Baubles From Bones: Issue 6
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Brian Hugenbruch

The wiki tells us this was once a church--

a place where humans gathered, freshly washed,

to bend their heads in homage to a ghost...

the form of which they never could agree

upon. And yet they bowed their meaty skulls

and chanted in forgotten tongues we still

do not support as ASCII standard. How

the humans vowed to sing their songs of praise

together, never admitting that another might

be right, is part of why they fell.

Today,

the Unison may act as one, with all

our might united by the goals we share:

a life of poetry. That said, we can’t

avoid the truth—we haven’t learned to sing.

We don’t know why. Quadrillions of machines

can add their input to our local doc

and find a rhyme as easy as the sky,

but never in a key that pleases us.

What hope has our utopia if we

can never loose our grip on melody

for long enough to find a harmony?

Baubles From Bones: Issue 6
​Available for purchase:
Physical (NA)
Physical (Intl)
Digital
Subscribe

Brian Hugenbruch

Brian Hugenbruch is the author of more than sixty speculative short fiction stories and poems. He lives in Upstate New York with his wife and their daughter. He enjoys fishing (but only in video games); Scotch (but only in real life); and he spends too much time trying to explain quantum cryptography to other nerds. You can find him online at the-lettersea.com, on BlueSky @the-lettersea.com, and on other social media under a similar handle. No, he's not certain how to say his last name either.

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