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A Map


by stephen hastings-king


It was war without beginning or end.  It was a time of transactions and weapon systems.  It was the enemy was a product of the war itself.  It was the polyphony of surveillance devices. It was the cross-hatched sightlines. It was continuous recording.  It was the silver trailer centers of chain-link labyrinths in the desert.  It was the systems that mapped the future and the algorithmic patterns of deviant behavior. It was a duplicate world. It was the vaporization of targets.  It was the drone operators who stepped outside for a cigarette, the situation of the sun and arrangements of clouds relative to the honeycomb cracked surface of the land.  It was the late night driving through mosaics of radio shatter, advertisements and sporting events, the names of the disappeared and other faraway places.  It was every nowhere.  

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