photographer: Amanda Williams
by Kimani Issac
The sun is in its final days, and all that’s left on earth is a tiny bacterium. Incidentally, this bacterium is E.Coli, and is the bacterium that a scientist Christian Bok designed to create poems in it’s chemical DNA.
Bok designed a system of storing literature in bacterium and created a bacterial poet. Here is its life and then death as the Earth is swallowed by our dying sun.
It’s hot. It’s always been hot lately. It’s not horrible, but I missed the days, years, millennia ago when it wasn’t so damn hot. Most of the trees on earth have gone. Anything green went long ago, but they outlasted the humans. Those creatures have long since abandoned the planet they gutted. They have gone, and I am left. I am often hungry, but I have become used to the dull ache in me. It doesn’t hurt much. Hold on, I feel something coming.
The Bacterium glows red for a second. To a human who can uncode the binary code locked within the bacterium’s DNA, it was a poem that the bacterium just released. It reads:
The willow tree sighs
The bark peels
The sun is splitting
Expanding
Opening
The leaves have all gone
Sorry, that happens often. A long time ago something changed in me, and now I periodically glow. I notice that there’s something different in me. I am...changed. I try to ignore it, but when you’re the only living thing left on Earth and you have to deal with solitude you can piss your own self off. It is the dry warm months right now. The hot ones. The ones with daylight. The earth stopped spinning millennia ago, and now I get long winters and long summers. Long daylights and long nights. Six months of each. Winter just ended but now it’s hot. Also it’s dusty. I miss water. It’s escaped through some hole in space. I think that I am dying, but I can’t be sure. The prospect of death isn’t known to my kind, but I can’t move so I guess I am. I can only think. I’ve lain here a long time. I kind of wish that night would come again like it used to. Remembering the way I used to sleep at night was nice. I liked latching onto something and feeding off of it. I think once that I was in the intestine of a human, because it was warm and dark in there, but I can’t be sure. There’s something really big and increasingly scarlet coming towards me. It’s where the sun used to be, but it can’t be because the sun isn’t that red. Hold on.
The Bacterium glows red for a second. To a human who can uncode the binary code locked within the Bacterium’s DNA, it was a poem that the bacterium just released. It reads:
The ground opens
Or is it the sky?
Red inkblots filling the sky
Misshappen butterflies flutterby
Becoming one with the universe
Ugh, not again. It doesn’t hurt it’s just annoying. I hate glowing like a light bulb. Light bulbs suck. I always slid off of them. The red thing is near me now, and it burns. Its burns and it’s burning up everything. I feel like everything my body is made of is ripping apart yet somehow I am still intact. I wonder if this is what dying is like. After I die, where will I go? I have never really contemplated an “after” before. I think its because I have never really known about death.
Bacterium Glows
Beating hearts,
Beat so fast
Primal rhythms
In beings that do not have them
Existence?
They’re becoming more and more frequent now. That worries me. Usually I just have it once per day. Sometimes a second happens but three is troublesome. I think I really am dying. There is red all around me now, and I am inside it. There is a bitter sense around me. I believe it’s hydrogen. I may have been swallowed. But then it would be dark. Did the sun finally…? It would seem so. I am still on fire but as I can think I know I am not yet dead. The heat is horrible. I can’t feel my back tails…maybe they’ve been burned. There is no pain now, only a cooling sensation as the heat has become so hot it now feels ice cold…
Bacterium glows as it dies:
The time is now past
Everything has been eaten by Apophis
I am eaten
I am gone
There is no more of anything
Oblivion has taken me
by Kimani Issac
The sun is in its final days, and all that’s left on earth is a tiny bacterium. Incidentally, this bacterium is E.Coli, and is the bacterium that a scientist Christian Bok designed to create poems in it’s chemical DNA.
Bok designed a system of storing literature in bacterium and created a bacterial poet. Here is its life and then death as the Earth is swallowed by our dying sun.
It’s hot. It’s always been hot lately. It’s not horrible, but I missed the days, years, millennia ago when it wasn’t so damn hot. Most of the trees on earth have gone. Anything green went long ago, but they outlasted the humans. Those creatures have long since abandoned the planet they gutted. They have gone, and I am left. I am often hungry, but I have become used to the dull ache in me. It doesn’t hurt much. Hold on, I feel something coming.
The Bacterium glows red for a second. To a human who can uncode the binary code locked within the bacterium’s DNA, it was a poem that the bacterium just released. It reads:
The willow tree sighs
The bark peels
The sun is splitting
Expanding
Opening
The leaves have all gone
Sorry, that happens often. A long time ago something changed in me, and now I periodically glow. I notice that there’s something different in me. I am...changed. I try to ignore it, but when you’re the only living thing left on Earth and you have to deal with solitude you can piss your own self off. It is the dry warm months right now. The hot ones. The ones with daylight. The earth stopped spinning millennia ago, and now I get long winters and long summers. Long daylights and long nights. Six months of each. Winter just ended but now it’s hot. Also it’s dusty. I miss water. It’s escaped through some hole in space. I think that I am dying, but I can’t be sure. The prospect of death isn’t known to my kind, but I can’t move so I guess I am. I can only think. I’ve lain here a long time. I kind of wish that night would come again like it used to. Remembering the way I used to sleep at night was nice. I liked latching onto something and feeding off of it. I think once that I was in the intestine of a human, because it was warm and dark in there, but I can’t be sure. There’s something really big and increasingly scarlet coming towards me. It’s where the sun used to be, but it can’t be because the sun isn’t that red. Hold on.
The Bacterium glows red for a second. To a human who can uncode the binary code locked within the Bacterium’s DNA, it was a poem that the bacterium just released. It reads:
The ground opens
Or is it the sky?
Red inkblots filling the sky
Misshappen butterflies flutterby
Becoming one with the universe
Ugh, not again. It doesn’t hurt it’s just annoying. I hate glowing like a light bulb. Light bulbs suck. I always slid off of them. The red thing is near me now, and it burns. Its burns and it’s burning up everything. I feel like everything my body is made of is ripping apart yet somehow I am still intact. I wonder if this is what dying is like. After I die, where will I go? I have never really contemplated an “after” before. I think its because I have never really known about death.
Bacterium Glows
Beating hearts,
Beat so fast
Primal rhythms
In beings that do not have them
Existence?
They’re becoming more and more frequent now. That worries me. Usually I just have it once per day. Sometimes a second happens but three is troublesome. I think I really am dying. There is red all around me now, and I am inside it. There is a bitter sense around me. I believe it’s hydrogen. I may have been swallowed. But then it would be dark. Did the sun finally…? It would seem so. I am still on fire but as I can think I know I am not yet dead. The heat is horrible. I can’t feel my back tails…maybe they’ve been burned. There is no pain now, only a cooling sensation as the heat has become so hot it now feels ice cold…
Bacterium glows as it dies:
The time is now past
Everything has been eaten by Apophis
I am eaten
I am gone
There is no more of anything
Oblivion has taken me