Anatomy & Etymology

Vol. 1 - Issue 7 [J.I. Kleinberg]

Element 109

A manila folder in my father’s bottom drawer
is crammed with notes and letters,
copies of articles and chapters,
pages ripped from magazines –
Nature, Science, Chemistry in Britain.
Mishpokhe, he calls her, claiming her as kin,
his mother’s second cousin, Lise Meitner.
Physicist, he calls her, the word complicated
and foreign in our family of lawyers and housewives.
Judgment fogged by misogyny, anti-Semitism,
the Nobel committee overlooks
her discoveries in nuclear fission,
awards her colleague the Nobel Prize.
My father is furious.
He appoints himself her posthumous publicist,
corresponding with authors, querying historians,
copying, stapling, mailing bits of this family lore
to a widening circle of mildly curious cousins.
Words highlighted, names underlined,
margins marked with arrows and exclamation points,
in his engineer’s hand my father pencils letters,
rehearses the questions he will pose on the phone,
puzzles out the known pieces of the jigsaw.
Many are missing.
But each paragraph in print is a small
acknowledgment, vindication, apology
for a brilliant life lived in shadow.
Three months before my father dies,
his course already clear, his work mostly done,
he sends round the last triumphant clips:
his grandmother’s name, our cousin’s name,
mapped into the heart of the periodic table,
element 109, meitnerium,
honored, official, numbered, named,
radioactive, unstable,
brimming with secrets.

Vol. 1 - Issue 7 [Melina Papadopoulos]

The Incomplete Karyotype

1. The First Mendelian Letdown

One by one, we unload our Punnett Squares.
There are traits we could cradle like nostalgia.
Some of us spent entire childhoods scrubbing
away our freckles, hoping either to extinguish them
or to capsize them like floating candlelight.
Some of us cried when we drew blood, not because it hurt,
but because that’s when we realized that we were
blacktop scribbles, chicken-scratch genotypes.

There are traits we wish we could toss away, but like coins.
Recessive claims heads, dominant demands tails,
but when our inheritance rolls into the gutter
we have to know what we’re worth
without our pocket change to back us up.

We mourned of Mom’s miscarriage
as its ultrasound, a sprouting
of fingers wrinkled like
second generation snap peas.
Eyes unopened, we never caught
maternal or paternal reflection,
either blue glass or cold steel,
guaranteed twenty-twenty
regardless of what he looked through
to see the sun.

We now imagine those eyes
in the stained glass skulls
of some garden monk’s monastery
where Mom might bow begging
to trade all those wasted bits
of Dad and her
for a broken condom.

He would have made a better mistake
than he makes a disaster
with a body to fill a casket.

—-

Chromosome 2

There once was prodigy
who fit on a pedigree chart
that looked like a concerto.
He bragged that he was born
equipped with piano,
something I believed for a while
because of the way he looked
ready to make music when evening shadows
filled his dimples with the sharps and flats
of black keys.

Then came a day when his cells
filled with organ pipes and Mom said
he was sick with something called Never hungry anymore.
Too late to his death bed, he was already a xylophone
primitive looking with a sheet of skin
between the air and the meek sounds he might have made
before everyone went silent.

—-

3. Pairs

Tale of Noah’s ark
two by two, purely human
and chromosomal

---

Karyotype: Reprise

When I was a little girl,
I wanted to climb
to the top of my family tree
and discover what kind of fruit
grows up there.
If there were apples, I vowed
to toss at least six back down to earth,
enough to feed the family and then some.
If it was barren, I promised to turn to my own womb
for springtime some day.

Back then, the wind was in everyone’s will
so I learned to hold tight to every campfire my father started.
Back then, gravity had hunger pains in its eyes.
If it had the energy,
it would have taught me how to fly
while I was still feather light.

In reality, I was just Zacchaeus
before he climbed the sycamore.

I hid from God, hoping
to catch a glimpse of him in creation through underbrush,
something I imagined wasn’t much more difficult
than watching Santa construct a toy train track
around an unlit Christmas tree.
I wanted to know that he put his catharsis
into every first cry, his fatherhood
into each color eyes can come in,
his crucifixion into final breaths.

Then my sister was born.
I was too afraid to hold her as a baby.
I left all my dolls
in the safety of a toy box.

—-

Sometimes the laws of inheritance work best
in whispers.

It takes patience to stay inside the lines
of each chromosome.
Maybe that’s why I finally forgave God
for not allowing me to listen in as he made her.
He was the first man to tell me that light breezes inherit
everything from the summer as a voice,
wind chimes, my breath that takes my birthday candles’ flames,
the sign language of the clouds on the days the sun has laryngitis.

Back then, the sun got laryngitis often
from sharing too many secrets with me.

I asked my friend why she was still an only child,
she told me that her mother was still praying
because she hadn’t been blessed yet.

At day camp, there were two brothers,
one whose head was always facing the ground,
the other who always had the sun in his eyes,
around the irises, patchy and white.
He’d wander the playground with a Dr. Seuss book, upside down.

One day, we plotted to hide his copy of Green Eggs and Ham.
We wanted to hear his cry start up, low and broken before there could even be tears.
We wanted to bask in the ways he was nothing like his brother.

Now, I want to pour over his karyotype.
I want to find the trinity in his trisomy.
There’s a father in his eyes, there’s
a brother his his blood, there’s a spirit
stretching past his growth no matter how stunted
and blowing all around him

because nobody really inherits the wind.
We all just take our traits like a tempest,
born like storms that will stop raging once
we know our names.

