One Theory of Ambition

Poetry
Written By Paisley Rekdal

There’s a patch of plastic trapped inside the Pacific’s Northern Gyre where inward spirals of weather stabilize water, ensnare its mass of polymers degrading into particle. It can’t be seen by satellite but must be mapped by mantra tows and boobies’ stomachs: haruspic signs of its existence scried like scraps of ship or meteorite. Our ambition was to reach the stars. But why the stars which are so distant, abstract beside an ocean’s flux of grilse in shades of wine? We have our fame. It travels in the skins of jellyfish, decoding up through bluefin, shark. Awash within our every vein like confetti drifting in the dark.

 
Paisley Rekdal

Paisley Rekdal is the author of a book of essays, The Night My Mother Met Bruce Lee; a hybrid-genre photo-text memoir that combines poetry, fiction, nonfiction and photography entitled Intimate; and four books of poetry: A Crash of Rhinos, Six Girls Without Pants, The Invention of the Kaleidoscope, and Animal Eye, which was a finalist for the Kingsley Tufts Prize and winner of the UNT Rilke Prize. Her work has received the Amy Lowell Poetry Traveling Fellowship, a Village Voice Writers on the Verge Award, an NEA Fellowship, a Pushcart Prize, the University of Georgia Press’ Contemporary Poetry Series Award, a Fulbright Fellowship, inclusion in the Best American Poetry series and various state arts council awards. Her poems and essays have appeared in or are forthcoming from The New York Times Magazine, American Poetry Review, The Kenyon Review, Poetry, The New Republic, Virginia Quarterly Review, Tin House, and on National Public Radio among others. 

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