Landfill

This is where our wealth haunts the earth—
bulldozers leveling back to dirt, frayed
comforters, pieces of faces ripped

from family photos, mancala marbles
clanging at the bottom of a black bag
with dull spoons & a steel urn

sanctifying mounds of past hope.

Metal corrodes quick in this acidic
environment, leaves behind gold
leachate
turning the land into venom.

Like ichor
it disenchants the wind,
ashes yoked in an alloy vase.

Even when we drove past this graveyard
ice-capped on I-40, I smelled
our bygones begging me to wonder

                             will I become that slurry
if my bones are scrapped this way?
I worried about the lost chicks

a farmer ordered during
the pandemic, the opossums
harvesting on fertile

& half-hatched eggs. & the Juul
carts or boba straws that sneak
off into the ocean.

I used to have hermit crabs
with Poké balls painted
on their shells, prayed

they made their way back
to the sea when they were lost,
found them petrified under the kitchen sink

after seven months. Which is to say
we threw them away too with all the Witness
propaganda, the red leather bible

you gave me that shed its spine.
If no one can create matter
nor destroy it, will waste come back to us

in one form or another over time
as a quilt of satin scraps, cracked
MJ CD’s, unraveled buttons,

can a grandmother return
as my sister, my father, my cat
if given a second chance?

_____

Britny Cordera is a Black writer and Creole poet, descending from African, Indigenous, and French/Spanish ancestors. She was a finalist for the 2020 Narrative 30 Below contest. Cordera’s poetry can be found or is forthcoming in Rhino, Narrative, Xavier Review, and Auburn Avenue. Currently, she is an MFA candidate at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale, a teaching artist through St. Louis Poetry Center, and a poetry editor for The New Southern Fugitives.