1 poem & 1 video
RECON THEORY: HACKING EMILY D’S CIRCUMFERENCE
I’m sorry, I made a mistake. I meant horror. I said terror
Sorry, I made a mistake. I said terror. I meant error.
I’m sorry I said error, I meant theory, I meant pleasure. I am a late settler
on U.S. terrain, nearing Algonkian, Nonotuck land.
I find myself in an action/adventure scene—with a helmet, hazard gear, and supplementary
air—approaching
the bunker
of American interiority, a pricey
hermitage—accompanied by Bobby Day, the Bobolink drone. A radio geek, he breathes another
medium, teaches me the bop
through some rad headphones. I guess you could say we talk.
I say into my com: Hey Bobby, what’s the mission? Where do I start?
Bobby Day whispers: Hack the merle amerique,
the bird-come-down-the-walk, tweedle-lee-dad-dee of Emily D’s keep.
I turn on my bird display. I go: tweet, tweet.
Bobby Day sings: Go-bird-go.
Her forcefield’s a sizzling business, but cheery from afar. Now, bop-bop-bop onto the street.
I bop onto the perimeter
of the flashing circumference, scaling its kinks. I wear its terror font, its error font, its rockin’
robin font, a violation. My head blazes orange. I begin to crawl in shock.
Bobby Day says: Go-bird! Walk!
Then, I see her: Emily D with her endless bots and spy cams. Emily D with her nanotweaks and
tender-ware, her sender-worms, and gardens. Her emissions! Her royal arms! Emily D, 17,
buttoned-up and still, frozen in a spell! Hair parted in the center, glowing neon yellow! Perilous.
Emily D squared off, shielded like Fort Knox!
I see a neon-wet worm
emerge from the silt of her part. It slinks out to the verge where I stand.
Eat it, says Bobby Day,
and I eat the fellow raw. Bobby Day does
a high-resolution scan
of my gut morphology as the worm passes through, testing the bristles and ventral nerves, to get a
flavor of its lethal,
data-rich hue. My gut seizes up like graffiti! Bobby, I’m gonna spew!
Bobby Days says: Go-bird-go, vomit into the dew. Careful, now. She’s watching! Make like
you’re the Orient at Dawn coughing up the Sun.
Bop-Bop-a-Lu-Ow! Oh, Kat-man-du!
Her circumference crunches in, expands, out-bops me. I puke up a mischance,
unravelling my invasive,
alien scaffolding
onto the private, domestic sphere. I catch my toe in the skew. A jouissance
of flail and slant and sick.
Beep-beep-beep
Alarms go off at my awkward dance! Emily D’s
bots emit a chemical slew! Oh, Bobby I’m tripping, and running out of air!
Bobby Day sings: Go bird go. Go Switcheroo. Play the frightened innocent,
velvet sweet but scared.
Tweedle deedle dee, Tweedle deedle dum.
Maybe she’ll feel bad, and offer you a crumb,
to settle your insides, then you can hop on home.
Hop. Hop. Hop. Away. Plashless.
Mission done.
Vidhu Aggarwal’s poetry and multimedia practices engage with world-building, science fiction, and graphic media. Her poetry book, The Trouble with Humpadori (2016), imagines a cosmic mythological space for marginalized transnational subjects. Avatara, a chapbook from Portable @Yo-Yo Labs Press, is situated in a post-apocalyptic gaming world where A.I.s play at being gods. She has published in the Poetry, Boston Review, Black Warrior Review, Aster(ix) Journal, and Leonardo, among other journals. In her latest poetry book Daughter Isotope (OS 2021), she engages in a “cloud poetics,” as a way of thinking about personal, collective, and digital archives as a collaborative process with comic artists, dancers, and video artists. A Djerassi resident and Kundiman fellow, she teaches at Rollins College.