Bottles - Erin Doyle
See-through wings and
Red eyed heads
Float like dust
In the light
Pigments leak from
Blue and green shells
Staining the alcohol yellow
Replace it with fresh
Drum-grade
Ethanol that chills through
Gloved fingers
Vanishes into air
Leaving a scent of
Sweetness that burns
Photograph
Separate by
Morphospecies and date
Assign numbers instead of names
Write labels in
Pencil and
Number lids with
Black ink
Pull legs off with
Flamed tweezers to
Send to
Sequence
Then pack in
Mason jars and
Leave in a
Non-sparking fridge
PCR Idol - Erin Doyle
Toy plastic,
Pink cactus costume wearing bear,
Personal PCR idol,
Totem of laboratory Paganism.
You stand to four legged attention,
Ready to guard,
With your Japanese styled cuteness,
Bristled in darkened spikes,
Inhibitors and foreign DNA,
Beware.
But I am a scientist,
So you do nothing, but
Lie forgotten in the orange shadows
Of running thermocyclers,
Collecting contaminants and dust.
I wipe you down with seventy-five percent ethanol,
And pack you away,
To another sterile room,
Air thickened by humming machines and
Sweet smelling nucleic acid destroyers.
I used my own tips - Erin Doyle
- They have to be sterile.
- The black lines on the unbroken autoclave tape prove that my tips are sterile.
- The plastic tips have white filters on the inside. The filters keep the tips clean.
- An auto-pipette is used and stored upright. So nothing in the tip can touch the pipette.
- The filter makes it impossible to fill the tip all the way up.
- The pipette should be clean.
- Except.
- The pipettes are shared.
- You can’t know if others keep the pipettes clean. Or, keep the lid closed on their tips.
- DNA and inhibitors get inside when the lid is off.
- So I used my own tips.
- And, flooded the laminar flow with blue light, UV radiation.
- It reduced the risk of contamination.
Contributor's Note
Erin is currently working towards an MSc at the University of Waikato. Her creative work has appeared in JAAM, Brief, and Mayhem.