Penelope Layland

Every single piece of plastic ever made still exists, scientists say

 
 
As a grain in the gut of an albacore or wrasse or drummer, or glittering like sand on the gills of the great ray, my beloved plastic swan of remembered infant baths, drifts her half-life, away from the chlorine and fluoride, at one with the heavy metals.
 
She dives there with her vector in the mazy deep, with the broken buttons and piano keys that saved the elephants, the bakelite phone that brought the doctor on the party line, the clingwrap  that sealed out the swarming air, the one-use cannulas and Y-sets that saved my cancered sister, the forgotten bags that bore the groceries to our first home together, the scrub that promises me a younger me, sloughed of the old me, sloughed too of the old ways of wood, that denuded the forests.
 
I cannot swim out far enough into my future to feel exactly the drag or the buoyancy.
 
 
 
 

Penelope Layland’s latest book of poetry, Things I’ve thought  to tell you since I saw you last, was published in August 2018. Her book Suburban Anatomy was short-listed for the Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry and her book The Unlikely Orchard was commended in the ACT Book of the Year awards. Penelope has a PhD from the University of Canberra and has worked as a journalist, a speechwriter, a media and policy adviser and a communications director.