Felt
by Robert Jackson
Cycle and churn, washing machines wear fleece pullovers and dry-wick shirts thin, turning plastic fibers into micro pool-noodles that slip seaward to cake the surf, sprinkle ocean trenches where mini-shrimp sip the soft-hued filaments—body-length—from sand, shrimp swallowed in turn by hunting arrow worms, centers strung in pastel fibrils stranded when each prey’s absorbed, worms guzzled by drifting comb jellies with tapestries of plastic warp and weft coating the heart of each translucent orb inhaled by salmon bulking up to spawn in graveled redds, pink plaits of floating colored fluff eaten, last, by us, a skin of hand-me-down felt —coral, seafoam, canary— piling slowly in our cores.
Rob Jackson has published poems in Southwest Review, Split Rock Review, Portland Review, Cortland Review, Atlanta Review, LitHub, and many other journals. A Guggenheim Fellow, poet, and environmental scientist, he has also published columns and articles in the New York Times, Scientific American, and more.