Plastic Sea Dreams of Its Fish

2025

Thinking about nature’s memory (is it long as the iceberg is deep, or short because it exists in the ever-shifting present?).

Fireflies are diminishing due to climate change, pesticides, loss of habitat, and light pollution. These magical, soft-bodied lamp-bearers (nature’s LEDs) cannot read their own signals because the landscape is so flooded with ambient light.

That part—the inability to communicate with the only available language, one literally, physically baked into your body—is chilling.

More selfish to my species, I wonder: what is childhood without fireflies?

We used to capture these creatures in the gloaming of Ohio on my grandparents’ small farm. Pushing through twilit cornfields with a mason jar in hand, skirting the edge of forest, dancing around the ferocious German shepherd on a thick chain that pulled hard to reach the menstruating bloodhound. We trapped the fireflies, then (the cruelest calligraphy) destroyed their bodies by drawing phosphorescent poetry on the rough concrete porch, just under the swing.