Lemonade
That night I knew you left and took her in
I imagined you played with her buttons feverishly
That scene played on repeat in my sad head
You pressed, she pressed. Remember
I placed you in rice, and reset you? I let you rise again.
And now you want me back? It makes no algorithmic
sense. Maybe you are just lonely, since she left
or it’s hard to let me go. When they soldered
us together, the solder overflowed.
That should have been the first sign. She left
you a virus, you say? I told you she
was a low-grade version with a mean glitch.
Damaged hardware and software. Nothing to update.
But baby, yes, you know. I still want all the bits of you.
This selection comes from the collection Love, Robot, available from The Operating System. Order your copy here. Our curator for December is Jessica Rae Bergamino.
Margaret Rhee is a poet, artist, and scholar. She is the author of chapbooks Yellow (Tinfish Press, 2011) and Radio Heart; or, How Robots Fall Out of Love (Finishing Line Press, 2015), nominated for a 2017 Elgin Award, Science Fiction Poetry Association. Her project The Kimchi Poetry Machine was selected for the Electronic Literature Collection Volume 3. Literary fellowships include Kundiman, Hedgebrook, and the Kathy Acker Fellowship. She received her Ph.D. from UC Berkeley in ethnic and new media studies. Currently, she is a Visiting Scholar at the NYU A/P/A Institute, and a Visiting Assistant Professor at SUNY Buffalo in the Department of Media Study.
Jessica Rae Bergamino is the author of UNMANNED, forthcoming from Noemi Press, as well as the chapbooks The Desiring Object or Voyager Two Explains to the Gathering of Stars How She Came to Glow Among Them (Sundress Publications), The Mermaid Singing (dancing girl press), and Blue in All Things: a Ghost Story (dancing girl press). Individual poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in Third Coast, Black Warrior Review, Colorado Review, and Southern Humanities Review. She is a doctoral student in Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Utah, where she serves as Reviews Editor for Quarterly West.
Fantastic write
i really dig the last stanza
” She left
you a virus, you say? I told you she
was a low-grade version with a mean glitch.
Damaged hardware and software. Nothing to update.
But baby, yes, you know. I still want all the bits of you.”
it leaves me with the idea of being broken but still longing with no update in sight.
great writing.