Anti-Ode to Trash (A Rant)

Nancy Lynée Woo

It’s mostly madness in my office
but sometimes it all comes together.
Papers everywhere, books, half-
finished poems open in Word—
cups and zines and notebooks
upon notebooks. How many
items of trash do I throw away
in a day? But there is no such thing 
as “away.” I have a bone to pick
with trash—capitalism invented trash,
planned obsolescence, 
planted in us the thirst
for more, pinning our lives
on constant extraction, waves 
of stuff shipped here in packing crates.
Do we really need so much stuff
all the time? So much dies
in a landfill or becomes a mountain
overseas, seagulls picking
through morsels alongside
brown hands, wall of white
plastic garbage rising and rippling
across the ground, islands
of trash, trash bobbing up
and down on the ocean’s skin.
Lobster cages flown loose
from their chains haunt
the ocean floors, trapping
bodies in them. Bottom trawling
crushes everything in the path
of the net. What do we do
about trash, all this
needless excess? I still see
people wandering around
the Southern California drylands
without carrying a canteen, 
buying a plastic water bottle
instead, which is consumed
within the hour and tossed
into the nearest trash can.
It’s madness. I want to shout
everywhere—carry your own
damn water, at least! Start weighing
your trash in years left.