by Annette Sisson

For while I destroyed his hopes, I did not satisfy my own desires.
Monster, Frankenstein


If computers expunge humanity,
would their pulsing motherboards

replicate human flaws?
Drones with nervous tics

scratching themselves in public,
or cluttered microchips multiplying

data, hoarding fragments
of cursive. Perhaps some

would dab watercolor light
onto rough press paper,

glide a bow, suffer
the trembling strings to mourn.

Would the warbler’s chipped
trill, the moon-white orchid,

stir their sensors, the Luna’s
lobed wing brush

mystery into code? And if
they chose a god to humble

them, prayed to their creators’
human ashes, would we

kindle ourselves, put on
the Godhead, breathe in translucence—

claim this progeny our own?

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Annette Sisson’s poems are published in Valparaiso Poetry Review, Birmingham Poetry Review, Rust + Moth, Citron Review, Lascaux Review, Cider Press Review, Glassworks, Aeolian Harp Anthology (2023), and others. Her first book, Small Fish in High Branches, was published by Glass Lyre (May 2022), and she is finishing her second, Winter Sharp with Apples. Her poems have placed in Frontier New Voices, The Fish Anthology, and others; several have been nominated for The Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net.

by Annette Sisson

An empty wooden frame, years
layered like rings of oak, the painting
discarded—a turbulent sea and sky
scarcely divided, streaks of gray
mimicking a choleric body of water.
This strife—a chaos, a suffering.

You consider a new canvas, how
it might be stretched, fitted—perhaps
a mossy kayak, a river, its creeping
tendrils and fronds jacketing mud-
slick banks. From the mullioned
window of a rural farmhouse, black-
slatted fencing bisects fields
of grass, rusty-feathered weeds.
Crows light in tree tops an acre
away. Jabbering ducks aggravate
the sky. A northern mockingbird scats
a rhyme, and coyotes shriek into night,
their scraping laughter sandpaper on slate.
The old tumult swells.

But ducks spread their wings
on rivers of air—like paddles turning,
countering surge. The canvas beckons
these birds, this kayak bearing you
through woodlands, copper fields patched
with fencerows, crows calling from threadbare
trees high above the chalky floodplain.

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Annette Sisson is a professor at Belmont University in Nashville, TN. Besides teaching, she enjoys traveling, hiking, baking, playing piano, singing alto in choir, watching birds, and being with her family. In the last year, she has published 15 poems in 13 journals and a chapbook, A Casting Off (Finishing Line Press, 2019). She was named a BOAAT Writing Fellow (2020), won The Porch Writers’ Collective’s poetry prize (2019), and received honorable mention in Passager’s national poetry contest (2019). She is currently at work on a full-length book of poetry.