Cut me open, and I bleed glitter. It scrapes against my veins. However

my heart aches most, perhaps, for the larvaceans and the rotifers.

I too am a poor innocent beast, soft-bodied and translucent and

mysterious and obscure and important and unaware and 

a vector for pollution.

The rotifers, they have no cognition. How could they even discern

a chunk of plastic (poly of ester, etheyne, amide, styrene, etc) from a morsel of food? 

The jaws of the rotifer shred and grind the already ground 

and shredded petrochemical into thousands of smaller, insidious

nanoparticles. The countably small collection of cells is just doing its job.

There’s this one sweater I got at a Plato’s Closet, back home

and I love it and so do my adoring fans on the subway who compliment

how perfectly my nailpolish (with glitter) matches my sweater (with tinsel)

and it’s soft and it’s boxy and it’s breezy and it reflects the light 

in five thousand different vectors, brilliant dazzle

of mylar shreds (biaxially oriented and metalized polyethylene terephthalate) 

on acrylic fibers (vinyl acetate/acrylonitrile co-polymer).

Every time I wear it, the sweater sheds some of the mylar shreds. And I justify it

saying there’s nothing I can do that will further harm the devastated ecosystem

of fucking Manhattan, New York. Sure, I could go live in a monastery

(eat clean, only wear natural fibers, deny myself the material pleasures) but

let me tell you what’s not going to happen.

Back to the giant larvaceans. I hope you’ve been wondering about them.

They’re not really giant, all smaller than four inches. Neotenic tunicates, if that

means anything to you (chordates but not vertebrates).

Basically, they make their living producing bespoke artisanal snotballs.

Finely wrought masterpieces of mucus, single-use double-walled filter houses

that get clogged and discarded and remade on the daily. The effort pays off,

giant larvaceans filter the ocean more quickly than any other pelagic organism.

Their detritus sinks to the ocean floor, and is a key source of nutrients

for the scavengers down there.

You can tell where this is going, I presume. I hope I don’t need to spell it out.

I don’t want to connect the dots, to draw lines between 

all the micro- and nano-plastics from my sweater and see that tangled graph.

It will remind me of trawler nets.

The Trawler Nets