Replication, the act of making
the second once you’ve done it once,
thinking you should do it again, thinking
it begins as all things begin with
the ideation of the thing since you
know the Real begins with the Symbolic
always, action following thought: Our
Baby of Best Laid Plans. Hubris. Poof! Dark
magic. At conception the gamete
enters a Black Box, says Dr. C.
Even with the most painstaking monitoring,
we never can tell. Ha! Dr. C belies
without realizing her entire profession,
without realizing that what she says
is funny: The Black Box That Swallows. My
Black Box in which nothing can explain why
we can’t get one to stick, or how the two
other unstickings proved that what was bound
could be easily unbound. The truth: for such
revocations, we have found no restitution
for cancellation or loss, no credit, no
exchange of goods. No good. No exhortation
can change anything. Resolution lies
in resignation; this list of rhymes
scribbled on the back of a receipt.
Wendy Chin-Tanner’s poems, essays, and interviews have appeared in numerous journals including The Mays Anthology of Oxford and Cambridge, The Saint Ann’s Review, and The Raintown Review. She is a founding editor at Kin Poetry Journal (wearekin.org), poetry editor at The Nervous Breakdown, staff interviewer at Lantern Review, co-founder of A Wave Blue World (publisher of graphic novels) and an online sociology instructor at Cambridge University, UK. Wendy lives in Portland, Oregon.