Our legacy, a test

Lisa Watkins

Carbons of the Cretaceous coughed from children’s lungs
First fast cars
Then airplanes
Then parachutes and gums

Today they’re in our carpets, our paints, and in our clothes
A potato wrapped
for safety
A straw stuck up a nose

It smells like food to turtles. It floats with food for whales.
In our water
In our snow
Fibers breezing through our air

Bisphenol A and phthalates, concern to fish, to us
Leach into brains
Latch onto fats
Gulls gobble up our gluts

The river flows right through my net, in this stream and the next
I count and count
Immortal waste
Our legacy, a test

It’s one thing that unites us: Worldwide, Red, White and Blue
Plastics.
They say “left behind”
But it’s here, in me and you

The Science

Exponentially more plastics are manufactured now than ever before. Many of those plastics get used a single time before being discarded. And a major portion of what is discarded ends up in our environment. Those drifting plastics bring along contaminants known to harm organisms, and once in our waters, act like a magnet, concentrating existing toxins on their surfaces. It's a pollution issue worth tackling, but it's one growing much too big for cleanups alone to solve. It’s time to get creative.

The Poet

As an Atlanta native, Lisa grew up backpacking the balds of the Southern Appalachian mountains. She now continues her childhood love of rambling in mountain creeks and urban culverts as a PhD candidate at Cornell University where she researches plastic pollution.

Next poem: Planetary Wobble by Rosie Garland