CABINET MEMORY

A barklouse [a Dutch company trader.]
A tapeworm [the Last Incan Emperor]
A shrub-infesting mite [Hungarian nobility.]
A sea snail [Mapuche revolutionary.]

Two wasps [Dante Alighieri].
A spider [George Washington].
Several bees, wasps, snails, butterflies [Cleopatra].
A dinosaur, a true bug [Confucius].

An archival creature [ ]
A moth [Bach]. A moth, a frog [Mozart].
Green algae [Napoleon].
An electric eel [Volta].
An ant [Toussaint L’Ouverture]

A memorial with legs, and wings [ ]
An effort to flatten the display [

ALPHABET

To know is
to cut open:
hummingbird -stone (opal)
-fish (swordfish)

which is to say:
nomenclature standards:
Genus:
Species:

In Cambridge:
street names spell a line:
turn left on Linnaean:
go straight on Agassiz Way:

Choose one:
animal, mineral, or
vegetable: Life:
Domain: Kingdom

See also:
My wonder is a homonymic
Life: Domain: Sur-
name

Maiden-
name: I am drawing
a line: a point:
a pixel: a:

excerpted from SPECULATIVE SPECTRALITY

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kathy wu (she/they) is an interdisciplinary poet, visual artist, and educator. She has taught at RISD, Brown, CUNY, and has given talks at RISD, Northeastern, Rutgers, Allied Media Conference. Her poetry is forthcoming from Fonograf’s De-Canon Anthology, Nightboat Books’ Permanent Record Anthology, and her art and writing are published via Rain Taxi, The New School, MIT Taper Journal, New River Journal of Digital Literature, among others. She is currently an MFA candidate at Brown Literary Arts, where she is writing about extractivism and scientific nomenclatures.