Poetry / Changes You Still
You stare at a syringe containing love.
A frown brushes the lip corners of the woman
across the lab table when you tell her
that soon you will love her as she loves you.
Other people have loved you before this.
Controlling mother, estranged father, unmet grandparents
and even distant cousins crowding a grainy baby photo,
color smudged from twitchy fingers -- they love you.
You consider that unquestionably odd considering
none of them knew you or your infant dreams
dividing and redividing into a grown
Nobel winning microbiologist instead of a poet
because the fourth chromosone on the left decided
to show up late. You posit love is genetic.
Some common gene allows love and nothing more. Now
the proof waits in the syringe, its needle hushed
like a crowd with eager hands impatient to applaud.
Last year, this woman with the brown curls and December eyes,
said I love you. You felt dizzy. Those words entered you
like the saliva from her kiss, like influenza introduced
to an already ravaged system. In a moment of pique,
you exchange tiny vials of blood, inside yours
swim millions of strands of her with that love etched
in phosphate and sugar. Your reply turned sickly
as your mutinous body fought back. You became demanding.
The easy proofs of her words-- soft whispers
in your daily cacophany or small labors that smoothed
the busy-ness -- left you feverish and gasping.
Since you've never loved anyone, you theorized
that your immune system would reject this and all future love
which led to this lab table and the syringe. From her blood,
you spliced out the gene that loves you. Ironically, you inserted
that gene into a flu virus which once inserted into you
will pierce your cells, restructure your chromosones
and write the ability to love into your being forever.
Or so you hoped. A dozen years from now as you stare
across the kitchen table at another woman you love
who is eating cookies with your child, chocolate smeared
on fingers and lips, you realize again as you realized then
when that needle bit and spat. Genetics isn't an exact science.
Mutation occurs. You are rarely late now and you see
your parents often. The syringe, like the kiss, fades
into the yellowed photograph of memory. But the thing inside it,
inside you now, continues to mutate and changes you still.
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This is fascinating, well-written, and novel, something both tender and eerie simultaneously. A man who cannot experience love from a genetic mutation steals from another who loves him, hoping her gene infused into him can make him love, simply put. I’m not sure about the ending, as to how the thing inside the syringe, inside him, continues to mutate and change him still. If he hadn’t loved before he now has a wife a child who I presume he loves. Or is this just a marriage of convenience? Not sure. The other thing, this is a short story more so than a poem, and a very good one at that. I wonder why you posted this under poetry for it has little poetic elements, except for the beautiful language with which it is written, to call it a poem. Nice work. I look forward to reading more of your work.
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