Mindy Gill
How vast our equine depths
once were. Only us, weightless
living motes of dust –
and what is left of life,
we eat and die in silence.
The phosphor of us diminishing
in the monument
to all that is unwanted:
the ghostnet, the lifeless bloom
of plastic. The chemical
swarm of flotsam
that outnumbers us,
and is home to our sunless
lives. Light, light, how we
long for it. We winnow
through indestructible slurry.
The colossal surface will never
reach our terminating
current. Where life appears,
it is not here, we do not
know it, though it begins
with our murderous survival.
Give me the impossible:
a siltless square of clarity
where I will drift, clean and infinite
sieving the Pacific dark.
‘The Phytoplankton’ was written after learning of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch – an area estimated to cover 1.6 million square kilometres in the North Pacific Ocean – filled with plastic particles and other chemical debris. It is bound by the North Pacific Gyre and horse latitudes. Microplastics outweigh plankton 6:1.
Mindy Gill’s poems have appeared in Island Magazine, The Lifted Brow, Award Winning Australian Writing, Australian Poetry Journal and the Queensland Art Gallery. She is the recipient of the Queensland Premier’s Young Writers and Publishers Award, the Tom Collins Poetry Prize and a Wheeler Centre Hot Desk Fellowship. She is Peril Magazine’s Editor-in-Chief.