AUTOZYGOTIC CONFIGURATION
Elevator buttons piled up. Plucked from their sockets. Yellowed plastic.
The hum of storms in beige and overhead lights and workstations. Over the years they muffled the surges and splashed a few tones in the pauses to bring the mind to puzzles and building blocks. Nap time.
Massaging your mind with digitized digits. Silicon fingernails declare shocks to schema and it’s all plasticity. Rewiring those well-trod pathways towards new horizons.
Many go just to let go. Let a few moments sink to the bottom and get crushed by the pressure. Slicing off the scars with black glass from infernal Gaian veins.
Chthonic. Cthth cthth cthth cthth. Tongue taps like brass instruments onto dental dams.
It’s a mindset. You’re in a new room. The lighting has changed.
You’re standing and you’re everything. You are the nexus and the beads and there are so many of you. With open arms and open eyes the world is moisturizing and pliable. The clay pulses and throbs with life for you to nurture. Everything enters with virginal refreshment and life will last exactly as long as you want it to.
It’s a mindset. You’re in a new room. The lighting has changed.
You’re lying down and you’re nothing. You are the links and the holes between and that’s all there is. With closed hearts and closed mouths the pit is eternal and invincible. The bricks lie as still as the birth of it all. Decrescendo is limitless with maternal obsolescence and nothing will ever be the same.
The monitor is verdant and sprouting. The monitor is a newborn with grasping hands. The monitor reads:
i.
Sledgehammer shrine nestled in rust, one square mile flanked by eco-friendly Topheth.
Dissecting drives. Storms and late nights. Trips that could have been epilogues in better worlds.
Sinking ships with shimmering slits, fool's gold and barbed wire fences.
Belt loops grip wriggling rodents. Pockets full. Soot-soaked denim suffocation.
Gold crush blushes without bodies, burning dollar bills. Force feed families, stop teeth from rotting.
Phases of heat-borne purification, thermometers in boiling baptismal fonts. Providence prosperity.
See the menses of motherless myrmidons, sycophantic serotonin servitors.
Dwelling in gloaming, cats watching corners. æthernet cable garrotte making data out of you.
***
The monitor is achromatic and senescent. The monitor can’t seem to remember your face. The monitor reads:
ii.
Skull on skull action pressing so hard. O*r eyes are weeping salt, weeping blood, weeping vitae.
Noses running and POV POWs.
A seed that makes my guts die. The .exe dwells in tunnels wrapped around necks.
I think the tourniquet made h*r dissolve.
Wrapped in foul reeking meat but fuck if i don't l*ve the smell of a b*dy sweating for me.
Dashed against stone and let all these mechanisms out into a saccharine red sea.
Won't the saline be good to me?
From making this locus slimy with a lenten lymph node.
When o*r throats make no sounds it's the cl*sest w* have ever been to h*ly.
***
By Viv Chavez
Viv Chavez has written stories for Expat Press, SELFFUCK, and Surfaces. She can be found @weirdal_andalus