1 |            Your flowering lip on the agar plate

                 and its potential to be recognised.
                 Between the tufts, your colonies

                 are milk teeth—
                 shape of a sand dollar, a dime’s size.
                 And your taxonomic call

                 like the blind reach of a newborn.
2 |            The scalpel answers your constance,

                 cleaves a thread
                 from your white toes, then goes.
                 You are placed on a slide wrapped

                 in iodine—
                 this cold cradle made of crystal

                 and you, translucent,
                 percolate the light.
3 |            Black scopes sharpen your nooks

                 and follicles, scour the dense dendrite
                 mesh, the rosary clusters exhausted

                 with clarity.
                 Your skirt of fruit-motes assemble

                 the knots.
4 |            You are the one claimed particular

                 of your sprawling whole—
                 this sterile cell a new familiar,

                 a forager’s wealth, or cure.
                 You are eventual.