Wren Hanks

Transiversary

I think about the plastic needle tops, orange and purple, lining a grouper’s stomach. About the potential for cancerous ovaries, cells sculpting a new land-ho! inside me. The Deepwater Horizon spill altered the building blocks of ocean life a Guardian article says. Sometimes I read the news to hurt myself—seabirds caked in oil, closest to the spill. I am a biological reality is less convincing when confronted with real hunger, the baby pilot whale drinking his mother’s toxic milk. What do I know of an environment I can’t control? Something, never enough.

Powder Blue Isopods

I windex the roaches, tell them:
I will kill your children and your children’s children.
I have watched the other murderers
traipse in beige socks to the ice machine.
I have nuzzled a bag of dreaming shrimp;
the other murderers are human. We line up to choose
our animal enemy—the leeches shine
in their bogs like pocketed diamonds.