J. Estanislao Lopez is the author of We Borrowed Gentleness (Alice James Books, 2022), a finalist for the 2023 Texas Institute of Letters John A. Robert Johnson Award. His poems have been featured in The New Yorker, Ploughshares, Poetry magazine, The Rumpus,Best American Poetry, and elsewhere. Lopez earned an MFA from the Warren Wilson Program for Writers. He currently teaches in the community college system in his hometown, Houston, Texas.
More By This Poet
Poem with Human Intelligence
This century is younger than me.
It dresses itself
in an overlong coat of Enlightenment thinking
despite the disappearing winter.
It twirls the light-up fidget spinner
won from the carnival of oil economies.
In this century, chatbots write poems
where starlings wander from their murmuration
into the denim-thick...