MyHeritage.com
By Brianna Cunliffe
an AI bot turns me into my ancestors
dresses me up in calico, gouges my eyes
to shadow, unhinges my jaw, adds extra
limbs. maybe they would see me like this:
hungry, eldritch thing. only daughter.
they who owned that meat market in that
splinter of the city less a neighborhood
than a factory of grist, ledger
of naturalization dues paid through the teeth
cabbage stewing, four fingers, one for the steel, washed in
buckets of soap and water and—
my mom still calls it a Braddock bath
when we clean ourselves that way
during hurricanes, travel, during leaner months
a washcloth, touched to our softest, tenderest parts
this scarcity, this deluge
this software turns my strength to pudgy pixel
as its algorithm turns my ancestors over in its jaws
If these things are to be believed, my great-great grandmother had
nine children and only two lived past twenty.
If these things are to be believed, I am barely recognizable
when I join their cast of ghosts
and garble out my womanhood
for clicks, for abundance beyond all imaginings
when I rise from misimagined histories
to seize tomorrow
in my still-grinding teeth
Brianna Cunliffe is an environmental justice activist and storyteller. As a queer woman who grew up on a disintegrating Carolina coastline, her work is animated by fierce love of the fragile places we call home. She’s a Best of the Net nominated poet with work published in Revolute, Reckoning Magazine, Lucent Dreaming, Storm Cellar, Claw and Blossom, Blind Corner, and more, and you can find her on Twitter @BriannaCunliffe.