The Paddock Review

from Insert Coin

~

six thousand twenty year olds

deployed in place on the ops floor 

spying, could be called reapers, dimly

lit room, arcade-style, streaming

 

footage from drones circling battlefields,

I saw blood so precise the missile took

the father, but not the 

child walked back to the pieces

 

of his father and began to place the pieces

back into human shape, crouching low

in the hollow of a gully with no door or window

…..

to pull, just the horizon, lumps,  angst-colored

……

This poem is from the book Insert Coin by Joshua Zelesnick (Finishing Line Press), and can be found at https://www.finishinglinepress.com/product/insert-coin-by-joshua-zelesnick/

In Insert Coin the reckless project of American capitalism and imperialism is felt through four characters—a contestant, a drone operator, a monster, and a prisoner—who interact in a world of game shows, chain-of-command killing, and confusion around the virtual and the real. Through video games, fantasy, and drone warfare by joystick, the book chronicles dissociation and denial as well as a soul longing for meaning in a world whose absurd violence and demand for profit feels simulated but is all too real. Insert Coin launches an experimental syntax with strict formal constraints, such as a 6-syllable line by 8-line stanza sequence to suggest the unbearable dimensions of a solitary confinement cell. In these poems, a civilization that can only imagine destruction asks, “how do I get to the next level?”