Green Linden Press

Score for Body of Troubled Water

Dive into troubled water | of a once Great Lake | where fish forage for bright confetti |
sucking down microplastics | fragments saturated with pesticides & heavy metals | jagged
edges scoring throat & gut | Through gills | warming waters | increase chemical uptake |
Larval fathead minnows | show deformities | scoliosis | edema around the eyes | swollen
hearts & yolk sacs | truncated tails | Centuries ago | storms sent sloops & schooners | great
vessels to the depths | Nesting in the wrecks | schools of smallmouth bass | ribs of the
hulls | hiding them like bullrush forests

Score for the Body as Chemical Bond

Pull her from the shale | our sister Ethane | Drag her to that massive factory | perched on
the Gulf Coast | pelican heaven | petrochemical hell | jumping with mullet | shrimp
bobbing like question marks | in polyester nets | Get her so hot | superheated to crack her
gas | break her bonds | her molecular bones | out of which will spring | her daughter
Ethylene | ruler of a plastic kingdom | Queen of adhesives & resins | Root monarch | of
crushed plastic bottles | & pharmaceutical chemicals | Taste her oxide in the hothouse air |
taste her degrading in water | traces of her found in our bowels | in our blood’s retort

Score for Bodies in Appeal

Give us a chemical halo | a non-stick life | in control of the elements | Conquer water with
Gore-Tex | Meet flame with Teflon | no charred marrow | no greased adhesions |
Scotchgard keeps us watertight | bone dry eyes | boots like citadels | molecules heckling |
blood levels | for miles around | Map the plumes | of compromised soil | beneath the skin
of the mountain | Track the particulate wind | back to the factory | of high performance
materials | In a town called Hoosick Falls | we ride the lubricated river | froth at the mouth
| of troubled watersheds | My face an appeal | at the bottom of the well

Score for the Body Politic

Uranium climbs the bones | of children | ruckusing near abandoned mines | small bodies
scaling | heaps of tailings | On Navajo land | Diné territory | trucks lug toxic rock | as
radioactive grit | sloughs into the wind | blows towards homes | Underground seams | &
abandoned shafts | leak downstream | leaching radionuclides | into groundwater |
wrecking the wells | Find the holders | who called the mines | mine | Rattle the chain of
custody | Target the end users | bomb makers | war hawks | Indict responsible parties |
governing bodies | Our body politic | standing by | as my father swallows dust clouds |
cuts pipes fleshed with asbestos | same killer mineral | lining the bellies of warships

Willa Carroll works with text, moving image, and somatic practice. Her debut poetry collection, Nerve Chorus (The Word Works, 2018), was noted in The Common as a “meticulously choreographed treatment of life as art.” Carroll’s poems have appeared in AGNI, Poem-A-Day, Tin House, The Slowdown, and elsewhere. A finalist for The Georgia Poetry Prize, she won Narrative Magazine’s Third Annual Poetry Contest and Tupelo Quarterly’s TQ7 Poetry Prize. Demolition Suite, her chapbook, was a finalist for the Tomaž Šalamun Prize and then selected for the Split Rock Press Chapbook Series (forthcoming October, 2023). Her poetry videos and multimedia collaborations have been featured in Interim Poetics, Narrative Outloud, and TriQuarterly. Awarded Best Poetry Film at the International Migration and Environment Film Festival, her work has screened at festivals in the US, Canada, UK, and Denmark. After earning degrees from Bennington and living in NYC for twenty-five years, she’s now based in upstate New York.

ISSN 2472-338X
© 2023