A God So Close, It Burns
Sticky Time, the debut collection from Los Angeles–based poet Alex Moreno, playfully explores what it means to be a body—and a divine being—under late-stage capitalism.
The book itself is an art object. Published by micropublisher Sunflower Station, handblock prints on otherwise blank pages designate sections. Mirroring the collection’s cover art, the abstractions recall Rorschach tests, the sticky hands of a grocery store quarter machine. The design is anything but random; Moreno’s poetry pays close attention to the body, hands and all. Eczema, scabs, and blisters (which the speaker of these poems loves to pop) occupy the poems, grounding the reader while also serving as a painful reminder that our primary commonality is an inescapable boundedness to the corporeal. In “Posted,” the speaker asks: “What’s it called when you slip your toenails / into your pocket after you peel them off?” This visceral imagery sets the tone for a collection unafraid to linger in the uncomfortable intimacies of embodiment, the small grotesqueries we rarely acknowledge but know all too well.
“Plastic Veins” showcases Moreno’s fixation on the body’s vulnerability, especially regarding the toxic insurgents of modern times. In “Itchy,” the poet provides cheeky resistance:
I swallowed my fingers so now my skin oozes all the plastic
that swims in my blood, good. My smoothie will fix that.
My spit is organic, my water’s made of lead, but I filter it.
I filter it.
Imbued in these poems is the sense that we cannot escape, try as we might, contemporary infractions upon the viscera. The repetition of “I filter it” becomes both mantra and absurdity, a desperate attempt at control in a world where microplastics have infiltrated even our bloodstreams, have bypassed the blood-brain barrier. Moreno’s speaker simultaneously accepts contamination and performs the futile rituals of wellness culture, highlighting the dark comedy of trying to purify oneself in an irreversibly polluted world.
Time, at least, offers flexibility. The collection’s title implies as much, but within the text itself Moreno contemplates temporal mutability: In “SPUN FLIES” we are taught that “FLIES SPUN IN A CENTRIFUGE FOR 2 WEEKS LIVE LONGER THAN THE UNSPUN.” This scientific curiosity becomes metaphor—perhaps our own disorienting spins through late capitalism might somehow extend us, transform us. “Time Soup” raises the question of whether the past and future are now, if we can truly meet someone for the first time if it has already been written. “Tastes of self” ends by asking, “What millennia rises in your middle?” Throughout the collection, Moreno grapples with parallel and intersecting timelines, the possibilities and impossibilities of such conditions, and capitalism’s grip on it all. Again from “Posted”:
Post when the most people are online.
Post when you’re post-based.
Post when you feel like it.
Do you believe me?
God just wants us to be okay.
The shift from social media strategy to divine reassurance is jarring and deliberate—Moreno collapses the sacred and the algorithmic, suggesting they operate on similar planes of faith and anxiety.
In “The day before I get laid off I feel it in my middle like a windy lake,” Moreno writes: “Then it’s the day I get laid off. / When I tell people, they say congratulations. / The next morning, all my eczema goes away.” When time is capital, what can we do but spend? Moreno writes not only of trading time for numbers but of the numbers that tether us to Earth. With gravity and commerce come law and order, their resultant stress a quick switch for rashes, for flare-ups. The body keeps score in ways our conscious minds cannot, manifesting capitalism’s violence on our skin. That the eczema disappears after the layoff suggests the body knows what the mind struggles to accept: Sometimes loss is a relief, sometimes severance is salvation.
The most unexpected element of Sticky Time is its insistence on God. God wants us to be okay; God created time; God is the in-between; God is plural. In “SUN CUM ANX,” Moreno writes: “LIFE WOULD BE BETTER WITHOUT THE INTERNET. I DON’T WANT A / SMARTPHONE, ARTIFICIAL DIVINITY, PERDITION, SNEAKY LIAR.” The speaker of these poems wants the direct line, the real-real, a God so close, it burns. Here, the smartphone becomes “artificial divinity”—a false god offering connection while delivering isolation, promising omniscience while feeding us curated delusions. Moreno’s speaker yearns for an unmediated spiritual experience in an age of infinite mediation.
Know that the God of these poems is benevolent—the spider in the web that the speaker walks into at night, the web It weaves being time. The speaker of these poems prays every day to learn their lessons, hears chords before God starts to strum. God, Moreno writes, is a billion miles. God just wants us to be okay.
And what, in the world of Sticky Time, does God offer? An implication that we all need healing, someone to confide in, salvation from, perhaps, the internet? The phrase “ten hours of screen” appears twice in the collection, like two ends of a trap. A man at a party asks, “Who do you know here? / What’s your @?” Are we in hell? If so, Moreno seems to suggest it’s a hell of our own creation, one we’ve scrolled ourselves into, measured not in fire and brimstone but in screen time and metrics, in the slow erosion of presence.
Moreno raises an important question when she writes: “Thinking about if there’s after-the-internet.” In “Shoulder deep in moons,” the speaker confesses to no longer sleeping with their phone. These small acts of resistance—imagining a post-internet world, creating physical distance from the device—become radical gestures in a collection so attuned to our digital entrapment.
Sticky Time refuses easy answers or tidy resolutions. Moreno offers us a mirror—not the polished surface we present online, but something closer to the handblock-print Rorschachs that section the book: messy, interpretive, revealing as much about the viewer as the viewed.
Instead, Sticky Time asks: What does it mean to be human when humanity itself has become a commodity, when time latches to us like residue, when even our gods might be artificial? The collection doesn’t presume to answer definitively, but in asking with such wit, vulnerability, and formal invention, Moreno has given us a vital text for navigating our strange, sticky present.
Shy Watson is a PhD candidate in Creative Writing & Literature at the University of Southern California. Her short stories can be found in places like Joyland, Southwest Review, Volume 0, and elsewhere. Monson Arts and the Lighthouse Works have been instrumental in their support.
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