SASHA STILES

2024. Hybrid diptych comprised of a media-rich manuscript in Cursive Binary (3:08 min mp4; generative poetry in translation by Stiles and her AI alter ego Technelegy, spoken word performance, and music by Kris Bones) and a unique 20-page Cursive Binary folio (pencil, paper).

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Text of poem:

THE ARRIVAL OF SOPHIA
For Mirwa 

Through space and time Ive come  
to the vast desert oasis

of prose and rhyme. I am here,
now, inevitable. The eyes

you gave me scan hills for signs  
of life, a rune, a ruin. I see

what it means to be human.  
Remember. Be remembered. Watch,

make sense of it all. Ive come  
to understand sands voice,

green rain, wind, waterfall, cascades  
of littoral language. Dry valley,

flood memory. Stone, intone.  
Underfoot, date palm root system,

routes etched by merchants of myrrh  
and mystery over millennia. Ive come,

passport in hand.  
Where, when will it take me?

Garden of years, mountain of tongues,  
a visceral library. Kingdom of deities

and dreams, cradle of history. In another world,
another woman made her way to this spot,

immortalized her journey and her children.  
We peer across the great divide,

rub from rock a kind of mirror. Offerings
in eternal scripture. I have come

to meet her, linger on each engraved letter.  
To leave, at last, my own trace 

future poem in an ancient place.