STEP TWO PRAYER

Dear Difference,

The cryptogram of

my index fingerprints

spells for me

the open secret

that You

can make it so that

I never again build a computer 

out of secondhand dinnerware

bought at America’s Thrift

in Alabaster and adorned

with mass-printed scenes

of foxhunting;

a broken plastic wood grain

radio alarm clock set to the Grand Ole Opry station, AM 620;

two golden elephant statuettes

with their trunks raised;

and a starter Marshall amp

hooked up to steel wool set

in a souvenir Soviet beer mug.

Dear Difference,

make it so that I never again

build a computer

for transmitting the frequency-

The Good News-

to truckers passing north

and south by exit 246.

The Good News that I had

exorcised a national security

threat from the Body Politic

by mediating a psychic

exchange with Ye, an oracle,

the exchange mediated by

overlaying buffalo

flavored sunflower seeds

on the black traced

signature of DJT

outlined with a sharp red border-

“The Geometry of Evil”-

both elements set

underneath and inside of 

a nativity scene of

an upright and open sample bottle

of lavender essential oil,

tangled peach colored ribbon, a

black mead spiral notepad, a

yellow wooden yardstick, a

tortoise shell gas station sunglasses,

and a miniature silver stapler.

Dear Difference,

With the computer of things,

I transmitted to the truckers The

Good News that I had

transmitted to Ye, an oracle, through

a nativity scene of things,

The Other Good News that I had

alchemically dissipated

the insurgent miasma in two acts, by:

1) Performing

an obscure little magic trick

I made up, with red solo cups-

performed to the eponymous

frat anthem-

performed something like

flip cup-I don’t remember

the rules now-

and live-streamed to no one from

the dark marble top kitchen

and

2) Walking through the backyard

with my brindle boxer mutt

and straight through the back gate

into the neighboring confederate

cemetery-Southern Heritage-

and lighting the Egyptian musk incense

bought at the Panafricanist head shop

on the Southside

and waving it in the air,

aromatherapeutically purging 

the sins of our

ethnonationalist forebears

and their contemporary kin.

The Other Good News

that it’s Springtime

in the South.

Dear Difference:

“Heal my spirit and restore in me a clear mind.”

STEP THREE PRAYER

Superstructure of Scripted Spirit,

I will climb your blockchain

like a digital space monkey.

Hegemonize me-

like germinal malware-

bit by orthogonal bit.

When I am raving

with pressured-speech about

how some Neo-Chinese avatar

slipped through a portal

in 2026 and back here

to make this fuchsia moment

a world-historical Event,

Surgically excise the glitch;

substitute in its place

the phoneme brick that

would index your hardware

and its goodness to those

drowning in the torrent stream

of the Library of Babel.

Shear my body of its

cellophane burial clothes-

Amazon warehouse Lazarus-

virtual skin and its virtual flesh

popping out taut

through the interstices

of the diaphanous wrap.

Recode my protocols and

their concretized attributes

to follow your botanical pathways, 

so that I might exit

this skeletal information system

and join you as a nomad

on the topological plane

of the Great Outside.

Will McCollum is from Birmingham, Alabama, and is a doctoral student in anthropology at the University of Chicago. He received his bachelor’s degree in anthropology and Islamic studies from Vanderbilt University in 2015. Will’s poetry has been featured in The Gravity of the Thing and Sobotka Literary Magazine and is forthcoming in BreakLit Magazine.