A billion moons ago (the same moon), I was a prokaryote. Named “Kari Yote,” I like to think. Though, maybe not.

I lived in a dish with a million other p. karyotes. Well, one time in a dish. Another on a wooly beast’s incisor. Another inside a zebra mussel shell and another I lay encapsulated by a drop of rain that fell from as high as heaven splat onto an active grenade. Let’s see…there was the arctic ice chunk, the dead scallop, the inside of a flute, the cottonwood trees—the point is, life after life after life, I’ve stayed suction-cupped to this spinning world. Even now I stay put. Though now— miraculously and reluctantly—now I stare out the window of an 11th grade classroom. With arms. Knees. A beige tank top, a human-girl set of pubic bones. An AP Bio teacher is scatter-painting a whiteboard, trying to impart to me and twenty-eight others the phenomenon of carbon exchange.

But I’m thinking about my time in the dish.

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