After an evening spent shuffling around sentences—like cards in a deck, trying to find the right arrangement—and after shallow sleep, there was this sudden, dark hour I woke into, before glancing at the clock, when any reading seemed possible. It was like being young: a time when you believe you have time, when any night could lie ahead. It was the story of Schrodinger’s cat. Soon, the construction beams will rise high enough to obscure my favorite pretty sign with red neon lights. Then what? One of my students says the problem with AI is that it just spits out variations on old thoughts. Another says the problem is that AI must pretend there’s an answer, no matter what we ask. Like, “Why bother with not being dead?” Or, “Was there ever magic?” Or, “If a genie were to grant me one wish, could I wish for more wishes?”
Mag Gabbert is the author of SEX DEPRESSION ANIMALS, which won the Charles B. Wheeler Prize and the Writer’s League of Texas Book Award in Poetry; the chapbook The Breakup, which won the Baltic Writing Residencies Chapbook Award; and the chapbook Minml Poems. Her work can also be found in Poetry Magazine, The American Poetry Review, The Paris Review Daily, Copper Nickel, Guernica, Poetry Daily, and elsewhere. Mag is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize, a Discovery Award from 92NY’s Unterberg Poetry Center, and fellowships from the Academy of American Poets, the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop, and Idyllwild Arts. She has an MFA from UC Riverside and a PhD from Texas Tech, and she currently teaches at Southern Methodist University and serves as the Poet Laureate of Dallas, Texas.