Trash Meditations
by Elizabeth Cranford Garcia
The evidence: wet nest of cling wrap wadded on the deck,
the handful of black circles scattered like loose change.
I cannot tell you if the whole plastic drum was upturned while we slept,
deaf to the crash, how careless we were to leave its lip agape,
what effort it took to pry the lid, or how starved the rodent
strong enough to pop it open. I can only say
it must have been dark and cold when it left
an epistle of holes in the bag, somehow claimed
the last piece of Papa Johns. So which is the metaphor:
you’ll know what to discard only by its taste—salty,
something that makes too much of itself,
like this poem? What do I know of animal hunger
to ask what right it has to be choosy? To pick off
and drop whatever is bitter, or irksome, like belief,
whatever doesn’t fit the tomato taste, the yeast that sustains him
in the dark? I only know there is something
to be made of what was missing—the mushrooms,
the peppers and cheese, the whole triangle of bread.
That whether he loped away with or without shame,
he loped away fed.
Elizabeth Cranford Garcia’s debut collection, Resurrected Body, received Cider Press Review’s 2023 Editor’s Prize. Her work has appeared in Southern Humanities Review, Tar River Poetry, Image, RHINO, Chautauqua, Rappahannock Review, Portland Review, CALYX, and Mom Egg Review, and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. She is a PhD student at Georgia State and mother of three. Read more at elizabethcranfordgarcia.com.
