Michelle Patton

Letter to Mark Zuckerberg’s AI

We are still gathering data

but it doesn’t look good

for your plastic plans. We

are dizzy with nausea. Your

face is killing us. Do you recall

the smell of your mother’s hands?

Where are your pupils? Can you

make a small fire with only your eyes?

When was the last time you felt

embarrassed? Do you play an instrument,

preferably the clarinet? Is your machine

of loneliness a Gena Rowlands or more

Lauren Bacall? Do you forget

who you used to want to be?

Is your math incorrect but beautiful?

Do not dismay. You are wretched

and everyone loathes you. Oh,

but you know the truth, know it down

to the place where your heart should be.

Letter to Elon Musk’s AI

Are we nearly perfect now, gleaming

with bankruptcy and a hole in the head

where desire once lived?

Tell me what it’s like

to be a building made of nothing

but numbers and intentions, be they bad

or simply stupid. Can you remember

the quality of your mother’s laugh?

I want to absolve you

in this new phase. I am writing to you

from a world sinking into cold waters.

I am holding out my arm, my hand

still shining like a knife in the river.

Michelle Patton received an MFA in Creative Writing from California State University, Fresno. She won the Ernesto Trejo Award for poetry in 2003 and was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her poems have been published or are forthcoming in The Atlanta Review, Southern Poetry Review, Zyzzyva, Prairie Schooner, Calyx, and others. She teaches English at Fresno City College.