The Biologist and I
by Steven Duong
We love each other to death.
It’s an improbable thing we do
each week. She might move in
with my parents, who live small lives
somewhere sunnier. Ahead of us,
she says, are decades of discouraging
winters in vast and unknowable cities.
Today, what she wants is the sun.
Okay, I tell her. You’ll have your sun.
I’ll bring it to you. While I finish
my novel, you’ll be warm, glad,
fed a steady diet of Vietnamese
by two failed refugees. Our lives
are a golden net. I love the biologist
the way I love the biologist.
Once, she separated two damselflies
from their wings and swapped them.
It was science, she said, but also
a game. They couldn’t fly anymore,
but that didn’t stop them trying.
Damselflies spend years in water
for a week of flight, a raw deal
made long ago in the deep sea
of genomics. In her lab, they fell
like torn kites. My biologist made
fools of them. She’s a foolmonger
with her good legs and business
acumen. I need her more than God
needs hell. We met in Grinnell,
where the biologists are made
to read Rilke and the sun sets like
it’s dying. It’s not dying, of course.
If this novel ever sells, I’m buying
her the whole damn thing.
Copyright © 2026 by Steven Duong. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on October 20, 2026, by the Academy of American Poets.
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