Floating in the world’s oceans
are 5.25 trillion pieces of plastic.
Fish must think they’re transparent rafts
or shards of a giant mirror shattered.
Young fish must play with them
like water toys. Old fish must scold
not to eat them. Certain fish must look
up through them like windows.
From above, seagulls must think
the ocean’s skin is flaking.
Only dolphins and whales must sense
it has something to do with humans.
The water itself whose intelligence
nothing else fathoms must think
they’re some god’s flattened, frozen
teardrops. The other day, up to my chin,
one piece floated past like a hyphen
between words, like a fill-in-the-blank
line on a test. I watched it make its way
across the surface, imagined it floating by
someone else in five hundred years.
—
Neil Carpathios is the author of seven full-length poetry collections, most recently, Lifeaholics Anonymous (Kelsay Books, 2023). His book of original aphorisms, The Lost Fragments of Heraclitus (Wipf and Stock), was also released in 2023. Currently, he is Writer-in-Residence at Malone University in Canton, Ohio.
