A Slow Decline

A Slow Decline Farmers wake, farm their fields. Their wives tend hearth and home, chickens, pull milk from cows, slop the pigs. Fishermen struggle against fleets of slowly departing commercial ships, haul in smaller catches of ever-smaller fish. But entangled seals barbed in wire loosely fit, don’t care, burgeon swollen into a razor sharp ring cuts through flippers, neck, and tail, chokes, slowly amputates does an ostentatious necklace flashy, glinting beneath a grayish overly hot and hazing sun, an aftermath of plastic, fish hooks, fossil fuel blackened air, and tons and tons of rank and raw sewage.