Transdifferentiation
When Daniel texts you:
happy international trans day of visibility,
it’s sweet, but kind of funny,
because that’s not today.
What if it were though,
what if every day were Trans Day of Visibility,
and for some people it already is;
visibility is a trap, wrote Foucault,
in the book you bought when we went to Bad Animal
for the first time. Most people don’t understand
there isn’t a hard division between men and women.
Nature has no edges, wrote the author of a book
about David Starr Jordan—the eugenicist on his knees,
piecing his specimen collection back together
after the earthquake. I’ve worked with teachers
who’ve made fun of students’ chosen names:
I don’t need to know their pronouns
to teach them math—they don’t know
that respect is suicide prevention.
Female hyenas have a pseudo-penis;
male clownfish can change their sex.
Jellyfish can be both male and female
and live forever.
We Considered Ourselves to Be a Powerful Culture
How would you send a message to the future?
The signs at long-term nuclear waste storage sites
might read: This is not a place of honor. The danger
is still present, in your age, as it was in ours.
It’s a problem for language and time:
English is still in its infancy at 1400 years old;
Latin has lasted only 2700 years; Sumerian
cuneiform tablets from around 3400 BC
are the earliest known records of writing.
The half-life of plutonium-239 is over 24,000 years.
Radioactivity was discovered a few generations ago;
Marie Curie isolating polonium and dying alone.
Potential solutions for communication to the future
are desperate—reports ponder hostile architecture:
Landscape of Thorns. Spikes Bursting Through Grid.
Shapes that hurt the body. One linguist proposed
an atomic priesthood to warn of the danger
and an artist made silver-lined robes, metallic masks,
walking staves—trappings of the faith.
We forget, so easily, what we’ve created.
Such luxury; to leave and remember nothing.
William Ward Butler is the poet laureate of Los Gatos, California. His recent poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Bennington Review, Cherry Tree, Denver Quarterly, Five Points, Switchyard, and other journals. He is a poetry reader for TriQuarterly and co-editor-in-chief of Frozen Sea.
Header photo by wal_172619, courtesy Pixabay.
