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Gradual
"Just one word....plastics."  The Graduate, 1967
     by Natasha Sajé

 

I wrench and cut the clear thick film—

envisioning its path to trash.  And next?

The hiding place where no one ever goes.

This stuff gets smaller and smaller…

micro to nano to who knows what.

Every way you look at it you lose.

1% of me is probably it

already, seeding cells with particles,

through infinitesimal scissor-teeth.

The vision that was planted in my brain.

In Latin, sapiens means wise.

The future will call us something else.

First published in The NonBinary Review.  From The Future Will Call You Something Else (Tupelo Press, 2023). 

 

The poem “Gradual” began about ten years ago with my thinking about the micro-plastics humans ingest.  I recalled the scene in the 1967 film The Graduate where Mr. McGuire says to Benjamin, “One word: plastics…there’s a great future in plastics.”  He was right: in the 60s we still used wax paper and foil, glass and ceramic.  Today it’s hard to buy anything edible that isn’t wrapped in plastic.  The film uses Simon and Garfunkel songs, so I spliced in lines from “Mrs. Robinson” and “The Sound of Silence.”  The last line of the poem, with a switch, became the title of my book.

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NATASHA SAJÉ is the author of five books of poems:  The Future Will Call You Something Else (Tupelo, 2023); Vivarium (Tupelo, 2014); Bend (Tupelo, 2004); Red Under the Skin (Pittsburgh, 1994); and Special Delivery (Diode Editions chapbook, 2021).  Her prose books are a postmodern poetry handbook, Windows and Doors: A Poet Reads Literary Theory (Michigan, 2014) and a memoir-in-essays, Terroir: Love, Out of Place (Trinity, 2020). Honors include the Robert Winner and the Alice Fay di Castagnola Awards from the Poetry Society of America.  Her poems have appeared widely in periodicals including Kenyon Review, American Poetry Review, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, and The New York Times.  natashasaje.com

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