Maya Weeks is a writer, artist, and geographer from rural California working on marine debris as capital accumulation, climate change, gender, and logistics. Recent work has been published in The New Inquiry, Blind Field Journal, GUTS Canadian Feminist Magazine, and the chapbooks How To Be on the Outside of Every Inside/How to Be Inside Every Outside (these signals press) and Panic Train (Mondo Bummer), among others. Catch Maya on a surfboard or in a river or on Twitter at @looseuterus.
3 from MYTH OF THE GARBAGE PATCH
i didn’t mean to turn garbage into my life’s work
but my life was meaningless
as were all of ours under capitalism
i was sick of throwing things away, like shoes, and my friends
i wanted to be my own person / but i wasn’t anyone
peeing beside the water tank
chopping wood in the living room
spitting in the dark, peeing in the dirt, peeing behind the water tank
boiling water on wood-burning stove
sitting next to it, basically like being in a sauna
for pleasure i move fire around. sit in the dark and watch it burn
i like being temporary
tear up where people actually bother to preserve things
intimate data exchanges
gashes made by miles-long trawl lines visible from space
every city’s surveillance mechanism
mandatory water restrictions for individuals but no groundwater management standards for farmers
petroleum, oil derricks, iron works
i’d say get the fuck out but i left instead
i went so far left that the world turned back on me
i wasn’t making it to los angeles
i thought i should go to new york, make a dumb circle
a parallel defect, if you will
my friends were everywhere; for this i was grateful
we’re out here with the copepods, the sand crabs, the eelgrass, the sandpipers, the sooty sheerwaters
with the rabbits, the mourning doves, the grasses, the dandelions, the sticky monkey flower, the stinkbugs, the sycamores
with the seagulls, the squirrels, the flies, the spiders, the sparrows, the cormorants, the turkey vultures
with the dragonflies, the bees, the california buckwheat, the cypresses, the algae
we’re out here with the lizards, the ants, the egrets, the mice, the seals, the moths, the swallows, the raccoons
with the yarrow, the fennel, the poison hemlock, the poison oak, the sequoias, the redwood sorrel, the night herons, the california condors
Live free, die fucked
light a fire under my ass
if the bridge burns
we have a boat
a bat
You can always come home
You can never go home again
I’m always on the edge of time
on the verge of time stopping
We hang on to our yogurt containers.
We think they will make us useful.
We think that we shall never be replaced
slow flow
of less lethal weapons
rising seas, rising inequality
how your life ends up in the ocean
just 1 of so many islands
we’re all out here
dead fish, floating
puffed up & beautiful
is this what my life is now
the ability to wake up in the morning
and be somebody else
an agreement
under the weather