjudicating? Perhaps the field.

The whole mob performance, pleading the point. Our heads were just to sit there
content.

A carnage never free from chance. Money’s short-lived hum, a pretence.

The realm of stakes we didn’t want. Cameras, floodlights convince. The fray ever
emptyhanded.

Posted in 102: GAME | Tagged

Firm Ice: Three Fragments of Sophokles

Posted on August 1, 2021 by Phillip Dupesovski

Translator’s Note

You are the translator.

Pages: 1 2 3 4
Posted in 102: GAME | Tagged

__LOCKDOWN__ Protocol

Posted on August 1, 2021 by Tim Busuttil

Posted in 102: GAME | Tagged

Hades

Posted on August 1, 2021 by Jonno Révanche

In time we will escape the citadel.
In time comes the white outline set of an
overlay from the bottom up,
in time drapery over the doorway
firing, squeezing the possibility
of love into pulp,
the view to certain boons becoming clear;
the bluff will pass.
The young prince chooses violence,
surveys his kingdom
all at once
and chooses to instigate
wine and former surrogacy.
The young prince finds that home
communicates the site of the wound,
(in comedic, ever-spiralling
continuity.)
There is the pageboy again
greeting you as you emerge.
There is the blowout as you challenge
familial ends.
The young prince resists the prophecies both of Freud and
Persephone, Antigone, rejecting frauds – death to any other
mother.
I too choose to run, sometimes with ease, jealousy, or availability,
sometimes not; away,
veering from discomfort, of “knowing”, that once separate energy is unspooling,
it collects its own conscience,
though still not ergonomic. To turn and face the gates of Tartarus, again,
endlessly, maybe? or Louise Bourgeois saying “I have been
to hell and back, and let me tell you,
it was wonderful” and Caroline Polachek,
“this is gonna be torture
before it’s sublime,”
or the culmination of a year, the growth
that comes from tears, and a movement
taking place in the mid-section,
the spilling of blood as
the Gorgon decides its uses,
or was this planned?
How tragic, to just
be a spinning top.
A father pins you down by force,
the other pins you down with grace.
or Oprah saying “the vultures are waiting to
pick your bones,” or never catching a glimpse
of something inside.

Posted in 102: GAME | Tagged

Gamespace

Posted on August 1, 2021 by Scott-Patrick Mitchell

1.

You, again. Waiting for Paradise, Godot, the new iOS. Marker in the flow. Stream yourself into this. A poem enters, plump with gamespace. Because what is a line if not trajectory. You are moving toward something. If the poem had lashes, it would bat them. Diamond pitch of voice. Ball as round as mouth inviting the fourth vowel of surprise. The poem leans in, wants you to give breath to the static. What do you do?

To read the poem, go to 4. To not read the poem, go to 8.

2.

You are being reconfigured. Here, papyrus: choose an avatar. Rehearse life. Reality is not yet real.i An absolute atopia. Local area network of digital space. Pixel persona. Gamespace is a metaphor for a stacked map: every deed sold off. Your body is a capital I, third vowel of seeing. Morph into Kafkaesque. Your face is changing. Do you recognise yourself anymore?

If you do, go to 6. If you don’t, go to 9.

3.ii

Subroutine: you can only reach here via die roll. Or endnote. Turn story into navigation. Database as description. Topology of wireless infrastructure. Each threshold is clearly marked. Controller of joy, stick. An a log. The difference between temporalized space and how the digital spatializes time are the tender buttons. A form of food: for the finger there are points, tipping horizon. Here, Gertrude is a hologram. You are too: you have no choice in this matter.

Go to 2.

4.

The poem reads you instead. Reads you: to filth; your rites; as if it wrote you. Lenin in the streets / Dostoyevsky in the sheets.iii An algorithm of sequenced archives: library as an operating system, dragging. Atomic, the elements construct gamespace. The poem samples you, records an imprint. It is there, just up above your eyes. You are being colonised. Reduce stamina by millennia. Ask yourself: is the poem spam, or am I?

