SHAPED LIKE A FISH

by Bonnie Naradzay

Earlier this year, scientists discovered that there is about as much microplastics in the brain as a whole plastic spoon. The paper, published in Nature Medicine in February, revealed that the amount of microplastics—tiny plastic particles smaller than 5 millimeters—in the human brain appears to be increasing: Concentrations rose by about 50% between 2016 and 2024. —Fortune, May 20, 2025

Reading about how NASA astronauts

grew edible zinnias while orbiting 

above us in space, I think of ways

we've chosen to live on this earth. 

 

Red lilies and oleander were the first 

flowering plants to thrive in Hiroshima’s 

charred remains.  In the rubble, gamma 

rays made the blooms even brighter.

 

Fields of sunflowers, grown in Chernobyl, 

change the radioactive dirt effectively, 

scientists say. Meanwhile, Agent Orange 

is everywhere in the soil in Viet Nam.

 

Flowers that have grown mutations, 

though near Fukushima, may be 

a mistake. Could that happen anyway?

On islands in the Tasman Sea, birds 

 

mistake ocean plastics for food to feed

their chicks, and dead birds were found

having ingested single-use soy sauce 

plastic bottles, shaped like a fish.  

 

When you mistake the song of a bird
for the death rattle of another species, 

It’s already over.  The world is filled

with microplastics, like our brains.

Source: Heliograf

Bonnie Naradzay’s manuscript will be published this year by Slant Books.  For years, she has led weekly poetry sessions at homeless shelters and a retirement community.  Poems, three of which have been nominated for Pushcarts, have appeared in AGNI, New Letters, RHINO, Tampa Review, EPOCH, Dappled Things, and other places. While at Harvard she was in Robert Lowell’s class on “The King James Bible as English Literature.” In 2010 she was awarded the University of New Orleans Poetry Prize – a month’s stay in Northern Italy – in the South Tyrol castle of Ezra Pound’s daughter Mary.  There, Bonnie had tea with Mary, hiked the Dolomites, and read drafts of Pound’s translations. 

EXCLUSION ZONE

by Joan Mazza

Evolutionary biologist Timothy Mousseau and his colleagues have published 90 studies that prove beyond all doubt the deleterious genetic and developmental effects on wildlife of exposure to radiation from both the Chernobyl and Fukushima nuclear disasters, writes Linda Pentz Gunter. But all that peer-reviewed science has done little to dampen the 'official' perception of Chernobyl's silent forests as a thriving nature reserve. —The Ecologist, April 25, 2016

Thirty years after Chernobyl’s accident
spilled radiation equal to twenty Hiroshimas,
wolves, roe deer, boar, bison, and moose thrive
between abandoned apartment buildings and once-
tended fields and gardens. Animals too contaminated
to eat. Appearing to be normal, they meander
within what is left of Pripyat. Tourists travel
to photograph the haunting beauty of decaying
buildings, trees flowering in spring, ignore long-term
threats of gamma particles that enter their bodies—
silent with their sinister destruction. This zone
is an unintentional wildlife sanctuary,

while Fukushima fallout spreads eastward
across the Pacific Ocean toward the west coast
of the Americas. Southern California seaweed
holds five times the normal radiation. What this
means for other foods, for long-term human
health, we don’t yet know. The ocean maps show
the field widening, contaminating fish, plankton,
and mammals, dumping tsunami debris on islands
along the way. Another natural experiment.
Perhaps another surprise nature reserve. We wait
to see what it brings, which of the fittest survives.
No one will be excluded from this test.

Joan Mazza has worked as a medical microbiologist, psychotherapist, seminar leader, and has been a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee. Author of six self-help psychology books, including Dreaming Your Real Self (Penguin/Putnam), her poetry has appeared in Rattle, Kestrel, The MacGuffin, Mezzo Cammin, Buddhist Poetry Review, and The Nation. She ran away from the hurricanes of South Florida to be surprised by the earthquakes and tornadoes of rural central Virginia, where she writes poetry and does fabric and paper art.

HOT TIME IN THE OLD TOWN WITH LICORICE UNLUCKIES

by Tricia Knoll

NAMIE, Japan — His may be one of the world’s more quixotic protests.

Angered by what he considers the Japanese government’s attempts to sweep away the inconvenient truths of the Fukushima nuclear disaster, Masami Yoshizawa has moved back to his ranch in the radioactive no-man’s land surrounding the devastated plant. He has no neighbors, but plenty of company: hundreds of abandoned cows he has vowed to protect from the government’s kill order. --NY Times, January 11, 2014

I grew up on the myth of Mrs. O’Leary’s cow, that careless bovine
kicking a lamp that burned down Chicago. Hot time in the old town
tonight we sang. When Mrs. O’Leary was officially cleared of wrong-doing,
it was too late for kids that learned that song in grade school.
That kerosene lamp, and she didn’t do it. The cow was innocent.

I like cows. I’m lactose in love. Ice cream. Cheese. At the Oregon coast,
we have a herd of Oreo cows --black at the butt, black at the head, a middle stripe
of creamy white around the belly. People tell stories about those Oreo cows.
Tourists go out of their way to take pictures of them, officially --
Belted Galloways.

Today’s hot time cows...well, they surprised me. Those radioactive cows,
the Fukushima cows, all one color cows -- I guess you’d call them licorice
unlucky cows. Cows of Hope. Officially Japanese blacks. Radioactive cows
feeding on contaminated grass and Mr. Yoshizawa who says the fault
is not the cows’, they are more than walking accident debris. So he lives
along side-by-side them to stop the genocide of licorice unlucky cows,
a shooting and a push into the big pit. He too will learn just how hot
time is in the old town.

Yup, those cows. Waiting at the dwindling manger to join the ranks
            Achelos
                 Mrs. O’Leary’s cow
             moon jumpers
             Elsie
             the Oreo cows
                 Y Fuwch Frech
             Babe
           
and the Licorice Unluckies in the hot town.


Tricia Knoll is a Portland, Oregon poet. Finishing Line Press is publishing her chapbook Urban Wild in May 2014. She once rode a pregnant cow on a ranch which was a filmshoot site for a documentary highlighting the danger of the widespread use of DDT.