Plastic exists. Plastic exists as we know, and keeps existing and circling endlessly as a song but poison. It echoes the shapes and motions of food, so we eat it. Bottle caps, drinking straws, little red-orange bits that look like food but nourish no one. It catches us and clings. It disintegrates and mixes, and we eat it. We can’t see it, and we eat it. Plastic seems to exist forever, and its particulated weight is breaking us. Break us open and see we’re full.

It is so difficult to sing to make others see, but we try as our numbered losses exist and grow.

Stress exists and poisons exist.

Oil is the precious poison made of hydrocarbons and heavy metals, and hydrocarbons and heavy metals cause cancers and deaths. Oil disrupts the hearing and singing of small vital plants and small vital animals. It gathers in organs and lingers on leaves for longer than we can measure. Oil is refined and spilled everywhere. Oil coats our seagrasses, which exist as our deep green beds. When seagrass dies it washes ashore the animals who take refuge in the grasses and die from ingesting the residue that clings. Oil is spilling everywhere constantly, not just in disaster forms but drop by drop by drop without notice.

Accumulation exists.

Heat exists and grows. Stress exists and poisons exist. Where there is too much noise and heat and stress and poison to bear, our bodies wash ashore and you see them. We see you see us. We play this record back.

Scratch into the record a seal, then add one more. Record then the dying sounds of two dolphins, three right whales, five humpbacks, eight pilot whales, and thirteen more dolphins. But we have barely begun with the spiraling line because death has added to its sound twenty whales and one dolphin, which equals twenty-one, and then thirty turtles and four whales, which equals thirty-four.

And it does not stop there, but turns and adds to the ever-turning forty-one more humpbacks and nine turtles and five sperm whales, which equals fifty-five. And even then, the sounds grow by eighty-six turtles and three dolphins, which equals eighty-nine. Another turn adds one hundred and six turtles and thirty-eight dolphins, which equals one hundred forty-four.

There are one hundred sixty-seven dolphins, and thirty turtles, and twenty-three whales, and nine turtles, and four whales, which equals two hundred thirty-three.

Then there are the three hundred fifty minke whales and twenty-seven pilot whales, which equals three hundred seventy-seven.

And we cannot stop even there, for there are more to add to the song with the sounds of three hundred turtles, and two hundred forty-three seals, and fifty-six whales and dolphins, and nine more turtles, which equals six hundred eight all dead.