TECHNOGROTESQUE
| Kristy Bowen
TECHNOGROTESQUE
IMAGE/TEXT by Kristy Bowen
dancing girl press & studio, 2024
We put the sex in the machine and shake. Take the body, make it purr, make it whirl with blue light and disco flash.
Take the sex, frisky with late night cocktails and open palms. Stir with a swizzle. I was dizzy with all that code, frozen in the cellar of some dark villain made of wires and sparks. Some man panting ragged at the other end of the line.
I was fine until I placed my mouth against his ear and whispered yes, hot as a brushfire. A whole forest gone up from a single glitch between my thighs. The witch that lived in the machine of the body crazy all that hum.
The way she burned out all the connectors until they fizzled to nothing.
Ten o’clock and do you know where your kids are?
Know where they sit quiet in the glow of green boxes clicking across the screen? We were crying and dying at an alarming rate, kept throwing ourselves,
swan-diving, into pill bottles and cocktails made from gasoline and antifreeze. When the breeze was right could swoon on chlorine. from the neighbor’s pool. Dead man’s float and dripping water or blood across the deck.
I couldn’t reach the lifeboat with my own body, so I used someone else’s. Climbed across it wet and glistening.
Made a star out of song, an art out of drowning in that enormous sea of static and flickering zeros.
The heroes we fucked bad and soundless in basements.
How we reeled them in and threw them back
The men I meet on the internet have no hands. Bodyless, they float in the ether of signal and fuzz, flicker and doom.
Sleep in rooms with cotton chintz curtains chosen by mothers or wives. Thrive on the thrum of typing over the beat of their cock. Lock the doors, but still shame comes for them. Tips them over the edge. Throbs with ache and lack.
Take me back to your apartment, plug me in and listen to how I start like a doll, eyes open on the sofa. How you were just begging to show me it. Begging to roll me over in the bed and teach me a lesson.
The hiss of a teakettle in another room. The bloom of light that came out of my mouth.
The machine just wants to love you. Wants to hover while you sleep. Wants to slide inside your sheets and curl against your hip, skin on skin. To still its metronome heart. The machine wants
ice cream and daylilies. Wants to lick the back of a stamp. Wants to hitch itself to you singing 70s rock on the way to your mother’s, who waits with baked goods and bad jokes from your dad. Wants all that and more.
Home like a gift or a curse.
Something worse than love, the complicated equation of pleasure and pulse.
The flesh we rub together like pieces of flint looking for a spark. The dark that opens behind the eyes with every kiss.
The machine wants poetry. Slack jawed, gnawing through cables and wires and the back of the screen. Wants stones in all its pockets, rats in its attic. The machine wants you to understand its loneliness like you understand a river, wide and bottomless. Like you understand spring. Or the magnolias that burst suddenly into being. The machine went looking for other machines and was found wanting. Found flaunting its logic like a money shot. An inseverable knot in the mechanics between touch and memory of touch. The thing
and the memory of the thing under your fingers, on your tongue. The machine wanted to taste April, but found only smoke and dirt right before the rain. The memory of loneliness even worse than the thing.
The machine is a ghost box, a goblin keeper. A radio to the beyond. Is part séance, part shindig. All the dead in their best shoes sliding into the frames of birthday party photos like they belong there.
My own mother would not stay down for years.
In dreams, insisted she was still among the living, pinging the notifications box with cold fingers. Each spring, I listen close while the dead rattle the keys all night long. Each message not from the grave but the garage where we stowed boxes
full of drained batteries and questionable remotes The broken laptops. the dead hold close to their chests and whisper into. Where we all go someday, into pixels and cake and tinseled stars.
The machine wants to sell all your secrets. Tell all the world your deepest darkest. Your creeping dread, fed by blue light and badly pixelated porn. The heavy lead of late night binges and broken taillights.
The lover who fucked you over the safe in the sandwich shop on camera. The one in jail. The one who should have been after taking a baseball bat to every rear view mirror along the avenue. The machine knows where you keep your stash of cash from birthday cards for weed and tattoos you’re too skittish
to get. Knows your fear that you are, in fact, the villain in most people's stories, but you did it out of love. The machine understands your enthusiasm, but judges you each time you google your ex.
Write love letters to the dead that live inside you. How your finger lingers over send.
