The Robots are Coming

with clear-cased woofers for heads, no eyes. They see us as a bat sees a mosquito—a fleshy echo, a morsel of sound. You've heard their intergalactic tour busses purring at our stratosphere's curb. They await counterintelligence transmissions from our laptops and our blue teeth, await word of humanity's critical mass, our ripening. How many times have we dreamed it this way: the Age of the Machines, postindustrial terrors whose tempered paws—five welded fingers —wrench back our roofs, siderophilic tongues seeking blood, licking the crumbs of us from our beds. O, great nation, it won't be pretty. What land will we now barter for our lives ? A treaty inked in advance of the metal ones' footfall. Give them Gary. Give them Detroit, Pittsburgh, Braddock—those forgotten nurseries of girders and axels. Tell the machines we honor their dead, distant cousins. Tell them we tendered those cities to repose out of respect for welded steel's bygone era. Tell them Ford and Carnegie were giant men, that war glazed their palms with gold. Tell them we soft beings mourn manufacture's death as our own.