Abecedarian: On Purchasing and Receiving Genetic Information from Two Commercial DNA Companies
Ancestry laid upon a curse, a jinx
Blood, and another thing molten—reveries of my face, the façade behind my face
Called to account the countries, deviations of echolocations:
Dead—mine—dark-detained
Ever banked in an ethnographic afterlife.
Fell—deep sleep postponing my rewrite, rotate, mutate;
Genes to be circumnavigated by spit-polished explorers.
How is a child’s globe a work of colonial conditioning?
In this condition, the wet hex in miniature
Jumps from gene sequence to succession. Pattern recognition:
Kinship, failing upriver—descent—
Life map itself in vials sent via the real
Mail, archaic method homesick for the gold horses of its origins.
Never miscalculate genealogical disruption’s (in)ability;
Orphan your ancestors in the underworld; above—who tends graves,
Pours the prayer of soju when the dead need music. Shall this be our final
Quarry, silent as a doe and daughter,
Reading the light, sewing a shade; a haunting
Sold to a centrifuge, the sterile shine of its exposed aperture—now
Travel to Neanderthal Valley; witness the heavy-brow-boned branch fork and break. Our dead
Underestimate us, time machines drifting at the rate of future’s arrival,
Venn diagrams of past and speculation
Where will we repose. Collected. Finger- and jawbone; dusted dictionary
Xenomorph, alien self, foreign
You, incarnate in the disciplined nation of the contemporaneous, stranger
Zealous for the sweet peace of the unborn, as yet unburied.
