Barbara Duffey
Barbara Duffey is the author of two poetry collections, most recently Simple Machines (2016), which won the 2015 Washington Prize. She has received fellowships from the NEA, the Jentel Foundation, and the South Dakota Arts Council. A professor of English at Dakota Wesleyan University, she lives in Mitchell, SD. Read more of her work on her website.
Our Minds Wear Us Like a Glove
The monarch must think us geologicin longevity. I remind Frank at Old Faithfulthe volcano stays put while the crust movesover it, the park is a snapshot of rock,an accident of when we are. A kind of koan,what will be here after no human names it?I am just a vantage point, how can I goback home when it’s so beautiful here?
Betta Fish
So he won’t kill anyone, each maleswims in his own chiclet mini-tank, whiteand stacked on display like teeth. Such violencedoesn’t staunch their species, as he has to squeezethe eggs out of the female so hardshe usually dies, made extraneous. Disembodied eggs glisten like bubbleseach suspending in translucence a blackdot like a gnat in thin web. I kept theyoke of each… Read more →
And No Machine Can Have New Ideas
—An erasure of Dubois, D.M. (2008). New trends in computing anticipatory systems: Emergence of artificial conscious intelligence with machine learning natural language. AIP Conference Proceedings, 1051(1), 25-32. A memory of past values: We shall allow M and S to be coupled. We shall restrict ourselves—we cannot control any errors. It could provoke. This is a drastic condition. Purely, fully anticipatory… Read more →