Two Colonized Sonnets by Sonnet L'Abbé



XCVI

Some say that it was a conspiracy, that fault lies with Grayson for plugging that bitch’s dorky game, that the wanton Quinn traded ass for good press. Others named Sarkeesian as harpy they’d most like to disfigure. 4chan pysched itself a lynch mob. Touting ethics (ahem) in video game journalism, trolls made extreme sport of bombarding their fellow gamers with hacking attempts and threats of assaults. Gamergaters loved the idea of a feminist conspiracy. The image of vindictive, plotting feminists hatching “communist” machinations (not in smoky rooms, but in the lefty, vaulted halls of disgruntled academia) to destroy macho gamer identity motivated haters. They resorted to harassing women, giving the finger to safe space. They profaned the Depression Quest developer’s name, gutting her basic sense of safety, doxing the “social justice warrior” so that she fled her own domicile. People bullied Wu as well, suggesting her kids would be murdered after she was choked and raped at her home address. Even a year later, tormentors continue hating, sending Wu their fantasies about slicing her genitals and defecating into her mouth. How can such ruthlessness be translated? Anonymous douches will forever troll forums, expressing things they’d never murmur in daylight or to a woman’s face. Always flamers will abuse comment. The images of hate: what cliché! My sonnet suffers, repeating such worn, flaccid fabrications. No poetry can lyric lifelike a bully’s ambition, or metaphor the feces they would have us ingest. Literary books can’t translate hate’s boring words. Manly gazers play games, fight realist fights, shoot virtual people. Cheerleaders are welcome, especially if they count as women the industry loves. But developers without penises wield the strength of virtuality, like leviathans boys are trained to behead. Brutality does not stop the girl-love that, like a feminist pansexual Cthulhu, rises from the subreddits. As Yuggoth sprouts its zombielike fungi, the minecrafty feminine rises; Mother Hydra games oospores into the wet dreams of Super Mario Brothers.




XCVII

Hooboy, what a hellish week. Give me aww imagery: kittens in knitted radish hats, charming baby capybaras wrestling celery from bunnies, kittens in furry costumes that disguise them as purple koalas, furry costumes on ferrets that style ferrets into little ferret-lions. Gifs of capybaras wearing cowboy hats, ferrets squeezing themselves beneath doors, attractive penguins fearlessly twerking their tails, knitted pairs of socks unhanding a panda. Tiny human babies are also effective: I can aww hard at two month-olds dressed as caterpillars, metal babies rocking Sabbath “Paranoid” onesies, babies-as-green-vegetables, wary newborns who peer out from Batman swaddling. Give me baby ferrets this time curled in palms, or venturing blindly from a water glass; give me tumblrs of lambs tenderly nestled with micro piglets. Show me tarsiers emailing,  auks stumbling, bichons growling from their rich moms’ Birkin carriers. Please, that I might bear in good spirit the ways entitled old men unburden themselves, post gifs of athletic black prima ballerinas’ sick jetés, winding women, more winding women shaking booties as feminist intervention, the epic eyerolls responding to some dude’s ceaseless oratory, the talk-to-the-hand flips, the ab fab duo slurring dahling, the First Lady asking: turnip for what? Beyoncé’s made Lemonade out of some men’s bunk; let her black ops meme hope formations, however ephemeral, into my social enduring. Some fathers’ dominions feel ruined; support for some trumped up troublemaker ascends. The image’s pleasures wait on them, too: here’s Obama in photoshopped thobe; here’s unicorns and rainbows ironically photoshopped over a jewy Bernie Sanders. Dems and Republicans don’t mean to unite over tiny baby feet held by muscly Adonis-men, or gifs of dalmatians wearing antlers. But there’s something about a dressed-up llama; it cheers the absurdist and believer. To save myself, on loop I’ll keep playing that sublime videowhere around the living room glides the cat, wearing the shark’s fin costume, riding a roomba.









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