Читать книгу Late Empire - Lisa Olstein - Страница 14

IT ALL LIGHTS UP

It’s hard to feel spry in any room

they’ve pushed you in or out of

as if the walls remember the wheels,

their muted whine, and your own

whimpering cries as rosy-fingered dawn

licked you clean with her rough tongue.

We’re all going to die, you’ve heard

a thousand times from your own

mother’s mouth. You never believed her,

how could you, she invented life,

but then one day stuck in traffic

you catch yourself muttering the line

and it sticks and every stupid argument

comes back to you stupider still

and your petty feelings about the special

Employee of the Month parking space

and all those nights you settled

for takeout and a blindfold. Here

at the university, the corridors are

labeled Corridor. The visualization

laboratory is dark. Inside, scanning for

shark-shaped shadows, the surfer knows

to borrow the seal’s suit is to borrow

its nightmares, too. Maybe today

species are outdated modes of technology,

and this is why we give them up

so easily. Sometimes there’s a glitch

in the system. Fatal errors occur.