I consider Frankenstein’s monster

by Mercedes Lawry

what remnants are combined
between flesh and power, what is the measure
of a creature of cacophony
stitched with chaos. I consider the robot,
the machine, the avatar, the hologram.
Those who toil to simulate, to hybridize
and mutate, to splice, eyes fixed
on the details whether shiny slim metallic or
code and digits, are they infused with vision
or hubris, or glittery with rogue imagination?

I have been saturated by the movies 
of my childhood and the TV aliens now blooming
to apocalyptic vistas and a bloody scramble 
to endure. Every manner of enemy has been conjured.
We would not be human without an ‘other’. 
We will find it under any rock, bubbling up 
from toxic sludge or down the street 
or across the zigzag borders.

Frankenstein and his monster have blurred
into one, devolved into comedy or campy horror.
Should I feel sympathy or allegiance or 
barricade the door? Does a soul shelter inside?
the leathery form? Capacity for evil is a fluid notion
and monster but a relative term.

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Mercedes Lawry is the author of three chapbooks, the latest, In the Early Garden with Reason, was selected by Molly Peacock for the 2018 WaterSedge Chapbook Contest. Her poetry has appeared in such journals as Poetry, Nimrod, and Prairie Schooner and has been nominated seven times for a Pushcart Prize. Her book, Vestiges, will be published in 2023.

Photo by Stas Tsibro on Pexels.com.

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