B. J. Best, “dimes of whiskey”

dimes of whiskey

you want to fall,
now washing smoke
in the sparkled harbor

as a calm hammock
hangs the forest of craters
and small waves.

my relocable mother
would shower water
in the curlicues of stars.

oh, i’ve moved me
with a boat, my feathers
twinkling in the wind,

and i love how you
order dimes of whiskey
to burn off the lake,

the excalfous ashes,
the sleeping hours
of the swan.

 

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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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