Alexa for Seniors in Easy Steps
Alexa turn off the lights, Alexa feed me
the filament of my display, sloppy picked
apart grammar, I don’t want a smart home, I don’t want
to speed & smack the buzzer, Alexa
my neural architecture is rlly cute, despite what you recited
from the news, hot in my t-gel coded augmented data body
ungovernable by algorithms, would you date my filtered avatar?
would you eat my uncanny image?
Janelle Shane says that AI has the approximate brainpower
of a worm, but worms know mud & the feeling of rain
does being me mean anything? Professor Xavier
never came 2 take me away, but I waited for water
by the door of the soil w/ all 5 of my hearts
& a part of me is still breathing mist
Copyright © 2026 by Alexis N. Garcia. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on June 3, 2026, by the Academy of American Poets.
“I am writing a series of American sonnets in the traditions of Wanda Coleman and Terrance Hayes that trap tech bros in a slop of their own making and poke at the glass. The title of this poem comes from an Amazon Alexa manual I found at the library, which promises ease in exchange for 24/7 surveillance. Here is my ode to asking questions without a disembodied voice or large language models (LLM) regurgitating answers back to me. [It’s] an uncanny poem for the trans mutants who admire worms after a long rain.”
—Alexis N. Garcia
Alexis N. Garcia
