STAKEOUT STATION
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Rows of translucent
ova line his lab bench: Heliconius, the butterflies my brother has flown halfway down the globe to coddle. He worries the hatch, microscope trained on one exterior. Lens to nest. No way to guess if a specimen’s sick or cross-bred sterile yet. As long as something comes out, it’ll come to use. In the images he sends, I fixate on his fingertips. They’re slim like mine and steady as he drops liquid beads from his pipette to the eggs’ rest. While my hands tremble at the finest tasks, his hold. He has always felt a pull toward fatherhood. I’m too cold to be called maternal. While this set gestates, its forebears (the few still flying) need him to trellis passion vines under mist nets, to seed their water with pollen and sweet. For him, they swaddle themselves in silk and emerge, winged for slaughter. For him, the scalpeled abdomens. The tweezed ovaries. The spread -sheet he’s left with to conjure their species’ odds of survival. |
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Rachel Edelman is a Jewish writer from Memphis, Tennessee, whose work explores how humans simultaneously confront and evade the destruction we have wrought. Her poetry and prose have received support from the Mineral School, Crosstown Arts, and the Academy of American Poets. She writes for the Ploughshares blog, and her poems have appeared in The Threepenny Review, Poetry Northwest, Lockjaw, The Pinch, and other journals. She earned a B.A. in English and geology from Amherst College and an MFA from the University of Washington. She lives in Seattle; find more of her work at www.rachelsedelman.com.