I think about the game I paused
my avatar guided by a map waypoint for
a side quest
I’m supposed to kill a local warlord
to stop his reign of terror
my reward, increased experience points
a new gun

The strokes quickened—Frantic now.
Details skimmed. Splotches of red.
The dicing was raw. Tap tap tap—
That’s how the skin was pierced.
That’s why the strokes
refused to dry.

we drop into one of the void spaces / so common in these games / only to land in the bottomless dark / in a place / both within and outside the game / where true life / twinkles out of reach / resembling merry moons / orbiting an absent planet / and the only way out is dying

I used to crouch, run electricity through my body too,
so, no one could reach the purple parts
of my visibly green skin. Ask anyone who tried
to love me before I turned twenty-five.

i say
i am waiting

for my uncles to finish paintballing
in the adventure park out back

they are just over there
my many uncles
their many guns

Your absence is a precinct.
I question it daily.
It offers no statements,
Only glass, fogged.
A radiator hums low socialism.

Do you alone recall folding through houses
like hands on a clock,

how your bones shrank into the space
between tatami and floor?

The wife wets her hands with daikon,
waits for the day you unlearn thank you.

Memory wouldn’t work anymore:
too much war, or school, or new names

Taking up space where our laughter
used to hide-and-seek each other.

And the lighthouse? It remains
beside the ruins of the old house

And then we’re off to the races, and it’s been a long tour in America, year after year of learning to read between the lines of her well-sold dreams — shopping malls! Highways! Cop shows! Liberty and justice for all! — and yet, here suddenly in the eleventh hour some things are revealed anew — PIRANHA PLANT! MUSHROOM! BANANA PEEL! BOO!

When I tell you I cried, I mean
that solanums are the largest genus
in the family Solanacae, the nightshades,
flowering plants both beautiful and dangerous,
as we learn many things are—I am reminded, here,
of the scrawling of a long-gone child,
asking if what is dangerous is evil.

“I tried to uninstall consciousness,” Jim muttered, his eyes flat—rendered without specular mapping, glassy from frame-rate decay. “Didn’t take.” He sounded like someone who had run too many diagnostics on his own mind and found the root directory encrypted by something older than memory.