Whistleblower The air itself isn’t dark, but it feels that way. There’s no moon, no stars. Or rather, there are, but not from this vantage point. Night is a hole in the basement floor and I am a mouse searching for somewhere warm to sleep. I recently heard AI has gained sentience. A whistleblower from Google apparently leaked the story. If I’m being honest, I still can’t wrap my head around the fact that there is such a thing as man-made light. Look—we’re moving through it right now, pushing through spacetime under lamplight’s glow. At this point, celestial bodies must feel nothing but disrespect. Which must be why the sky is cloaked in a hoodie, pulling the drawstrings tight. You can’t blame it. Tonight, I am reminded that the search for warmth is not the same as wanting the clouds to part. Mice in the yard can run at speeds up to eight miles per hour. Warmth can move at the speed of light. How fast is that really when time is irrelevant?
Cold Front The door to my house is frozen shut—the air ribbon-wrapped in record lows and gusts of ice- pick gale. It’s weird: There’s a theorem that says monkeys could write the sonnets of Shakespeare if given enough time. And it’s true: press keycaps at random and its output will eventually change the world. It’s happened before and it’s happening now. Wind at certain speeds can work a keyboard, but that’s beside the point. There are hidden messages stretched across the terrain already, from mountainsides at a distance to beach sand under microscope. By mid-morning, the sun in front of the house will unfreeze my exit with partial poems left behind in the thinning ice. So, too, the bone-raw draft at the window with its songs of Elizabethan English. Of course, I don’t understand a thing it’s trying to say. I am not nearly as well- read as the vigor of winter.
From the author:
Adam Gianforcaro is the author of the poetry collection Every Living Day (Thirty West Publishing House, 2023). His poems can be found in The Offing, Poet Lore, Third Coast, Northwest Review, and elsewhere. He lives in Delaware.
