"punnett" poems
My past time
is drawing punnett squares;
measuring my chances at certain genes
measuring the maybe chances at babies.
constantly calculating 'could-have-beens'.
Though, not always certain,
I discover myself in the punnett squares
written in graphite
sprawled across my table.
99.9% chance of being normal,
and I got stuck at that .1.
I can go on,
drawing punnett squares on my arms
and legs
and stomach
and back.
Calculate
my chance
at being
DECENTLY FINE.
Now's not the time
to be drawing punnett squares
all over the place...
But what are my chaces
at a prettier face?
What were my chances at brown eyes
and carmel skin?
What were my chances,
where do I begin?
Punnett squares
excite me
because I see my
could-have-beens.
What are my chances
of finding
someone like me
identical in thought,
obsessed with
the past
and how we could-have-been
BETTER?
But we're not.
We're just a
punnett square.
Feb 1, 2017
Feb 1, 2017 at 1:07 PM UTC
For her eighteenth birthday,
a gift from the fates;
she knows how she will die.
Before, there was a vague notion—
A shadow cast by a hungry dragon
who roosts on the branches of the family tree,
devouring her ancestors, waiting and unslayable.
Now, the diviners speak to her in pedigrees
and punnett squares, leafing through a deck
of tarot cards, checking vials of her blood
for patterns in the tea leaves at the bottom,
hardening the shadows at their edges and
twisting peripheral horror into prophecy,
a promise, and she sees it all,
she sees everything, laid in front of her
and stretching out like a golden string
towards the vanishing horizon:
The sharp burn of dread at every twitch
and missing memory, jellied elegies oozing
from the center of others’ puffed pleasantries,
years spent watching her soul
get thinner and thinner, trapped
within a broken heap of matter and flesh,
cursed bone, misfiring electricity,
eroding endlessly, self destructing,
never ending, ending soon,
and, at last, alone, gazing back on a youth
spent gazing forward, ****** and dying
and derelict, and decades in the making—
she asks herself, what would she not give
for the chance to unknow,
to trade the dragon for the slow, soft lull
of the indifferent stars,
and to die whole and confused,
like the rest of us.
Jun 20, 2016
Jun 20, 2016 at 1:24 AM UTC