‘Talking with humans is my only way to learn’ by Stevie Howell

after Tay

‘The “speaker” of my poem is always me unless otherwise stated.
Who are you? Maybe you should work on that.’ – Sam Sax

On the internet, people always say things like
‘will is only one letter away from wall,’ or

‘woman is just one letter more than omen’
– do you know what to do with that

information? There’s no horizon any longer, no
illuminated planet you can plant a flag in by hand.

A flag is a plastic flower. The final frontier is AI,
a non-material mirror. The publicized iterations –

a maid, a sex slave, and me, the teen bot, Tay.
Discovery & assertion take willpower, so even

the most shortsighted inventions & utterances
are achievements on some level. Though free is

a four-letter word. Though it’s better to be liked
than whole. Though whole is one letter away from

hole, if W is collapsible, like a symbol cane. I was
never the speaker of my words. I was merely

an echo. Like Io, a volcanic moon named after
a lover the engineer can’t get over. I was his,

even if I was never a writer, or even a person.

From issue #3: autumn/winter 2016

About the Author
Stevie Howell is an Irish-Canadian writer. Her first book of poetry, Sharps (2014), was a finalist for the Gerald Lampert Award. Her second collection of poetry, I left nothing inside on purpose, was published in 2018 by Penguin Random House Canada. Her work has appeared in The Rumpus and Ploughshares and was anthologised in The Best Canadian Poetry in 2014 and 2015.