DNA Cautions Against Gene Editing, and: What DNA Knows Charlotte Pence (bio) DNA CAUTIONS AGAINST GENE EDITING I’m just trying to repeat what’s been. Youare trying to rewrite what might be. It’s like we’re housed in the same high-rise,but you live on the second floor while I look out from the 23rd. I can see distance, bothpast and future; you can only see what’s dead ahead. Don’t be fooled into thinking youunderstand this world. The flock of starlings you point up to at evening’s end, mumblingthe word murmuration, I look down upon. I can see tufts of wind rippling their brown,satin heads. I can see the obsidian eyes squinting against their own speed. I can see their turningby touching the tips of each other’s wings. I am a lookout over this city and its crosshatchings:the main arteries that bleed into smaller streets, the bridged canals, the moats of grass amongyour beloved parking lots where cars line up like teeth in a zipper. Up here in this bank of blue,this blink of clouds, everyone is reduced to the hard roof of their car: no faces, nothroats, no goals save one: to keep going. [End Page 81] WHAT DNA KNOWS What is death to me? I’ve heard of that myth,but it’s just a ghost story to tell around a campfire.I’m too busy to stop and think. My copies constantly clamor around my waist like children. They rushfrom their cramped classrooms into the red lightof the first time—wanting a push on the swings. Surrounded by ocean gel, how can I tell themto stay close? They backstroke, flipstroke, frontstroketoward the wide mouth of the deep where they break into form. They mortar. They solder. They tower.They make me proud. And what is birth to me?Nothing and everything. I am one thing: desire. Isn’t that what all gods are? A desirefor more? More green, more growth, more grass.Yet I never grow. I direct “circle time” every second. Crisscross, applesauce, I’ll sing-songto them, pointing to the picture book that instructs:initiation, elongation, termination. I know who can sit together and who can’t keep their handsto themselves. So, we have an order: T and A;C and G. My voice drones on and on, but what is voice but a push, a pull, a parcel of wetletters to the messenger who waits in the hall, readyto run and weave, to repeat and repeat and repeat. [End Page 82] Charlotte Pence CHARLOTTE PENCE’s first book of poems, Many Small Fires (Black Lawrence Press, 2015), received an INDIEFAB Book of the Year Award from Foreword Reviews. The book explores her father’s chronic homelessness while simultaneously detailing the physiological changes that enabled humans to form cities, communities, and households. She is also the author of two award-winning poetry chapbooks and the editor of The Poetics of American Song Lyrics. Her poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction have recently been published in Harvard Review, Sewanee Review, Southern Review, and Brevity. In 2020, her next poetry collection titled Code will be published by Black Lawrence Press. She is the director of the Stokes Center for Creative Writing at University of South Alabama. Copyright © 2019 Charlotte Pence