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Poem with Human Intelligence

By J. Estanislao Lopez

This century is younger than me.
It dresses itself
in an overlong coat of Enlightenment thinking
despite the disappearing winter.
It twirls the light-up fidget spinner
won from the carnival of oil economies.
In this century, chatbots write poems
where starlings wander from their murmuration
into the denim-thick clouds of a storm.
When the chatbots inevitably learn
to kill their darlings,
we’ll ask if we are their darlings,
we’ll dive further inward if not or if so.
In films, the intelligent computer always arrives
at a misunderstanding of the human soul
because it lacks our ability
to lie to ourselves.
To feign hope and love through disillusion.

Poet Bio

Author photo of J Estanislao Lopez

J. Estanislao Lopez is the author of We Borrowed Gentleness (Alice James Books, 2022), a finalist for the 2023 Texas Institute of Letters John A. Robert Johnson Award. His poems have been featured in The New Yorker, Ploughshares, Poetry magazine, The Rumpus,Best American Poetry, and elsewhere. Lopez earned an MFA from the Warren Wilson Program for Writers. He currently teaches in the community college system in his hometown, Houston, Texas.

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