Foundry
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STAKEOUT STATION

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.
Picture
Hippolyte Bayard. Arrangement of Specimens, about 1842. Cyanotype. The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles.

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.
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  • Home
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    • Masthead
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    • Issue Eleven
    • Issue Twelve
    • Issue Thirteen
    • Issue Fourteen
    • Issue Fifteen
  • Guidelines