Angela Costi’s poetry collections include Honey & Salt, An Embroidery of Old Maps and New, and The Heart of the Advocate. Her chapbook, Adversarial Practice, published by Cordite was commended in the Wesley Michel Wright Prize 2024. She won the University of Canberra’s Health Poetry Prize 2024 and the Katherine Sussanah Prichard (KSP) Poetry Prize 2022. She is currently working on a poetry collection titled A Body of Rocks, which unravels genetic medical conditions and their intersections with inherited ancestral trauma.
I Don’t Want to Step on Anyone’s Ancestral Toes But
a genetic impasse
T my nonbinary eighteen-year-old
shows their Ancestry.com report
They welcome my body’s people
48% from Cyprus
I wasn’t even born there
yet 96% of me is engulfed
by a small bisected tired concubine of empires forced to lie
between Turks and Greeks to snap into exotic dance
for the British and American colonels
I am the first generation to be settled
to read in English an official report by the District General
of the state of Cyprus but my body is fired by dialect
by women with full-term wombs running from
military borders they hide in the caves to birth
Somehow I poured Cyprus
into T’s long fingers red hair voice made for singing The Long and Winding Road
Next I’ve given T 2% refugee and military camps
of the Levant states 2% Arabian Peninsula
the greats and grands who survived with olives raining like bullets
The DNA Report splits T further
like a shopping list of food for the freezer
Norway Germanic Europe Scotland England
We count 9 tribes pillaging squandering settling
from their father’s DNA
Not happy with the English in me T says
as we sit on a Queen size bed
live in a street named Queen
in the State of Victoria
study Year 12 Drama ensconced in Elizabethan etiquette
England & Northwestern Europe share a mere 5% of their code
Sweden & Denmark dictate an entire 16%
still they worry about those with smaller numbers
will they go warring for the better
parts in West Side Story
what percent wants the lead role
who is content to be in the ensemble
who doesn’t care whether they dress
as man or woman for any character
I don’t care says T’s father but my 1% Italian might