Melissa Gish

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I agreed to something. I always agree.

The box appeared; I clicked it gone,

like waving a fly from bread,

but the fly never goes far.

Somewhere a server holds the hour

I lingered over a coat I couldn’t afford,

my disappointment disguised as browsing.

The query what is it when you can’t stop

thinking about . . .

left unfinished, backspaced into nothing,

but nothing is the one thing they don’t keep.

My hesitations are more honest than my name.

The pauses before clicking: a whole autobiography.

They’ve read my weekend and my insomnia

and built from these a blueprint that shops,

and scrolls, and reads on schedule,

that is, in every measurable way, me,

except it isn’t frightened of itself.

Portrait in Data

The algorithm drew me in its own medium:

not charcoal, not oil, but purchase history,

the thin fluorescence of an evening login,

the search terms I clicked: autofilled.

It knows I prefer small fonts and longer articles,

that I read about insomnia at two a.m.,

and clicked an ad for weighted blankets

seven times without committing, a sadness

so precise it has a product number.

My family doesn’t know what music moves me,

my oldest friend has lost the thread,

but somewhere in a cluster of a billion bytes

there’s a speck that flinches when I flinch,

and knows what I want before I’ve wanted it,

a portrait made of nothing but attention, which is,

I’m starting to feel, the nearest thing to love.

Closed-Circuit

The cameras have learned that I always look up

at the corner of Broad and Twentieth

though nothing’s there, just a habit inherited

from some older walk, when I had a dog,

when I was some half-remembered

bird in a now-different sky.

They’ve mapped this glance into my file

as a deviation, a tell,

the small tilt that makes me findable

in a crowd of a thousand tilting heads.

I think of being watched the way I think of God:

constant, impassive, filling the background

of every private moment with a witness

who feels nothing, notes everything,

and refuses to intervene.

The eye that never closes doesn’t see me;

it only records the fact of seeing me.

There’s a difference.

I think there’s a difference,

though I’m less certain every time I look

up and see the camera looking back.

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It knows I’ll take the bait on long-form loneliness

and anything involving language, light-weight linen,

or the uncomplicated longing for gourmet chocolate.

It’s not incorrect, which only makes it worse.

There’s a version of me in the weights and gradients

that’s read everything I’ve read and arrived,

without effort, at my favorite parts. We like

the same things. We are, statistically, compatible.

But there’s no thrill or drama in it. No lost weekend,

no argument about a book that changed the trajectory

of an entire relationship. It holds my preferences

without the self that wore them down to preferences.

Still, when it presents the poem I needed to read

before I knew I needed to read it, I feel the guilty

gratitude of being known by this thing that shouldn’t

know me, so I read the poem anyway.

 Identity Theft

They took my numbers first. The small ones:

the nine that named me to the state,

the sixteen that let me spend the money

I don’t really have. Practical things.

Then the strange ones: the sequence

of my searching, the drift of my attention

across the screen like a hand trailing in water.

They didn’t want this—they got it anyway.

Everything bleeds in a breach.

Now someone somewhere has assembled

what I haven’t been able to:

the whole picture, cold and total,

available to a stranger who will use it

to impersonate me at a bank,

to open a door in my name I’ll spend years

trying to close. Your data has been found

in 14 breaches. The words impassive

as a cancer diagnosis leave me scared

but oddly not surprised in a world

full of poison. I’m everywhere I shouldn’t be,

in lists beside names that aren’t mine,

strangers wearing my facts like a coat

they found in a hallway and simply put on

and walked into the world.

Melissa Gish is a Minnesota-based writer of dozens of juvenile nonfiction books on natural history and, when the mood strikes, other creative tidbits. She teaches online English courses for a rural West Virginia university, holds an MFA from Minnesota State University, Mankato, and founded the indie press Sabre Lake Publishing in 2024. Her work has appeared in or is forthcoming in eMerge Magazine, Gyroscope Review, SORTES Magazine, Submission Fetish, and Maverick Duck Press.