Artificial Intelligence

Sometimes I watch AI videos of toddlers doing stand-up, or an America’s Got Talent performance where a woman turns into a swan & it brings Simon Cowell to tears. It’s okay to engage in disbelief, even if it’s not even real disbelief, even if there’s a layer over it, a sheath, our eyes shaded from the…world? I want to say world but I’m not totally sure I remember where I was going with this. Yesterday my son went down the slide, over & over, until it felt like he was on a loop, & then he kept going more. He screamed when we left. He screamed so loud I thought we’d be struck down by a god’s lightning. It was real, that scream. It was beautifully real.

On the Shore of the Gulf of Mexico

My father & my father’s brother & my father’s
other brother—I’m sounding, I know,
like I’m some place between Bob Newhart
& the begettings of Jesus—
walk their bodies into the salt water,
out deeper & deeper. I begin to think of them
not as family but as bobbing heads
until they emerge high again on the first sandbar.
How I miss the traditions: fishing
under the stars, my grandfather—
shit, I think. Time has made him
so distant a memory that I can’t place him
in scene, though he must have been there,
at least some of the times. That whole side
of my bloodline was never my side
of my bloodline: a stranger amongst bodies
that have my eyes, my hair, my own
last name. I’m thinking, now, of the Gulf
as a kind of baptismal font,
but I don’t know what’s being washed clean,
or even if anything can be cleansed
in water so muddied that hands
vanish under an inch of it.

How the Fuck is Baccarat a Real Game

The man in the YouTube video is playing $2,500 hands of baccarat, losing it all like it’s nothing. I can’t make sense of the game. I’ve tried, but only in the casual way a person tries to learn something: a quick glance at the Wikipedia page, a promise to yourself that you’ll remember what you read, though you know already you won’t. My son is asleep beside me on the couch. I just finished reading a novel about a father built of drugs & violence, which makes me feel better about how I’m doing as a parent. Josh suggested I read a book, but it’s been at least six months since I started writing this & I left off after the word book, so I don’t remember what it was he wanted me to read. Time makes a fool of my brain. My son still sleeps beside me on the couch but he’s bigger now, takes up space in a way that doesn’t feel real. I haven’t thought of baccarat since the video that prompted the poem, but I’m sure, at the casino on the other side of this city, someone is playing it right now, & if I went there & watched them, it’d be like I was witnessing something I’d never seen before.  





Justin Carter is the author of Brazos and the editor of Some Words.

Website | Twitter | Instagram