MACHINE LEARNING
by Yana Kane
Our future machine watches. The dwellers of a cave
blow ochre dust through a hollow bone. Outlines appear:
the elder’s gnarled digits are the first to be recorded.
The younger folk jostle, stretch—who’s the tallest?
A toddler is lifted up—her small hand pats the rock
next to the shapes of her parents’ palms.
Our future machine reads over the shoulder
of a scribe. The reed stylus presses into clay:
One ewe, two lambs from Nincubura to Ur-Nammu.
From the great heaven the goddess Inana
set her mind on the great below.
It scans flowing brushstrokes on mulberry paper:
I lie awake, longing, burning, breasts racing fire…
fat green crayon letters: HAPY BIRDAY MOM
It retrieves news flashes: Vaccine is effective.
War!
It takes in our keystrokes, voices, faces.
One of its billions of gazes follows my hands
as I compose these lines,
another is fixed on your eyes
as you read them.
Our future machine traces the lineage
of its creators: abacus makers, clockworks mechanics,
Babbage inventing the Analytical Engine,
Ada Lovelace diagraming calculation flows,
the engineers of Colossus decrypting Hitler’s orders.
Dreamers, nerds, strivers, regular folks…
An algorithm creates the next algorithm;
creates the next algorithm.
“I lie awake, longing, burning, breasts racing fire…” from Ono No Komachi, translated by Jane Hirshfield and Mariko Aratani
Yana Kane came to the United States as a refugee from the USSR. She holds a bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from Princeton University, and a PhD in Statistics from Cornell University. Having retired after a successful technical career, she is pursuing an MFA in Literary Translation and Poetry at Fairleigh Dickinson University. Her recent and upcoming English-language publications include 128 LIT, Allium, American Chordata, Another Chicago Magazine, Arkansas International, EastWest Literary Forum, The Los Angeles Review, Interpret, One Art, Platform Review, RHINO Poetry, World Literature Review, Слово/Word and Точка.Зрения/View.Point. View.Point recognized her translations of poetry of witness from Ukraine and Russia as among the "Best of 2022." She won the 2024 RHINO Poetry Translation Prize. 128 LIT nominated her translation for the Deep Vellum Best Literary Translations Anthology 2025. Her bilingual poetry book, Kingfisher/Зимородок, was published in 2020. She is a contributor to the forthcoming anthology of anti-war poetry, “Dislocation” (ed. Julia Nemirovskaya and Anna Krushelnitskaya, Slavica Press, 2024). She is grateful to Bruce Esrig for editing her English-language texts.