Modern Prometheus 

“I doubted at first whether I should attempt the creation of a being like myself, or one of simpler organization; but my imagination was too much exalted by my first success to permit me to doubt of my ability to give life to an animal as complex and wonderful as man.”  – Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Frankenstein 

Upon confrontation, my father 
told me that I had been an 
interesting experiment– 

as if he were creator Himself, 
as if 

he had personally moved the vials, the petri dishes, 
ushering a haploid waltz while draped in white. 

Great creation, what innovation; 
I fear the sterile beam 
of laboratory light 
was my first definition 
of warmth. 

When I first sprouted from the Earth, 
did I yearn for other arms to catch me? 
Did I cry, filling that great, gray room? 

Holding me, naming me, feeling the heartbeat he had formed, 
how could a father not see how I would one day 
run blindfolded through woods, hungering for embrace? 

How could flesh and bone, brought to rhythm by lucid electricity, 
be anything but a miracle?

Volar 

To be young and in love is to balance 
certainty and uncertainty 
between your fingers on a windy day. 

Watching their bodies shudder, 
it is to watch the future 
splayed out before you like an open palm– 

for your eyes to follow only one weathered, epithelial valley
while glossing over each diverging path.

Selen Frantz is an urban planner from Detroit and is currently the William T. Battrick Poetry Fellow at Oberlin College. Her work has appeared in Lucky Jefferson, BarBar, Meniscus, Prime Number Magazine, ellipsis, and elsewhere.

Featured image: Mary Shelley, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.