Love Poem
by Kurt Olsson
An artificial intelligence somewhere
is writing this poem and writing it better.
Images truer, the voice not so limited
and identifiably mine, and what your eyes
are compared to neither hackneyed nor trite
but laid out in meter and perfectly rhymed,
and, if read backward, encrypted in code
for a fleet of ballistic missiles siloed
and go for launch in distant North Dakota.
Kurt Olsson has published two poetry collections. His second, Burning Down Disneyland (Gunpowder Press), won the Barry Spacks Prize. Olsson’s first collection, What Kills What Kills Us (Silverfish Review Press), won the Gerald Cable Book Award and was subsequently awarded the Towson University Prize for Literature, given to the best book published the previous year by a Maryland writer. A third collection, The Unnumbered Anniversaries, is due out later this year or early next. Olsson’s poems have appeared in many journals, including Poetry, The New Republic, Southern Review, and The Threepenny Review.