Spring 2007 Issue

"Silverette--New Wage Fascist Date Routine" by Brett Celinski

Suburban girls hold lust intact

Like robots, boy thing is to react

When the suburbs outside are a black melted sea

Leviathans of light caress the streets

When brothers and sisters draw blood from elites

Ms. Silverette is searching for me

I’m that dolphin who sends out sonar

And gets nothing back

But watery white noise

Which Silverette (haunts)

So you begin building beautiful parts

In your head

And pretentious devices

That Silverette wants

-the date-

I shot a heartlazer

(Into the murky cold suburbia)

It sped ruthlessly away

Like graffiti on a monorail- it’s a massive pink storm of metal hands

And red-eyed ghosts with jewelry guitars

And clove cigarettes and boyhood scars

My random hand

Slices and destroys and remakes

My chest is the bureau holding clandestine files

I reach in and do paperwork; my hand’s the getaway car,

Speeding through bloody rain and ribcage highways for miles

A heartlazer is what you shoot when you want to be malevolent

To make the dry corners you can’t stand irrelevant

You want that heartlazer to bounce off rain-soaked car metal

Sink into the concrete, electric wet

Do an underground dance to unsettle

Empower and recharge Ms. Silverette

You want her to savor and make solute of the lyric

Really the whole thing is all too vampiric.

The signal reached her, she grabs it with fingernails

And puts it in her pocket; I can hear her smirk

Yeah, heartlazers work, cause they’re bright in this murk

And so do all devices inside my tongue

I like to call it “the department berserk”

I fired sick lines

Tongue cannonades

Neurotica napalms

Seduction brigade

She hears my metallic tempo

To that her hips swayed

Time for the date

The seduction brigade

I goose-stepped downtown on a rainbow

And I won’t tell her any weird thing, I know

I see my friends: Chant the mathematic chant

To get them off my back, yeah that’s that

Light cigarette for Ms. Silverette

These waters are the haunt of H.M.S. Silverette

She laid by the streetlight, thin and demure

She walked arrogant, like a ghost sat on her shoulder

She was undone, careless clothes in some mess

Satin and jeans, cigarettes on her dress

I laughed and shouted bladelike commands

I spat out ideas from my random hand

I scattered it all to a starry old sand

“The heartlazer is your future assassin”

But she still shimmered and danced, and whirred

I waited what would come of it, vision blurred

She saw all my lasers, she spoke low in ice

She spoke matriarch, high priestess, all venomous nice

She said:

“I wanna wire your chest

Push machines in your breast

So I can carry your packaged heart”

She confessed

I said “girl, you’re no surgeon” Cause I thought I was blessed

But then, but then she caressed-

And I woke up synthetic, metallic, possessed.

I woke up distressed

Stolen and misplaced

Rewired and defaced

Like an amplifier dissected

My lasers erased

On the monorail home I smoked to myself

And wondered how that bitch decanted my health

I looked back inside of my ribs for the answer

Realized she was a thief and a sex necromancer

My heartlazers are gone

My hands are abused

Because in my bureau chest I just was robbed of a fuse

For the Silverette machine

I forget how to use

And I just play the heartlazer fascist love blues

Because suburban Silverettes hold lust intact

And like robots, boy thing is to powerlessly

React