Of bodies that cough blood and can't breathe so good after the spill
Drop nets
Pull them up
Bursting with eyeless shrimp
And fish with oozing lesions.
I remember that time, in the Lower 9th, a fisherman non-chalantly explaining that the way you know whether or not the fish are good is that you open them up right then and there and the ones with maggots inside you don't eat.
And this was years ago, now, after the Storm. Before the Spill.
There have been many poems written about the spray-painted Xs on buildings
And the water lines
And the time we saw a tree on top of a roof, three years after Katrina,
A trunk that floated up and never came back down.
So I'll leave those stories be.
Instead I'll laugh at a name like Corexit
(as if we are that gullible)
And remember and remind that British Petroleum tells us exactly who they are,
Doesn't hide that it is run by humans whose hands resemble the hands
That pull the disfigured marine life out of the ocean in half-full nets.
The hands are paler, softer, fatter.
Humanity, this is us.
This is what our hands, on steering wheels and in wallets and on shopping carts and on the remote control, have created.
Some hands always cleaning up the mess that other hands have made.
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