nearly every rip is a crisp pact,
nearly every step is a disabled piss,
a slip, a psst, is past, is past

the squawking headline, below
the photo of a juvenile herring gull
clasping in its beak, sailing in its scat,

ridding from its ass, the remains
of a Yoplait parfait. In 1960, 5%
of sea-faring avians ate plastic.

In 1960, fewer sporks, fewer caps,
fewer cigarette tips. By 1980,
the number had jumped to 80%,

a stirrer, straw, & Starbucks lid
explosion. Global production
doubles by the decade, global lips

part, global rods cast, global
disablers dig, global dips subtract.
By 2028, more plastic swirling

in that gargantuan garbage gyre,
that loosely collected rubbish
spectacle than all the plastic

factory-spat since plastic-ing began.
When auklets stab at shrink wrap,
when pigeon guillemots gulp

Doritos bags, there's no room
in a gut for a mollusk, a morsel
of crab. Punches holes

in their organs. Strips parts. Scraps
scripts. When birds chew Blowpop
wrappers, guzzle Glad bags,

courtship desists. When one bird
eats 200 pieces. When one bird,
piling and bridling, is trapped.

When one bird's track
departs. "If you add plastic
to a gut, it will make a difference,"

said the gadfly petrel never. Subtract
how many there were, take two away
from three. Take away: a voice

vamoosing, an attic collapsing,
a number deeply dinged, teetering
on cast away, on doused, on dropping to nil.
from the journal NOTRE DAME REVIEW
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Head shot of Martin Espada
Martín Espada on Whitman in the Time of Trump

"Whitman confronts a history of silence, charging himself with the responsibility to 'remove the veil.' If the alternative is silence, then the 'long dumb voices' of the despised and the 'forbidden voices' of the indecent 
must speak through him. The question, even now, is whether this country is ready for Whitman, open to his 'way of being' when we need it most.”

via POETRY MAGAZINE
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"The ars poetica is a poem that takes the art of poetry as its subject matter. The tradition can be traced back to the Roman lyric poet Horace (ca. 19 B.C.E.) and his poem titled “Ars Poetica,” in which he argues that poetry should be both amusing and instructive. Modern and contemporary poets have approached the genre in a myriad of ways over the years, employing it, for example, to construct broad defenses of poetry, or to make arguments for particular kinds of poetics, or as a space to meditate on or define their own aesthetics."
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