AI Lullaby
Christy Lee Barnes
| poetry
We’ll need to use voice learning first, of course.
We’re still in the developmental stage,
but you can sign up for our mailing list.
Picture this: your kid drifts off each night
to stories told in voices of the dead
or absent, anyway: Dads fighting wars
or locked up, or deployed on business trips.
Or moms of course—moms also can be lost,
or just too busy for bedtime routines.
They’ll push a button, pick a story, plot
and setting. Press play, they’ll float off
toward easy dreamlands sterilized of loss,
costing you nothing, spooling endlessly.
Christy Lee Barnes is an educator originally from Los Angeles who now lives in Seattle with her husband and toddler son. Her writing can be found in Prairie Schooner, Plume, Cream City Review, Cagibi, Spillway, The Comstock Review, Tin House’s “Broadside Thirty,” The Seattle Times, McSweeney’s, and elsewhere. Her first chapbook, Commodore Rookery, is forthcoming Fall 2025.