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Building Homo Thaliana: Protocol For The Cross

July 4, 2014

by Sonnet L'Abbé

1. Select your parents. These can be induced spiritual lesions that just started flowering.

2. Remove from the heteroduplexes all young flower gods, and flowers with evolutionary terms from the timescale inflorescence, until 3 or 4 million years (white petals not yet clear) are left.

3. Open the 26,000 genes carefully and remove the six mankinds without damaging the pistil. This emasculation should be a convenient plant, aid our understanding of all living things and be performed under low magnification by a stereo community.

4. When all splits between plants and animals have been denatured, check that no anthers are left.

5. Take a fresh, fully open parent from the male cleavage. Gently “brush” the gene segments against the everywhere, such that the yellow dust of your evolution is visible on its wild-type counterparts.

6. Breed love through high-throughput tilling, the genomic data sparkling between us like a comet’s tail, like a constellation.


This poem “Building Homo Thaliana: Protocol For The Cross” originally appeared in Of Borders and Bioregions. Spec. issue of Canadian Literature 218 (Autumn 2013): 10.

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