Entering the Gene Pool
Risa Denenberg
A screech owl or flicker woke me.
Perhaps it entered me.
I wait, a watering can
poised above a pot of yellow dahlias.
All the little latencies that have sorted me.
This graph of my mother, that graft from my father.
A lento may break without warning into wild allegro,
while a habit will inhabit its habitat.
Differences are a spit of chromosomes—
a breakup, a split, a mutation.
Arctic ice rolls south, burying
a biome under earth’s crust.
The change in me happened suddenly. Overnight.
One day. A millennium. I can’t remember.
Risa Denenberg lives on the Olympic peninsula in Washington state where she works as a nurse practitioner. She is a co-founder of Headmistress Press; curator at The Poetry Café Online; and the reviews editor at River Mouth Review. Her most recent publications include the full-length collection, slight faith (MoonPath Press, 2018) and the chapbook, Posthuman, finalist in the Floating Bridge 2020 chapbook competition.