Status Quo “After” the Gulf Incident
for JoAnn
Now that the estuary is a well-oiled machine, ball bearings in the slippery, every blade a dipstick,
the Government and the BP’s and the Halliburtons can breed plants down there, import workers, who will care
how much it all stinks. Just think: rampant oil could be a metaphor—the corporatocracy
gumming up everything, subsuming peoples of the world (& us), drowning Earth
in its own sleek excrement. Where is Spartacus
when you need him, all loincloth and muscle definition? These days, the only line anyone draws in the crude-fouled arena
is the bottom line, that lawless scrawl staking its claim across the world floor.
No one noticed the crack it scored and now like scrofulous skin the fault splits open—
and the sweet benzene spreads. In solidarity, thinking water everywhere refuses to reflect. No sunstruck Aegean, no Aurora in the Northeast Passage, no
moon-split China Sea—it is all morass, an iridescent mire
laddering beyond Alexandria, up the Potomac: Lincoln Memorial, Tidal Basin, non-Reflecting Pool
and Spartacus is there, primed with grease and sand—an engine, he tears up the Mall,
leaps to the top of the Capitol steps, tarball chains and all, looks back and bellows, Who is with me?
~~~~~~~~~~
Transfusion Reaction
Oil in the Gulf, as seen from the Delaware Coast
stuck earth won’t scream—bleeds
itself, arterial
ocean the soaked bandage
pressed against this beating
blood transfuses the Gulf congeals
at edges, festers
in estuaries—a soup: ancient
bodies of plants, choleric
Pasts back to haunt, whose foul
humors’ ghostly fingers
slide into that marsh just as
the wayward doctor mines the body
of girl after baby girl no one
does anything not for a long time
until a million little girls
accommodate
with their birds and fishes
the black rubber hands
~~~~~~~~~~
Abby Millager lives and writes amid mushroom farms in the northern hills of humble Delaware. Her poetry, prose and translations have appeared in 5 am, Agenda (UK), Barrow Street, The Flea (Australia), Fourteen Hills, Goodfoot, The Journal, New Zoo Review, The Pharos, Phoebe, Prairie Schooner, Redactions, Southeast Review, Terminus, Verse, Worcester Review and elsewhere. Originally trained as a doctor, she graduated from the Bennington Writing Seminars in 2002. She received a 2009 Emerging Individual Artist Fellowship from the Delaware Division of the Arts. Her chapbook Hairwork has just been released (Doll’s Eye Press, 2010).
Poets for Living Waters 