Prayers Received at noreply@
The address says in its own name that nobody is listening. We press the button anyway. Somebody, it turns out, is.
Behind the curtain+
One story, micro scope: a man owns the domain behind countless noreply addresses and receives what everyone sends back to the robots.
A liturgy is the form people already use to address something declared incapable of answering, so the litany was sitting inside the premise; the comedy is in the specificity of the petitions, not in the frame.
Hear us, who were told in your own name that you would not.
No reply.
For the man who typed thank you beneath a shipping confirmation, because he was raised properly.
For the woman who wrote yes, 3pm works to a calendar.
For the one who sent STOP to a pharmacy eleven times, in caps, escalating.
For whoever asked a bank who is this.
For please stop sending these here, he died in March.
For I did not order these. For I did order these. For is there a human.
For the six-paragraph appeal, with attachments, sent at 2:14 in the morning, to a robot.
No reply.
For we have read the header. We press the button anyway, because a thing needed saying and something in front of us was shaped like a face.
No reply.
And yet: received. All of it. By a man who happens to own the domain, who opens his mail each morning to the accumulated confessions of everyone who was certain they were shouting at a wall,
and who, being also raised properly,
deletes them.