Poem

Squander

By W. J. Herbert
Illustration of animal-skull shapes in blue, yellow, red on light blue background with white bars
Paul Spella / The Atlantic

I’m still a magpie. If it glitters,
          I want it, no matter
                    the cost—

I don’t connect the bangle
          I buy online to a gold
                    mine’s cyanide heap

leaching, or the made-
          with-fracked-gas plastics
                    that I throw in the trash

to the survivor in an as-yet-
          unnamed epoch
                    who’ll sniff the fossil

bones of a predator
          unknown to it, though
                    the skull that it licks

will likely be ours,
          and even if this creature
                    resembles the rat-size

mammal that evolved when
          dinosaurs died, by what blood
                    chemistry will it breathe?

W. J. Herbert’s debut poetry collection, Dear Specimen, will be published in the fall of 2021 as a winner of the 2020 National Poetry Series Competition.