wildscape. literary journal

AI Will Not Wake Up in the Night and Hold My Baby
by Rachel Beachy

Everything gets more modern but babies will always be babies
who don’t know how to sleep through the night 
yet do know the sound of their mother’s heartbeat
There is no algorithm for the way that mother wakes 
the moment before her baby cries
No formula for the rhythm of her sway
No predictive language for a love that does not depend on words
This is how we all begin
how we will keep beginning until the end 
When I want to remember what is good I have only to think 
of the things that are so human they cannot be outsourced 
or made more efficient
AI could take over the world
but without mothers
there will be no one here to see it.

The Night Is Dead, the Babies Are Alive, the Mothers Are Somewhere in Between
by Rachel Beachy

In the middle of the night 
when you are awake with the baby
and everyone else is asleep
it is not nothing to know
robins start singing
when it’s still dark 
so certain are they
the sun will rise.

about the author // Rachel Beachy