Red Ribbon Spermatozoa

by Tom Hunley

There is another world, and it is in this one.
                                                              —Paul Eluard

In another world, Shrödinger
is a Nobel Prize winning poet,
Whitman, an astronomer
who storms out of poetry readings,
fixes his telescopic eye on the stars,
reflects, in his loneliness,
that the stars are as numerous and large
as the sperm cells in a single emission
are numerous and microscopic,

and in yet another world,
a just one, I was never born,
because the winning sperm,
the one that wriggled
its way into my mother’s egg
before any of its rivals,
the sperm that joined with that egg
to form a coincidence called me,
was dishonorably disqualified.

To the red ribbon spermatozoa,
whom I edged out of this world
in a coital photo-finish:
I apologize. I’ve been a cheater
my whole life and longer.
This world rewards that.
But if it’s any consolation to you,
this world has also punished me
in ways that someone like you
could never fathom.

                                                                                            from My Life as a Minor Character

Tom C. Hunley is the husband of Ralaina Ruvalcaba and the father of Evan Joel Ruvalcaba Hunley. He has degrees from Highline Community College (AA), University of Washington (BA), Eastern Washington University (MFA) and Florida State University (Ph.D.), where he was the recipient of a 2002-2003 Kingsbury Fellowship. He is currently an Assistant Professor in the English Department at Western Kentucky University. Before settling on a career in academia, he worked as a public relations writer, a sportswriter, a technical writer, a warehouseman, a Salvation Army bellringer, an enumerator for the U.S. Census Bureau, a typist, a data entry clerk, a file clerk, a fry cook, a cashier, a dishwasher, night manager of a convenience store, and a canopy construction worker. He is the editor/publisher of Steel Toe Books.