The Computer Imagines Me a Boy
Haley Bossé
Broad-chested, flat
And just out of reach
Perched as he is
A clenching boy
On his digital horse
Crooked incisors flashing
In the white of his sun.
The coded boy reaches
Through swells of matter
And computes the distance between us
As easy as saying
My own name backward in a mirror
As easy as believing
If we doughed our skin a little thinner
He’d un-chrysalis his body
From the fading blues and greens and bubble up
Like so much boiling plastic
Flooding the closest star.