Mine is a life dedicatedto the calculation of loss.I know with certaintyalmost nothing. Yet here I amexecuting legionsof decisions each moment.I aim to organizemy ledgers like a skull.A place I imagine to be full.Of spreadsheets that seizurelike cities. Undefined functionsthat compile just fine.Explore, record, explore,record, explore, record.Eventually I learn to limitthe loss. I come to knowwhere I should not go:The fire escape, zip codeswith low property taxes,some drugs, some jobs.Then the threshold beyondwhich I’m just an airplane.Occasionally I fly new routesbut never load more thana few hundred passengers.Nor advance into the sequenceof sky that vibrates behind the skyI have seen. Never the pilotundressing in a suburbwhen the flight is over.Pressing an unclosed handagainst a cold bedroom window.
Bounded Regret Algorithm
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- June 7, 2025
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“Bounded Regret Algorithm” from NOT US NOW: by Zoë Hitzig.
First published in The Yale Review.
Published by Changes on June 1, 2024.
Copyright © 2024 by Zoë Hitzig.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
“There was no need to dream it; I could feel my organic machine taking in each of Zoë Hitzig’s remarkable poems through my eyes, processed with the algorithm of breath into an epiphany. Imagine a book that can spur transfiguration; it is in your hands!”
–CAConrad, author of Listen to the Golden Boomerang Return
“Can a variable dream? Can a person not dream? Hitzig’s lyric algorithms lead us, step by step, toward deepening mysteries of identity and existence. Let’s not forget that her variable ‘o’ also functions as the grammatical particle of poetic invocation. O Muse, O Rose, O Death—it’s an ancient way to address something beyond the human.”
–Srikanth Reddy, author of Underworld Lit
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