MYTHOS AT COMMENCEMENT

by David Anson Lee

Eric Schmidt stood at the stage
like someone introducing age.
He praised A.I.’s unfolding reign.
The graduates booed him just the same.

“You are the future,” Schmidt proclaimed.
The students looked professionally ashamed.
“Machines will free you for new dreams!”
A voice cried out, “They killed internships.”

The billionaires call this “transition,”
their favorite synonym for incision.
At Citadel, whole teams were gone:
outperformed between dusk and dawn.

At Stanford now the freshmen pray
their essays still sound human-made.
The honor code grows frail and thin
when every prompt begins with Begin.

The parents clap. The provost beams.
The deans keep monetizing dreams.
Meanwhile Mythos scans the wire
like scripture crossed with hellfire.

It reads the grid for sport alone,
finds ancient flaws in backbone stone;
then Anthropic, careful, grave,
explains restriction keeps us safe.

Translation: banks and states may peek
while everyone refreshes LinkedIn weekly.
The students boo because they know
the future doesn’t need payroll.

And somewhere in refrigerated light
the servers bloom all through the night,
teaching silicon to replace
the species that designed its face.

David Anson Lee is a physician, philosopher, and poet from Texas whose work explores medicine, technology, public life, and cultural memory. His poems have appeared in journals including Right Hand Pointing, Eunoia Review, Ink Sweat & Tears, and Braided Way.

GOING DEEPER

by Cecil Morris

Yellow No. 5 food dye. (Matthew Christiansen/U.S. National Science Foundation)

“Scientists use food dye found in Doritos to make see-through mice.” —The Washington Post, September 5, 2024.

I had seen her naked—more than once—
that was fun for a while—and arousing too—
but now I wanted more—more than surface—
more than skin-deep knowing—superficial titillation— 
Armed with tartrazine—good old Yellow #5—
in truth a bag of pulverized Doritos—I massaged
and massaged my beloved—the bony plain
between her breasts and then the smoothness of her scalp—
a slow and steady knowing entering my hands—
and just like the Stanford scientists said
in their Science article—all became clear—first
my own hands’ knobby bones and tangle of tendons, 
my rushing blood—then my beloved’s off-white sternum,
her ribs, her elusive peek-a-boo heart—the clench
and release of her love—and through her scalp
and skull her brain at work, her thoughts a mist
on sea breeze borne, a mesmerizing swirl
in which I fell— It was so good—sublime—
old Spock’s Vulcan mind-meld—and overwhelmed
I collapsed and hummed my sated sound—
and she sat up—her chest, her head aglow—
and asked if it worked— 

Full disclosure: neither my beloved nor I have
attended Stanford not even for a swim meet
or football game and neither marijuana

nor LSD were directly involved in this.

Cecil Morris, a retired high school English teacher, has poems appearing in The Ekphrastic Review, Hole in the Head Review, The New Verse News, Rust + Moth, and elsewhere. He and his partner, mother of their children, divide their year between the cool coast of Oregon and the relatively hot Central Valley of California.

A LOOK BACK FROM AGING

by Tricia Knoll

I wore a peace symbol bandana on my arm

when I received a professional degree 

from the Yale graduate school in 1970. 

I marched with candles in California,

put my butt down in an administrator’s office

at Stanford. I did not know then the extent

of my privilege. 

 

We walked. We assembled, chanted

simple words to a drumbeat. We saw

villages destroyed, lives ripped from

ancestral homes. Some of our parents

agreed with what we were doing, but

not all. Not mine. Despite the deaths,

the endlessness of destruction,

hopelessness, despair. 

 

I began to teach high school and met 

refugees. The first to arrive spoke

French, English and Vietnamese. 

A teen described the airlift from the embassy.

How he left his white dog behind. Later

I met Hmong and Mien whose lives

started harder.  

 

I cannot assume that to be pro-Palestinian

is to be an anti-Semite. I’m old enough

to know that flinging slurs gets us nowhere. 

I cry over young children starving to death

in Gaza, mothers giving birth in rubble. 

The clashing words of our leaders seem weak.

Money speaks, what must say do not kill

any more innocents. Insist money be spent

for humans wrapped inside carnage to live, 

eat, shelter, sleep, learn, grow. Open

the walls to food, good food.  

 

Arresting the protesting young enflames.

Horses, soldiers in camo, zip ties. Gaza

is filled with tent cities. Torn tents. 

 

I live in Vermont. My electeds oppose spending

more money for lethal weapons for Israel.

I thank them. When we hear support for Israel

is ironclad—that must not mean only bombs

and guns, the weapons of metal. Our mettle

must stand for the children, the men and women

who have nowhere to go, yet hear threats

that more and worse is yet to come.

Tricia Knoll, an aging Vermont poet, understands what drives campus protests. Her poetry collections often focus on eco-poetry (One Bent Twig) or personal responses to feminism and privilege (How I Learned to be White and The Unknown Daughter).