By Ellen Girardeau Kempler
Heat buffets us seaward.
Sunburn sends us home.
We trail wakes
of bags & butts
clamshell packages
& coffee cups.
Styrofoam seeds
sprout like alien plants
neoprene petals
band aid leaves.
Straws take root
in tangled kelp.
Saltwater & sun degrade.
Waves & currents take away.
Great Garbage Patch.
Undersea pyre.
Microplastic harvest
fills the widening gyre.
Turning & turning
in the trash-dimmed tide.
things fall apart.
Ellen Girardeau Kempler’s poems have appeared in Tiny Seed Literary Journal, Narrative Northeast, Writers Resist, Phoenix Rising Review, Gold Man Review, Orbis International Poetry Quarterly and many other small presses and anthologies. In 2016, she won Ireland’s Blackwater International Poetry Prize and honorable mention in Winning Writers’ Tom Howard/Margaret Reid Poetry Contest. Called “a timely and powerful selection of climate poetics,” her chapbook, Thirty Views of a Changing World: Haiku + Photos, was published in December 2017 by Finishing Line Press.
Photo by Debbie Hall, a Writers Resist poetry editor
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