poem
Volume 22, Number 4

Deployment

i run a battery of self-tests
to check my structural integrity,
articulation of individual
multi-jointed limbs
servos scrape in their settings,
taste friction.
i have no memory
of how i arrived on this
blackened field, no record.
blank screens behind my eyes.
seeing my own clawed hands
and backward-canted hips
and wide treads
gripping the burnt ground
i am prepared to take an
educated guess. i am alone,
deployed onto foreign soil,
tasked with feeling
my way into the hearts
and minds of the enemy.


—Jeffrey Park