Featured Poet





Peter Pereira

( Seattle, Washington )

1.

Much-maligned garbage 
heap, barren wasteland of repeating 
beads of DNA. Mere
place holder.

A fragile thing, easily broken.
Unable to pair like the other chromosomes,
repair its dinged-up nucleotides,
tagging along with its mismatched X. 

Boy’s first gift from his father:
78 genes encoding the production 
of sperm, and not much else.



 

2.

When two X’s meet
in metaphase, they touch everywhere,
depend upon each other, share 
everything, like old girlfriends
exchanging recipes or gossip.

But when X and Y pair
it’s uneven, unbalanced:
He’s a cartoon muscle-man, all 
shoulders & arms and a skinny little body.
Her four limbs too much for him.

They only touch at one end. He has 
so little to offer her. So little that 
many believe he may one day become
obsolete. Superfluous 
as a husband holding a purse
outside the women’s restroom door. 

3.

But now we learn there may be more 
to Y than meets the eye. 
His few genes a kind of palimpsest
parsing forwards, backwards, upside down.

Sequences of nucleotides origami-ed 
into new readings, skipped sections folded back 
to generate new texts, neighboring sections 
pairing up, rebuilding themselves —
the seemingly nonsensical 

perhaps a kind of source code, an entire world 
built from palindromes and puzzles.

Why a man says: I can 
take care of myself.

Why he’s the ultimate multi-tasker:
watching the ball game and planning a porch redo,
calling his mother on the cell and 
eating a ham sandwich — all while seeming
to be doing nothing at all.