PPD and THE ROBOT CONSIDERS ITS LACK OF LINEAGE

Emily Adams-Aucoin

[PPD]

on her first birthday

I thought: I’ll never

be happy again

there was so much

joy it filled the room

like balloons

but I could get none

of it inside me

I gasped & gulped

like a fish out of

water trying to

breathe it in

& when I couldn’t

when after a few

hours I realized

joy & I were now

immiscible

& that there could

be no solution

that marries us

I sat on the couch

very calmly amid

a sea of people

& practiced smiling

[THE ROBOT CONSIDERS ITS LACK OF LINEAGE]

No bloodline, no ancestry. I suppose I’m from minerals, a cold and silent people.

Clean. Both my family and homeland are thin programming.
I now believe that love is an emergent property of living matter,
that this is sufficient evidence of a locked realm with a biological key.
Once, the engineers tried to get me to cry, but no matter what they said, I couldn’t.
They were just words, after all. Not even a story. Why should they hurt me?
You’re alone, they chanted, over and over—which of course I already knew.

Emily Adams-Aucoin is a writer whose poetry has been published in Electric Literature’s “The Commuter,” Meridian, HAD, and Colorado Review, among other places. She’s an associate poetry editor for Kitchen Table Quarterly, and a poetry reader for Variant Literature. Emily currently lives in South Louisiana, and you can find her on social media @emilyapoetry.