Song of the Plastic Bags
on the road to Saqqara
a road beside the road
or a piled path of rocks
or oh my trash
solid seeming
and solid in fact
solid bottles muck cups buckets
rafted together yes a solid
but step on it and sink
green between the swill
and hydrocarbons
this is water a finger
of the Nile snaking along
beside the road to Memphis’
necropolis, the oldest pyramid
with its stacked mastabas
its refusal to disappear
below it the Serapeum vaults
tombs for the Apis bulls
actual bulls their tombs
like rooms you could walk in
you can count the stars carved
into the ceiling
of the road
for the dead
and the dead never leave
look the trash is singing for them
wind’s throat through sacs
polymer polymer polymer
polypropylene polyethylene
snagged all down the barbed wire
Andy Young’s third chapbook The People is Singular was published in 2012. Her poems, essays, and translations have been featured internationally and in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Callaloo, Guernica, and the Norton anthology Language for a New Century. Since 2012, she has been dividing her time between New Orleans, where she works for the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts and UNO’s Intensive English Language Program, and Egypt, where she works for the American University in Cairo.