by Celeste DeSario
 |
| Cartoon by Nick Anderson |
META DATA
Timestamp: 2026-08-28 2:15 EST
Geographical Coordinates: 40.8458° N, 72.8972° W
Direction of Travel: Northbound
Vehicle Make: Ford Escape
Primary Color: American Flag Blue?
License Plate reads: TRACK THIS
Driving to Walmart
for a two-dollar pack of sticky notes.
Placing them over the T’s or the K on the plate—
My best defense.
And just like that,
The million-dollar system fails.
And I vanish.
Or better yet,
I take an alternative route
where no Flocks have yet taken root.
The safer option to being watched,
Photographed.
Can I duck a camera
while walking to grab a burger and root beer?
Maybe.
If the shutter clicks
and I’m in the background,
I’m an unwilling celebrity,
now in the database
Filed Under:
“Incidental Capture.”
You’re not their target
unless you’re an exclusive story.
Undocumented.
Dark-skinned.
A headline—
If you’re from Norway.
Or Sweden.
Relax.
But every tabloid needs an editor.
Who is that sitting at the stationhouse keyboard?
Scrolling, scrolling, scrolling through the candid shots?
A chorus of Troopers.
Officer Pacheco in Massachusetts,
typing a plate number into the void.
Tracking her
ex-girlfriend.
Officer Zahir in Kentucky,
searching for those unposed shots—
The ones that let us glimpse behind the curtain.
Running her fingers through her hair before
turning onto a street
whose name he doesn’t recognize.
Officer Klein in Texas
looking for that Money Shot—
The one where she leans in for a kiss,
The one where she opens his front door with her own key.
Click.
Main Street.
Click.
Medical Center.
Click.
The new lover’s driveway.
Do the Troopers have his plate, as well?
Or are they tracking Hector?
Our undocumented farm worker?
The one who helps me pick out ripe melons,
carries my bags to my car,
asks about my day.
Pinpointing where he lives.
Where he works.
Where he can be apprehended.
Intercepted.
Arrested.
Those apples aren’t going to pick themselves, you know.
Remember the days
when we could go out into the world
and no one wanted to film us?
Now Flock is the 21st-century paparazzi,
always watching
Recording
Cataloguing.
Once you step outside your door,
Your movements are saved to a hard drive.
A web woven tightly—
no escaping the fingerprint
the timeline of your movement—
one you never asked for and yet…
Uploading…
That quick drive to the store—
A sighting. A hit.
That walk down the block—
A capture.
Flock.
Eliminating crime
In your neighborhood.
In your life.
The right to move unhampered,
the right to exist undetected?
No longer a given.
For any of us.
For all of us.
Achievement Unlocked: Full Equality
Celeste DeSario writes poetry to process and make sense of life’s events. Her work is featured in The New Verse News, The SportsScribe, The Changing Times, The Ekphrastic Review, The Dissident Voice, and Three-Line Poetry. She lives in Shoreham Village, NY—a town where no Flock cameras have been sighted… yet.
