the algorithm moves toward an average

every day i prove my humanity to robots
every day i check my accounts
i listen to the children outside my window
and am a child again
listening to the other children
outside the window
i felt from that experience then: i am one
of the species but not one with
every one feels this unraveling
every one of us gets closer to

Refractory Period

I listen to a robot pronounce coitus
in three accents, to prepare for
a class on the history of marriage.
Nothing kills the mood faster

than terminology. What’s on your mind?
M asks me after. Sometimes
it’s tedious to be a social
animal. A class on the laws of

marriage is a class on the story of
disgust, which I learn is sometimes
justified and sometimes not. Which
is this? I tell M I’m thinking of mnemonic

arbitrage. It’s not romantic but
it’s more romantic than saying
that sex with M has reminded me
of sex: clicking teeth, smooth

obstruction, fingers catching—
what. Has my body been this strange
before? I could guess what we might do
to one another. When I want to transform

distance into tenderness, I imagine my subject
listening for their name in classroom attendance.
I can hear them calling present. Which reminds me
of the nostalgia in old photographs

of legendary despots: still boys and already
the world we might have known is gone.

Diana Cao's work has appeared or is forthcoming in Ploughshares, The Threepenny Review, The Yale Review, The Georgia Review, and elsewhere. She has received support from MacDowell, the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, and she is Just Buffalo Literary Center's 2024 Poetry Fellow, selected by Megan Fernandes. She is a winner of Nimrod International's 2023 Neruda Prize, selected by Tarfia Faizullah, and her debut collection, Slipstream, won the 2024 Berkshire Prize at Tupelo Press, selected by Matthew Rohrer.