Poem-a-Day

      ^{—after Dante Di Stefano}

The music of smishing
hides its meaning, a type
of online fraud. Nurdle makes me
smile, until I read it’s plastic

choking the ocean. Girl Dinner
is not three plates of my mom’s
lasagna, but meager bites and leftovers. Brainrot
sounds like what it is, as does

enshittification and global
boiling. I feel a fever coming
scrolling through Merriam Webster’s
youngest words—until I hit jorts, remember

June. Soon I’ll shed these wools
of my first winter in Upstate New York,
where cold damp clusters under
skin. A word for that? I ask

the chatbot, who says, “Ooh, I love this
kind of invention” before delivering
chillmur: That creeping, whispery sensation …
subtle but insistent, like fog

slipping in. A word for fear
of chatbots? Scriptechxia. For
the breed of ennui that tempts
poets to query them

for language? Lexadeference or
verbadelegate or thinksourcing. Not
bad. Isn’t it time I peeled myself
from the couch, touched grass, 

left the digital sphere to run
my fingers through Binghamton’s hair,
the astroturf of my neighbor’s lawn? Knockoff
of what the brand AstroTurf

rolled out in Houston’s Astrodome
in 1966. The stadium’s name a nod
to the city’s NASA Mission Control,
which led the first astronauts

to land on the moon. Or did they land?
My friend swears no. I’m not sure
of much, except it’s hard to say
what’s true. We suspect the higher-ups

have hidden motives for telling us
so. The feds, my parents, their Catholic
god, AI, this sense, despite all I know
of marrow, of wind in my bones.