Five delivery robots
wait on the corner for work—
autonomous prostitutes
under a blinking store sign.
Their small pixel hearts blink red,
but their owling eyes wink dead—
sent out nightly for the last
mile no one wants to walk.
One glitches and slumps off the
rutted edge of the cracked curb,
wheels spinning, in a panic,
crying in mechanical.
And somehow I feel sorry
for it. As if loneliness
and humiliation don’t
require blood or warm flesh.
A drunk douche laughs, nudges it
with his sneaker. It corrects
its course immediately,
polite as an aloof wife.
No one here wants to concede
how quickly we adapted
to machines crowding sidewalks,
trying hard to seem useful.
Our pendulum souls know what
human extinction looks like
packaged as convenience.
And for one accursed second
I imagine it pleading:
"Please.
Please.
Pull the plug."
This poem was inspired by the growing presence of autonomous delivery robots on city sidewalks, a technology that has moved remarkably quickly from novelty to an ordinary part of urban life. I became interested in the strange contradiction of seeing these machines perform work in public while remaining completely indifferent to the people around them. We have begun adapting to them almost without noticing.
The poem uses the robots as a lens for thinking about automation, labor, convenience, loneliness, and the ways technology changes our relationship with public space. When one of the robots malfunctions and is mistreated, the speaker feels an unexpected sympathy for it, despite knowing it cannot actually experience humiliation or pain. That impulse raises the larger question of why we can easily feel compassion for a machine while becoming increasingly comfortable with the displacement of human labor and interaction. As autonomous technology becomes more embedded in daily life, I wanted the poem to capture the unsettling moment when something once futuristic becomes almost mundane.
The turbulent AI era is here. The choices we make now are critical: https://www.gatesnotes.com/a-turbulent-ai-era-and-critical-choices-to-make?utm_source=chatgpt.com
San Jose let delivery robots roll before writing the rules: https://www.siliconvalley.com/2026/08/27/san-jose-delivery-robots/
Autonomous deliveries could go mainstream by 2030: https://finance.yahoo.com/technology/articles/autonomous-deliveries-could-mainstream-2030-161253186.html
City of Hoboken announces delivery robot pilot: https://www.hobokennj.gov/news/delivery-robots
Alicia Cook is an award-winning poet and essayist from New Jersey. Her popular poetry collections Stuff I’ve Been Feeling Lately, Sorry I Haven’t Texted You Back, and The Music Was Just Getting Good have resonated with readers worldwide, and her words continue to shed light on themes of grief, mental health, addiction, and hope. Her work has been adapted into dance and opera. Her writing has been published in anthologies and featured in places like The New York Times, HuffPost, and Rattle.