B. J. Best, “what ripples are”

what ripples are

i want the bells, the sundry of sunburn
in the skin, of white that can’t be clouds.

you were the map about a kitchen of rains,
the treasure of a garden of stars.

the wind with an antique talk about water.
is the lake too sad, you with many swimming said?

windows standing in dust. sudden the talons,
and whatever we drought, you want.

who sabotages at the stars? i want the sun
pressing bones. you want the weather of flashing,

a boat simple, wind over an amazed cattail lake.

 

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B.J. Best is the author of three books and four chapbooks of poetry—most recently, Yes (Parallel Press, 2014). He lives in Wisconsin. His poem is a collaboration with torch-rnn, a neural network library that writes words one character at a time. The neural network was trained on Best’s own body of work from the past twenty years. The resulting poems, therefore, are his own writing rewritten by a computer, then edited by Best. Torch-rnn was created by Justin Johnson, based on work by Andrej Karpathy. It lives on GitHub.

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