Pavlov’s cat

Poetry by Claire Kruesel

Poem 1 of 3

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Claire Kruesel grew up just outside Rochester, Minnesota, then migrated to Iowa State to study Biochemistry and Genetics. A first-year in the Creative Writing and Environment MFA program, her vision is to merge poetry with science to translate the awe she feels for the natural world in an unexpected way. Her interests include antiques, evolutionary psychology, epigenetics, and viewing the world through shifting perspectives of scale. She is also a yoga teacher and member of the ISU women's ensemble Cantamus.

As Martone noted, these poems are a bit jumbled up - this reflects both the way they originated (one image or moment, perhaps, multiplying itself in my brain like a desired virus until it’s a house of variations-on-the-original-mirror), and the way we evolved, which is one of my main sources of inspiration: the amazing, unlikely, haphazardly juxtaposed way that genetic mistakes do-si-do'ed with themselves to ever-so-slowly and un-self-awarely create something delightfully unexpected. (To even begin to explore the evolution of the eyeball-machine that's allowing you to read this would require volumes!) As an undergrad, in the lab, I was always focusing on the "wrong" things - the lovely spectrum of assays' blue hues as they developed, for example, not the molecular concentrations behind them - so to me, the intersection of science and emotion feels like home. (The tug-of-war at that address - between our genes and our egos - is something I explore in this set of poems, particularly with Hello, Hello, this is your Telomeres; in Definitions, we are the gene, wandering in the body of the world). I aspire to use my background in Biochemistry and Genetics to ground my joy at being part of this grand experiment, and to show the reader that you need not have on lab gloves to appreciate the invisible or overlooked scientific delicacies all around us.

for Esio trot

A dog named Schrodinger

and a cat called Pavlov

unaware of their inverted

ownership, secretly eat

from the other’s food bowl

This moment does not

matter to anyone, not

scientists, not silent purrs, not

upside-down bedrock or the Vicar

or squirrels, not Janus or giant sea

turtles, not molecules of watching sky

that fizzle and fall

into water like ash, gulped

up by a catfish and photo-

synthesized into seaweed

a clever child wreaths as

Medusa, her brother baptizing

her a god, a god, a god.