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 video—where
around the living room glides the cat, wearing the shark’s fin costume, riding
a roomba.
