Poems by Samantha Imperi

Seabird

by Samantha Imperi

From Canary Summer 2024

Samantha lives in the foothills of middle Appalachia overlooking the Hocking River. She and her tiny dog walk several times a week to the top of Radar Hill to see the sunset.

It is June on the California coast and I watch a seabird
peck the sand for morsels left behind by a mass
of bodies that fill the landscape with flesh and fabric,
the refuse of humanity falling from their fingers
into the beach in forgotten scraps and shards that glitter
like treasure along the shore. I remember

an image on the internet of a dead seabird
cut open to expose a distended belly full of trash
indigestible plastics and the bright metallic
of a torn granola wrapper. It died of starvation
in a body so full of nothing that it burst.

I’ve never forgotten the array of bottlecaps and soda tabs,
cigarette butts and shiny plastic straw wrappers
that littered the autopsy, the way it must have kept eating
and eating until its stomach could stretch no more
and meal by meal, its body drained of life
like water leaking from the well. I can imagine

the day it laid itself down to rest, betrayed and broken,
too heavy to fly, a body less body than burden, wracked
with pangs of angry hunger and the injury of indulgence
expanded inside. I wonder about the ignorance of a bird
to die, silently, unknowing, like laying down to rest
after a long flight, like wishing for relief and receiving it.

On the beach in June I am smoking a cigarette,
drinking a can of soda. I watch the seabird
find something small, and head back, swallow it whole.