46XX
By Nancy Baenziger
I am the goddess of evil it was
named after me the source of all
man’s sorrow
no mention made of the possibility of
stupidity in having seen that
apple too and said
yes, let’s
no momentary slip in judgement there
The antidote’s clear
and bright as the halo pure
and unviolated, no nicked circles here
no base metals underlying the
figurines, no life, no breath in the
waxen creche,
the essence of all that’s good and true no deviation
from the dance of the apes
NANCY L. BAENZIGER, Ph.D. Nancy melds writing interests in science and creative arts. Her professorial first career reported her biomedical science advances in journals such as Cell and Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences: discoveries ranging from a new protein called thrombospondin, now recognized as a large multi-purpose molecular family, to cellular signaling cross-talk that links inflammation to Alzheimer’s disease. Currently a retiree from the neuroscience faculty of Washington University in St. Louis, which institution seeks to obliterate any evidence she was ever there, Nancy writes from Mauna Lani on Hawai'i Island and from Oregon’s Columbia Gorge in a second life as a health care policy journalist, poet, and community newsletter editor/contributor. Publishing articles with Creative Health Care Management on pain, women’s health, and Hawaiian concerns, she presents biomedical concepts in terms understandable to a broad audience, outlines health care controversies, and offers practical solutions. Nancy’s poetry, published in The Gorge Literary Journal and Hawaii Writers Guild’s Latitudes, is being compiled into several books. She is the founding editor of the newsletter, Sight Lines, for her Hood River OR homeowners’ community. Her online essays for the Mauna Lani women homeowners’ group, Na Lani Wahine, appear as the Page Views and News column on the group’s web site blog. Still to come is at least one murder mystery novel, as Nancy notes “Aspiring writers are always told to write about what you know…”
