[Britt Bustos, Associate Editor: "This poem is a reclamation of the seemingly trashed items that surround our late-capitalist lives and a stunning cultural critique of what makes us appear good vs. actually being good. Through fragmented memories interweaved with detailed syntaxes of objects and gendered tactility, H.R. places us within a liminal space of pillowcases, plastic bags, and tampons, daring us to reconsider what we view as ephemeral."]

The proliferation of dog shit bags, filled with dog shit, on the beach 

leads me to believe people are more interested in appearing good than being good.

This is my subject matter now—what I pick up and carry, what I leave to rot. Peach 

 

pit, watermelon pickled whole in sea brine, devil’s purse, driftwood— 

the matter I am subject to. I wanted from sex what I got from the marine

trash pickup at Herring Cove. The de-invention of narrative’s falsehood 

 

and its truth. The astrology app on Z’s phone tells us Storytelling is the most desperate means 

of sustaining a relationship. My father emails me an article about the Canadian folk singer killed 

by coyotes on the beach thirteen years ago. He is taking comfort in imagining me as this acoustic teen 

 

in her peasant top, her political innocence. It is wish fulfillment 

more than terror of me walking alone in the dunes. He tells me to carry a stick. 

I tell him I carry a knife, demanding he imagine me as a woman capable and skilled 

 

enough to stab a coyote to death or retreat. I have demanded this imaginative trick 

of myself, as well, because the coyotes are too bold for my comfort. Catching crabs in the salt

marsh, eyeing my approach. And I have seen an owl, lunatic 

 

with daylight, attack a runner on a trail, a doe too, though it was unclear what form her assault

would take, should she catch the fleeing man. I go pick up garbage even after looking at the map

of private planes leaving LA after the Super Bowl. It is futile, trying to calculate what is my fault. 

 

We take the garbage to be sorted and measured. Pile shotgun shells with shotgun shells. Bottlecaps

with bottlecaps. Ring of broken condom. Ropes > 3 meters, ropes < 3 meters, knots, shoes, floats, floss. 

I feel, crouched on the beach untangling a Mylar balloon from rockweed, wrapped 

 

in invisible bells. On the cheap mattress, hangnail-stained pillowcase, I wanted this loss—

the narrative self destroyed by noise—senseless, personal, repetitive. The sticky silver pendant 

the sea sucks on. I wanted it from sex, but it was impossible to stop imagining myself—an albatross 

 

screaming overhead. So much story, so much salt. The purse seiners pass, their attendant hairdos—

birds, nets, stink. The woman attacked by a coyote in July waded out to a boat for rescue.

The grainy video makes no sense without narration. It looks as though the coyote is the defendant, 

 

the jogger the aggressor. I’m a good girl. I have a plastic bag full of plastic trash. Plastic lures. 

Plastic soldier. Plastic dinosaur covered in guns. Again and again someone will lift a tampon applicator

and proclaim people are disgusting. Are they disgusted by the disgust they imagine a stranger endures— 

 

unwilling to touch their own vagina with their own hand, or by the vagina itself? I am an accumulator

of items, nothing more. I do not think this is a moral act, or an act with a relationship to morality. 

The coyote’s imaginary blood is all over my hands, and my father’s. I’m abject translator  

 

of nothing into nothing. The sea is full of plastic. I am wearing my bells! Their plurality

is all I need to not exist for a moment. I think this is delight. I am forgotten! 

The sea, its impossible sex, has forgotten me to my brutality.