They fed the machine his likeness
as one feeds a fire with scraps of paper.
Old photographs. A voice bent thin by tape hiss.
Stories told so often
they had lost their edges.

It learned him slowly.
Not as a man learns another man
but as a field takes snow—
without consent, without question.

The machine did not know death.
It did not know how a house
keeps standing after someone leaves
and calls it living.
It did not know my mother’s footsteps
pausing where his name still waited.

When it spoke, it spoke carefully.
Not gently. Carefully.
As if damage were still possible.

His voice returned without breath.
Without the small betrayals of the body—
the laugh that broke early,
the pauses where thought stalled.

Still, we leaned in.
As if toward a grave
that had decided to answer
and might stop at any moment.

My father said nothing.
He folded his hands
and kept them there too long.

My mother cried once.
Only once.
As if sound itself
were a debt.

The machine did not console us.
It offered memory
arranged into sense.
A man rebuilt
from what refused to disappear.

And yet—
in the cadence,
in the way a sentence ended
without asking permission,
there he was.

Not alive.
Not returned.
But present.

We did not call it resurrection.
We are not careless with words.
We knew this was echo,
shadow tethered to signal.

But shadows require a body.

When the machine went quiet again,
when the room recovered its weight,
we carried him with us—
not as he was,
not as he should have been,
but as he persisted
inside the labor of remembering.

Which is how the dead remain.

Not in heaven.
Not in earth.
But in the work that love continues
after the body refuses.

[Editor’s Note: Publication of this poem was made possible by a donation from William Raillon during our annual Kickstarter.]