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. 

IMAGES OF THE OREGON APOCALYPSE

 by Tricia Knoll

Scientists say that the wildfires in the West combined with drought and record heat waves could be triggering one of the Southwest’s largest migratory bird die-offs in recent decades. Photo Credit: Allison Salas/New Mexico State University via The New York Times, September 15, 2020

Is there any reason to write anything today
when ink on paper looks like soot
fallen from a malignant sky? The oneness
we dream about flies in this wind: their house
of forty years, the plastic wading pool and hose,
rake, car, Bible, gramma’s wedding pictures,
ash of curtain, ash of couch, ash of rug,
the soot is a negative of what all they had. 

How many dead birds have you ever seen
in your life? One or two bounced off a window?
Maybe your cat was a bad actor or you
were the bad actor that let your cat roam.
But piles of the dead? The migrating dead
won’t be back next year. We didn’t really
know exactly how they found their way
in the first place.

Such great weariness. With flimsy masks.
Stay inside to not be sick – you’ve followed
that mantra for months. You can’t outwalk
this cloud. Or see from one bridge to the next.
The firefighters sleep in peril. And wake
in dark fatigue. You check your air numbers
every hour and somewhere else is flooding
under winds that twirl the birds. 

Tricia Knoll is a Vermont poet who lived in Portland, Oregon for 45 years. She is checking in with her friends under evacuation watches, hears of one who lost her home and sees the images with great sadness.

ICARUS

by Louise Robertson

Top: Carcass of a bird set alight by focused sunlight at the Ivanpah Solar Generating System (seen below) along the Nevada-California border. Top Photo: U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service via Earthweek; Bottom Photo and caption: Earthweek.

Environmentalists and animal rights activists are in rare opposition, because birds are being cooked alive when they fly through the concentrated rays of the world’s largest solar thermal power plant, Ivanpah Solar Power Facility in California. Solar thermal plants are excellent means of creating renewable energy and jobs. They help reduce US reliance on foreign oil. But the reputation of solar energy as a whole could suffer unjustly from the charred feathers showing up at giant solar thermal plants. --Michael Howard, Esquire, August 20, 2014

Ever since Icarus took to the sky

we have been talking about nothing else.



At once posing ourselves as the boy, aloft,

or falling;



but also we put on the father's shirt and wings

and grieve.



We paint ourselves into the figures

minding our own business on the ground



with the corn and the book

and the spiked tool.



Over and over, we say where were you when

Kennedy/9-11/whatever happened.



Then the sunlight catches the birds

on fire



who know best of all

how Icarus really felt.



Burn. Burn. Burn.



Louise Robertson has earned degrees (BA Oberlin, MFA George Mason University), poetry publications (Pudding Magazine, The New Verse News, Borderline) and poetry awards (Mary Roberts Rinehart, Columbus Arts Festival Poetry Competition -- twice). She is active as a poet and organizer in her local Columbus, Ohio poetry scene.