How to Make Your Own Automaton

By Rebecca Morgan Frank

Devote yourself to the resurrection, build
a body that moves. Begin with the skin:

cast a bulwark, impermeable hardware
more malleable than meat.

Dispatch your lusus naturae
like a Trojan horse into factories

where they won’t understand what lurks
in the future. Someone’s just doing

their job: sure, the buildings remain. Yes, it will
self-destruct, wipe out its own hard drive.

Tell yourself your creations are
amusements, or machines made to do

the work and leave you to invention—as if
destruction were the sole work of others.

Tell yourself you have built something
that outlasts grief rather

than something that invents and repeats it.
Did not Daedalus grasp the danger

as he swaddled his son’s agile frame
with a cape of feathers?

And yet, what a wonder,
to see your creation launch

into flight and hover before the sun.