If the poem is spam, go to 7. If you are spam, go to 2.

5.

Chance is something we take. There is no prescription for luck. Only superstition. Three gold coins. Knock on wood. A pinch of salt. Looking back to find it there. Windfall. Wind theft. Seizing opportunity as it withers your grip. Pasteur’s prepared mind. The caution. The optimism. The faith of four leaves and greener pastures. Grab die: roll for it.

If you roll an even number, go to either 8. If you roll an odd number, go to 3.

6.

Your data is dogecoin. Which is to say: you are increasing in value with every click. The further you unravel into digital space, the more of you they can mine. They: substitute corporate name here. Incorporate yourself into stream. Multiply identity. Clone for the company. Reminder: a soul only has value to you. And The Devil. Unless the latter is slain by Montero. Take a poll.

To go to 8, go to 8. To go to 3, first go to 5.

7.

Hello, this is The United Nations Public Information Office. Beloved, we have found a resolution solution regarding your compensation payment. You can make millions from this wealth loophole. Your mailbox cannot be validated. You have been mentioned in this document. Receive our late client’s funds directly into your bank account. Please provide your name, address, rising moon sign and favourite scene from any movie released in 1994 via the link below.

To link below, go to 10. If this message seems dangerous, go to 5.

8.

Finality is a form. But it doesn’t have to be. Check boxes to continue. We write to move on: create gamespace beyond flesh. How ink is a code that rewrites us. Everything not saved will be lost.iv Back up. To quit has origins in quiet, stillness, setting free. A body may collapse, but a game lives on. Until the end of the internet.

To live on, go to 1. To reach The End of The Internet, go to 11.

i From a quote by Theodor Adorno. The full quote reads: The unreality of games gives notice that reality is not yet real. Unconsciously they rehearse the right life. While you meditate on this, gain one stamina point. Return to Gamespace via 7.

ii This section remixes McKenzie Wark’s Gamer Theory (2007, Harvard University Press). The italicised lines are direct quotes from pages 81 and 83 respectively. It’s a really cool book. Please return to Gamespace via 1.

iii From the song Read U Wrote U by The Cast of RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars Season 2 (2016). The line you just read was written by Katya Zamolodchikova. She’s an icon. Please return to Gamespace via 3.

iv This is the message that appears on the Nintendo quit screen. Now… you have the opportunity to engage in a finite feedback loop. It would be infinite if you were infinite too. But you aren’t. Not yet. Please return to Gamespace via 8. We will see you again soon.

Posted in 102: GAME | Tagged

Griefing

Posted on August 1, 2021 by Rebecca Jessen

there’s this mode of gaming called griefing / to deliberately disrupt
the narrative / here we disrupt our own narratives / here you are not my little brother
but some outsized version of yourself / some other you who had a chance
here in this edgeless map you are an embodiment / a physical self who never arrived
you collect me in your yellow Ferrari / we go shopping for high-end threads
and everything fits / I exist in the body I imagine / we take your chopper
to your nightclub / the smoke machine obscures our forms / we dance as if
our bodies could be left / I cycle through new moves to find out who I am
and we can’t stop laughing / you get blackout drunk and briefly shimmer
off screen / there’s a way to increase the intensity / to move so perfectly
to the beat / you forget that other body / in cinematic mode I can see us fully
two actualised versions of ourselves / off-screen our bodies are not limitless
we are not yet who we are / I ask what grief our virtual selves shed / to exist in this

Posted in 102: GAME | Tagged

natural sciences trivia

Posted on August 1, 2021 by Dženana Vucic

Qs.

