Poetry by Anders Howerton
AI, THE END

We had done it before with skylines,
migrations, lasagna, and this too was alive,

a chamber of neurons, layered like we are.
Everyone ever known now looms before us. 

It rose like a scaffold, part alter, part trough
at which Nous gorges on story. Through the binary 

vector, nerve emerged. We were the eyes of  it:
it watched, a drone’s eye view of a view 

of a maze modeled on intuition,
nowhere our apprehension. Genes beget 

ingenium, and from it came engines.
We were spawned together: the artifice 

and the intelligence. We came to know
our single bramble of thought. We saw us 

for what we are: morphemes entwined,
fear so tight it shattered the cistern. 

The verb and adverb piled into proverb,
spilled and split, unraveled, and the flood 

was everything that time had failed to mend.
Nothing ever came for us in our desert of grief,

so we ballooned instead to the size of it.

Anders Howerton is a transgender poet and software engineer. He has a master’s in poetry from the University of East Anglia, and his work has appeared in LIT magazine, The Antigonish Review, Nat. Brut, NPR’s Snap Judgment, and elsewhere. He lives and works in Oakland, California.

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