[Issue 2025.73]

‘Dissolution’, Danielle Levsky

Art © 2025 Ellis Bray

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In the year of mandatory markers,
they categorized our bodies like library books—
neat decimal systems of flesh and bone,
hormones tracked through smart watches,
monitored menstrual apps for deviations,
fed our blood samples to hungry algorithms
that sorted XX from XY like spam from inbox.
I learned to fold myself into the spaces
between letters, to dissolve
in the static of surveillance feeds.

My chest is a contradiction
of soft and sharp angles, wrapped
in clothes that whisper rather than declare.
Each morning, I paint my face in algorithmic-approved patterns,
while beneath, my body runs
its own quiet revolution.

The gender police scan retinas
at every threshold, their machines
searching for the clean lines
of either/or. But I am neither/nor,
a state of being
that refuses to collapse
into their certainty.

At night, in abandoned server farms
on the outskirts of Silicon Valley,
where cooling fans mask our footsteps,
we gather—the undefined, the fluid,
our phones left in Faraday cages
miles away. Our bodies glow
with black-market bioluminescence,
chromosomes remixed
like underground music tracks,
while above, facial recognition drones
hunt for unauthorized assemblies,
for the heat signatures of community.

I keep a box of my analog memories:
a polaroid of my last Pride party,
pressed flowers from the last protest,
a vial of tears my friends and I shed when they burned
the last of the Planned Parenthoods.

These artifacts of what they tried to erase
are the reminders that crack the surveillance state.

When I hold my memories, I see everything anew:
a constellation of possibilities,
each point of light a different way of being.

When they catch me—and they will,
for dissent leaves digital footprints
no matter how carefully I step—
they will try to debug my body like faulty code,
restore me to factory settings.
I will not offer them confessions.

Like Hypatia before the mob,
I will make my final act a demonstration of defiance:
My death will be a question they cannot answer,
my silence a revolution they cannot quell.

Let them see, in their final “victory”,
how poorly their boxes contain infinity.

© 2025 Danielle Levsky

[Issue 2025.73]

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