The poet is hungry again. Not for lack of food: her cupboards are full, and she knows she’s lucky that the Company pays her so well. But the hunger stirs something in her, so she sits at her screen and tries to write.

A poem a day: that’s her contract. The Company picked her because she eluded them. Their machines couldn’t mimic her style. At first she was elated. And hungry, yes. God, so hungry. The money they offered to write exclusively for their algorithmic eyes--to produce training data, in blunt terms--was astonishing.

Now she has stability. Comfort. A room of her own and a 401K. She told herself it wouldn’t matter if no one read her words, audience satisfaction was never the point. But now she pours her voice into a black box that never sings back.

Her hunger sharpens. She feels disembodied from the letters writing themselves on the screen, tiny soldiers lining up. She’s hungry, she’s starving, but when she thinks of the food on her shelves, her mouth fills with ash.