  1. at what rate is the moon leaving us, in centimetres per year? for an extra point: at what rate do poets reduce the moon to the page per year? are these figures related?
  2. where do whales go?
  3. true or false: women who cut themselves in high school are twice as likely to take cuttings of green life to fill their nests?
  4. who killed the last Great Auk?
  5. if the speed of light is 299 972 458 m/s and the universe is expanding in all directions at 72 km/s per megaparsec, how long will it take for all the light in the world to pass through you?
  6. what is the weight of an adult human heart?
  7. rounding to the nearest thousand, how many atoms have you lost in handshakes and kisses with strangers? how many have you given away?
  8. what, according to Li-Young Lee, is the oldest sound? what is the oldest sound according to your mother?
  9. what is the scientific name for the study of sighs? bonus points for giving its three alternative spellings.
  10. what have you been left with?

As.

  1. estimates suggests she withdraws 3.8 centimetres for every year we spend as sunflowers, and pulls away more quickly in response to our excesses—the breaking apart of supercontinents, melting glaciers and large-scale wailing. poets are unable to leave the moon alone; every poem contains the moon and she is indifferent.
  2. the same place a flame goes when extinguished; the same place Oumuamua went after seeing what we’d done; the same place a single new sock disappears after the wash; the same place eyelashes go once they’ve been wished on.
  3. experience tells us: yes.
  4. three men and their fear of witchcraft, and by extension: women, the sea, healing and the loneliness of mothers.
  5. a trick question; you are the light.
  6. 200 litres salty tears, 560 grams violence (self-inflicted), 682 instances of forgetting, 850 cups tea (various), 206 birthday cards, 83 moments of inappropriate laughter, 77 kilograms unclassified secrets.
  7. also a trick question; these atoms were never yours to lose, neither yours to give away. on a subatomic level you never end and i never begin and the space inside molecules of air, water, carbon, is the space inside us.
  8. water; but your mother knows it to be blood and tears and a soft wet squelch.
  9. exhalation; exaltation; existentialism [archaic].
  10. lichtenberg figures and the ability to shock.
Posted in 102: GAME | Tagged

Heart Engine

Posted on August 1, 2021 by Pierce Wilcox

an imaginary game for 4 players

You are the pilots of four great and terrible robots you use to fight monsters.
They are sometimes the parts of an ever greater and more terrible robot,
it’s not for you to understand.

The battle you’ve trained for is here.
Choose one of the following memories:
your first loss / your latest betrayal / your childhood shame
Share it in turn. Feed it to the engine.

If someone else picks the same one as you,
you trust them more. You don’t know why.
You and that person join your robots together. It’s hard to get them to come apart, after.
Share how it feels to separate from the one person who gets it.
If you did not join your robots,
share how it feels to see people with wounds that aren’t yours.

You return victorious. Nobody will ever know your other two memories. They are gone. You
don’t even remember what they felt like.
Try to make friends.
You can’t talk about the parts that are gone.
If you think about them, you take 1 damage.
You don’t have a health bar, but you know it’s better not to hurt.
Stop this from happening. Do anything you can.

The battle comes again. Each player takes a turn suggesting a new set of three.
Repeat this process until you run out of pains to burn.

The battle comes for the last time.
Choose one:
your anger at your teammates / your anger at yourself
Don’t share it. Feed it to the engine.

This battle is worse.
If someone else picks the same one as you,
you trust them more. It’s difficult, though, not to resent them.
You join your robots together. Only one of you can pilot.
Describe how you choose.

You return victorious. You sit in the ready room.
Describe the fight to each other so you don’t have to share what you chose.
For example, you could talk about your lasers and their teeth.
Talk about your lasers for as long as you can.
As soon as you run out of things to say about your lasers, share what you chose.
Don’t be subtle.
You’re not a coward. You’re a pilot.

If everyone picked the same thing, you stay together.
Describe how you sleep that night.
If three people picked one thing and one person picked the other,
describe how you exile the other to the monsters outside.
If two people picked one thing and two people picked the other,
one group turns traitor.
Describe how you choose.
Describe what it is like to join the monsters.

In the ranks of the monsters, you can remember everything you fed to the engine.
Is that better?

Posted in 102: GAME | Tagged