As May yawned with its rain,
I sat in the final chemistry lecture 
of my undergraduate career, 
three years of the subject—
general, organic, and biochemistry—
               the nerves of picking a seat                     always in the second row
the claws of each grade             reviewing notes until my eyes throbbed
            naming our lab group Humerus             inking faces onto test tubes
our eyes meeting when a professor said a diagram was simplified
                the weekly labs and reports         troubleshooting spectrophotometers
waiting during Western blots                     penning polyatomic ions
sketching the arrows of mechanisms                     writing out pathways
            when I said it’d take forever                       to understand
the math and logic of chemistry
                                            to appreciate its courses
ending with a fifty minute lecture. 

Yet as June stretches with its gray skies,
the few days in my extracurricular 
chemistry lab seem too slight 
to encompass the subject’s importance 
but also too much to heal the callouses 
it took to climb this far up.