At precisely nine in the morning,
working with focus and stealth,
our entire membership succeeded
in simultaneously beheading no one.

We set, on roads in every city,
in every nation in the world, a total of zero
roadside bombs which, not being there,
did not subsequently explode,
killing or maiming a total of nobody.

Also, none of us blew himself or herself up
in a crowded public place.

No bombs were dropped, during
the lazy afternoon hours,
on crowded civilian neighborhoods.

No stun guns, rubber batons, rubber bullets,
tear gas, or bullets were used.
No one was forced to don a hood.
No teeth were pulled in darkened rooms.
No drills were used on human flesh,
nor were whips or flames. No one
was reduced to hysterical tears
via a series of blows to the head or body.

In addition, zero planes were flown into buildings.

Since the world began,
we have gone about our work quietly,
resisting the urge to generalize,
valuing the individual over the group,
the actual over the conceptual,
the inherent sweetness of the present
over the theoretically peaceful future
to be obtained via murder.

To tell the truth, we are tired. We work.
We would just like some peace and quiet.
We stand under awnings during urban
thunderstorms, moved to thoughtfulness
by the troubled, umbrella-tinged faces rushing by.

We are many. We are worldwide.
Though you are louder, though you create
a momentary ripple on the water of life,
we will endure, and prevail.

A Press Release from People Reluctant to Kill for an Abstraction, 26 August 2004.

Although it felt 
a little creepy 
engineering 
a drug-resistant 
strain of E. coli 
in my kitchen,
there was also 
a definite sense 
of achievement.

(From Crispr and the splice to survive)

He has coaxed his skin to produce
a fluorescent protein, ingested
a friend’s poop in a D.I.Y.
fecal-matter transplant, and attempted
to deactivate one of his genes
so that he could grow bigger muscles.

Inside the box, I found an assortment
of lab tools—pipette tips, petri dishes,
disposable gloves—as well as several
vials containing E. coli and all I’d need
to rearrange its genome.

Ants that can’t smell, beagles that put on
superhero-like brawn, pigs that resist
swine fever, macaques that suffer from sleep
disorders, coffee beans that contain no
caffeine, salmon that don’t lay eggs, mice that
don’t get fat, and bacteria whose genes contain,
in code, Eadweard Muybridge’s famous series
of photographs showing a horse in motion.

We are as gods, but we have failed to get good at it. 
We are Loki, killing the beautiful for fun. 
We are Saturn, devouring our children.

(From Crispr and the splice to survive)

I strip in the doorway when I get home,
stand in the shower too tired to think or cry.
I sing Happy Birthday twice over every
part of my body. At work I can’t eat,
at night I can’t sleep. The dreams I have now
have only three themes: gasping for breath,
wiping things down, somehow, by accident,
being touched by somebody. Did you ever wake
in those last moments, or in your sedation
did you ever dream? I still wake some days
with a small beat like a held breath before
the truth of this new world hits me. Be safe
say the families I call on the phone.
Your name is a poem I’m required to keep
to myself.

This is the day you start to turn.
What we suck up from your lungs turns frothy pink
and then the frank red of blood. There are tests
but no one willing to run them — you are too sick
and you have never cleared the virus. No one
would ever want to be what you are now:
a hazard, a threat, a frightening object
on the edge of death. We try not to touch you.

Stronger together say the screen savers
on every screen in the hospital, the banners
on the sides of the shuttle bus. What I’ll see
is just how much this isn’t true, how so many
of our sickest patients are Black or Brown like you.
I will see a forty-six-year-old Black man,
infected with SARS-CoV-2, die instead
from having a police officer kneel on his neck.
I will see those who protest police brutality,
though masked and mostly peaceful, tear-gassed
and shot with rubber bullets. I will see
your death multiplied by ten thousand,
by a hundred thousand, all those bodies,
mothers and fathers, daughters and sons.

With my arms at my sides, I watch through the glass.
I have never mattered less in my entire life.
And this is how you die, near no one who
ever loved you, a spectacle of futility
and fear. Time is called, and someone calls your
husband, and it isn’t me. I am not the one
who hears him cry out in grief.

(From The New Stability)