OED Human

One of the paintings that showed up when I google imaged soul

I looked up the word human in the Oxford English Dictionary and this is what I found:

1. a. Of the nature of the human race; that is a human, or consists of human beings; belonging to the species Homo sapiens or other (extinct) species of the genus Homo.

With this basis I wrote the poem Dialogue with a Dictionary: Hominid as an attempt to address the somewhat lacking definition of what a human is. It should be read as someone reading the definition out of the OED and filling in all the blanks in their head. I used the longest word in the English dictionary to accomplish this: Osseocarnisanguineoviscericartilaginonervomedullary, an adjective that means to be of bone, flesh, blood, organs, gristle, nerve, and marrow. I filled in the resulting symbols that come to mind when one thinks of each. Symbols that resonate with what it means to be human. I decided to include this piece which I had started at the beginning of the year because it seemed to fitting to use as a summation of the life experiences I used in the other pieces for the publication project.