Colleen Farrelly

def me():

def me():

     “””My assignment sprawls across a notebook margin
          like a fractal fueling a self-similar dynamic system.
          My dating profile limits me to eleven adjectives
          drawn from a random list. My company icebreaker
          distills me to two truths and one lie. Which ones,
          I’ll never tell.”””

     my_identity={
                                      “born_female“:”””water sign
                                                                            a wave curves
                                                                            over my curves”””,
                                      “agender“:”””coffee burn
                                                                  he calls me ‘she'”””,
                                      “widow“:”””grief waves
                                                               my neighbor
                                                               a bit too friendly”””,
                                      “disabled“:”””cod oil tonic
                                                                  another miracle cure
                                                                  fails”””,
                                      “scholar“:”””laminar flow
                                                                my algorithm runs smoothly”””,
                                      “athlete“:”””whitewash
                                                               the surf masks
                                                               my inner self”””
                                }

     #select three social masks
     import random
     my_sample_identities=random.sample(list(my_identity.items()), 3)
     my_shown_identities=dict(my_sample_identities)

     return(my_shown_identities)

#Inter/sex

“””I bury my body on dating profiles, hack my hormonal code
written in truncated codons that pop positive for nothing
known to genetics. Apply a little rouge. Cover the blood
and bruises, contusions from a failing body held hostage
by shots. My hormones never quite balanced, never quite
mine.”””

their_gender_guess=(“female”,”male”)

for guess in their_gender_guess:
     if guess==”female”:
         print(“””the curve
                         of my wig’s curls
                         bouncing
                         a fatal error code
                         when they unwrap me”””)

     if guess==”male”:
         print(“””peach fuzz
                           lining my upper lip
                           tickling
                           their tropical curves
                           until I unbind my own”””)

#Session terminated. Profile terminated. Identity buried again.

 

Colleen M. Farrelly (she/they) is a haibun writer and mathematician in Miami, FL, whose dual career was recently highlighted by Nature. Her first full collection, The Haibun Laboratory: A Thesis in Form, is forthcoming this summer with Cuttlefish Press, and her chapbook, Shasei from the Homefront, was a semi-finalist in Cinnamon Press’s 2026 Pamphlet Contest. She also has a topology book, The Shape of Data, with No Starch Press. Her day job involved a lot of coding in Python, advising computational math PhD students in Africa, and publishing papers spanning computational radiology, proteomics, and epidemiology.

 

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