Litter

Alexandra Burack

The loneliest trust—that printed words attached to my name will outlive me, escape the mouths that catch steel shelves between copper teeth and masticate study carrels of revelation that used to be libraries or basement coffeehouses—is the work of poets. Dispersed amid forever plastics from fast food palaces on every beach, playground, and trail, destitute words loiter at corner stores and bus stops, syllables’ memory of humid guttural orations like organ music without the pedals. We’re made to feel guilty about waste but not orphans we carve from books, rent from syntax and crumbled under the spindly feet of fowl, who peck them as gruel and chirp, which we mistake for only bird stories.