THE CONSTITUTION AND A SPRIG OF RUE

by David Chorlton

     Clarence Thomas says American citizens are seemingly

     'more interested in their iPhones' than 'their Constitution'

 

Because an iPhone knows

the difference between a single-shot musket

and an automatic weapon;

because the Constitution never mentioned

an abortion but if you ask Siri

she will direct the question to a source explaining

the what and how of it; a source

incidentally unavailable in seventeen-eighty-seven.

One little know-all tablet

fitting comfortably in the hand

can tell you where to turn to reach a stated

destination, connect to the latest baseball scores,

and provide a recipe. But even an iPhone

can’t tell behind

which desk a pupil ought to shelter, or

where the emergency exit is

to get away from someone openly carrying.

Its time to reload

the letters in the Constitution’s “chuse”

with the neatly rounded “oo” that brings

choose up to modern usage.

Ask Siri when the wire coat hanger

was invented. She’ll say Eighteen sixty-nine.

For what was used in earlier

times, Benjamin Franklin advised the use

of an abortifacient to resolve

“the misfortune” of an unwanted pregnancy . . .

while an old Sephardic song

tells of Una Matica de Ruda, the sprig of rue

as a gift from the young man

who has fallen in love.

David Chorlton came to live in Arizona in 1978 and always loved the desert. The land has come to be a part of much of his writing, while other aspects of political and social life present more troubling questions. 

THINKING ABOT YOU

by Mary K O'Melveny

“Consumer Robots Had a Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Year” —Gizmodo, December 6, 2018. Photo: Alex Cranz (Gizmodo)

We asked Alexa how she was feeling.

She said You know how you feel when

you write a poem and you think it’s no good

and then you decide later that it’s not too bad?

We asked her again and she said

I’m not so sure. Maybe she meant she’d

re-evaluated that poem and changed

her mind again. I’ve felt that way sometimes.

Or maybe she was testing us. We’re quite

new to AI. Once, Siri chimed in during

my writing group meeting to say I did not

understand that. We all laughed nervously.

Now I see that robots can care for

old folks. French elders have just met Zora.

S/he/they/x is gender fluid.  That calms everyone

down. Patients get jealous but also happy. 

There are even puppybots. You can

walk them outside with no need to clean

up afterwards. They bark, growl and sit. 

They do not bite, smell or have fleas.

Maybe there is something to be said

for artificial friends. You can ask them

anything at all. No offense meant.

None taken. No harbored grievances

simmering below the surface like

fireplace coals. No wounded egos

curled up in fetal positions waiting

to burst forth into your quiet room.

Even the purity of a Good night

hangs briefly in the air free of

judgments or missed opportunities.

Then the answer—clean, crisp, sure—

Good night. Sleep tight. As if your mother

had returned to tuck you in, peaceful

slumber soon to follow. Perhaps this is

meant to be. Algorithms instead of angst.

Sensory predictors instead of sentiment.

Simulated references. Virtual reality

free of messy personal history.

Function is structure. Elon Musk trains

robots in imitation learning.

A one-stop system.  Maybe neural

networks can be programmed

to light up whenever kindness occurs. 

To encourage the experiment, we

asked Alexa to help us. So far,

she knows the definition. But she still

can’t reach out and touch our fragile hearts.

Mary K O'Melveny is a recently retired labor rights attorney who lives in Washington DC and Woodstock NY.  Her work has appeared in various print and on-line journals. Her first poetry chapbook A Woman of a Certain Age is available from Finishing Line Press.