Meg Freer
The Turtle’s Shell
-for Bruce K.
A gull with six-pack rings around its neck
cries in agony. Nervous octopus arms
clutch bottles and tubes. Seals and whales
fight with plastic hangers and jugs for space.
The Great Pacific Garbage Patch,
a giant gestating map of our negligence,
grows three times the size of France.
A hypothetical new country, the Trash Isles,
comes complete with flag and stamps.
Images on the proposed currency
trace the muscles of ocean life.
On the other side of the world,
a child exclaims, “It’s small as a pickle seed!”
upon seeing a newborn baby’s pinky toe,
and laughter covers pressing thoughts
of end times, releases ripples of hope
that ocean travelers will find not plastic,
but moss on a turtle’s shell.
The Turtle’s Shell
-for Bruce K.
A gull with six-pack rings around its neck
cries in agony. Nervous octopus arms
clutch bottles and tubes. Seals and whales
fight with plastic hangers and jugs for space.
The Great Pacific Garbage Patch,
a giant gestating map of our negligence,
grows three times the size of France.
A hypothetical new country, the Trash Isles,
comes complete with flag and stamps.
Images on the proposed currency
trace the muscles of ocean life.
On the other side of the world,
a child exclaims, “It’s small as a pickle seed!”
upon seeing a newborn baby’s pinky toe,
and laughter covers pressing thoughts
of end times, releases ripples of hope
that ocean travelers will find not plastic,
but moss on a turtle’s shell.
Meg Freer grew up in Montana and now teaches piano in Kingston, Ontario, where she enjoys running and photography and wishes she had more time for writing poetry. Her prose, photos, and poems have won awards in North America and overseas and have been published in anthologies and journals such as Ruminate, Young Ravens Literary Review, Vallum Contemporary Poetry, Poetry South, Eastern Iowa Review, and Borrowed Solace.