Early Warning System

By Gabriele Micozzi

​

​The drone does not buzz.

It reports.

Its wings are not wings
but a method for touching flowers
without being touched by them.
 

It descends on a blossom
printed in government white,
a petal laminated against weather,
a code at the center where gold
once kept its little violence.
 

Nothing opens.
Nothing needs to.
The flower has already agreed
to be read.
 

The orchard is quiet in the way
new hospitals are quiet:
not peaceful, only designed
against the acoustics of pain.
 

There are no bees.
There are service windows.
There is a subscription tier for scent.
There is a maintenance clause
for grief mistaken as biodiversity.
 

The company does not say
we replaced nature.
The company has learned mercy.
 

It says:
non-optimized systems may be upgraded
without loss of essential function.
 

Outside the school, a boy draws a flower
from an image on his mother’s phone.
He uses gray
because the photographed petals
had already surrendered color
to compression.
 

He draws no corolla.
Only a margin.
A white administrative silence
around the place where yellow
should have made a small scandal.

​

His teacher bends over him.

What is this part? she asks.

The boy points to the blank.

​

That is where the bees go

when the picture is loading.

For a moment the classroom keeps breathing.

Then the drone passes the window,
carrying pollen in a sealed cartridge,

and every flower on the lesson sheet
becomes accurate.
 

Gabriele Micozzi is an Italian writer whose recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in Asymptote, ONE ART, Heavy Feather Review, Strange Horizons, Space & Time Magazine, and The Ecological Citizen. His work explores the quiet violence of systems and the fragile boundary between technological progress and ecological disappearance.