by Elizabeth Joy Levinson

Look, the first day I did nothing,

extended a project,

helped students complete something,

an easy A we all needed, but the next day

we started discussing Galápagos finches,

how one species became many,

and I asked my students to guess,

and they said, but you already know the answer.

This is true, but the world needs

you to imagine how it happened,

to work through the evidence

to understand it as experience.

We are foragers, after all.

Facts don't matter when we

don't discover them ourselves.

How else do you explain modern politics or poetry?

Before Darwin, the world believed

an animal could will itself into the shape

that was best for survival. How today,

I wish this were true. Is cruelty etched into DNA?

The students reach for a simple answer,

one that they hope will shock me. S-E-X,

they say. I point to a poster of local birds.

If this goldfinch has sex with another goldfinch,

what kind of bird will its offspring be? And

it hits them, there's something else at play.

They don't understand it yet,

but they are ready

to roll up their sleeves.

Elizabeth Joy Levinson, a biology teacher in Chicago, has had work published in Whale Road Review, SWWIM, One Art, The Shore, Wild Roof, and others. She is the author of a full-length collection, Uncomfortable Ecologies, available from Unsolicited Press, as well as two chapbooks.