My mind is quick to name a thing Wasted- my day, my time, my life. But before us, Wasted had nowhere to call home in this created world. No; Wasted is a thing contrived exclusively with human hands. like hungry machines gobbling forests; like plastics degenerating into ocean waters, Filling the bellies of Albatrosses so new to this world that their cradle of sticks is all they yet know of it. Mother cocks her head, confused at her limp, cherished newborn because trust in what this ocean provides is all she’s ever known; is the only choice she has. For Waste was merely a thing imagined, until we wrought it with our own two industrious hands. So when my mind wants to speak of Waste, let me take a seat and bear witness to the life that could have been- Gliding over a world comprised entirely of blue and gray, belonging only to her- A world we share in the abstract, but I could never hope to know. For her feet would not know dry land for more than a year, propelled only by a handful of wing beats. And she would have lived for sixty-six years, I’m told. That is, if her belly were not lined with printer cartridges.