Joshua R. Helms

Machines Like Us Joshua R. Helms

Machines Like Us is part love story, part dreamscape, part exploration of self. For the characters (Speaker, Boy, and Historian), love is dangerous, disorienting, self-erasing. To understand themselves as individuals, they must investigate the boundaries separating each from the other.
Boy finds a spot beneath a tree & stretches out
taking up half of the forest floor. Historian & I
have to keep stepping over Boy's limbs & sometimes
we step into each other, a pile of Boy & Historian & me.
Over the course of the collection, the three struggle to tether and untether. They continuously disturb and upend, externally and internally. They are terrified to be with and without each other. The resulting horror-blood, broken bodies, decomposition-is a landscape, both natural and unnatural, of their glorious failure.