—-

Today, I spotted God in the sandbox
from the treetop.
He had just surrendered to a gang
of bullies with back muscles taut
as though they had just shed wings.

He’s not making his son.
He’s not making a name for himself.
This is pretend-play creation dust,
catharsis while he can still cry
with the intentions of just a child

and I am going to watch him grow
until his knuckles bleed and
I see footprints through him.

Vol. 1 - Issue 7 [Michele Harris]

Moon Jellyfish

“The chicken has an inside and an outside. Remove the outside and you find the inside. Remove the inside and you find the soul.”
-Vivre sa vie

Lit like firing neurons, they drift
in the bubbling current, closing
and opening.  Translucent
wombs, bellying water
behind  glass.  Each tentacle
finer than an eyelash.  
Rip back their skin
with your eyes.  If they had hearts,
you’d see them beat and punch
out blood.  But they don’t hide
what they are:  diaphanous
bell, velarium, nerves and water,
this water—if you believed
in a soul, it’d be here:  this
is what moves them, fills them,
drowns inside them.

Avondale Mining List

JONES, EDWIN D of Hanover. Head thrown back,
and tea-can slung around his neck. Found
among the sixty-seven. Wife.

HOWELL, Chern, name in illegible  ink
on arm; two fingers off. Lived
at Walsh Hill, Plymouth. Wife and four
children. Eyes closed, mouth open.

REESE, DAVID, Jr., Plymouth (Coal Street). Father
and brother brought out dead. Mouth
all bloody; tongue between teeth. Single.

HATTON, Willie, about 10 yrs old, Plymouth.

MORGAN, Samuel R., Plymouth, wife and four children,
three of whom boys, were in the mine
and brought out dead.

SMITH, Henry, Avondale. Wife and four children. Hands
clenched as though guarding
against a blow; shirt up
around his neck; face quiet.

JONES, Thomas, Plymouth, wife and children. Buried
one child last Sunday.

ALLEN, William, Hanover, leaves
a wife, soon to be a mother.

HUGHES, Thomas, Walsh Hill, Plymouth;
face very red; arms limp; fists clenched.

EDWARDS, W. Edwards, Plymouth (Coal street); head
horribly bloated; discolored and bloody; thirty
years old. Wife and one child.

WILLIAMS, William, Hyde Park, 14 yrs
of age, who had only worked there one day

Vol. 1 - Issue 7 [Florence Major]

Specimen I

A specimen is a part that will pass
for a whole: To be viewed from a distance
upon a slide, through a lens to make sense
of it, to find what lies upon the glass
that then will be viewed as genus or class,
as stain or section, the final essence
of a thing. What will be its alliance―
What kingdom will claim its critical mass?

And then, from an objective distant eye
peering from a sight high up in the sky,
a slide of specimens is massed below,
some targeted to live, others to die;
a cluster of fire is all that will show,
then from genus human, no sound or cry.

Vol. 1 - Issue 7 [Emily Cousins]

Vol. 1 - Issue 7 [Jake Sheff]

The Cure for the Hiccups

Darling, if you want to cure your hiccups just do a headstand and hold your breath.  There ain’t no pill for it yet, so for now this is all we got. Okay, okay, very good, doll.  Now, while you hold that position and your breath, let me tell you a little something my daddy taught me when I was a kid – he was a surgeon and ordained minister. He said an upside down man was a right-side up display of Genesis. You got your brain down there in your head, that’s the root of your tree of knowledge, your lungs with their big fruit: that plump, blood-pumping apple in your chest. Then above that’s your diaphragm, the roof over Paradise, like the atmosphere, and appropriately since that’s what drew the breath in you’re holding. Then you got your abdominal…oops, you hiccupped again! Let’s take a deep breath and start over, hon. Okay, so in your abdomen you got your winding loops of viscera, spiraling like the nothingness of chaos, and in the center is your pancreas – daddy said that’s a place no soul should ever go, and no surgeon should ever nick if he wants to keep his practice.  Then on your left is the sinister spleen, that serpentine devil creeping through to tempt Eve. On the right side’s your liver – the Romans called it that believing it’s the seat of the soul. And that’s where souls go in limbo. From there some go to the gallbladder – that sludge- or stone-filled bile lagoon – and then, on to H-E-L-L. Oh, you never took physiology in school? You surely would’ve chuckled if you had. Ah well, all the better, so you can keep on holding your breath down there. Now, you also got your kidneys –some poets called them the reins – you don’t suppose that’s because they make rain do you? Oh, I’m just kidding, honey. My father said souls go from the liver to the kidney, and from there on to heaven – St. Pete’s gate of course being the bladder. Uh-oh, I see a smile on your face! Now you’re realizing what heaven and hell is, up there in the pelvis. My daddy always did have a bawdy sense of humor for a minister – oh dear, did I just pun? A body sense of humor!

I think we’ve done it, it sounds like your hiccups are gone. Go ahead and breathe, darling. You have some great arms, do you work out? I guess I could say you have the arms of Atlas, couldn’t I? But why don’t you go ahead and bring your legs down, too. They’re starting to tremble and fall a little. I wouldn’t want you getting hurt. Ooh, ooh, be careful…oh no! Are you okay, sweetie? My daddy said our world was crumbling morally, too many people losing their faith –I guess that makes our legs our faith: if they’re weak the world turns upside down. Then again, that’s only if you’re doing a headstand, and there’s really no reason to do that, except to cure the hiccups, of course.

Aw, darn it. It appears we didn’t cure yours after all. Okay, well…better get back on your head. 

The new issue is coming. Stay tuned.