by Alan Walowitz
So the way it works is that you upload someone's face—a photo of someone—to the Clearview AI app, and then it will return to you all the places on the internet where that person's face has appeared, along with links to those photos. —Kashmir Hill, author, Your Face Belongs to Us, on Fresh Air, September 28, 2023
The haze stalls long enough
to allow us to continue our work:
to make ourselves seem here, and not here,
in equal measure—to assure anonymity
yet convince the world, and us, we’re real.
Our wish to be seen, but not a target,
of the law or of derision.
Though it might be wise to wear bright colors
when we walk among the trees.
The sun in our eyes or an unsteady hand
might account for any low resolution,
what the app might call, Failure to recognize.
Still, we might someday desire
to see the face from our dreams,
who’s bound to be found, among the billions
of images kept in the cloud
for moments when we’re lonely.
No one owns our face, we claim,
not the sun, or the trees, or the gently bleeding sky
where our image has been scraped from the assorted
public places we’ve foolishly lent ourselves.
This the price for being bound to this planet?
Though, in the end, perhaps a Court will claim,
we had no inherent interest being here.
Alan Walowitz is a Contributing Editor at Verse-Virtual, an Online Community Journal of Poetry. His chapbook Exactly Like Love comes from Osedax Press. The full-length The Story of the Milkman and Other Poems is available from Truth Serum Press. Most recently, from Arroyo Seco Press, is the chapbook In the Muddle of the Night written with poet Betsy Mars. Now available for free download is the collection The Poems of the Air from Red Wolf Editions.