THREE SITES

The site contained all information. There was no information that was not contained by the site. If there
was uncontained information, however, it proved upon closer inspection to be not information but its
facsimile. Thus it was the province not of the site but of some lesser, meeker site, one that didn’t contain
information per se but its various facsimiles and imitations, clumps of characters that resembled
information but turned to dust the moment you thought of them. The lesser site’s color scheme was a
white background with black text; it looked like a word document that had gotten excited. Excitement for
information is contagious.

The site contained most but not all information. The information the site left out was bound up with what
it left in. For each piece of information the site contained, there was a companion piece, an antipode, that
was necessary for the site to exclude to create the effect of a certain reality. This effect was not unlike that
of a page with writing on it: black text on a white page, a contrast designed to generate excitement or its
facsimile regarding what was contained at the cost of what wasn’t. But if the site were, for example, to
undergo an inversion—if the page were to go from black text on white to white text on black, or if what
was contained were to become what was left out in a smooth, vitiating movement— would this be the
sign of a new contagion? Would this really be so exciting?

The site contained all and not all information. Possible knowledge included whether the site contained
certain information was, or of what that information consisted, but it did not include both at once. The site’s
possible color schemes were accordingly different: it could be black text on a black background or white
text on a white background, but it could not be black text on a white background or white text on a black
background. You couldn’t know what the text was saying if you already knew that it said. So you had to
read the site in a different way. You had to read only for the information that you knew was already there,
information so contagious that it could be there while not being there. In this way the site contained no
information. In this way the site contained all information. When you read the site the site read you and
made you new again.

NO FICTION

I was born a passive baby. I only
cried one time. I didn’t want to cry
my tears because I didn’t know
the tears were mine. Decades later
I left the farm, met intersecting
arrays of heat. Heat lines who
with their latticework wove
nets of infinite density, griddy
cross-stitch patterns weft
by the gimmick of celestial hands.
I was caught in the stitcher’s matrix. Or
the stitcher’s matrix was caught
in me—my body beset by sun
stroked forces acting as instruments
do upon music as they make it. Fluency,
influency. Masks bedeck my cherry tree.
A monad prone beneath backslash heaven’s
perpetually draining light. I make a face
to signal thought that's bleached
of thinking’s happening; a smile of self-
replication plays across the livestream's
faces. They’re playing “What Is Love.”
They’re playing what the image’s for. A silence
never rendered, never real, super random.
Let's agree the only secrets left are those
we lack a language to tell. Now try to
spell mime without mimetic: N-O-P-E.

Peter Myers is the author of the chapbooks Brade Lands (above/ground press) and The Hangnail (Belladonna*). His reviews and essays have been featured in Chicago Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, Annulet, and elsewhere.