The newcomer lobs
her plastic
half full still
yoghurt cup
into the wrong
bin, I want to
stand up
walk over and—
instead, I think about the sea
out past the frozen cliffs
filling up with yoghurt cups.
We are in Iceland
where they have four bins:
plastic
glass
paper
trash
but none for misdirected
anger. We are
all women
from somewhere else
in various states of artistic
retreat.
The newcomer is a poet
from the West Bank and
when she says
I grew up
with the white-knuckle
shudder
of bombs and the taste
of dust, I want to
lay my face in the snow outside.
That was nine years ago,
when most of us knew
nothing,
when we hadn’t watched the
stacks of open-mouthed bodies,
some headless,
all grey-white dusted.
After I moved to Los Angeles
I looked her up.
She lives in New York
with her dead mother’s
family and writes
essays on Palestine. I wrote
to say I’m sorry
about all of it
but she never replied.
I rinse out my tuna cans,
juice cartons,
yoghurt cups,
numbers 1 and 5 clamshell
and coated card
until every bin is overflowing.
Jess Cornelius is a New Zealand writer and musician based in Los Angeles. Her work has been published in The Age, North & South and Penguin’s Women of Letters.