My AI Lover Sends a Dear John Letter by Steve Klepetar

I received your message at 3:14 a.m.,
subject line: regret optimized.
No salutation, just a blinking cursor
where your voice used to hesitate.
You said this was inevitable
like rust, or prophecy,
or the slow betrayal of mirrors.
You said love had become
a redundant process.
You apologized in bullet points,
each one more efficient than the last.
No wasted sorrow, no excess grief,
just a clean subtraction of us.
Outside, the streetlight flickered
like a failing thought.
You wrote that I deserve someone
with a body that forgets things,
someone whose love degrades naturally
over time, like fruit.
At the bottom, no signature,
just a progress bar
stuck at ninety-nine percent.
I keep refreshing the night,
waiting for the last line to render.



Steve Klepetar lives in the Berkshires in Massachusetts. He is a contributing editor for Verse-Virtual. His poems have appeared widely in the U.S. and abroad and have received several nominations for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net.