Embedded, by Pamela Annas

Gaia prowls the supermarket aisles.
A hijab frames her face.  She is all of us
in jeans and flip flops, a baseball cap, a sari,
a dark blue business suit and red shoes.
Her heels click on the linoleum.

The three year old in the jump seat wants licorice.
Gaia remembers dancing the quickstep
down an empty aisle with his tall Norwegian father. 
Where is the freshness? The shuffle, the stammer,
the biscuits, the sweet peanut oil?

She stubs her toe and mutters shit.
Her son, enchanted, sings out shit shit SHIT!
She hands him a stick of strawberry licorice,
stares down the scowling grandmothers.

Gaia’s teaching a class in ecofeminist lit
tomorrow morning.  Get groceries home,
make dinner, bathe the child in icy river water,
read him to sleep—The Left Hand of Darkness,
The Lorax which by now he has almost memorized—
write tough love comments on 28 essays,
read herself to sleep.

Lately she is troubled by dreams
of archeological digs, abandoned elementary schools
the crack of breaking ice, deserts writhing uphill,
a portent of crickets frantic to mate.
By 1969, in Buffalo, NY, the fireflies
had choked to death in chemical smog.
Their light went out.

She sees veins glowing with infection,
truck drivers clutching their loading manifests,
something she can’t quite remember—a roiling
gray mist pulling form out of chaos.
The neighbors trundle their recycle bins
out to the road.  It’s raining again.
In the morning, the child wants a new word.Work, Gaia says

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