Marty and the Avatar Mal Nińo

by Ujjvala Bagal Rahn

In his den, Marty forgets to put things away.
Wrappings and boxes fall unnoticed to the floor,
Amazon purchases rest on his desk,
as he turns to the computer screen.
Mal Nińo never has to put anything away
because his hands are always empty,
except for an impossibly curvy white woman-image.
Mal Nińo’s toilet-less, kitchen-less mansion
faces a silver digital sea. Its rooms are uncluttered
by books, birthday cards, souvenir shot glasses,
University of Georgia memorabilia,
little busts of famous people, little lion statues,
bottles of blood pressure and cholesterol pills,
shoes in all four corners.
Mal Nińo doesn’t have a computer,
but Marty has three: a laptop,
a desktop for remote office work,
and a desktop for his Second Life,
where there are no wheelchairs, no bills to pay,
no car to wiggle into with hand controls
that knock reconstructed knees.

Mal Nińo doesn’t eat. Even if he did,
the virtual dishes could just disappear,
instead of crusting over under papers.
Mal Nińo deejays in clubs
or hangs out in his mansion,
or in other avatars’ mansions
where he fondles virtual breasts
or gets a virtual blowjob,
though he doesn’t have a penis.
(After all the work of putting Mal Nińo together,
Marty didn’t feel like bothering with it.)

Marty turns off the computer. Mal Nińo disappears
into the black void of the computer screen.
Marty transfers to his recliner to watch TV.
(Mal Nińo has neither recliner nor TV.)
Later he rolls into the bedroom.
He wrangles with compression socks
and pulls himself into bed.
(Mal Nińo has neither compression socks nor bed.)
Soon his brown wife joins him.
(Mal Nińo has no wife, just partners that disappear.)

Tomorrow, Marty will board a plane to Connecticut
to visit his grown daughter. When she was born,
Marty cradled her in his big hands.

Ujjvala Rahn was a finalist for the 2023 Loraine Williams Poetry Prize, and her second poetry collection Memories Lounge was a finalist for the 2021 William Faulkner–William Wisdom Creative Writing Competition. Her work has appeared in The Threepenny Review, The Tipton Poetry Journal, Illuminations, Möbius: The Journal of Social Justice and Bangalore Review. She is the owner of Red Silk Press, a micropress of science fiction, science, poetry, and memoir. Red Silk Sari (Red Silk Press, 2013) is her first collection of poems. She lives in Savannah, Georgia.