by Murray Silverstein
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AI-generated graphic by NightCafé for The New Verse News.
Feed the poems to the bot
all the ones that ever were
and tell it, “Write the next one,
and, please, the one after that.”
After making everything prior to you,
life made you. Artificial
Intelligence is no more artificial
than us: us giving birth
to us. A Trump's been in us all along,
slouching toward D. C.
Hamlet, too. The mackerel-crowded sea
is us giving birth
to
nothing
but
us.
Murray Silverstein’s third book of poems, Red Studio, appeared Spring 2024 from Sixteen Rivers Press. He has been published in RATTLE, The Brooklyn Review, Cape Rock Poetry, Spillway, Poetry East, West Marin Review, RUNES, Nimrod, Connecticut Review, ZYZZYVA among others. He has authored two previous books of poetry, Master of Leaves (2014) and Any Old Wolf (2007), the latter of which received Independent Publisher’s Bronze Medal for Poetry in 2006. Silverstein is the senior editor of the anthology America, We Call Your Name: Poems of Resistance and Resilience (2018), winner of the Independent Publisher’s Silver Medal for Anthologies in 2017. All were published by Sixteen Rivers Press. A retired architect, Silverstein co-authored four books about architecture, including A Pattern Language (Oxford University Press) and Patterns of Home (The Taunton Press), and lives in Oakland, California.
