
crossing the alps with a happy elephant the beehive in the punchbowl babbage’s engine through the looking glass the collapsible virgin in stark disarray avocados shaped like cell phones the moon-landing in my bathtub the iridescent umbilical of my dead brother
Editor’s Note: Cited from Computerhistory.org: Charles Babbage (1791-1871), computer pioneer, designed the first automatic computing engines. He invented computers but failed to build them. The first complete Babbage Engine was completed in London in 2002, 153 years after it was designed. Difference Engine No. 2, built faithfully to the original drawings, consists of 8,000 parts, weighs five tons, and measures 11 feet long.
BIO: Bruce Boston is the author of more than fifty books. His work has received a Pushcart Prize, the Bram Stoker Award, the Asimov’s Readers Award, and the Rhysling and Grand Master Awards of the SFPA. His latest collections, Brief Encounters with My Third Eye and Sacrificial Nights (a collaboration with Alessandro Manzetti), can be found at Amazon. bruceboston. com