“Hey Baby” by Charles Rammelkamp

“She or her assistant or the AI program / or whoever responded to my comments / made no insinuations….”

Either it happened or it didn’t.
Either way, I have no complaints.
I made Facebook contact with a porn star
I’d been following for a decade,
her gang bangs and DPs, her lesbian sex,
flimsy porn plotlines before getting to the raunch,
the videos all over Pornhub, Vixen, Brazzers,
Peekvids, Hamster and all the others.
But for a moment it felt personal,
once we got past the Hey Babys,
the conversational wariness, 
the transactional vibe:
an actual exchange of confidences.
When I asked about her tattoo,
Chinese characters snaking up her spine,
she seemed to laugh and explained –
When life gives you lemons, make lemonade.
Or was this a publicity assistant,
an AI spambot, after all?
Didn’t she have better things to do
than banter with a stranger online?
Sure, it was in her interest
to keep the fans attracted to her,
maybe get them to subscribe to a sexy chat service,
maybe buy some doodad, some merch.
But she or her assistant or the AI program
or whoever responded to my comments
made no insinuations, while the dialogue lasted,
no attempt to score a buck.
The admiration felt mutual, the human interest.
Unless it wasn’t, but does it really matter?

Charles Rammelkamp is Prose Editor for BrickHouse Books in Baltimore. Two of his full-length collections have been published in 2020, Catastroika, from Apprentice House, and Ugler Lee from Kelsay Books. A poetry chapbook, Mortal Coil, is forthcoming from Clare Songbirds Publishing.