As I move through the room everything
becomes symbolic. Lampshade teacup ruin.
An envelope from an insurance firm
really wants my business and a pamphlet for pedestrians
says it’s pathological to move any faster.
I hover over icons looking for
an entrance to ecstatic algorithms.
Arrows gesture like fingers in a religious painting.
Double take fake parlor game into the debris
pile if you must when you must
send me unsolicited messages.
Attention is a creation narrative.
The fruit flies in my kitchen will live for
about a month and I enjoy how rotting fruit
forms its own universe.
All my rugs taste like oval flavors.
Green grass. Brown cud.
And the news is on
and the ticker tape of words
beneath the chattering heads is
red punch.
I’ve paced a mile
inside the house today. I could cut the tension with
cardstock propaganda smiling but
I’m in no shape to discuss politics.
Technology is talking. It reaps the benefits of
all of our listening. Thunderstorm. Spacedeck.
Unrequested weather crashes upon
the shore rough waters. What’s below is
pressurized fiction.
You offer ocean joy or ocean breeze.
Are you in charge of hyperrealism?
I walk up the stairs and notice myself
walking up the stairs then I notice the noticing
and this thought is incomplete.
There are approximations being made
every minute. The world is built on second
guesses recycled into ancient vases.
Illustrious copy asserts a winter freshness when
a snowman skis down a hill but
the hill is really a dessert plate and
he’s making a sorbet.
What if reality is a line that doesn’t
waver? What if I could walk along it
and not fall?
It’s Wednesday and Daniel says
hats are strange decorations for the head.
But none of this correlates with the grandeur
I imagine as
I climb the stairs and this time
there’s an urgency as if this is what
I was meant to do.
Are you a figment of my imagination or a statue or a deer?
Too many faces hinder placement
like a broken slide carousel.
Your apparitions can’t get here quickly enough.
I need to refresh.
Click. Click.
And you are watching me search for you
amongst sixty weddings worth of ALL-Clad.
Bar furniture. New arrivals.
Please share your feedback.

Jennifer Metsker is the author of the poetry collection Hypergraphia and Other Failed Attempts at Paradise published by New Issues Press. Her poetry has most recently appeared in The Shore, The Dialogist, and After the Pause. She lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where she is the Writing Coordinator at the Stamps School of Art and Design.

José Rojas (he/they) is a Mexican multidisciplinary artist and creative director based in Berlin. For the past ten years he has worked at the intersection of art, design, photography, video, animation, music and education. His visual work is a surreal vision of numerous fantasies, oscillating between the vanilla and the grotesque. As a storyteller -and queer person- he advocates the urgency of reinventing narratives, told in a framework of new values that intercept pop culture and social media. Inspiring audiences to unlearn recurring outdated and dangerous patterns.