if nevada alexandra

the boy with the girl's name,
had been able to follow his father
from house to house 
to White House
he would have said
Stop, look at me—
and presented his face,
still made of newborn clay,
but already hinting at the fullness
of humanity: furrowed brow, bowed lips,
eyes watching his parents'
every move.

If Nevada Alexandra's
eyes had been given the gift of time,
they would have settled
into a mirror of his father's:
cash-green, with flecks of darkness.

Nevada Alexandra listened
from the womb 
as his father spat out his own
father's words and then ran from them.
Safe inside his mother, 

Nevada Alexandra gave
her the gift of grief,
bits of genetic code lodged
in her bloodstream forever,
tasting like ache and impossibility.
She broke, forever—
or so she would have said,
but he saw her grow
into a twisted vine.

Nevada Alexandra watched over
the next baby, a girl
with a boy's name, and whispered,
Your eyes are your own,
and they can change
with the light.

But Nevada Alexandra's
father preferred to launch himself
into space, rather than cry or sweat—
all the messy excretions of grief,
too much like the shit-and-piss days
of babyhood, which he mostly left
to his wife anyway.
He was a meme about men and therapy,
he believed in the absolutes of gender
and the immaterialism of everything else:
money, mortality, the borders of self
and vehicle.

Nevada Alexandra lives
not in space, but in time.
The lungs that failed him
that day in his crib 
transubstantiated: a small pink envelope
became ash
became memory
became ghost
tethered to those who would have him.

Nevada Alexandra would say,
to those who would not,
The magic you imagine 
is not born
from slashing and stomping.
Your must burrow into a scream
that crosses generations. 
Don't let yourself be blinded
by the reflection 
bouncing off
blood diamonds.

Nevada Alexandra watches 
his father biohack  
through a jungle of misfits,
throwing out babies defined
by murky bathwater.
(He selects the best embryos,
legislates from the pointed tip
of a eugenic tower.)
Down here:
blind eyes, weak limbs, brains
as intricate as the father's own.
Not optimized,
not hyperlooped,
just the slow pain of personhood.
Not the perfect undefined future,
just the steamy breath of the present
and the endlessly textured past.
Not science,
just nature.

*

Note: I wrote this after reading Darryl Cunningham's comics biography of Elon Musk, whose first child died of SIDS at ten weeks old. His ex-wife said Elon refused to grieve. It's not hard to see his life since then as an attempt to run from the mess of human emotion. Maybe I'm wrong. But I wanted to honor the imperfect dead (and the imperfect living) in poetic form.

Photo credit: Fonsi Fernández on Unsplash