ODE TO A
PLASTIC
ISLAND
On a long enough timeline, everything evolves
to be a crab swept up in ghost nets
and stringlights or engulfed in THANK YOU
HAVE A NICE DAY bags from the bodega.
A mollusk may be a martyr on doomed debris,
claiming space where the earth has broken
to fragments and flotsam, moss animals,
jellyfish, sponges, arthropods, anemones
sprouting clones, an exiled bestiary
from the sullied coasts. Teach me how to turn
this wreckage into some semblance of life.
All our wicked appetites, tropical fruit slices
in a plastic box, the shedding polyester
of a clueless sugar daddy, glow-in-the-dark
figurines of Christ and Captain America
distributed throughout the water column
I think of copepods and gulls when they say
the spirit inhabits the house most ruined
for colonies in the neo-pelago, the newborn garbage
island is a station of the cross. Survivors, sin-eaters,
show us how to prosper in a future fallen from grace.
Each detergent bottle cap is a nail through the palm
of the Pacific. Downstream our convenience is a city,
then suddenly a continent in the open sea.
Someday soon we will have no choice
but to walk on water.