Anne-Marie Turza

Top-Down Shooter Game

I’ve auto-joined the green unnumbered citizens

viewed as pixels from above in the game
of feeling wrong in language. My companion’s

a medieval dog named Beste-of-All
with a beard of skeptical bullshot.
We’ve levelled up in talking:
I talk to ants with roses, and ants talk
to my dog in proffers. It works like this:
To say to ants, tell Beste-of-All his name, I offer

rose seeds. Trees burgeon woodenly. They aggro
flower, unfolding like exploding linen napkins! Some ants

appear. Animated dark marks like hyphens. And something—
something sensory with motions and feelers,
something further, happens.
To be honest it’s beyond
an Ant-Rose-Dog native speaker’s
understanding. It works, Ok! And is the alchemy

of every true adventure.
I wear a cotton coverall. My name per Beste-of-All—

I think, translated via several species—is:

Specific Cheerful Cotton Skin Stink. I am armed,

typically with brandy. I can throw a drink on anyone’s old
impressive wound to make it sting. The problem is:

too many thousand players, the sentient wind,
900 km per hour, a blinding orbit, audacious
mission, a planet mistaken for a star. And stars mistaken
for grenades. I say with scattered rose seeds, specifically:

Why language?,

trees blasting into orange and yellow flowers.
Ants alpha-release the whole game with brazen sensitivity.
No one knows the roses from the question marks.

Anne-marie turza

is the author of two collections of poetry, The Quiet (Anansi, 2014) and Fugue with Bedbug (Anansi, 2022), and the chapbook Slip Minute (Baseline, 2018). She was a finalist for the Bronwen Wallace Award and the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award, and won the inaugural Writers’ Trust Board Fellowship (2026) for her body of work.