March 2, 2025Your Brain May Have a Spoon’s Worth of Microplastics
In the hospital, my stepfather wakes.
They ask him who is president.
Well, what year is it? he jokes,
as if there will never be a time
he won’t remember,
as if plastic the size of an ice cream scoop
isn’t lodged in his brain like a forgotten moon.
Sometimes, he forgets our names,
but never Gary Anderson,
whose missed field goal kept the Vikings
from the Super Bowl in 1998,
or some obscure blues singer from Butte,
a record he and my mother play
in the living room, swaying,
as if the air might resuscitate a stranger’s face.
We don’t get to choose what we remember.
Our brains are plastic. Single-use.
Uncapped, emptied, tossed in a blue bin,
processed at a recycling center
thirty miles from heaven.
Exiled angels scrub the residue
with latex gloves—
tiny pieces of the things we loved,
upcycled, reclaimed.
She repeats her name.
He searches for the answer behind his eyes,
like a door locked from the inside,
like he’s trying to cut a steak
with a plastic knife,
like he’s sculpting her face
from someone else’s memory.
from Poets Respond