"...more than 2,000 experts will wrap up a week
of negotiations on plastic pollution at one of the
largest global gatherings ever to address what even
industry leaders in plastics say is a crisis."
- 02 December 2022, Associated Press
What have we taken into our mouths, what
have we fed each other? And from our
shining hair, what molecules of gleaming
swirl away into the ocean at the end
of the drain, never to dissolve?
What we wash the windows with
is hardly water, is hardly rain.
If I buy you a fine halter
would you give me a noose?
If I leave the potted lemon tree outside,
will it beg owl feathers from the moon?
Each streak, a little tragedy first
born in the bowels of the earth.
From the torching of wood
and the crystalline repellents of moths,
an atmosphere of polymer and phosphorus.
The sweater I wear comes from
an indeterminate length of yarn
extruded from five recycled bottles.
What is a measure of softness when some
toothbrushes will not degrade for at least
five hundred years?
In a dim basement chamber of a museum,
fish from the last century still float
in vats of alcohol. Our appetite
for catalogs is undiminished, our hearts
doubled over from the weight of debts
we haven't finished paying.
Poet Luisa A. Igloria (website) is Co-Winner of the 2019 Crab Orchard Open Competition in Poetry for Maps for Migrants and Ghosts (Southern Illinois University Press, September 2020). She was appointed Poet Laureate of the Commonwealth of Virginia for 2020-22, and in 2021 received 1 of 23 Poet Laureate Fellowships from the Academy of American Poets and the Mellon Foundation. She is the winner of the 2015 Resurgence Prize (UK), the world’s first major award for ecopoetry, selected by former UK poet laureate Sir Andrew Motion, Alice Oswald, and Jo Shapcott. She is the author of What is Left of Wings, I Ask (2018 Center for the Book Arts Letterpress Chapbook Prize, selected by former US Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey); Bright as Mirrors Left in the Grass (Kudzu House Press eChapbook selection for Spring 2015), Ode to the Heart Smaller than a Pencil Eraser (Utah State University Press, 2014 May Swenson Prize), Night Willow (Phoenicia Publishing, 2014), The Saints of Streets (University of Santo Tomas Publishing House, 2013), Juan Luna’s Revolver (2009 Ernest Sandeen Prize, University of Notre Dame Press), and nine other books. She is a member of the core faculty of the MFA Creative Writing Program at Old Dominion University which she directed from 2009-2015; she also teaches classes at The Muse Writers’ Center in Norfolk. In 2018, she was the inaugural Glasgow Distinguished Writer in Residence at Washington and Lee University. When she isn’t writing, reading, or teaching, she cooks with her family, knits, hand-binds books, and listens to tango music.