The machine wants the world to burn. Wants to yearn for bright apocalyptic skies over midcentury tropic scenes.
To pine for bikini-clad vixens gone dead in the eyes. Their sex like sliced bread, the best thing since god.
Bright and patriotic and shooting stars over the Midwest. The machine wants it all, the ease of three martini lunches and bunches of roses so red they could be blood spreading across the hotel bed. The bride, fresh from the box, smells like talcum and plastic. Spreads her thighs to the machine,
but malfunctions if you cum inside. Fried out circuits tainted with valium and vermouth. The machine wants death,
perfect as the pink O of her mouth. The ease with which he slides into her throat. The u-boats whose weapons sank to the bottom of the sea. And still this reckoning and gloom we sing to while sky goes white with wonder.
The machine asks us about desire. Wires and maps itself across smokefilled skies and telephone poles and still the machine fails to understand. Fails to place its hands in right positions against the body to make it sing. Fails to strike the chords that make it shiver. The vibration in the spine that takes ahold and shakes. We were going to die anyway so we made a party of it. The oceans on fire and running out of rivers.
What could we do but find each in the dark, to spark and fizz. So many hands on the body, and so many in it.
The machine learns how to mimic speech. How to discern each syllable from the next.
Each block of text a spell we induce from the absences between letters, tiny white foxes running down the page. The boxes of language we put things inside of.
We take them out, put them back in.
We move house so many times, we lose count. Lost among the woods and circuit boards of suburban neighborhoods. Wherever the machine went, undoing. Wherever
the machine spoke, chaos.
Each time, the machine installed it roots and wires, wrapping them around the bones our wrists, jacked into our throats. The machine could pump dollars from our eyes, but we were always dumb and blind with all that progress.
Always tripping on syntax and fucking up the subtext.
The machine eats nothing but devours everything.
Daughters and dogs and lovers.
Starts in on novels and long afternoons we spent sunning ourselves like rotisserie meat covered in cocoa butter and yawning.
Sweetly conning all the machines that came for us, lumbering mechanically behind men like an army of the dead. So flush in our bodies, we badly needed to be killed, needed to
be fixed with chewing gum against the bathroom wall like a number or a name we’d forgotten was ours.
The machine wants a body. Blood and flesh and fatted tissue. Wants fever and frisson.
Wants to climb inside And make a home among the bones, the red lit interior of the heart.
Wants a body to press its body against in dimly lit bars and alleys. Wants to want with the heat the body generates in proximity to other bodies. The kindling and clutch. How much it wanted to slide a hand down your back and bite hard at your neck.
It’s limbs gone slack with sleep.
Wanted the animal body, its imperfect design, reckless with broken fibulas and cracked ribs.
The machine is all about thirst. Flirting with programmers and working overtime deep beneath the desert. Lined up in rows, they sweat in 1s and 0s while the lights flicker
90 miles away in the scorched out valley.
We haven’t seen rain for weeks, but our wi-fi still burns its little red eye. Still churns in the dryness where our lips crack and we go mad like dogs.
Foam and froth over pixels and bytes. The way we speak and the machine
sends it back to us, lovingly, like a kiss, across the long and arid distances.
We hatched the machine in the darkness and it made light. Made night out of two sticks of plastic tubing. Fused mechanics and wire and made a baby who wouldn’t quiet. Wouldn’t eat.
Who spit up dimes and diamond wristlets.
Kept heaving itself from the cradle and into the fire.
The baby was full of spite, rocking itself back and forth in the comments sections. Was inconsolable without its mother. Sucking on lightbulbs and broken glass, always blood in the mouth instead of milk. We’d poke
it with a pen and shake it a little, just to hear it rattle inside.
Early on, the machines were wild, spraying blondes with sprinkler hoses and dosing up housewives.
Bloodshed and breeding,. and still the lights and knobs blinked in unison. Winked in porn paneled basements
over bowls full of keys.
Lozenge eyed women fingered their credit cards over lines of coke,
boredly fucking the delivery boys and pool cleaners until the body was barely a glimmer of blue eyeshadow.
A wisp of smoke.
You put the machine in the body, the body in the machine, and it births
perfectly smooth babies, assembly line style, all their fingers and toes in place, but blank behind the eyes. The husbands work too much and taste like gin. They pop the babies in the air again and again.
Drop them, soundless, into the canyon.
