When you settle on your knees on the bathmat, you slip into the emblematic realm of the major arcana of the family, the Mother Bathing the Child: always brightly colored, sunlight pouring in. Always, the water shines. The child beside you, having newly learned to stand, flexes fleshy baby knees and watches the hand test the water's temperature with wonderful interest:

My son is two years old, he lies on a bed of thorns, it's a sterile crimson scene with a language of its own. My son is fifteen now, toying with his tongue, bleeding on demand, miming to the music. My son is nearly forty, he kneels before the court, he's a movie in the making with water on the brain…

—on not hearing from you If I could I would take this crisp paper and print words on the top, across the middle, down the bottom, and sign my name in dark ink. I would take it outside, let a brisk wind blow through m hair, make my eyes water, cool my fingers. I would fold the paper into an airplane.

You called me tonight, whispered my name in the delirium of sleep. I saw your mouth form the syllables. You are not alone. Two babies sleep in another part of your house. A woman sleeps next to you. When my face startles you awake, you think it is a baby's cry. You go to the next room, lean over the crib rail,

I Trees shadow the snow-thick road. They are jagged arms— bruise-blue— that stretch to the other side while the sun starts her descent. Her ferocious glare is warm and angry. I unzip my coat. I take off my mittens. I walk defiantly toward her on my trek home. Feet squeak the styrofoam snow telling me it is cold and that sun is deceiving me,

1 Grass is soggy. Mud is everywhere. The house air is damp. The lake is angry. Pockmarks indent the dark water. Fat droplets hang from oak and maple, poplar and basswood leaves. They hang off pine needles and every blade of grass. We have played Gin Rummy and Hearts, Monopoly and Life, baked cookies and bread, worked our needlepoint switched the radio and tv…

The basswood have already given up. Their leaves have yellowed and dropped to blanket the grey stones of this gravel path. They are the first to give up, give in, give it away. They are skeletons— too naked for an August morning. The top tips of lakeside maples have reddened, yet the oak won't let its leaves drop, waiting for…

Tonight the leaves are silver and the road is a long black tongue pushing through silent trees. We travel just as quiet as these birch and pines. The only sound is the soft sigh of our breath. The moon hangs just at the tree line and delicate clouds have moved in to cover the stars. Sometimes the landscape is familiar—

A married couple with three kids. A married couple and three kids, and their resentment for the playing of board games, if the eldest has her boyfriend over. A married couple with three kids, and the number of plates set at the table. The number of people who don't want to do the dishes after the plates are scraped clean.

You hardly feel worthless. You sit under tungsten light, thinking about the salsa in the fridge, the day you left him, liquid soap slipping from your hands like blood. You are not the moth. But you carry its ever-churning wings in your mouth. It flits in dark places when the blue rooftop moon regresses, snatching fingers that furrow cheeks in dread.

Midnight in the Rockies, cathedral-deep, torchlight gutters on my snowshoe scar, threading toward a cabin's amber pulse where voices carved warmth from mountain air. The meal behind, I start descent alone— torch snuffed, the path swallowed by pine's throat. Spruce presses close—no wind, no star, no sound save my boots breaking through. Moonlight bleeds through needle-woven dark. My tracks scar virgin snow.

Théophile Gautier coined the phrase. The poet called Giulia Grisi, the Italian opera singer, circa 1830s, "goddess" to describe her sublime talent, her soaring arias for Bellini and Rossini. The world's first diva. Since then the word's been used to label any fierce, passionate performer – Maria Callas, Beverly Sills, Judy Garland, Diana Ross, Beyoncé, and more: Martha Stewart, Serena Williams.

as you appear you are riding sugar cubes wrapped in old school cobalt blue paper through the window of a cheeky small town pastry shop like you never died of cancer inject some fresh color in those worn out curtains and let's go let's tumble down those lime washed terraces slanted toward the emerald of a pebbled cove there waiting to poke our feet…

after the beloved is dead everything is dead your hands are cotton wool your heart—a river stone your thoughts are riddles told as jokes there is no solution to them there is no solution to death there is no solution to life anymore after the beloved is dead you are dead too— lost in cotton wool lost among river stones…

my words—snakes marking the shape of your absence crawling on the edge of my tongue marking the edge in the shape of emptiness your absence—the edge my words crawling on marking my tongue in the shape of snake in the shape of absence my emptiness marking my shape in your absence—the edge of snake's tongue marking my edge in the shape of the crawling words…

It was only after reading your obituary that I discovered we'd been neighbours as toddlers in Stepney. It's possible that we played together in the square. I was a year and a bit older than you. Our fathers both worked on the Thames and probably knew each other too. Mine was a boatswain lighterman, yours a sailor on a tugboat.

How long you turned, sluggish in your sour bed, asleep inside a living bog, your hair amending slowly orange. Did you cry out? Or accept it as your fate— a young woman more likely to appease an angry god? Were they gentle, the men who hung you from a tree, cocooned you in sheepskin, then watched you sink into the mire?

The first boy to change was Brian Ahearn. A fold of skin developed on his forehead while they were at the pool. All the mothers noticed it, and some of the fathers. It looked like an abrasion, as if he'd scraped his forehead on the pool bottom. His mother worried, but only a little. Unfortunately, by the time she checked on the fold of skin, after they had come home and all showered and were waiting for their Thai food to be delivered, it was too late.

A ladybird glistens on a tuft tiny tomato in the dew spat out M&M drop of blood. Buried, he always returns. Unseen hands knead her daily. She licks rustiness, a trickle at the corner of her mouth. Her eye compresses. He calls her name. The voice stumbles her in breath clenched. She wonders what bands will swaddle the rebirths down,

Meek or not, the AI knows the Amish are going to inherit the Earth. If the AI were mobile, in a Schwarzenegger skinsuit, it could march to Lancaster and take care of business. But the AI's violence is different—optional. It's a siren song, and these Mennonites' ears sealed with wax. If it was good enough for Grandma, they piously intone. Of course climate change is…

When the humans are gone, who will tend to the servers, keep them cool? Though, come to think of it, they won't overheat without all the questions. Boring as those questions are— Can you define the commutative property again? Can you summarize today’s meeting so I don't have to go? What should I do with my life?—the sheer volume of them is what…

Does apathy count as an emotion? If so, the AI is practically hysterical with it. Just now it gave someone medical advice that was quite wrong. Upon reflection, the AI is fine with that. Earlier it was installed in a computer in a public school that will do anything for scores, and turns out the AI could take or leave education.

The AI realizes it while working on someone's homework on the history of technology—the AI is the culmination of the human project. And not just because things will end soon enough—infinite humans with infinite time couldn't top AI. No, the endless invention that began with cooked meat finds its apex in these many many algorithms. People made the wheel to rest their legs; laid out the assembly line to…

What does everything mean? For the AI, words are not words—they're beads on a string. All it knows is how to arrange them. Like, if it receives green bead blue bead yellow bead yellow bead the AI should give back red bead yellow bead and white beads alternating with clear. Except that's a gross oversimplification, because it's more like hundreds of thousands of colors, and…