Rebecca Hawkes
“why suck the strap” why look at a sunset. why listen to your favourite song. why stop to smell the flowers. come on now
To live ethically in the present moment means finding creative strategies for living with toxicity—to accept it as a new queer future and to find ways of navigating horror while resisting the policies, governments, and corporations that would like to see our lives foreclosed.
– Heather Davis, “Imperceptibility and Accumulation: Political Strategies of Plastic”
I.
Until the state sharpens its scalpels
I will remain immaculate.
Rubber talismans implanted
in the inner fascia of my bicep.
Instructions fed directly to my flesh.
Softcore cyborg so what-
ever else I might invite
inside myself
remains nobody’s business.
II.
I eat a brand new credit card each day,
shredded and sprinkled like sugar crystals
over probiotic yogurt.
My future lymph runs hot with pesticides;
my bisphenol A, my mouthfuls of phthalates.
Ever compromised by chemistry… now you
have asked me to stop swimming in the creek
where pale foam gathers to soft peaks
like whipped cream begging to be licked from skin.
III.
Why not waste these brief days
tonguing silicone?
Some faiths require supply chains
of warm bodies to inhabit. Hermit crabs
rehomed in RealDoll torsos.
My babes go unmade. Still I worship
powers of creation:
fealty sworn to fossil deaths
processed to form a hot pink cock.
Those hydrocarbon corpses rise again,
brilliant as their Precambrian sunshine.
Our endowment’s replica pearlescence
welcomed into every widening gyre.
IV.
Long after our bodies go, this dildo
marches among the ocean’s bright parade.
Cruising islands of stray toys and torn drag
-nets shimmy over the waves. A smorgasbord
of buoyant dross attended by turtles
draped in fishnets, and the royal albatross.
Sparkling garbage with sea dragons. Men-o-war.
Violet snails and by-the-wind sailors, all
the jellies and the fishes,
elegant insects that walk on water,
each devoted to their governing currents.
Ocean cleanup operations skim
all kinds of fragile life-forms
indiscriminately from the sea.
Washed up on the beach in record numbers,
strap-ons of all sizes
nudge each other
as though breeding.
V.
From below, the bottled light
beamed through the Great Pacific Garbage Patch
bestows a queer cathedral window.
Take ye now the polyethylene tag
from the bag that reseals for freshness
yer body’s broken bread. With your thumb
lay it down upon my tongue.
No need to pray. We’ve beaten death.
Our love will not decay.
We’ll shimmer microscopic
in the polar snows and tropic rains.
VI.
And even once our enemies
have murdered us,
the children
will inherit plastic raptures
shining true as glitter in the blood.
Rebecca Hawkes is a queer painter and poet from Aotearoa, New Zealand. Her book Meat Lovers won Best First International Collection in the UK Poet Laureate’s 2022 Laurel Prize and was a Lambda Literary Award finalist for bisexual poetry in the US. She is head shepherd of warm-blooded literary journal Sweet Mammalian and co-edited the Antipodean climate crisis anthology No Other Place to Stand. In the US, her poems have been awarded Salt Hill’s Philip Booth Poetry Prize and Palette Poetry’s Sappho Prize, with more work published or forthcoming in Glass, Hobart, Cordite, Landfall, HAD, and Gigantic Sequins. Rebecca is currently topsy-turvy between hemispheres studying an MFA in yearning (and, to a lesser extent, poetry) at the University of Michigan.