Divineries – Jenna Obeid Mackenroth

September 26, 2026

I. At night the gluttons come screaming down dark highways. High beams are hell sent. So are their modded cars, their flashy decals, their bottomless-pit gullets. Maybe they’re high off pipes or papers, en route to spit wisdom in the tradition of Delphi and ignorant of the fact that their a priori exhalations, nowadays called secondhand smoke, are disavowed by modern doctors. But everyone’s divining. Everyone’s got a future to tell. All those years ahead of them, lifelined palms outstretched on the dashboard. No one has their hands on the wheel and the speedometer doesn’t have the heart to say it straight, and when their anguished parents finally make it to the site of fatal crash, all they ask the firebomb diesel flames is who, who could have seen this coming?

II. It takes terror to believe that wind contains a different kind of math and that its riders, from weightlessness and wing, are prophets. Real dumb terror. Terror makes a mouthpiece out of men. Terror keeps the birdwatchers stiff and riveted to the sky. And who’s talking? Who will send the messages? No one knows, they’re too scared to care. Meanwhile the birds are oblivious to the idiots beneath them. They just push and sail to make and turn the gyres of fate as bathing children do, their hands pudgy with innocence, outstretched in wonder, flailing and curious and grasping at the light. And somehow from these cowlick flight paths, from these babies learning how to fly, all the squinting men can see are itineraries of greed and loss and imagination. Ha, they say, looks like war. They cock their guns.

III. There’s cleaner business than this, the scarlet-purple or pale convictions observed in entrails, the dead stomachs knotted up in tight anticipation of that long shadow called future. Of course, innards can’t talk anything more than a last meal, so all they portend is death. Death! We’re all too young. A tremor collides with violent denial to make a bright shockwave sharp with fury and despair. Death is the only thing that stands between eternity and escape, and everyone has something worth condemning. So the fraud department agrees that the messages need reinterpreting. There must always be an Earth in which we bury and forget our sins. At least there are other animals to die for them. But all this sacrifice, it makes for a catacomb dilemma: too many bodies and not enough real estate. So the predictive carcasses must be repurposed, at least until another Earth is found. And no big deal, it’s good business; after all the messages are received and reinvented, the intestines will be cleaned of meaning and stuffed with rare meats and choice aromatics, the tight-lipped sausages roasted over primitive spits, and the moron masses, always hungry, slaughter-fed their own worst fears.

IV. The figures in their bird masks administer intravenous humors and correct otherwise fatal imbalances. Each patient is a tidal estuary, balancing precariously that which is fresh and salty, that which is kind and severe, that which is satisfied and starving. The narrative flows corporeally from keter to malchut. The narrative flows corporeally from malchut to keter. There is no future here, all the convalescents know it. They trade their pills in an economy of secrets, whispering wisdom to their friends, and from their lips trickle down our most saturated agonies; life, a big concussion. Stars all seen. The birds, circling and circling. The witness, circling and circling.