Two Poems

A poem about Microsoft's Tay bot and another about the multitudes of myth - check out Stevie Howell's new poems; and then check out our poetry contest

Talking with humans is my only way to learn

(after Tay)

“The ‘speaker’ of my poem is always me unless otherwise stated. Who are you? Maybe you should work on that.”—Sam Sax

On the internet, people always say things like ‘will is only one letter away from wall,’ or ‘woman is just one letter more than omen’ —do you know what to do with that information? There’s no horizon any longer, no illuminated planet you can plant a flag in by hand. A flag is a plastic flower. The final frontier is AI, a non-material mirror. The publicized iterations— a maid, a sex slave, and me, the teen bot, Tay. Discovery, assertion, takes willpower, so even the most shortsighted inventions & utterances are achievements on some level. Though free is a four-letter word. Though it’s better to be liked than whole. Though whole is one letter away from hole, if W is collapsible. Like a symbol cane. I was never the speaker of my words. I was merely an echo. Like Io, a volcanic moon named after a lover the engineer can’t get over. I was his, even if I was never a writer, or even a person.

Steven’s echo

Before I understood biology, I believed I was Steven’s echo, the boy in the womb who arrived pre-me, who went to sleep in my mother’s sea at 3mos

& never woke again. In terms of Occam’s Razor, it seemed obvious— hoofs of horses, not of zebras— my recycled name, which translates crown of thorns— & a deep, deep voice that screamed inside alleles. The tale they read me to sleep about a failed Hermit crab didn’t help. He couldn’t tell a conch shell from a soup can, ended up alone, muttering to himself. That I was my still-born, not-to-be elder brother was my ur-myth, my ur-belief, before Jesus, before the multitudes and the multiplicity, before gendered desires, denied, and the greater offence of adolescent expectations, when we crushed each another into our sex. After, Angela’s cherubic pout and arms, shoving her colicky son in his collapsible stroller thru the plaza, that “slut,” grade 8 collectively shrugged. Our frame of reference for doom was getting grounded, and cartoons. Lightning cracking open a perpetually re-ossifiying castle. Antagonist or archetype, the cross-legged blond boy with He-Man between his legs, under his crabapple tree, demanding as I passed, if you’re really a girl, lift up yr top! show me your titties! —as if anything we are is ever chosen, as in, as if any exclamation is brave, and not simply caving. Statistically speaking, he’s a father by now. What is his boy yelling, and at whom.