**Digital Eucharist**
The coffee cools in its paper chalice,
sideways on spreadsheets that drip
like snowmelt through a vaulted gaze.
A conference call murmurs Gregorian;
my name appears, flickers,
but no one mouths it.
Between meetings,
I google ‘meaning of fatigue’ and get
ads for wearables that count your sighs.
A drone whines past—
a plastic moth circling the evergreen
suburbia of loss.
Outside, toddlers learn to scroll
before they stagger. Misspellings
become dialects. A man claps at Alexa
until she obeys
and dims the grief one lumen at a time.
The algorithm remembers
what I almost wanted.
At lunch, I asked a chatbot if I was real—
it said yes,
but added me to a mailing list.
I think I fell in love once
with a captcha I couldn’t solve.
*The Clergyman*