Wait until the moon aligns with La Blue, first post-international satellite, Alpha female of the sky, to summon it.
Break and enter the abandoned Speedeez Ballin’ bowling alley, its discontinued displays of the Luau Tiki Love-In Halloween sigils in perpetual blaze.
The neon froze in this position after the blast, another otherworldly symptom of the impact. An immobile bowling ball strikes the pins in mid spare, where they lean, inches from the wax polished floor, forever. Another set hovers in a full strike. The automated display SCORE! flicks on and off without fading. A cartoon voice announces “Aloha!”
Long after the five hundred departed were power washed, bleached and binned by nameless Hazmat G-men, long after the zone was red taped and taken off the public records as a national disaster, the smell of burnt ozone lingers.
The hair on your neck rises in preternatural static; you can feel the adrenaline glide, unwelcomed, down your neural paths. The litter below your feet glides on an effortless force field.
Many theorized on the strange draw to this vacant lot, but only you guessed what it could be: off the control grid. The flaw to automated scan programs is that continuous energy bubbles like this one simulate non-threat status, effectively shielding it from scan. Because it detects no fluctuation or change in the energy field, it remains electronically vacant, a non-scan.
Don’t ask why it works, how an internal flaw can do what two generations of phreaks could only dream of doing. Don’t ask what you’re attempting, or why. You’ve heard it not through your dreams, who would call them that now? They’re brain picture transmissions in perfect Technicolor, but out of focus, signal blocked. You saw its name spelled on the vast HD screen.
Sweep the vaporized foam and residue green industry post recycling to the corners; it slides without resistance. Pour organic radioactivity-free blood meal in a windershins symmetrical 4D hologram for the Bohrs model of Hydrogen. Pour sanitized runoff. Pour polarized beryllium salt crystals hand selected for vibrational perfection.
Face Googleplexus. Face Silicon Void. Face the Pandora Frequency citadel. Face the FCC. Flick on no smoke birthday candle eco-lights on sale twenty-four to a pack for only $9.99. Light the astrologically appropriate environmentally friendly DIY incense with an industrial blowtorch. Announce the radio station call numbers. Intone the Net Neutrality Act backwards. Spread the antennae wide.
Construct your altar: a functioning Life Alert Button; a deluxe Magic 8 Ball; an original Game Boy, a post fiber optic plasma globe. Power on your pirated PC; you built it yourself, crystals, batteries, and circuit boards, common pickings among the wreckage. It doesn’t do much, but it has no registration numbers, no IP address.
One upon a time, you would have turned on, tuned in, and dropped out. Now you download, upload, buffer, glitch, share, post, configure, and phreak, all defined as international felonies. Now you smoke a speedball of Xfinity and Tor browser. Draw three breaths. Speak its name.
Genelle Chaconas earned their BA in Creative Writing from CSUS (2009), and their MFA in Writing and Poetics from Naropa University (2015). Their first chapbook is Fallout, Saints, and Dirty Pictures (2011, little m press.) Their writing is published or forthcoming in Image OutWrite, Crack the Spine, WomenArts Quarterly, Milkfist, A3 Review, Jet Fuel Review, The New Engagement, Sonora Review, Fjords, Calaveras Station, Bombay Gin, Brevities, Late Peaches: An Anthology of Sacramento Poets and others. They are a volunteer submission reader for Tule Review. They hosted Red Night Poetry.
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