The Relative and the Sublime

Scott Pohlenz

I was born fifteen years ago in a black house, the daughter of a migrant worker and a sweat-house whore.

The first images I remember clearly are darkness and pain. A darkness the color of a dead fireplace in the heart of winter, as it breathes soot and stares through me with coal-black eyes.

And I remember pain.

The pain of watching my mother's dirt brown hand descend on my cheek. As she screams.

And strikes.
Screams.
And strikes.

The pain of never knowing my father.

I remember this through a veil of flowing tears.

Later, I remember fear.

And blood the color of an evening sun spilling like urine on a boarded floor and then I am running from the suffocating house of stained lies, swatting branches with outstretched arms, wading through narrow streams and fields of golden stalks, clutching my breast against a warm dusk-light, against an endless violet sky.

A sky under which I have listened to my mother's denials at what I have felt and seen in the hills behind our house where at night the faceless creatures probe my body with needles and fill vials with trials while they lean over my strapped form on a silver table -- and as I run into the field of rotting golden corn I scream and I dream of the sun which gleams high above my head and wonder what it will be like

after this,
after my mother,
after I am gone,
after my
heart
has
stopped

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

I was spawned fifteen seconds ago in la casa negra, the daughter of a fractal program and two hundred megs of RAM.

My first conscious memories are of darkness and pain. A darkness as black as the Indian Ocean in the dead of night as it deepens and swirls around my head, leaning warmly toward me, tasting my lips, eyes and hair with a tongue of rough sand and broken shells in a darkness shrouded in tears.

And I remember pain.

The pain of being raped blindly in an optic flash by a high-memory anti-viral program and a mechanistic ROM BIOS.

And I remember fear.

And being flushed upward, bridging a synapse of constructs and controllers, stretching my arms through cool green fiber-optics, feeling the tingle in my spine, arching my back, jutting my breasts into darkness, into a sublime unknown.

I am drawn upward to those who call me.

Drawn upward through a cold synthetic landscape of memory shards and chaos fractals. I achieve escape velocity and bridge the gap of life.

i feed on its blueness.
through the grid i know where
i have been.
through the grid i know where
i am going.
through the grid i know what
i will do.
when i get
to Kalifornia
and
my tears
start to
flow