- My sisters and I learned desire from the Sears Roebuck catalogue. Six hundred and forty-nine pages of want: dual-paddle mixer, flat hammer, ice cream maker, work boots, wool socks, ladies golf clubs, clothesline, Burpee seeds, dustmop, cotton underpants three pack, girdle (comes in xl), doll bed, saddle shoes, washing machine, hand lawn mower, croquet set, ballet slippers, rubber bands, basketball. The game we played—circling one thing on every page in the color of cash, of the vast maples outside our windows.
- Walt Whitman wrote that animals, unlike humans, are not demented with the mania of owning things.
- On Facebook, I read that the worst thing for the environment is to have a child.
- Yes, I say quickly, without thought when my daughter-in-law asks Are you optimistic about the world? She’s barely pregnant. I’m barely breathing—the day setting heat records. Our basement still flooded from the tropical storm. We live two thousand miles north of the tropics. I spin arguments into the languid air where they linger a little too long. We both choose to believe in the barely there. After all, out the window there is green, and recently I’d seen the sea stars returning to our waters, orange, pink and blue—yes, sea stars the color of the sky on a good day.
- When trimming the smoke tree, my love pulls a bird’s nest out to find eggs within, speckled, pale yellow. He tucks it back in the leafy hollow. We have disturbed so much.
- I read an essay in Esquire that said if [Baby Boomers] were animals, they’d be a plague of locusts, devouring everything in their path and leaving but a wasteland. If they were plants, they’d be kudzu, choking off every other living thing with their sheer mass.
- Despite the rain, the nearby reservoir is already at drought levels in early June. See the rings around the basin like a dirty, empty tub.
- This fall, my mother will fly to Manitoba to see the polar bears before they become extinct and before she dies. The flight alone will consume CO21t. She’ll purchase offsets.
- My friend Sophia texts: If the universe had an ICU, the earth would be in it.
- After three days of record heat: a tire melts off a car speeding by, we sit on our front porch in our underwear, the hydrangea leaves burn and flowers nod like the elderly sleeping, and the elderly roll their chairs by the ac pretending it is the gentle wind that set their skirts dancing long ago. I paddle onto the Sound and find the sea stars disappeared. I imagine them crawling further into the cooler, deeper waters. I imagine them still alive.
- In a week, I will read that a billion sea creatures died in these waters from the heat, what scientists are calling a mollusk massacre. Soon the beaches will be awash in shells, bleached and broken. My son will text an ultrasound image of life cupped like an oyster in its shell.
This poem was a Frontier Open finalist and first appeared in Frontier Poetry.
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Heidi Seaborn is Executive Editor of The Adroit Journal and winner of The Missouri Review Editors Prize in Poetry. Her third book of poetry, Tic Tic Tic, is forthcoming in 2025 from Cornerstone Press. Heidi’s aurhored of three award-winning books/chapbooks of poetry: An Insomniac’s Slumber Party with Marilyn Monroe, Give a Girl Chaos, and Bite Marks. Recent work in Agni, Image, Poetry Northwest, Terrain.org, The Slowdown and elsewhere. Heidi holds degrees from Stanford and NYU. heidiseabornpoet.com
