Maybe I’ve written all the poems already, in a palimpsest of triplet code C&G and mutations like memories recalled when a passerby smells of White Shoulders. Though you can’t place it. You can’t name it, this feeling. And not naming it means not knowing if it is good or bad. Sitting like bathing in the warm and cold currents of a desert spring. Because the naked truth is ambivalent. The silent, heavy-wet pulsing of our lives. The perfection we strive to return to, but for our chattering, but for our thinning vellum of histories.
You pull out your cards - solitaire - and flip the first to slide it under a pile of mystery. Constructing a story in which things line up in an arbitrary pattern that we agree is a cause and effect of putting one thing after another. I learned to count on my fingers. I learned that my body is made up mostly of pairings. Sequences. And I have learned that this is the good. The good-ly assembled pile of facts, the good story.
You know the story. Recognize the retelling that happens out loud and in public spaces. Where everything is really okay. And we are grateful for even the pain because it was the cause for the effect and we slide the effect under the mystery in the good-ly column and believe it will all work out. The odds are good-ly after so much losing.
(from the as-yet-untitled wasp collection, 2025)
Thank you for taking the time to read/listen. I’ll be back again Sunday with another process journal entry.
Until then, I hope you have a great week!
Warmly,
Ren
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I really enjoyed this piece. I’ve read it a couple times, and I’m still unraveling the mystery, but I love the way you mix the language of genetics into it. Base pairs, nucleotides, manuscripts, the stories we share — it all seems to amount to something coherent, something comforting. But does it actually add up to that? No idea. Thinking out loud. All that to say, thanks for sharing this wonderful work. 🙂