2024 Environs Prize Finalist
The lab faxed your son’s exome results
5 variants of uncertain significance
(which are just that, we don’t know what they mean).
–Genetics/Dysmorphology
5 variants of uncertain significance
(which are just that, we don’t know what they mean).
–Genetics/Dysmorphology
I. AP4B1
One copy of the gene is normal, the other a de novo variant––
de novo means neither parent hosts this distortion.
Severe mental retardation when both copies are mutated––
absent speech. You sit mute under the Chinese elm’s
absent speech. You sit mute under the Chinese elm’s
shadows of rose and gray in the canyon breeze.
Your hair ruffles, and what may be a smile flickers
over your lips. Oxygen hushes through the line,
goldfinch and house finch ruffle in a saucer of water
under the apricots. Your great mystery has no metaphor
really. Nothing revealed except x-y of bird feet in the dust.
II. ADCY5
One copy is normal, the other a de novo variant.
When both are mutated? Dyskinesia––abnormal
One copy is normal, the other a de novo variant.
When both are mutated? Dyskinesia––abnormal
jerking. Often you are a startled supplicant to seizure
even as honeybees sup calmly from the fountain.
I can’t remember feeling as light as yellow
anymore. In the low sun hours, a monarch floats,
and our heartbeats cautiously re-set their rhythm.
For now, all the tiny birds clacking like fans
can keep their chatter and flutter. For now,
we’ll be the stillness of grapes hanging in cluster.
III. CFTR
A maternal mutation in the cystic fibrosis gene,
no second mutation. You and I are carriers.
A maternal mutation in the cystic fibrosis gene,
no second mutation. You and I are carriers.
A house finch carries a bit of acacia pod
away toward the shimmer of gold canyon––
a monarch and mourning cloak float toward us.
It’s sticky milkweed that calls them.
Our future––I hold myself to fountain rhythm,
bee crawl, a daytime moon this morning,
and after I clear your trach, your pale cheeks,
wide eyes. Sweet boy, we’ve no sharp edges.
We’re the thick rippling water of I-don’t-know.
We’re the damp gauze of the marine layer.
IV. DOCK7
One copy is normal, one a paternal variant.
When both copies are mutated: early-onset
One copy is normal, one a paternal variant.
When both copies are mutated: early-onset
intractable epilepsy, dysmorphic features, blindness,
intellectual disability––a clinical match for you.
Mostly sleeping all day––you and the calico cat.
Glory be to God for dappled things, said Hopkins,
and that is the pied beauty of every day now.
We don’t choose or struggle, just move like clouds
across the blue. Let slip resistance––what else
is there but the finches turning their heads
to look up with one eye and down with the other.
We are quieter than the lizard on graying wood,
than the sunflower growing overnight.
You’ve schooled us in patience,
in the grace of the monarch with one frayed wing,
in the fallen nopales rooting where they lie.
V. MED25
One copy normal, the other a maternally-inherited variant.
When both copies are mutated, another phenotype match––
When both copies are mutated, another phenotype match––
eye, brain, cardiac and palatal abnormalities, microcephaly,
growth retardation, and severe intellectual disability.
What you can’t tell us we’ve always tried to guess.
Two orange-throated hummingbirds fly straight up
to become specks in late sunlight, then swoop down
and arc right back into the sky. What are they doing?
We don’t know. You are everything, enigma of our lives.
We orbit you, small stomata, with moon-pull and true geometry.
Day follows night and ecclesiastical season. Even apricots
know the golden halo that wraps them in light.
Melissa McKinstry
Melissa McKinstry holds an MFA from Pacific University. Her poetry appears in journals including The Adroit Journal, Beloit Poetry Journal, Rattle, Alaska Quarterly Review, december magazine, Tahoma Literary Review, and Best New Poets 2023. She was selected as a 2024 Djanikian Scholar at The Adroit Journal and the inaugural writer-in-residence at the Edna St. Vincent Millay House in Rockland, Maine. You can connect with her at MelissaMcKinstry.com.
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