"Rosy Poem" by Romie Stott © 2026
Content warning:
Christian Bök and Lydia Contreras,
prompted by the inevitable fading of ink
and the dust of paper,
chose a vessel to preserve a poem
made not of stone or disk, but of life itself.
Deinococcus radiodurans.
Conan the Bacterium. A creature
that laughed at vacuum, ice, acid,
that endured radiation lethal enough
to shred our own fragile code.
They took the verse,
a delicate thing of dashes and spaces,
and translated its grief
into a new alphabet.
Not of words, but of nucleotides. A, C, T, G.
Each line a sequence, a ghost in the machine.
Inserting this elegy into the plasmid,
a tiny ring of DNA,
they placed it inside the bacterium.
And the cell, in its blind, biological wisdom,
accepted it. Made it part of itself.
A permanent guest in its house of being.
Now, when it divides,
splitting one world into two,
it copies the poem.
Replicates the memory
of written stanzas.
This is no book. It is a library
built inside a single cell.
A living fossil, not of bone, but of sense.
An artwork designed to outlast continents,
to sleep through epochs
in permafrost or salt, waiting.
Waiting for a future without us,
that might learn to read its resilience,
and find, preserved in that durability,
the soft, human, utterly vulnerable
sound of trying to remember.
Author’s Note: Canadian poet Christian Bök and University of Texas chemical engineer Lydia Contreras have embedded a poem into the DNA of one of Earth’s toughest organisms. This microbe could preserve art for billions of years.
[Editor’s Note: Publication of this poem was made possible by a donation from Lisa Nohealani Morton during our annual Kickstarter.]