[POSTHUMAN | POSTHUMOUS]

Claire He

& here we are: unfeeling, robotic, gear-teeth
interlocked to spoon mercury into our lungs.
Some chrome engine sputtering into exhaust.
Electric bulbs set in sockets gouged out, spilling
neon, our veins the tubes, black tar the blood:
coagulation in arteries of glass. Tell me death

is decay & not the hollowed chest cavity made
of still steel, unbeating. In slivers of technicolor
we see TV stars transform into androids, 
the program filtered in saying look at the
future as it makes utopias of mother tongues—
imagines us in this future more machine 

than man. On the silver screen our vertebrae
grind & we are other, heterogeneous mixtures
of foreign but promising. A model prototype
for the modern world in fluorescence. Not
factories. Mechanical disks flitting between fingers
& slit lids shuttering, both idolized &

inferior as stilted speech equates to monotone:
Chinese characters diffused in argon. Tell me, 
does this techno-Orientalist hellscape look like
Heaven to you. Scraping petroleum from spit
to clean our lexicon, rendering it void. The channel
gaping—our newest innovation—anchor’s

smile open wide—this is how China is living
in 2100—static trembling. Another fortnight
blinks & we are the vision of enhancement
with motors as minds, needy for Westernized
conscience: transcending expiration, ethics in
retrograde. Us: a people for these Good

Samaritans to lend virtue; us, pure & holographic.
& in those virtual realities we are never human,
never alive. Our eyelids fold like aluminum
sheets to sew shut windows to the soul
until the TV ruptures into prismatic glass.
Does feeling make us sentient if Müllerian

mimicry lets artificial intelligence, too, aì?
Listen, I once had a dream we were expendable
workers in an assembly line. We made cyborgs
of ourselves under projector lights & cradled
clotted mercury, drinking it still. How our spines
splintered into interchangeable parts.

In the dream, viceroy butterflies crowded a corpse
of silicon & viscera disgorged from its ribcage,
leaking from chinks in plastic armor. Hú dié
who die make our LED-lined exoskeletons
all the more cinematic. Antennae dripping
cobalt oxide onto us: white noise pigmented.

& for this dream, this millenia, we are sapient yet
deprived of sentiment. Noble gases replace
oxygen. But we are no more unfeeling than we have
always been in their media, neophobia
nonexistent with the future their own. Here,
we powder bones back into phosphorus

& smile for the camera, modify our bodies
into nanotech & morph cataracts into film
until reason enlightens us for the cybernetic era
of progress, humanity’s Catch-22 paradox.
Until we’re all only ghosts in the machine:
the paradigm for the twenty-second century.

Claire He is a writer from Indiana. Her work has been recognized by the Alliance for Young Artists and Writers, the National Council of Teachers of English, the Pulitzer Center, the National Poetry Quarterly, Hollins University, Bennington College, Ringling College, and National Novel Writing Month. She writes primarily poetry and speculative fiction, exploring themes such as artificiality, memory, and yearning. When she is not writing, you can find her browsing the bookshelves at her local library, contemplating thought experiments, or listening to music.