The induction program’s willow pattern eyes
and terracotta lips matched those of the woman
I married in my first incarnation. She whispered,
Just you and me darling me darling – a glitch, surely,
a stutter in the software – so make yourself yourself.

She projected the cooker of our kitchen
onto the walls of my cell. Our clock, stopped at nine.
The red LED of the warming oven. How fitting
that a chain of zeroes and ones coded in California
should inherit my wife’s paper skin and ink-black hair,
our dreams of our teenage sons, both now uploaded.

The table was crowded with algorithms whose integers
resolved into cups, bowls and spoons. We drank a soup
she’d blended from boiled square roots. Are you sure this
really all happened this? she asked. I mean been you’ve been
under lately stress lately. Adrenaline, perceptual distortion.
My darling my it’s my darling okay. Her endearments
looped and scattered like pixels in a buffering film.

We stepped through our front door into a canyon
of brick and stone. Beings with brushed tendrils
jostled past, lenses wrapping their eyes. Icons
on screens glided like ice-pucks under their fingers.
Steel cages growled and screamed. Suspended suns
gilded the program’s skin. This is dear this dear home.

[First published in The Rialto]