‘Midden’ by Kate Greene

for weeks the Neolithic midden
clung to my clothes, hair, and skin
or lay embedded in fingerprints, under fingernails,
in open cuts
now it’s falling off slowly as dust on to twenty first century technology
on the seats of taxis and airplanes
and cotton hotel bedsheets and duvets
it’s washing down porcelain sinks into metal drains and PVC pipe
toward a water treatment plant an ocean and five thousand years
away from where it began

Kate Greene
July 29, 2018